This book explores the evolution of a Shia Ismaili identity and crucial aspects of the historical forces that conditioned the development of the Muslim modern in late colonial South Asia. It traces the legal process that, since the 1860s, recast a Shia Imami identity for the Ismailis, and explicates the public career of Imam Aga Khan III amid heightened religious internationalism since the late-nineteenth century, the age of 'religious internationals'. It sheds light and elaborates on the enduring legacies of questions such as the Aga's understanding of colonial modernity, his ideas of India, restructured modalities of community governance and the evolution of Imamate-sponsored institutions, key strands in scholarship that characterized the development of the Muslim and Shia Ismaili modern, and Muslim universality vis-à-vis denominational particularities that often transcended the remits of the modular nation and state structure.
Author(s): Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 220
City: New Delhi
Cover
Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
The postnational, the denationalized and the cosmopolitan
Religious internationals and cosmopolitanism: The religious, the secular and Ismaili subjectivity
Religious authority and the question of articulation
Outline of chapters
Endnotes
1 The Khoja Ismailis and Legal Polemics: Religion and Customs in Nineteenth Century Bombay
The broad contours of the colonial episteme
Unravelling religious attitudes
Antinomies of socio-religious standardizations: Customs and religious traditions
A question of commonalities: Social base, vocabularies and modalities
Conclusion
Endnotes
2 The Howardian Moment: Morality, Aryanism and Scholarship
The historical backdrop
The reformist rhetoric
The Defendants’ response I: The moral claims of the Shia
The Defendants' response II: Morality and the 'Aryan' Ismailis
Conceptualizing an epistemological entity: Production and institutionalization of knowledge
Conclusion
Endnote
3 Pan-Islamism and an Asiatic Spirit: Postnational Subjectivities in an Age of ‘Transition’
Conceptualizing ‘transition’: Community development and national efficiency
India beyond India: ‘Transition’ and postnational sensibilities
Pan-Islamism and the quest for an Asiatic ethos: ‘Spiritual force’, reason and an ethical community
A question of reception
Conclusion
Endnotes
4 The Hazir Imam, Ismailism and Islam in Late Colonial South Asia
On leadership and languages of identification
Ecumenism and the liberal quest I: Reform and identity in Bombay
Ecumenism and the liberal quest II: Aga Khan III and a Muslim identity in South Asia
Conclusion
Endnotes
5 The Importance of Being Ismaili: Religious Normativity and the Ismaili International in the Age of Global Assemblages
Conferring on normativity: Ismailism and Islam in the twentieth century
Carriers of normativity: Visions and institutions
Conceptualizing an Ismaili international
Conclusion
Endnotes
Concluding Reflections
Endnotes
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources
A. Manuscripts and Archival Documents
The British Library
The Cambridge University Library
Archives of the League of Nations, The United Nations Archives, Geneva
Maharashtra State Archives
National Archives of India
The Norwegian Nobel Institute
The Parliamentary Archives of the United Kingdom
Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (The Political Archives of the Federal Foreign Ministry, Germany)
B. Published Primary Sources (official publications, memoirs, speeches, publications of individuals and organizations etc.)
C. Law Cases and Judgements
Printed Secondary Works, Dissertations and Theses
Index
