Number of words: 632 Outside of the particularities and rituals of the two faiths, what also separated them was the medium of education, the language used and the curriculum adopted; they were entirely different and separate. Schools of teaching tended to be attached (mostly) to temples, mosques and such other congregational centres. The medium of … Read more

Number of words: 476 At the leading edge of this Islamic reform, was Deoband, founded in 1867 by Ulema imbued with the tradition of Shah Waliullah. They believed that education should no longer be for the purpose of training Muslims for serving the Empire, instead it ought to train them in the art of ‘survival’ … Read more

Number of words: 307 Afghani’s views were astonishingly correct for those times; he advocated nationalism of a linguistic and territorial variety, implying a unity of Hindus and Muslims, with little said about unity amongst Indian Muslims or with Muslims of other lands. He was not a pan-Islamist, at least not then, effectively refuting such notions … Read more

Number of words: 162 An unexpected, perhaps inevitable but nevertheless, sad consequence of the multiple traumas of 1857 was a decline in the status of Persian in India. In consequence the ashraf suffered most, and some of the rational sciences, those distinctive contributions of Iran and Central Asia to Indian Islam, began to lose their … Read more

Number of words: 285 In areas where the Persian Islamic traditions were dominant, that distinctive culture (Perso-Islamic) began to represent the culture of the rulers, these were/are the ashraf, the global people, whose ancestors had come from other cultures, or so they averred, and some certainly had but most only so claimed. The ashraf had … Read more

Number of words: 425 Because most Indo-Persian chroniclers of medieval India identified Islam with the fortunes of their royal patrons, therefore, with sycophantic inaccuracy they reduced accounts of those reigns into such hagiographical nonsense as ‘India’s history’ begins only from when Muslims began to rule areas around Delhi/Agra/Malwa. This attitude can be traced to the … Read more

Number of words: 222 It is, of course self-evident that Islam is not, just as Christianity or Zoroastrianism are not, indigenous to India, for born elsewhere Islam came to India wielding the evangelising sword of the invader; in consequence it arrived as an outsider and, at least initially, remained just that (an alien faith). But … Read more