After 1947, Muslims of India, acquired a different form, in terms of their role, status, problems, challenges and opportunities. The partition of the country divided them in two and later three parts and led their political, bureaucratic and intellectual elite to migrate to Pakistan. The expert opinion was divided about their very future. W.C. Smith, a renowned scholar of Islam, for instance, believed that Islam in India would emerge as more progressive, dynamic, liberal and creative than Pakistani Islam . The fact that Muslims in India bear the same proportion in Indian Population as those in the world bear to the world population, make their experience of universal value. Religion has two components. One is set of theological beliefs and practices. Two as a basis of a social identity. Even those who do not follow its beliefs and practices and are agnostics or atheists are an integral part of a religious community. This book is primarily a study of Muslim community since partition. But some references to pre-partition lessons and Islam, based on its acknowledged authorities, were inevitable for the study of contemporary problems of the community. This study of micro problems of Indian Muslims is a humble contributioin to the vastly grown scholarly work on macro Islam. About The Author: - Balraj Puri, started his public career in 1942 as editor of a Urdu weekly in Jammu. He has written over a thousand articles and authored or co-authored around forty books. Intercommunity relations and problems and potentialities of Muslims in India have been a matter of his special interest, as a social and political activist as also a writer. Apart from intervening in many conflict situation, he has been extensively writing on these subjects for national dailies and academic journals and addressed many academic gatherings. He has been interacting with Muslim scholars and leaders of the country belonging to various scholars of thought. He is vice-president of the Minority Council

Islam in India, as elsewhere, continues to be seen as a remainder in its refusal to "conform" to national and international secular-modern norms. Such a general perception has also had a tremendous impact on the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, who as individuals and communities have been shaped and transformed over centuries of socio-political and historical processes, by eroding their world-view and steadily erasing their life-worlds. This book traces the spectral presence of Islam across narratives to note that difference and diversity, demographic as well as cultural, can be espoused rather than excised or exorcized. Focusing on Malabar - home to the Mappila Muslim community in Kerala, South India - and drawing mostly on Malayalam sources, the author investigates the question of Islam from various angles by constituting an archive comprising popular, administrative, academic, and literary discourses. The author contends that an uncritical insistence on unity has led to a formation in which "minor" subjects embody an excess of identity, in contrast to the Hindu-citizen whose identity seemingly coincides with the national. This has led to Muslims being the source of a deep-seated anxiety for secular nationalism and the targets of a resurgent Hindutva in that they expose the fault-lines of a geographically and socio-culturally unified nation. An interdisciplinary study of Islam in India from the South Indian context, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Indian history, political science, literary and cultural studies, and Islamic studies.

Monograph on social integration of the Islamic minority group in India - examines cultural factors which have contributed to social conflict and unharmonious intergroup relations, presents survey data, etc., and recommends that moslems undertake voluntary cultural change and undergo acculturation to the surrounding hindu majority.

Interest in Shi'a Islam has increased greatly in recent years, although Shi'ism in the Indian subcontinent has remained largely underexplored. Focusing on the influential Shi'a minority of Lucknow and the United Provinces, a region that was largely under Shi'a rule until 1856, this book traces the history of Indian Shi'ism through the colonial period toward independence in 1947. Drawing on a range of new sources, including religious writing, polemical literature and clerical biography, it assesses seminal developments including the growth of Shi'a religious activism, madrasa education, missionary activity, ritual innovation and the politicization of the Shi'a community. As a consequence of these significant religious and social transformations, a Shi'a sectarian identity developed that existed in separation from rather than in interaction with its Sunni counterparts. In this way the painful birth of modern sectarianism was initiated, the consequences of which are very much alive in South Asia today.

In a study of the vitality of Islam in late-nineteenth-century north India, Barbara Metcalf explains the response of Islamic religious scholars ('ulama) to the colonial dominance of the British and the collapse of Muslim political power. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.