Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 [Paperback]

Ayesha Jalal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0415220785 | ISBN-13: 978-0415220781 | Edition: New edition

Self and Sovereignty surveys the role of individual Muslim men and women within India and Pakistan from 1850 through to decolonisation and the partition period.
Commencing in colonial times, this book explores and interprets the historical processes through which the perception of the Muslim individual and the community of Islam has been reconfigured over time. Self and Sovereignty examines the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the individual, regional, class and cultural differences that have shaped the discourse and politics of Muslim identity. As well as fascinating discussion of political and religious movements, culture and art, this book includes analysis of:
* press, poetry and politics in late nineteenth century India
* the politics of language and identity - Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi
* Muslim identity, cultural differnce and nationalism
* the Punjab and the politics of Union and Disunion
* the creation of Pakistan
Covering a period of immense upheaval and sometimes devastating violence, this work is an important and enlightening insight into the history of Muslims in South Asia.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Jalal has produced an outstanding book, which brings a new level of understanding to the recent history of that third of the world's Muslims who live in South Asia.' - Francis Robinson, Asian Affairs February 2002

About the Author

Ayesha Jalal is Professor of History at Harvard University. Her books include Modern South Asia with Sugata Bose (Routledge, 1998) and Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia (1995).

Product Details

• Paperback: 652 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (January 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415220785
• ISBN-13: 978-0415220781
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,370,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Different Look at South Asia, March 10, 2002

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"eryczek" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (Paperback)

A work of encyclopedic proportions, Self and Sovereignty's wide-ranging investigation into South Asian Muslim thought and politics since 1850 is sure to fascinate aficionados of South Asian and Islamic history alike. In almost six hundred pages of meticulously researched analysis, Tufts University scholar Ayesha Jalal surveys the cultural, political and religious movements of the past 150 years in an attempt to unravel the complex intermingling of trends that reconfigured Muslim identities in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Her questions are as complex as they are provocative: By what process of social re-engineering, combined with preexisting cultural difference, did religious distinctions come to be privileged over class, cultural and regional differences? How were South Asian Muslims able to surmount longstanding cultural, regional and even religious differences, to forge the world's first nation founded on the basis of religion?

But these questions have been asked before. Jalal's point of departure from other contemporary thinkers on the Muslim "problem" in South Asia is found in the boldness and breadth of her objective: to entirely rethink the puzzle of identity and difference in South Asia in the context of the changing relationship between the Muslim individual and community of Islam. Relying extensively on hitherto unexploited sources in Urdu and Punjabi as well as a broad collection of official documents of the late-colonial state, Jalal undertakes a meticulous reexamination of the circumstances by which the idiom of separation prevailed over prospects for Indian unity, presenting the tension between Muslim and Hindu communities in all their manifest complexity. Her research leads her to the conclusion that, with the end of Muslim rule in India, self-perceptions of Muslim identity and the place of the Islamic community in South Asia were fundamentally altered. Through the intertwining of external interests - political, cultural, economic and social - with the religious, a potent wedge was inserted between Muslim and Hindu, giving birth to the social and geo-political polarization of these religious communities that persists to this day.

Though Jalal offers insights the processes of identity formation and inter-group dynamics throughout the subcontinent, her discussion of the history of ordinary, non-elite Muslims and their Hindu counterparts, including women, is weak. Moreover, at times Jalal's analysis glosses over history that might serve to weaken her argument. For instance, short thrift is given to the movements initiated by Shah Waliullah and other thinkers of the Islamic revivalist movement who sought to "purify" Islam by returning to the hadith and purging contemporary practice of syncretic or otherwise externally influenced customs and rituals. Though tolerant of other religions, Waliullah regarded Islam as having superseded the religions of the past; hence a well-defined separation between `Islamic' and `un-Islamic' became increasingly important. Waliullah's philosophy might not have been significant for understanding Islamic identity and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if his ideas had perished with him; however, his mantle was adopted with vigor by modern leaders in Pakistan like Mawlana Mawdudi, founder of the Jama'at-i Islami (the Islamic Party), an organization that would put down the roots of Islamic fundamentalism all across South Asia and the Middle East.

These few criticisms notwithstanding, Self and Sovereignty is as important a contribution to the study of Islam in South Asia as any to appear in the last decade. Jalal's outstanding tome offers compelling arguments for reconceptualizing the nature of individual-community interaction in South Asia, and the role of this dynamic in shaping political realities through to independence. Moreover, it would be shortsighted to limit the scope of applicability of Jalal's insights to the Muslim or even South Asian contexts alone. Beyond their value to students of South Asian and Muslim history, Jalal's conclusions have important ramifications for the way scholars of religion, culture and politics understand communalism and nationalism, and indeed the way South Asians understand their political and social heritage.