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

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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.