Irfan Ahmad
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3587416 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Irfan Ahmad |
| NOMBRES | Irfan |
| APELLIDO | Ahmad |
| FIRMA | AHMAD I |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3780-0509 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 67 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 90 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Marginalization in the Nickel Industry
This study aims to examine how language practices reflect power relations, social identity, and forms of marginalization experienced by local communities during the expansion of the nickel industry, especially in the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP). The research employed a qualitative approach of a case study conducted in Central Halmahera Regency, North Maluku Province, Indonesia. The 15 informants consisted of community leaders, non-g…
Ternateno as a Portuguese Creole
This article discusses Ternateno, a Portuguese-based creole language that developed in Ternate, North Maluku, through sustained language contact since the sixteenth century. It analyzes the creolization process, the social functions of Ternateno as a postcolonial minority language, and the ongoing language shift within its speech community. Ternateno blends Portuguese-derived vocabulary with structural influences from Malay and Ternate and functi…
Toward a Genealogy of Indian Sociology
This article scripts a genealogy of Indian sociology radically different from its regnant history. Its fundamental thesis is that Indian/Hindu nationalism and knowledge are entwined such that to view them separately is to understand neither. To substantiate this thesis, it focuses on the othering of Islam/Muslims. Far from being accidental, this othering is organised and so ‘naturalised’ in the histories of sociology and majoritarian nationalism–…
Habermas as an ethnic thinker Par Excellence
Taking Habermas’ 2023 statement on Palestinians-Israel as the point of entry, this article examines his concept of critique. Against the dominant view of him as a philosopher of ‘universalism’ and ‘critical rationality,’ my thesis is that Habermas is an ethnic thinker, for, his ideas of critique and universalism unidirectionally rest on ‘to all’ rather than ‘from all.’ Consequently, it is missionary and borders on Islamophobia, particularly after…
Making place for Muslims in contemporary India By Kalyani DevakiMenon. Ithaca, NY
Forecasting the human cost of disasters under Sustainable Development Goal
Recognizing Hindu Orientalism
This essay proposes Hindu Orientalism as a central category of analysis across disciplines. It begins by demonstrating how the claim to decolonize India is in fact (re/neo)colonial in many ways as it recasts Western Orientalism in the catalogue of Hindu Orientalism to shape India as well as the world. To this end, it critically engages with Hallaq’s (2018) Restating Orientalism. The first part of the essay identifies three important theses in Hal…
The Revolution of Blockchain in Digital Payment Systems
This study aims to analyze the revolution of blockchain technology in digital payment systems, as well as explore the legal implications and regulatory challenges faced in its adoption. The research method used is a qualitative approach with normative analysis, utilizing data sources from literature, applicable regulations, and case studies from various countries. The results of the study show that blockchain has changed the digital payment lands…
Dotless Arabic Text for Natural Language Processing
This article introduces a novel representation of Arabic text as an alternative approach for Arabic NLP, inspired by the dotless script of ancient Arabic. We explored this representation through extensive analysis on various text corpora, differing in size and domain, and tokenized using multiple tokenization techniques. Furthermore, we examined the information density of this representation and compared it with the standard dotted Arabic text us…
Commentaries on Irfan Ahmad's Rappaport Lecture, “Drinking Secularism”
As an admirer of the work of both Irfan Ahmad and the late Shahab Ahmed, I find this sh‘er by the Urdu poet Amjad Islam ‘Amjad’ to be an apt opening for my comments on Irfan sahab's Rappaport Lecture, which is a trenchant critique of Shahab Ahmed's seminal work, What is Islam? For in this brief essay, while I agree with some of Irfan Ahmad's critiques, and explore how they open new ground for Islamic studies, I do not wish to discard the valuable…
Drinking Secularism
In this 2023 Roy Rappaport lecture, I take up Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? as a point of entry to inquire into larger themes and questions-salient, hidden, to-be-pursued-in the study of religion and Islam. While Ahmed's book has been hailed as "a new way of looking at Islam," I demonstrate how his definitional enterprise is unoriginal because the problématique of Islamic orthodoxy it is tied to belongs to the long-standing Orientalist objectific…
Securitisation of Muslims in India is as old as modernisation and nation-statisation
Clinicopathologic analysis of intussusception among Pakistani adults
The intussusception adults are rare and almost always as a result of secondary condition. The aim of this study is to review the adult intussusception's presentation, diagnosis, and pathophysiology was the goal of this study. Methods: This retrospective analysis study was held in the surgical department of Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar from April 2022 to September 2022. This study included 24 cases of intussusception in patients >18 years of ag…
Comparison of functional outcome of intra-articular steroid injection versus steroid injection in rotator interval in the treatment of early frozen shoulder
Adhesive capsulitis (AC) is a painful frozen shoulder disease that continues for more than 3 months, is also known as frozen shoulder. The glenohumeral joint capsule fibrosis that results from this inflammatory disease is accompanied by substantial range of motion limitation and gradually advancing stiffness (typically external rotation). The findings of this study will support better outcomes for adhesive capsulitis patients in our local populat…
Newborn Care Practices and Associated Factors Influencing Their Health in a Northern Rural India
The practice of essential newborn care still needs to improve in Bareilly; there is a need to create awareness among the mothers and family members on newborn and early neonatal care aspects, such as promoting exclusive and early initiation of breastfeeding and delayed bathing practices
Nationalism and knowledge
This essay is about how Indian anthropology-sociology has historically theorized Islam and Muslims. In it, I demonstrate how anthropologists’ discourse on Islam and the majoritarian Hindu discourse on nation – Muslims being its constitutive other – dovetail into each other. Three main catalogues through which anthropology has dealt with Muslims are: silence, alienness and erasure. Against anthropology’s self-perception as the most reflexive disci…
The Nation Form in the Global Age
This book provides a range of perspectives on the meaning of nation and nationalism across several world regions. This is an open-access book.
Introduction
Covid-19 and the Local Tradition of the People of North Maluku
Dealing with pandemics has never been a new issue, seen from the perspective of the history of mankind. It was a manifestation of l’histoire se répète. As an example, a few centuries prior to the Black Death and Cholera Outbreak, Galvao wrote that a respiratory disease had broken out in Ternate around 1553, while De Clercq mentioned a deadly plague in Bacan throughout 1706-1709. Traditionally, these issues were treated as a result of badly conduc…
Nation Form in the Global Age
Introduction
This chapter makes a set of three interconnected arguments. The first argument, which critically binds the volume together, is that rather than seeing contemporary politics in terms of globalization eroding the nation state or its persistence regardless of globalization, what characterizes the world is the globalization of the nation form. Second, by showing nationalism’s relationship with violence it underlines the need to interrogate the effica…
Muslim Bare Life in Contemporary India
Today Hindutva has become hegemonic to the extent that Muslims not only have to fear for their way of life but also for their own bare lives. The election of Narendra Modi as prime minister is a sign of the changes that have occurred from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-led Hindutva campaigns of the 1980s to the firm grip on government by the BJP-RSS today. Analyses of ‘the success of India’s democracy’ (Kohli, The Success of India’s Democr…
Bacterial Coinfections Increase Mortality of Severely Ill Covid-19 Patients in Saudi Arabia
Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) is an ongoing global pandemic that is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The severity and mortality rates of COVID-19 are affected by several factors, such as respiratory diseases, diabetes, and hypertension. Bacterial coinfections are another factor that could contribute to the severity of COVID-19. Limited studies have investigated morbidity and mortality due to microbial co…
Anthropology and Ethnography Are Not Equivalent
In recent years, crucial questions have been raised about anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. These interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large. This volume contributes to the debate about the interrelationships between ethnography and anthropology and takes it to a new plane. Six anthropologists…
The Politics of Muslim Identities in Asia
Explores the intersection between Islam and politics in contemporary Southeast Asia, South Asia and China Gives a comparative view of Asia’s diverse Muslim identities, looking at the complexity of identity politics and the instrumentalisation of religious difference that create social divides Situates the contemporary contestations of identity and belonging amid new waves of Islamic revivalism, ethnic nationalism and political repression Includes…
Cracks in the 'Mightiest Fortress
Islamists' ideas about the position of women are readily invoked to portray them as 'anti-modern'. The operating assumption is that Islamism (mutatis mutandis Islam) sanctions gender hierarchy. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research and written sources of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India, founded in 1941, I question such assumptions. While defending Islam against the 'epidemic' of westernization, Maududi (b. 1903), the Jamaat's founder, call…
Genealogy of the Islamic state
According to the conventional wisdom, there is no separation between religion and the state in Islam. Ernest Gellner thus asserted that Islam 'was the state from the very start'. Most readings of 'Islamic fundamentalism' aver that since Islam fuses religion and politics, the idea of the state flows from the inner logic of Islam. Challenging this explanation, I argue that the state became central to Islamism not because of theology. Rather, the co…
Immanent critique and Islam
This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question - what is immanent critique? - it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment's notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment's specific conceptualization of reason as critique per se is misleading for there are non-Enlightenme…
Recognizing Hindu Orientalism
This essay proposes Hindu Orientalism as a central category of analysis across disciplines. It begins by demonstrating how the claim to decolonize India is in fact (re/neo)colonial in many ways as it recasts Western Orientalism in the catalogue of Hindu Orientalism to shape India as well as the world. To this end, it critically engages with Hallaq’s (2018) Restating Orientalism. The first part of the essay identifies three important theses in Hal…
In Defense of Ho(s)tels
I foreground the reconstituted notion of 'nation-state-as-home' as central to our understanding of the hostility to and fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, in the contemporary west and beyond. The reconfiguration of the quest from a 'heavenly home' into an 'earthly home' – a prime signature of secular modernity – led to the consolidation of the nation-state as sort of a 'natural' home generating a new kind of love: domophilia – domo + philia, love for…
Anthropological publics, public anthropology
Based on a transcript from the AAA 2016 roundtable on "anthropological publics, public anthropology," organized by Sindre Bangstad, held at the AAA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 18, 2016, and edited, referenced, and footnoted by Sindre Bangstad, this forum explores prominent anthropologists' experiences of doing "public anthropology," asks what kind of structural impediments there are in our time to the engagement of wider…
Between moderation and radicalization
Religious movements have often been studied in the context of nationstates. With scholarly attention now shifting to globalization and other world system processes, there is a growing move to go beyond the particularity of nation-states and study the general transnational dimensions of religious movements. In this article I describe the processes through which Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), a contemporary Islamist movement in India, developed links …
Nationalism and knowledge
This essay is about how Indian anthropology-sociology has historically theorized Islam and Muslims. In it, I demonstrate how anthropologists’ discourse on Islam and the majoritarian Hindu discourse on nation – Muslims being its constitutive other – dovetail into each other. Three main catalogues through which anthropology has dealt with Muslims are: silence, alienness and erasure. Against anthropology’s self-perception as the most reflexive disci…
Injustice and the New World Order
This article presents biographies of three activists of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Following 9/11, the Indian state banned SIMI for fomenting “terrorism”, “sedition” and “destroying Indian nationalism”. Of the three SIMI activists, Qasim Omar had spent 30 months in prison and Samin Patel, a US citizen of Indian origin, 27 months. Both these prominent SIMI leaders were charged with denigrating the photo of India’s flag and makin…
On the State of the (Im)possible
This essay offers some critical reflections on Hallaq’s (2013) The Impossible State. In part I, I summarize the author’s contention. Part II identifies certain conceptual tensions in and neglect of some of the issues therein. I dwell in particular on three aspects: (a) the meanings of sharia, its place in Islam and its usage in the academic discourses; (b) the possibility of disentangling the calls for an Islamic state from statism to stress othe…
Talal Asad
Anthropologist Talal Asad, interviewed by Irfan Ahmad, talks about his conceptual engagement with the outcomes of religion, politics, and the past and his work to problematize a "seamless web" view of history's unfolding
Democracy and Islam
The dominant debate on Islam and democracy continues to operate in the realm of normativity. This article engages with key literature showing limits of such a line of inquiry. Through the case study of India’s Islamist organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, I aim at shifting the debate from textual normativity to demotic praxis. I demonstrate how Islam and democracy work in practice, and in so doing offer a fresh perspective to enhance our understandings…
Anthropology of Islam
NILE GREEN, BOMBAY ISLAM: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2011, pp. 327 HUMEIRA IQTIDAR, SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-da’wa in Urban Pakistan (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2011, pp. 216
Modernity and Its Outcast. The Why and How of India's Partition
Additional informationNotes on contributorsIrfan AhmadI am thankful to Ian Copland for an immanent reading of an earlier draft of this essay; he offered valuable suggestions and directed me to some important references. I also thank Mridula Chakraborty (University of Western Sydney) for her comments; she disagreed with me on some points. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her critical, suggestive comments. I alone am responsible for …
Forecasting the human cost of disasters under Sustainable Development Goal
Drinking Secularism
In this 2023 Roy Rappaport lecture, I take up Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam? as a point of entry to inquire into larger themes and questions-salient, hidden, to-be-pursued-in the study of religion and Islam. While Ahmed's book has been hailed as "a new way of looking at Islam," I demonstrate how his definitional enterprise is unoriginal because the problématique of Islamic orthodoxy it is tied to belongs to the long-standing Orientalist objectific…
Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy
This book, Gods in the Time of Democracy, is theoretically sophisticated. Based on research from 2007 to 2018, inter alios, with Hindu sculptors in north and south India, including fieldwork with Hindu diaspora in Trinidad and Mauritius, it examines the multilayered interrelationships amongst intensified construction of and visitation, from the 1990s on, to Hindu religious monuments, practices of democracy, economic reforms, aesthetic forms and m…
On the Absence of the Political in Four-Field Anthropology
The absence of politics as a subfield in four-field anthropology—physical/biological, archaeological,linguistic, and cultural-social—has often puzzled me. I first encountered the exact term “four-fieldanthropology” during my doctoral training at University of Amsterdam. If these subfields are whatmake anthropology a holistic discipline, how can politics be excluded? The absence of politics as asubfield unto itself actually does something quite in…
Twentieth-Century Faces of Anthropology's Holism
In conversation with an ordinary Indian
This conversation between a private security guard, Dharmendra Panchal, and Irfan Ahmad serves as a window to understand contemporary India from the perspective of an “ordinary” or “common” man, an
Between mourning and melancholia
In reviewing this autobiographical book by Saeed Naqvi, an internationally known Indian journalist, this essay first discusses the relationship amongst journalism, autobiography and anthropology, the discipline this reviewer broadly works in. Arguing for a crossover amongst them, it documents the evolving relationships Naqvi describes between religion and politics in modern India, including the moment of India’s Partition in 1947. It discusses su…
In Conversation With John Keane
John Keane in conversation with Irfan Ahmad
Islamophobia, European Modernity and Contemporary Illiberalism
The term ‘Islamophobia’ has been gaining quite a prominence over recent years.1 It has been used increasingly to refer to the rejection and discrimination from which the Muslim population in Europe
Theorizing Islamism and democracy
Liberal reading often posits Islamism as obverse of modernity and reason. Phil Briscoe's statement that Hitler's Mein Kampf might be kept in libraries but not the books by authors like Jamaat-e-Islami's founder's (Maududi) amply illustrates it. This article calls such an understanding into question. On the basis of my historical-ethnographic fieldwork on India's Jamaat-e-Islami and its offshoot, Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), I examine…
Between moderation and radicalization
Religious movements have often been studied in the context of nationstates. With scholarly attention now shifting to globalization and other world system processes, there is a growing move to go beyond the particularity of nation-states and study the general transnational dimensions of religious movements. In this article I describe the processes through which Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH), a contemporary Islamist movement in India, developed links …
Cracks in the 'Mightiest Fortress
Islamists' ideas about the position of women are readily invoked to portray them as 'anti-modern'. The operating assumption is that Islamism (mutatis mutandis Islam) sanctions gender hierarchy. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic research and written sources of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India, founded in 1941, I question such assumptions. While defending Islam against the 'epidemic' of westernization, Maududi (b. 1903), the Jamaat's founder, call…
Islamism and Democracy in India
Genealogy of the Islamic state
According to the conventional wisdom, there is no separation between religion and the state in Islam. Ernest Gellner thus asserted that Islam 'was the state from the very start'. Most readings of 'Islamic fundamentalism' aver that since Islam fuses religion and politics, the idea of the state flows from the inner logic of Islam. Challenging this explanation, I argue that the state became central to Islamism not because of theology. Rather, the co…
Body composition and its components in preterm and term newborns
A prospective, cross‐sectional, observational study in preterm and term infants was performed to compare multimodal measurements of body composition, namely, limb ultrasound, bone quantitative ultrasound, and dual X‐ray absorptiometry (DXA). One hundred and two preterm and term infants appropriate for gestational age were enrolled from the newborn nursery and neonatal intensive care unit. Infants were included when they were medically stable, in …
A Note from the Reviews Editor
Is There an Ethics of Terrorism? Islam, Globalisation, Militancy
Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2008), x + 229 pp., ISBN: 9781-85065925-9, hbk, npg. In Metapolitics, Alain Badio
Democracy and Islam
The dominant debate on Islam and democracy continues to operate in the realm of normativity. This article engages with key literature showing limits of such a line of inquiry. Through the case study of India’s Islamist organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, I aim at shifting the debate from textual normativity to demotic praxis. I demonstrate how Islam and democracy work in practice, and in so doing offer a fresh perspective to enhance our understandings…
Immanent critique and Islam
This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question - what is immanent critique? - it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment's notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment's specific conceptualization of reason as critique per se is misleading for there are non-Enlightenme…
Modernity and Its Outcast. The Why and How of India's Partition
Additional informationNotes on contributorsIrfan AhmadI am thankful to Ian Copland for an immanent reading of an earlier draft of this essay; he offered valuable suggestions and directed me to some important references. I also thank Mridula Chakraborty (University of Western Sydney) for her comments; she disagreed with me on some points. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewer for his/her critical, suggestive comments. I alone am responsible for …
Theorizing Islamism and democracy
Liberal reading often posits Islamism as obverse of modernity and reason. Phil Briscoe's statement that Hitler's Mein Kampf might be kept in libraries but not the books by authors like Jamaat-e-Islami's founder's (Maududi) amply illustrates it. This article calls such an understanding into question. On the basis of my historical-ethnographic fieldwork on India's Jamaat-e-Islami and its offshoot, Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), I examine…
Islamic Reform in South Asia
The articles in this volume build up ethnographic analysis complementary to the historiography of South Asian Islam, which has explored the emergence of reformism in the context of specific political and religious circumstances of nineteenth-century British India. Taking up diverse popular and scholarly debates as well as everyday religious practices, this volume also breaks away from the dominant trend of mainstream ethnographic work, which cele…
Islamophobia, European Modernity and Contemporary Illiberalism
The term ‘Islamophobia’ has been gaining quite a prominence over recent years.1 It has been used increasingly to refer to the rejection and discrimination from which the Muslim population in Europe
Anthropology of Islam
NILE GREEN, BOMBAY ISLAM: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2011, pp. 327 HUMEIRA IQTIDAR, SECULARIZING ISLAMISTS? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-da’wa in Urban Pakistan (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), 2011, pp. 216
In Defense of Ho(s)tels
I foreground the reconstituted notion of 'nation-state-as-home' as central to our understanding of the hostility to and fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, in the contemporary west and beyond. The reconfiguration of the quest from a 'heavenly home' into an 'earthly home' – a prime signature of secular modernity – led to the consolidation of the nation-state as sort of a 'natural' home generating a new kind of love: domophilia – domo + philia, love for…
Inaugural Statement
On the State of the (Im)possible
This essay offers some critical reflections on Hallaq’s (2013) The Impossible State. In part I, I summarize the author’s contention. Part II identifies certain conceptual tensions in and neglect of some of the issues therein. I dwell in particular on three aspects: (a) the meanings of sharia, its place in Islam and its usage in the academic discourses; (b) the possibility of disentangling the calls for an Islamic state from statism to stress othe…
In Conversation With John Keane
John Keane in conversation with Irfan Ahmad
Editors’ Choice
Talal Asad
Anthropologist Talal Asad, interviewed by Irfan Ahmad, talks about his conceptual engagement with the outcomes of religion, politics, and the past and his work to problematize a "seamless web" view of history's unfolding
Injustice and the New World Order
This article presents biographies of three activists of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Following 9/11, the Indian state banned SIMI for fomenting “terrorism”, “sedition” and “destroying Indian nationalism”. Of the three SIMI activists, Qasim Omar had spent 30 months in prison and Samin Patel, a US citizen of Indian origin, 27 months. Both these prominent SIMI leaders were charged with denigrating the photo of India’s flag and makin…
Muhammad Iqbal, Stray Reflections
Muhammad Iqbal, Stray Reflections: A Notebook of Allama Iqbal." Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2(3), pp. 359–360
In conversation with Richard Jackson
Arguably one of the leading anti-doxa thinkers of political violence and peace of our times, Richard Jackson converses with Irfan Ahmad on a series of key issues that define contemporary politics a
Between mourning and melancholia
In reviewing this autobiographical book by Saeed Naqvi, an internationally known Indian journalist, this essay first discusses the relationship amongst journalism, autobiography and anthropology, the discipline this reviewer broadly works in. Arguing for a crossover amongst them, it documents the evolving relationships Naqvi describes between religion and politics in modern India, including the moment of India’s Partition in 1947. It discusses su…
Religion as Critique
Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam—indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and German as well as Fre…
Sociology (42 obras) · Political science (39 obras) · Law (35 obras) · Politics (29 obras) · Philosophy (28 obras) · Philosophy (19 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 obras) · Anthropology (15 obras) · History (15 obras)