Nile Green
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587578 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nile Green |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nile |
| FAMILY NAME | Green |
| SIGNATURE | GREEN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9575-3889 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 100 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 353 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 96 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print
The second half of the nineteenth century marks a watershed in human history. Railroads linked remote hinterlands with cities; overland and undersea cables connected distant continents. New and accessible print technologies made the wide dissemination of ideas possible; oceangoing steamers carried goods to faraway markets and enabled the greatest long-distance migrations in recorded history. In this volume, leading scholars of the Islamic world r…
From Persianate pasts to Aryan antiquity. Transnationalism and transformation in Afghan intellectual history, c.1880–1940
This essay forms a case study of the transnational dimensions of Afghanistan's modern intellectual history through a focus on the practice of history. It traces the development of Afghan historical writing between around 1880 and 1940, with an emphasis on the revolutionary historiographical transformations of the 1930s. Prior to this decade, Afghan historians broadly continued the dynastic and genealogical traditions of the Persianate tarikh (‘ch…
Qu’est-ce que “l’islam global” ? Définitions pour un domaine d’étude
The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean
In response to recent discussions of the possibility of writing global intellectual histories, this essay asks what that might involve for world regions beyond the West, particularly for ethnically and linguistically diverse areas that make up the necessarily complex units of analysis with which global historians must reckon. This methodological task is undertaken here by way of a case study of the Indian Ocean during the high tide of European co…
Sufism, Literary Production, and Printing in the Nineteenth Century, written by Rachida Chih, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Rüdiger Seesemann
The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History and the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity
Through their interactions with French archaeologists from around 1930, Afghan historians formulated a new official historical identity for Afghanistan based on its pre-Islamic past. This article provides the first analysis of this process by tracing the emergence of the new historiography through the career of its chief promoter, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, as curator of the National Museum (founded 1931) and director of the Afghan Historical Society (fo…
The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean's Middle East
I first encountered the Indian Ocean on the shores of Makran. I thought I was at land's end, Asia's edge. The ocean hadn't entered my thoughts except as non plus ultra , an ending void. The map said Baluchistan, and I had come to find the Baluch. But I soon found Africans and Zikris, palm-frond huts and Omani passports, old soldiers (or mercenaries) from an overseas foreign legion and smugglers of whiskey, opium, and pharmaceuticals. Now China ha…
The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia's Future
This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia's cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of 'de-cosmopolitanization'. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or politi…
Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran
This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of 'Fordist' connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that f…
The Invention of A Hindu Sufism
This chapter uses a case study of a Hindu religious impresario who championed a Muslim holy man to show how, in the social production of religion, agency is more important than identity. Focusing on the Urdu pilgrimage diary of Kishan Parshad, the Hindu prime minister of Hyderabad State, the chapter shows how he created a “Hindu Sufism” as a means to overcome the increasing disunity of Hindus and Muslims in the early twentieth century. Written by…
Founding The First Mosque in Japan
This chapter traces the global exchanges that surrounded the founding of the first purpose-built mosque in Japan. Opened in the port city of Kobe in 1935, the mosque was the fruit of six years of fund-raising by the Kobe Sunni Mosque Committee, a new religious firm established by emigrant Indian merchants. The chapter positions the Mosque Committee’s activities amid the evangelizing efforts of many foreign religious firms who flocked to the port …
A Brief World History of Muslim Dreams
This essay offers an introductory overview of the history of dream narratives and dream interpretation among various Muslim communities worldwide. The survey ranges from the early Islamic period through to the twentieth century. After examining pre-Islamic traditions and Quranic references to the dream and vision, the essay turns to the elaboration of formal Arabic oneirocritical works, the role of dreams in Sufi theory. Particular attention is p…
The Cambridge World History: Volume 6, the Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, Part 2, Patterns of Change
The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of The Cambridge World History considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of e…
Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam
This book offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the expansion of Islam in the modern world. Through the model of religious economy, it traces the competition between Muslim, Christian and Hindu religious entrepreneurs that transformed Islam into a proselytizing global brand. Drawing Indian, Arab, Iranian and Tatar Muslims together with Scottish missionaries and African-American converts, the book brings to life the local sites of globaliza…
Buddhism, Islam and the religious economy of colonial Burma
Bringing to light the first known Urdu primary source on Islam in colonial Burma, this essay examines the polemical encounter with Buddhism in the years surrounding the Third Anglo–Burmese War. Using the model of religious economy, the Urdu Sayr-e Barhma is contextualised amid the religious pluralisation and competition that accompanied colonisation as a multitude of religious ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘firms’ rapidly entered the colony. Among them was…
The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca
With the spread of steam travel through the Middle East and Asia from the 1850s, the world’s largest Muslim population zones rapidly came into closer contact than ever before. Yet the geography of this new transport infrastructure — the hard networks that bound steam hubs together — also intensified Muslim contact with non-Muslim peoples and places. And as the industrial transport revolution enabled a massive growth in travel among all classes of…
The Global Occult: An Introduction
Breaking the begging bowl: Morals, drugs, and madness in the fate of the Muslim faqīr
This article follows a set of developments that transformed the meaning and value of begging as a religious pursuit in colonial India. Focusing on the Muslim faqīrs, the article argues that missionaries, colonial officials, and physicians joined together in a moral and then medical critique of the faqīrs as venerated idlers and sanctified drug users. The moral dimensions of the critique were then taken up by Muslim and Hindu reformists. Positione…
Rethinking the “Middle East” After the Oceanic Turn
Models of geographical space are empowered by a hard rhetoric that, in suggesting the concrete stability of the longue durée, lends the aura of geological fixity. But while places might themselves be sheer facts, our conceptions of them both in themselves and in relation to other places are cultural constructions born in particular moments in time. A coinage of the early twentieth century to demarcate a strategic middle ground between the “Near” …
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…
Anti-Colonial Japanophilia and the constraints of an Islamic Japanology: Information and affect in the Indian encounter with Japan
Against a background of expansive Indian and Middle Eastern interest in Japan after the Russo-Japanese War, this essay examines the epistemological foundations of this evolving knowledge about Japan through a deconstructive case study of an important but neglected Urdu text. By drawing an analytical distinction between Japanophilia and Japanology, the aim is to measure the opportunities and constraints that defined Indian Muslim understanding of …
Shared infrastructures, informational asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c .1890–1930
Drawing on primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and English, this article compares Persian and Indian travel accounts to assess the similarities and differences of contemporaneous encounters with Japan. By linking Persian and Urdu writings from either side of 1900 to the differential impact of industrial communications (vernacular printing, steam travel) on Persia and India, the article reconstructs the global connections and inter-Asian networks …
Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the “Muslim World”
The ocean that I had to cross seemed to me a gulf between the life that was passed and the life which was to begin
Sea Tracks and Trails: Indian Ocean Worlds as Method
Cluster Abstract Though historians have long imagined it as a world both unto itself and integral to histories of global capital, nation‐building, imperial rivalry, and sustainability in many dimensions, the Indian Ocean and environs have become a preoccupation for scholars from a wide variety of locations, disciplinary, and institutional, in the last two decades. The essays in this cluster offer a thematic introduction to recent work in Indian O…
Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay
While Indian Ocean and Mediterranean cities are usually examined separately, this essay presents a comparison of the port cities of Bombay and Barcelona between around 1850 and 1920 to assess the usefulness of the maritime worlds model of oceanic historians and the world‐system model of global historians. By tracing the many similarities in the urban, economic, and infrastructural development of two largely unconnected ports, the comparative exer…
Rethinking the “Middle East” After the Oceanic Turn
Models of geographical space are empowered by a hard rhetoric that, in suggesting the concrete stability of the longue durée, lends the aura of geological fixity. But while places might themselves be sheer facts, our conceptions of them both in themselves and in relation to other places are cultural constructions born in particular moments in time. A coinage of the early twentieth century to demarcate a strategic middle ground between the “Near” …
Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the “Muslim World”
The ocean that I had to cross seemed to me a gulf between the life that was passed and the life which was to begin
Journeymen, Middlemen: Travel, Transculture, and Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing
Within a few years of 1820, Muslim-owned printing presses were established under state sponsorship in Iran, Egypt, and India, marking the true beginning of printing in the Islamic world. Printing projects had been initiated before this period—most famously by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745) in Istanbul—but these were isolated and unsustained ventures. None gathered the joint momentum of state support and technological transfer to compare with wha…
Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam
This book offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the expansion of Islam in the modern world. Through the model of religious economy, it traces the competition between Muslim, Christian and Hindu religious entrepreneurs that transformed Islam into a proselytizing global brand. Drawing Indian, Arab, Iranian and Tatar Muslims together with Scottish missionaries and African-American converts, the book brings to life the local sites of globaliza…
The Uses of Books in a Late Mughal Takiyya: Persianate Knowledge Between Person and Paper
This paper addresses several questions that appear preliminary to understanding the circulation of knowledge in early modern India (circa1500 to 1800): What work did writing do? What was the relationship between writing and speaking? And what can our answers to these questions tell us about cultural formulations of 'knowledge' in this period? After addressing these questions on 'modes' of circulation, this paper turns to the more practical issue …
The Religious and Cultural Roles of Dreams and Visions in Islam
Since “visions appear material to spiritual persons only, the vulgar herd of historians and annalists cannot hope to be so favoured by Heaven”. So, in his nineteenth-century account of the sūfīs of Sind, Sir Richard Burton expressed the dilemma of scholars researching Muslim dream and visionary experiences in his characteristic style. But while scholarly discussion of the visionary activities of premodern sūfīs and other Muslims is still no strai…
Sea Tracks and Trails: Indian Ocean Worlds as Method
Cluster Abstract Though historians have long imagined it as a world both unto itself and integral to histories of global capital, nation‐building, imperial rivalry, and sustainability in many dimensions, the Indian Ocean and environs have become a preoccupation for scholars from a wide variety of locations, disciplinary, and institutional, in the last two decades. The essays in this cluster offer a thematic introduction to recent work in Indian O…
Making Space Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PREFACE 1. BETWEEN TEXTS AND TERRITORIES 2. THE MIGRATION OF A MUSLIM RITUAL 3. TRIBE, DIASPORA AND SAINTHOOD IN INDO-AFGHAN HISTORY 4. MIGRANT SUFIS AND SACRED SPACE 5. THE PATRONAGE OF SAINTLY SPACE IN THE EARLY MODERN DECCAN 6. THE USES OF BOOKS IN A LATE MUGHAL TAKIYYA 7. BRAHMINS AND SUFIS IN A LANDSCAPE OF NARRATIVES 8. RE-MEMBERING HISTORY AT THE SHRINES OF AURANGABAD BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca
With the spread of steam travel through the Middle East and Asia from the 1850s, the world’s largest Muslim population zones rapidly came into closer contact than ever before. Yet the geography of this new transport infrastructure — the hard networks that bound steam hubs together — also intensified Muslim contact with non-Muslim peoples and places. And as the industrial transport revolution enabled a massive growth in travel among all classes of…
The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian 'Urdusphere
In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim moderni…
From the Silk Road to the Railroad (and Back): The Means and Meanings of the Iranian Encounter with China
In view of the recent expansion of Indo-Persian studies, the neglect of the Sino-Persian nexus is a missed opportunity to place Iranian history on a larger Asian stage. While Iranian contact with China has continued episodically from antiquity to modernity, scholars have so far focused almost exclusively on the pre-modern phases of exchange. As a contribution to developing the field of Sino-Persian studies, this article situates two twentieth cen…
Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam
This article uses the wide dispersal of ostrich eggs and peacock feathers among the different cultural contexts of the Mediterranean – and beyond into the Indian Ocean world – to explore the nature and limits of cultural inheritance and exchange between Christianity and Islam. These avian materials previously possessed symbolic meaning and material value as early as the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, as well as amid the early cultures of Mesopotam…
Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay
While Indian Ocean and Mediterranean cities are usually examined separately, this essay presents a comparison of the port cities of Bombay and Barcelona between around 1850 and 1920 to assess the usefulness of the maritime worlds model of oceanic historians and the world‐system model of global historians. By tracing the many similarities in the urban, economic, and infrastructural development of two largely unconnected ports, the comparative exer…
Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad
Encounters between Sufi saints and Muslim rulers have played a long and important role in the textual historical traditions of Muslim South Asia. Historians of the sultanates of Delhi and the Deccan writing in Persian such as Ziya al-din Barani and Abu'l Qasim Firishtah peppered their accounts with such narratives, much to the distaste of their nineteenth century British translators who frequently excised such episodes wholesale. Some of the earl…
The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History and the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity
Through their interactions with French archaeologists from around 1930, Afghan historians formulated a new official historical identity for Afghanistan based on its pre-Islamic past. This article provides the first analysis of this process by tracing the emergence of the new historiography through the career of its chief promoter, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, as curator of the National Museum (founded 1931) and director of the Afghan Historical Society (fo…
Breathing in India, c. 1890
This essay examines a series of ‘Hindustani’ meditation manuals from the high colonial period against a sample of etiquette and medicinal works from the same era. In doing so, the essay has two principal aims, one specific to the Indian past and one pertaining to more general historical enquiry. The first aim is to subvert a longstanding trend in the ‘history’ of religions which has understood meditational practices through a paradigm of the myst…
Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History
Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, the main centers of political and cultural gravity for the Pashtuns lay in India, where numerous Pashtuns migrated in pursuit of commerce and soldiery. Amid the cosmopolitan pressures of India and its alternative models of self-knowledge and affiliation, Pashtun elites elaborated a distinct idiom of "Afghan" identity. With the Afghans' absorption into the Mughal Empire, ea…
Africa in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian Settlement in East Africa
This article examines an Urdu travelogue written in 1901 to analyze the discursive frameworks by which Africa was rendered knowable to Indian settlers. As a vernacular ethnography written for a readership of Punjabi migrants associated with the Uganda Railway, the travelogue provides our earliest direct evidence of colonial Indian attitudes towards the peoples and landscapes of East Africa. Envisioning the region as at once an imperial and Islami…
Buddhism, Islam and the religious economy of colonial Burma
Bringing to light the first known Urdu primary source on Islam in colonial Burma, this essay examines the polemical encounter with Buddhism in the years surrounding the Third Anglo–Burmese War. Using the model of religious economy, the Urdu Sayr-e Barhma is contextualised amid the religious pluralisation and competition that accompanied colonisation as a multitude of religious ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘firms’ rapidly entered the colony. Among them was…
The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean's Middle East
I first encountered the Indian Ocean on the shores of Makran. I thought I was at land's end, Asia's edge. The ocean hadn't entered my thoughts except as non plus ultra , an ending void. The map said Baluchistan, and I had come to find the Baluch. But I soon found Africans and Zikris, palm-frond huts and Omani passports, old soldiers (or mercenaries) from an overseas foreign legion and smugglers of whiskey, opium, and pharmaceuticals. Now China ha…
The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia's Future
This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia's cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of 'de-cosmopolitanization'. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or politi…
Shared infrastructures, informational asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c .1890–1930
Drawing on primary materials in Persian, Urdu, and English, this article compares Persian and Indian travel accounts to assess the similarities and differences of contemporaneous encounters with Japan. By linking Persian and Urdu writings from either side of 1900 to the differential impact of industrial communications (vernacular printing, steam travel) on Persia and India, the article reconstructs the global connections and inter-Asian networks …
Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism, and the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran
Through a detailed examination of the emergence of printing in Iran, this essay argues that the diffusion of printing through Islamic Asia in the early 1820s took place as part of a printing global revolution initiated by the mass production of iron handpresses of the kind invented by Charles, Earl Stanhope in 1800. Unlike the cumbrous wooden presses of early modern Europe and its settler populations overseas, the durable, mass-produced, transpor…
Blessed Men and Tribal Politics: Notes on Political Culture in the Indo-Afghan World
This article examines some of the foundations of the political culture of the Afghan communities of medieval North India through analysing the roles of Sufis and Sayyids in the arbitration of disputes. The social roles of such 'blessed men' are interpreted as part of a wider political culture in which places, objects and persons of mediation functioned on both the small scale of private quarrels and the grander scale of tribal and 'state' diploma…
Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State
Research Article| December 01 2005 Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State Nile Green Nile Green Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005) 25 (3): 617–633. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-3-617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nile Green; Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customar…
The Survival of Zoroastrianism in Yazd
dynasty, the heartland of Zoroastrian Iran was in Firs, and this continued to be the case for a number of centuries after the conquest.3 Several Muslim geographers record the existence of active fire-temples in the region through to the thirteenth century.4 However, in spite of enjoying a literary renaissance during the ninth century, when what might be described as a literature of popular instruction first began to appear in the Zoroastrian cano…
The Religious and Cultural Roles of Dreams and Visions in Islam
Since “visions appear material to spiritual persons only, the vulgar herd of historians and annalists cannot hope to be so favoured by Heaven”. So, in his nineteenth-century account of the sūfīs of Sind, Sir Richard Burton expressed the dilemma of scholars researching Muslim dream and visionary experiences in his characteristic style. But while scholarly discussion of the visionary activities of premodern sūfīs and other Muslims is still no strai…
Migrant Sufis and sacred space in South Asian Islam
(2003). Migrant Sufis and sacred space in South Asian Islam. Contemporary South Asia: Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 493-509
A Persian Sufi in British India: The Travels of Mīrzā Ḥasan Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh (1251/1835-1316/1899)
(2004). A Persian Sufi in British India: The Travels of Mīrzā ḥasan ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh (1251/1835–1316/1899) Iran: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 201-218
Auspicious Foundations: The Patronage of Sufi Institutions in the Late Mughal and Early Asaf Jah Deccan
Emerging Approaches to the Sufi Traditions of South Asia: Between Texts, Territories and the Transcendent
This article examines Sufism as a textual world composed of several overlapping genres of writing, arguing that the crucial interface between different kinds of writing, the world and the individual Muslim presents a major challenge for the study of Sufism. The co-existence of the embodied realities of powerful Sufi practitioners of South Asia’s past and present with the alternative textual reality of the literary world of Sufi writings from the …
Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad
Encounters between Sufi saints and Muslim rulers have played a long and important role in the textual historical traditions of Muslim South Asia. Historians of the sultanates of Delhi and the Deccan writing in Persian such as Ziya al-din Barani and Abu'l Qasim Firishtah peppered their accounts with such narratives, much to the distaste of their nineteenth century British translators who frequently excised such episodes wholesale. Some of the earl…
Geography, empire and sainthood in the eighteenth-century Muslim Deccan
This article examines the relationship between the Mughal colonization of the Deccan during the twelfth/eighteenth century and the development of the Sufi traditions of Awrangabad. Concurrent with the defeat of the Deccan sultanates was a process of re-ordering the sacred Muslim landscape of the Deccan into harmony with the cultural and political values of the region's new elites by the importation of Sufi traditions from the north. As a reflecti…
Who's the king of the castle? brahmins, sufis and the narrative landscape of Daulatabad
This article discusses religious dimensions of three local ethnohistories of the Indian fortress of Daulatabad and its surrounding landscape. Composed between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two of the accounts were written in Persian by Muslim authors, while the third consists of a Maratha oral history (bakhar) recorded by an early British surveyor. Despite differences in content, the three narratives bear many similarities of…
Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbin's approaches to mystical Islam
Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State
Research Article| December 01 2005 Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customary Religion in an Indian Princely State Nile Green Nile Green Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005) 25 (3): 617–633. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-3-617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nile Green; Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing Customar…
Mystical missionaries in Hyderabad State: Mu'īn Allāh Shāh and his Sufi reform movement
This article discusses the emergence of a Sufi-inspired movement of Muslim reform in the princely state of Hyderabad during the first half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which the movement arose, using archival material to discuss the activities of Christian missionaries in the city in which it first emerged. Located in Aurangabad, away from the capital of the Nizam's State, the history of the ri…
Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan
Sufism is often regarded as standing mystically aloof from its wider cultural settings. By turning this perspective on its head, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century reveals the politics and poetry of Indian Sufism through the study of Islamic sainthood in the midst of a cosmopolitan Indian society comprising migrants, soldiers, litterateurs and princes. Placing the mystical traditions of Indian Islam within their cultural contexts, this i…
Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam
This article uses the wide dispersal of ostrich eggs and peacock feathers among the different cultural contexts of the Mediterranean – and beyond into the Indian Ocean world – to explore the nature and limits of cultural inheritance and exchange between Christianity and Islam. These avian materials previously possessed symbolic meaning and material value as early as the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, as well as amid the early cultures of Mesopotam…
Blessed Men and Tribal Politics: Notes on Political Culture in the Indo-Afghan World
This article examines some of the foundations of the political culture of the Afghan communities of medieval North India through analysing the roles of Sufis and Sayyids in the arbitration of disputes. The social roles of such 'blessed men' are interpreted as part of a wider political culture in which places, objects and persons of mediation functioned on both the small scale of private quarrels and the grander scale of tribal and 'state' diploma…
Breathing in India, c. 1890
This essay examines a series of ‘Hindustani’ meditation manuals from the high colonial period against a sample of etiquette and medicinal works from the same era. In doing so, the essay has two principal aims, one specific to the Indian past and one pertaining to more general historical enquiry. The first aim is to subvert a longstanding trend in the ‘history’ of religions which has understood meditational practices through a paradigm of the myst…
Religion, Language, and Power
Dialogues on Religion and Violence at the Parliament of the World's Religions - John Zavos 2. The Making of 'Religion' in Modern China - Francesca Tarocco 3. Reclaiming Mysticism: Anti-Orientalism and the Construction of 'Islamic Sufism' in Postcolonial Egypt - Andreas Christmann Part II: Execrating and Excluding the Other 4. Insider/Outsider Labelling and the Struggle for Power in Early Judaism - Philip S. Alexander 5. Who are the Others? Three …
Defending the Sufis in Nineteenth Century Hyderabad
As India gradually fell into British hands, Hyderabad State became the last great bastion of traditional Indo-Muslim social and intellectual life. The old families of court and religious notables sought to maintain a metaphysical and moral order which vanished elsewhere in the dust clouds of the Rebellion. But the reformist versions of Islam that emerged in British India did find their way to Hyderabad, splintering its Muslims into polemical and …
Paper Modernity? Notes on an Iranian Industrial Tour, 1818
This article contributes to discussions of technology transfer in the modernisation of Iran through the study of a neglected episode in the memoirs of an early Qajar traveller to England. Arguing for the importance of papyrology to cultural historians, it deals with the irony by which in the early nineteenth century Iran was able to import modern print technology but not the new papermaking skills that printing required. By building on references…
Moral Competition and the Thrill of the Spectacular: Recounting Catastrophe in Colonial Bombay
At 10:15 on the night of 31 May 1903, the D–block of the recently completed Sita Ram Building in Bombay suddenly came down with a crash. Most of the building was unoccupied, but on the ground floor was a saloon bar, which over the past months had done a brisk trade with British soldiers and sailors. The customers of this bar comprised most of the dead and injured when the building collapsed. Since the bar stood across the road from the tomb of a …
Jack Sepoy and the Dervishes: Islam and the Indian Soldier in Princely India
Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendi…
Making Sense of 'Sufism' in the Indian Subcontinent: A Survey of Trends
This article provides a summary of developments in recent decades in the study of Sufism in South Asia (referred to here as the Indian subcontinent). Beginning with the highly influential formulation of Sufism as Islamic 'mysticism', it analyses the serious shortcomings of this category, before moving on to assess the impact of anthropological, socio-historical and post-structuralist approaches to Sufism in the subcontinent. A final section consi…
Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History
Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, the main centers of political and cultural gravity for the Pashtuns lay in India, where numerous Pashtuns migrated in pursuit of commerce and soldiery. Amid the cosmopolitan pressures of India and its alternative models of self-knowledge and affiliation, Pashtun elites elaborated a distinct idiom of "Afghan" identity. With the Afghans' absorption into the Mughal Empire, ea…
Islam for the indentured Indian: A Muslim missionary in colonial South Africa
Tracing the migration of Muslims from India to South Africa's Natal colony in the late nineteenth century, the article focuses on the missionary activities of Ghulām Muhammad "Sūfī Sāhib" (d. 1329/1911). Placing Ghulām Muhammad in a new religious marketplace of competing religions, and versions thereof, the article examines the strategies through which he successfully established his form of Islam among Natal's indentured and merchant Muslim clas…
Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire
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