Islam in History and Politics

Abstract

This collection of essays consists primarily of the output of Australia’s first major conference on SouthAsian Islam, held in 1996.Most of the contributions to this somewhat delayed volume, then, were written by scholars working in the Australian and New Zealand academe. Editor Asim Roy has tried to close the intervening decade with an at times polemical introduction focusing on the Islamophobia that has been rising steadily since the conference was held. The book opens with Francis Robinson’s conference keynote address. A professor at Royal Holloway in London and former president of the Royal Asiatic Society, Robinson is one of the most prominent scholars on (early) modern Islam in South Asia. His presentation discusses the shift from an “other-worldly” to a “this-world Islam” and the consequences that this inward turn had for the individual Muslim’s sense of responsibility. As the ulama lost their monopoly on the interpretation of Islam in this process, reformists and modernists – and Muslim women in particular – were all thrown back on their own devices for re-evaluating the role of religion in what had become, to a large extent, a disenchanted world ...