Islamic Modernism and Religious Community
This project examined key developments in the intellectual, social, religious, and political life of the Muslim community in north India between the 1880s and 1947 with a focus on the history of Islamic modernism. At its core is a case study of the Anjuman-i Himayat-i Islam (Society for the Defense of Islam, AHI), established in 1884 in Lahore, one of the most important Muslim organizations in the wider region. The AHI was mainly carried by lay volunteers belonging to the new colonial middle classes, including civil servants, teachers, traders, shopkeepers, artisans, and journalists, a fact that raises significant questions about religious authority, religious identity and the construction of communal boundaries in late 19th and early 20th-century South Asia.
The project reconstructed the AHI's history between its founding in 1884 and the partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 from both internal and external documents. I prioritized a close reading of the local, decentralized, indigenous Archive over the colonial Archive, analyzing the AHI’s proceedings, meeting minutes, and published reports and newsletters in addition to other Urdu sources such as biographical dictionaries, pamphlets, newspaper articles, reformist writings, and scholarly publications, all gathered in archives across Pakistan. This is complemented with material from the colonial Archive, including administrative records, periodicals, textbooks, and mission documents.
The monograph resulting from this project, which is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press in January 2026, reveals that Islamic modernism in the Punjab deviated in important ways from the modernism propagated and taught at Aligarh, was intimately connected with the Ahmadiyya movement, had complex ways of dealing with the Islamic scholarly tradition and was socially conservative and overall politically loyal to colonial rule until the late 1930s. From that time onward, modernists connected with the AHI began to resist colonial policies and became involved in the construction of religious nationalism, particularly through their close involvement with the movement that eventually led to the creation of the state of Pakistan in 1947.
Rethinking Islamic Modernism, therefore, uncovers alternative and localized genealogies of Islamic modernism, unravels modernism’s complex relationship with the Islamic tradition, demonstrates the modernists’ central importance for the history of religious nationalism, and writes the contribution of marginalized figures, such as women and orphans, back into the historiography of Islam in South Asia. Overall, the monograph makes an argument for taking modernism seriously as a religious tradition in its own right and emphasizes the ways in which Muslim voluntary associations contributed to a redefinition of Muslim religious authority and identity over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Publications
Rethinking Islamic Modernism: Religious Identity and Community in Colonial North India, McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming January 2026.
