{"title":"For Francis Robinson","authors":"M. Hasan","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000378","url":null,"abstract":"Francis Robinson's academic romance with the subcontinent began when he was doing research for his doctoral thesis at Trinity College Cambridge. He has often reminded me that we were contemporaries—or near contemporaries—at Cambridge, but I do not remember having met him then. I do recall that his supervisor was my friend, the historian Anil Seal, who was a fellow of Trinity College.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41757063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Cheek by jowl’: education as a bridge between Muslims and the British in colonial India","authors":"Sumaira Noreen","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000330","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Muslims’ education in British India is treated in the literature as something encompassing resistance, reaction, and hence emancipation from putatively exploitative British policies. This article focuses on the patterns of Muslims’ emergent knowledge traditions in British India in response to the British government's involvement in the educational matters of the Indian subcontinent. Data findings reveal that Indian Muslims’ responses to the growing trend towards ‘modern’ education in the Indian subcontinent evolved gradually through discursive interactions leading to divergent reformist tendencies in favour of or against adopting Western education. The British government's decision to make ‘special’ arrangements for Muslims’ educational uplift had left legacies of mutual admiration, fear, and sometimes resentment between Muslims and the British government in the subcontinent. Amid ambivalent relations between the British and Muslims, it was not difficult to find apt illustrations of what Francis Robinson calls a ‘cheek by jowl’ relationship.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44147750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Religion and the rise of magic in Urdu print culture: the case of Chīn aur Bangāl kā Jādū","authors":"Markus Daechsel","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000226","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article offers a first survey of a novel genre of grimoires published in Urdu-reading India in the early twentieth century. It contained a wide selection of magic material from Islamicate and Tantric sources as well as Western parapsychology and spiritualism. Its applications ranged from remedies of last resort in illness, relationship troubles, and other life problems to common household cures and magical tricks performed for pleasure alone. Produced and read by members of all religious groups in North India, this material indicates important changes in popular attitudes towards magic. Magic by no means declined at the beginning of the twentieth century, but flourished as a viable commercial print genre that became increasingly detached from religion.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43901593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rationalising ritual: worship in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries","authors":"M. Zaman","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000317","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the discussion of core Islamic rituals in the writings of the influential eighteenth-century Sufi, hadith scholar, and jurist Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762). It brings out the implications of Wali Allah's sustained concern with demonstrating how divinely mandated rituals serve human interests, not just at the individual but also at the societal and political levels. This aspect of Wali Allah's thought has parallels with how many modernists and Islamists in colonial and post-colonial South Asia have sought to explain Islamic rituals in terms of their social ramifications. But there are some significant differences between them, too, and these help shed further light on Wali Allah's distinctive theory of ritual.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47011623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A heresy inquisition in the National Assembly and the Islamisation of Pakistan","authors":"A. Moin","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000299","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The goal of the second constitutional amendment passed in 1974 was to excommunicate the Ahmadis and establish Pakistan as a bona fide Islamic state. The Pakistani state accomplished this goal through an extraordinary process in which the National Assembly conducted a month-long examination of Ahmadi beliefs. Conducted by the attorney general of Pakistan, who was aided by the ulema members of parliament, these proceedings were a type of heresy inquisition in which the leaders of the Ahmadi community served as defendants. This article examines the key religious issues involved in these proceedings from a longer historical perspective that includes the Mughal and Safavid eras. In doing so, it highlights how pre-modern forms of religious persecution and accommodation came to be adapted to serve the ends of a modern constitutional nation-state.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42342534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Education among Indian Muslims. Jamia Millia Islamia's journal Payām-e taʿlīm","authors":"Margrit Pernau","doi":"10.1017/s1356186322000840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186322000840","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The rapid changes caused by high imperialism and modernisation induced an orientation towards the future among the Indian Muslims: where was the community and the nation heading? What did the young generation need, in terms of both character and knowledge, to master the future and to shape it in such a way as to bring justice and civilisation, honour and prosperity to the country?\u0000 This article aims to investigate how such important, lofty questions on education were translated into everyday pedagogical practices by looking at Payām-e taʿlīm, a journal for children that was brought out by the Jamia Millia Islamia, the nationalist Muslim university and school in Delhi, from 1926 onwards. Payām provided stories, knowledge, and ideas to students of Jamia's own primary and secondary schools, but which was also successfully aimed at a wider geographical spread.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47303733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sorry for what? Asking the right questions about the Bangladeshi liberation war and Pakistan's genocidal military operation in 1971","authors":"Ali Usman Qasmi","doi":"10.1017/s1356186322000839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186322000839","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Three aspects of the historical memory of 1971 remain highly contentious. The first concerns the (il)legitimacy of the military operation and the description of Bengali resistance against it as ‘national liberation’. The second centres on the accusation of the Pakistani military's genocidal violence, the use of rape as a weapon, and the counter-allegation of a Bihari genocide. The third focuses on the way forward: whether this should be by forgetting the past or seeking an apology for war crimes.\u0000 This article will focus on all three aspects of the debate about the violent events of the 1971 war. Instead of writing a history of 1971 as such, I will propose a methodological framework for writing a history of the war: that of asking the right kind of questions. I invoke this method not for a correct answer, or even a different kind of history, but mainly for its interruptive power to sabotage the dominant discourse, force a moment of introspection, and open up a reflective space for the possibility of reparative justice through an intimate historical narrativisation.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43818351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wilful daughters, domestic goddesses, pious Muslims, and rebels: Islam, fashion, commodities, and emotions among upper class women in Pakistan, 1947–1962","authors":"Elisabetta Iob","doi":"10.1017/s1356186322000785","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186322000785","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Pakistan, 15 January 1950. Impeccably dressed, Zarina is going out to celebrate the wedding of her partner-in-gossip-crime, Fizza. Her busy life makes her feel anxious. The wrongdoings of the home helpers and her parents’ constant bickering fill her family life. Fashion magazines, get-togethers at the association she has just joined, and ladies’ glamorous parties are her only antidotes to stress.\u0000 This article explores the history of Zarina and her fellow upper class women's emotions, everyday lives, and daily perception of religious and socio-political ideas of change in Pakistan's momentous formative years (1947–1962). By relying on Francis Robinson's research on religious change, self, and the fashioning of Muslim identity, it provides the first historical ethnography of how upper class women in Pakistan understood and experienced socio-political change through the transformation of their emotions, religious views, lifestyle, and behaviour.\u0000 Drawing on material and visual culture and a rich selection of newspaper clippings and government records, this article lifts the curtain on the material and immaterial ‘stuff’ of women's dreams, taste in fashion, private lives, and political and religious ideas. Finally, it illuminates how women and their gendered agency became the key ‘sites’ for a new and, at times, surprising Islamic revival.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43714607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marshall Hodgson's ideas on cores and modernity in Islam: a critique","authors":"R. Eaton","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000275","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Marshall Hodgson has been rightly admired for his vast contributions in the fields of both Islam and world history. Despite the many decades since the publication of his works on these topics, his ideas have largely survived the test of time and continue to be influential. There are two respects, however, in which Hodgson's ideas appear to have been fundamentally flawed—namely, his notion of cultural cores versus peripheries in the Islamic world, and his understanding of modernity. This article explores both of these themes.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45821824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China","authors":"Nile Green","doi":"10.1017/s1356186323000263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1356186323000263","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Three centuries after the Mongol-era historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) wrote his influential account of China, an émigré Christian convert from Islam translated Matteo Ricci's book on China into Persian in Mughal Delhi. In doing so, he provided a remarkably detailed depiction of the rulers, religions, and regulations of the Ming empire that greatly updated, and superseded, Rashid al-Din's celebrated account. Nonetheless, by the very virtue of its triangulated origins—between China, Europe, and India; between Chinese, Latin, and Persian—this was a fraught endeavour. For Chinese cultural traditions had to be rendered into Islamicate Persian terms that were approximate equivalents for Latin Christian terms which themselves inevitably misrepresented Confucian terms that in turn provided biased depictions of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. By looking at two moments of the transmission of Ricci into Persian—in the early modern era of manuscripts and amid the colonial ascent of Indian print—this article uses translation as a lens through which to observe both the reach and limits of the cross-cultural connections that have captivated global historians in recent decades.","PeriodicalId":17566,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42160069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}