Islam, Modernity, and the Question of Religious Heterodoxy

This chapter undertakes a comparative and historical inquiry to address the role of sharia in shaping concrete state responses toward managing “heterodox” religious communities across time and space. The aim of this inquiry is, first, to undertake a critique of civilizational analyses that seek to capture supposedly essential features of Muslim societies, and second, to underscore the marginal role of sharia in adjudicating issues related to religious heterodoxy in both early modern empires and modern Muslim states. It analyzes, first, how Muslim rulers in two early modern Muslim empires, Safavid Iran and Mughal India, dealt with the same heterodox group, the Nuqtavi Sufi order. Next, it focuses on how two contemporary Muslim-majority states that emerged from these empires, Iran and Pakistan, have sought to regulate and discipline “heretical” groups in their midst—Baha’is in Iran and the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan. The analysis opens space for formulating alternative accounts of transitions to modernity that are not beholden to teleological Eurocentric notions that normalize notions of unredeemable and non-usable pasts and always-already open and progressive futures.