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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 political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 Muslimfaqīrs, the article argues that missionaries, colonial officials, and physicians joined together in a moral and then medical critique of thefaqīrsas venerated idlers and sanctified drug users. The moral dimensions of the critique were then taken up by Muslim and Hindu reformists. Positioned at the centre of an immoral nexus, for their British critics thefaqīrswere key to the spread of drug abuse and in turn insanity among their followers. For Indian reformists and then nationalists, this nexus also connected thefaqīrsto the moral, economic, and physical weakening of the nation. In both of these critical visions, the begging mendicant was seen as an actively harmful figure whose misdeeds ranged from promoting the inversed morality of an anti-work ethic to peddling the evils of drug addiction and rousing the riotous masses on holy days. By drawing on a range of missionary, medical and Muslim reformist texts, the article shows how from around 1870 the discourses of Islamic reform and Indian nationalism gradually joined forces with the medical and moral discipline of empire such that by the 1920s thefaqīrshad gained an assembly of powerful enemies. In this way, the colonial period is seen as a crucial period of transition in the meanings of begging and drug use that would leave the venerated mendicants of former times disempowered in post-colonial South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 East Asia in the inter-war period. Through a contextualized close reading of theHaqiqat-e Japan, the essay reconstructs the infrastructural, social and intellectual networks that gave shape to the most detailed Urdu study of Japan to appear before the better known Indian nationalist alliances with Japan during the Second World War. The text has been selected for being the most detailed and best informed of the many Urdu books about Japan to appear between the beginning of Indian interest in Japan in the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War. As such, it provides a suitable test case for assessing the scope and limits of Indian Muslim ‘Japanology’. By contrasting this Japanology with the Japanophilia that gave rise to it, the essay makes a case for the distinction and divergence between information and affect at the height of the anti-colonial movement across Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the fundamental assumption of Edward Said that orientalism was a product of the secular Enlightenment, this article explores the state of oriental learning at England's most prestigious sites of intellectual and discursive production in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the definitively Christian approach to empire propounded by the leading university orientalists of the period, the essay excavates an important era of orientalism overlooked by modern scholarship. From the most senior positions in the universities there spread a distinctly anti-secular and ‘providentialist’ reading of empire. Unlike the secular orientalism of the eighteenth and later nineteenth century, this new ‘evangelical orientalism’ formed the major institutionalised means of understanding Britain's Asian empire during the decades in which it was chiefly acquired. In place of the collusion of extractive imperialism and secular knowledge forms delineated by Edward Said, the article therefore outlines a relationship between orientalism and empire that was more fraught and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the impact of nineteenth century religious reform on the voicing of mystical experience in Urdu poetry. Shifting the focus away from the better-known literary milieu of colonial North India, the article turns towards the more neglected setting of princely Hyderabad. By setting the mystical lyrics produced there by Iftikhar 'Alī Shah Watan (d. 1324/1906) in relation to the poetry of his contemporaries, it argues that in a new public sphere in which poems were distributed through print no less than performance the poetry of mystical experience took on more morally conservative idioms that eschewed the sensual metaphors of older Urdu and Persian tradition. In this way, the article highlights the compromises that Sufi poets were required to undertake to protect their message from the critiques of moral impropriety that were a potent force in literary no less than religious debates during India's fin-de-siecle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Mesopotamia and Crete. The main early cultural associations of the eggs and feathers were with death/resurrection and kingship respectively, a symbolism that was passed on into early Christian and Muslim usage. Mercantile, religious and political links across the premodern Mediterranean meant that these items found parallel employment all around the Mediterranean littoral, and beyond it, in Arabia, South Asia and Africa. As an essay in the uses of material culture in mapping cultural exchange and charting the eclectic qualities of popular religiosity, the article provides a wide-ranging survey of the presence of these objects, from their visual appearance in Renaissance paintings to their hanging in the shrines of Indo-Muslim saints. A final section draws conclusions on the relationship between shared objects, cultural boundaries and the writing of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 structure in narrating a landscape ordered by the topographic signs of either sufis and sultans or brahmins and rajas. More importantly, they all refer to the same local landscape, with each history seeking an answer to the blunt facts of the region's topography and its corresponding architecture through recourse both to the cultural memory of their respective traditions and to more contemporary social change in the lifetime of their authors. Questions of aetiology are crucial to each of the accounts, with the different authors claiming the landscape in the name of a primordial historical association with either a brahmin or a group of sufis. All three narrators thus looked to the past to construct claims for symbolic control of Daulatabad fort and the landscape that surrounded it by blurring the boundaries of the geographies of royal and religious figures, of the narrative and physical landscape, and of past and present events. In this way, we see how the same landscape is capable of projecting profoundly different meanings according to the religious identity of the observer and their re-interpretation and, indeed, re-imagination of the historical past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the patronage of the shrines of Sufi institutions by Indo-Muslim rulers including Babur in the 16th century in India. Babur was fond of the shrines, including the Naqshbandi saints of Central Asia. Sufis and its shrines were also patronized by the Deccan Muslim dynasties. As the Mughals brought their cultural and political changes to the Deccan, the dominating classes of the area were associating themselves to places that had the power of the Sufi saints. It cites that Sufi institutions' interiors were decorated royal designs.

This article examines the relationship between travelling Sufis and the creation of sacred Muslim space. Beginning with a discussion of the theme of travel in Sufi writing and practice, the discussion moves to an analysis of the role of migrant Iranian and Arab Sufis in the evolution of a regional sacred geography for Muslims in South Asia. The figure of the migrant holy man is interpreted as the crucial means by which emerging holy sites in South Asia could be connected to the peoples and places of the Islamic Heilsgeschichte in the Near East. An illustration of this process of inter-linking geographies is given with reference to the real and imagined journeys of the Sufi saints of Aurangabad, as reflected in the hagio graphic literature associated with their shrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]