My book provides an account of the complexities and internal disagreements of a highly sophisticated and influential yet less studied intellectual tradition: the discourses and debates of South Asian ulama and their interlocutors-cum-competitors on Hindu-Muslim friendship and its boundaries. My aim in considering a range of conflicting voices on this question is to punctuate what is among the central arguments of this book: Muslim scholarly investments in delineating the limits of Hindu-Muslim friendship are often inextricable from intra-Muslim disagreement on Islam and its limits.
The particular themes that form the focus of the individual chapters in this book – inter-religious translation, doctrinal polemics, political solidarity, everyday intimacies, animal sacrifice, and the imitation of non-Muslims – showcase the breadth and elasticity of friendship between Hindus and Muslims both as a category of analysis and as an idea that espouses tremendous interest.
Collectively, these themes allow for a capacious understanding of inter-religious friendship that includes and brings together problems of theology, history, politics, ritual practice, and the performance of religious identity in the public sphere. Ultimately, the case studies highlight an important and rarely examined dimension of the problem of religious difference in South Asia – namely, the intra-minority debates and tensions generated through the encounter between the legacy of pre-colonial traditions, and norms and the conditions and institutions of colonial modernity.
This encounter, I try to show, has meant considerable aspiration, anxiety, and intellectual ferment, as it has been a central site of avid politics. As Salman Sayyid, in his piercingly brilliant book Recalling the Caliphate, describes the political: “The political erupts when a distinction between friend and enemy takes hold. The intensity of the distinction, in other words, the intensity of enmity and amity, determines the depth and range of the political.” Sayyid’s observation can be productively folded with the following statement by Carl Schmitt in a lesser-read text, Theory of the Partisan: “The core of the political is not enmity per se but the distinction of friend and enemy: it presupposes both friend and enemy” (emphasis mine).
The chapters in this book present an account of different moments of the eruption of the political when the question of “the intensity of enmity and amity” between Hindus and Muslims was authoritatively debated. I have argued that engaging the question of Hindu-Muslim friendship requires close attention to intra-Muslim encounters over the boundaries of Islam and difference, especially during South Asia’s transition to colonial modernity. The ulama and their discourses present a vital site for the exploration of the varied and conflicting ways in which intra-minority relations and the limits of inter-religious friendship and hospitality were imagined and contested in colonial South Asia. To put it differently, the interaction of Muslim political theology and the conditions of colonial modernity is critical to thinking through the question of inter-religious encounters in South Asia, especially Hindu-Muslim encounters.
I begin with early modern Muslim scholarly translations of Hindu thought and practice. Over the course of this book, I employ phrases like Hindu-Muslim friendship and Hindu-Muslim relations without meaning to authorise “Hindus” and “Muslims” as bounded, primordial, or naturally opposed identities defined primarily by religion and theology. Rather, the very point of examining the ambiguities and complexities shadowing traditions of intra-Muslim debate on inter-religious friendship is to help unbind any stagnant or congealed notion of religious difference.
On October 26, 1920, Maulvi Hakim ‘Ali, a teacher at Islamia College in Lahore in British India – among the foremost institutions of higher learning in Northern India – wrote a letter to the towering late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921). Khan was terminally ill when he received this letter, and he died a year later. In his letter, Maulvi Hakim ‘Ali sought Khan’s guidance on a conundrum that had taken the Islamia College campus by storm. A few days earlier, another prominent Indian Muslim scholar and political leader, Abu’l Kalam Azad (d. 1958), had issued a juridical opinion that prohibited all Muslim schools and colleges in India from accepting any form of financial aid or support from the British colonial government. He had also declared that students at religious schools and colleges must annul their enrolments if their institutions did not decline all forms of financial support from the British, thus creating a good deal of confusion and consternation in colleges across the country, including at Islamia College.
Azad’s exhortation was animated by the anticolonial non-cooperation movement led by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The leaders of this movement called on all Indians, including Indian Muslims, to abandon any relationship of friendship, cooperation, and service with the British. Azad was also a major protagonist of the Khilafat movement which was in full swing at this moment. The Khilafat movement combined the anticolonial fervour of the non-cooperation movement with the political mission of protecting the Ottoman caliphate from what its leaders saw as the colonising designs and aggression of the British in the Arab Middle East following the First World War.
Azad and his compatriots’ call for abandoning relations with the British catalysed a heated debate among Indian Muslims over the normative limits of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims, a debate that often took the form of outright polemic. At the heart of this polemic were certain pressing questions for Muslim scholars. For instance, what were the limits of friendship for a colonised Muslim community that found itself in a moment of political crisis? Which unbelievers were worthy of friendship, and which were not? In the context of colonial India, was there a distinction to be made between the British and the Hindus in terms of their normative allowance for friendship? And, perhaps most crucially, how was Indian Muslim identity to be imagined, performed, and protected in the colonial public sphere?
I describe the opposing views of two major scholars who were at the centre of this polemic – Abu’l Kalam Azad and Ahmad Raza Khan – with the purpose of exploring the question of how competing imaginaries of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims translated into competing understandings of politics, sovereignty, and a moral public in modern South Asian Islam.
In this book, SherAli Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim scholars imagined and contested the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly discourse and debates on this subject were unresolved tensions and fissures over the place and meaning of Islam in the modern world.
Perilous Intimacies considers a range of topics, including Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, the question of inter-religious friendship in the Qur’an, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits.
Based on a close reading of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book illuminates the depth and complexity of Muslim intellectual traditions in South Asia while presenting the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations and tensions.
Excerpted with permission from Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire, Sherali Tareen, Permanent Black.