Perilous Intimacies: Forum Introduction
J. Barton Scott
Perilous Intimacies: A Forum brings together four major voices on South Asian religions and Islamic studies to discuss SherAli Tareen’s pathbreaking new book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023), recently selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award. Even when they disagree with Tareen, Elaine Fisher, Supriya Gandhi, Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst, and Noah Salomon demonstrate that his provocative work is immensely good to think with. In a spirited forum coda, Tareen reciprocates by thinking with and from their critiques.
Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies asks how South Asian Muslim scholars or ulama imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. The book is a master class in how to open a dense intellectual archive to non-specialists. Although making imposingly erudite use of sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, Tareen always approaches these sources with a light touch. Often funny, Perilous Intimacies humanizes its ulama, even as it pays scrupulous attention to the complexities of their texts.
A substantial introduction fleshes out the book’s major themes, including friendship (via Jacques Derrida and Carl Schmitt). Six substantive chapters then explore these themes across chronologically diverse terrain. Chapter 1 takes us to the late eighteenth century, distilling the long history of early modern Muslim writing about Hinduism via a close reading of Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan. Chapter 2 jumps to interreligious debates of the 1870s between Deobandis and Arya Samajists. Chapters 3 and 4 most explicitly take up the theme of friendship. They are the heart of the book, or one of its hearts, thinking from the early 1920s conjuncture of the Khilafat Movement when, at Gandhi’s urging, Hindus and Muslims banded together around the cause of saving the caliphate. In Chapter 3, we find Abu’l Kalam Azad, the noted Congressite, and Ahmad Raza Khan, founder of the Barelwi movement, at loggerheads. In Chapter 4, we shift to debates about cow protection. In Chapters 5 and 6, we get another rich set of themes—contagion and imitation.
SherAli Tareen, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindo-Muslim Friendship After Empire. Columbia University Press, 2023. pp. 360 $35 (hardback)
As a whole, Perilous Intimacies substantially reframes scholarly debates on modern South Asian Islam by making three interlocking arguments. First, Tareen dispenses with the clichéd binaries that have structured so much scholarship (traditionalist/modernist, continuity/rupture, Sufism/law) so as to recuperate the internal logic of ulama debates. By doing so, he comes to his second and defining argument: “In the aftermath of Muslim political sovereignty, it is in the performance of everyday ritual life that sovereign power was increasingly located and exercised.” The “after empire” in his title, then, refers not to the British, but to the subcontinent’s Islamicate empires, defunct after 1857. With sovereignty now transposed onto Muslim bodies, the “fraught labor of delineating… intra-Muslim differences, fissures, and narrative framings” would henceforth become newly salient (12). Whence Tareen’s third argument: Muslim discourses on Hindu-Muslim difference (i.e., “communalism”) cannot be understood independently of discourses on intra-Muslim difference.
By Tareen’s account, the social production of religious difference in late colonial India would seem as much a product of the collapse of Islamic empires as of British-colonial knowledge systems. Nineteenth-century Islam, we might say, was a theologico-political assemblage in the process of being rendered a depoliticized “world religion.” Rather than taking religion as an established fact, a fixed social vector in colonial India, Tareen presumes that “religion-making” (to use Arvind-Pal Mandair and Markus Dressler’s term) was the integral process of the period.
It would be hard to overstate the intellectual pleasures offered by this book. It would also be hard to overstate its political urgency. Tareen dedicates Perilous Intimacies to Sharjeel Imam, a person he has never met. As he explains in the epilogue, Imam was charged and jailed for sedition by the Indian government for speeches he gave in 2019 and 2020 at India’s two leading non-seminary Muslim institutions of higher learning, Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University. He remains imprisoned. Standing in solidarity with Imam, Tareen (ever the consummate textualist) gives us a close reading of his allegedly seditious speeches. At AMU, Imam critiqued the Indian constitution and its secularism as inherently discriminatory toward Muslims, and he pointed especially to rhetorical positions carved in the 1920s by people like Azad. Congressite inclusion of Muslims produced a “poison” that persists in the present, with Azad and others going too far toward erasing Muslim difference or distinction.
Imam’s provocation, Tareen suggests, “serves as an urgent reminder to take seriously and on its own terms, the normative logic and rationality of a thinker like Ahmad Raza Khan, whose conceptions of religious identity and difference sit rather uncomfortably with contemporary liberal secular notions of a good Muslim eagerly aspiring for interreligious assimilation and harmony.” To take such figures seriously is not to lionize or valorize them, but simply to recognize that we need to see them clearly if we are to understand what was lost en route to our present.
Sharjeel Imam further argued that, because of these assimilationist compromises, a proper history of Muslims in South Asia has yet to be written. If that is indeed the case, Perilous Intimacies would seem a major step in the right direction—bringing new and welcome energy to the study of South Asian Islam and religious studies more generally.
J. Barton Scott is Associate Professor of Historical Studies and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (University of Chicago/Permanent Black) and Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago/Primus).
