Overview

In a series of legal battles starting in 1882, South Asian Muslims made up of modernists, traditionalists, reformists, Shias and Sunnis attempted to modify the laws relating to their places of worship. Their efforts failed as the ideals they presented flew in the face of colonial secularism. This book looks at the legal history of Muslim endowments and the intellectual and social history of sectarian identities, demonstrating how these topics are interconnected in ways that affected the everyday lives of mosque congregants across North India. Through the use of legal records, archives and multiple case studies Sana Haroon ties a series of narrative threads stretching across multiple regions in Colonial South Asia.

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Through five illuminating case studies of disputes surrounding mosques across British India and Burma, Sana Haroon explores the dilemmas of public worship in a colonial secular state. Showing how mosques became spaces of social influence and control, she traces the ascent of prayer-leaders and mosque custodians as these lesser-known counterparts to Sufis and 'ulama became widespread intermediaries between ordinary Muslims and legal officialdom. - Nile Green, Professor of History, UCLA Deftly bringing together colonial legal archives with vernacular texts in Urdu, The Mosques of Colonial South Asia offers a bold new approach to understanding lived Islam in colonial South Asia. Ranging from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and from Rangoon to Lahore, the book centers the mosque as a site of social change, sectarian debate, and legal regulation. The result is a highly original take on a crucial aspect of Muslim public life, the mosque, that historians have mostly overlooked. - Brannon D. Ingram, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Northwestern University, USA

Author Information

Sana Haroon is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. She is the author of Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afhgan Borderland.

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