Abstract
Speaking to the timeliness of SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire, in January 2024, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, an ardent Hindu nationalist, inaugurated the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, calling it “the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes” (Mashal and Kumar 2024). This pinnacle moment of saffron politics comes at the despair of the approximately 200 million Muslims in India. The temple is built on the site of the historic Babri Mosque, the origins of which goes back to the Mughal era when it was built on what Hindu nationalists argue was the place of an earlier Hindu temple that the Muslim Mughals destroyed. In 1992, amid waves of sectarian violence that killed thousands, Hindu activists razed the Babri Mosque. “The manner in which the mosque was razed,” reads an article on The New York Times, “set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat ‘love jihad’ and—in an echo of Ayodhya—‘bulldozer justice’ in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions” (Mashal and Kumar 2024). Yet Perilous Intimacies shows that India’s Hindu-Muslim relationship cannot just be read as a binary of inclusion/exclusion, tolerance/intolerance, or secular/religious. Rather, its complexity demands a more sophisticated understanding—one which Tareen offers through the prism of “friendship.”
Perilous Intimacies takes its readers to a paradoxical moment in Indian politics and in the development of South Asian Muslim thought. The South Asian Muslim scholarly elite in the late Mughal era to the colonial and late colonial periods relied on premodern texts, written during the Mughal Empire, on how to govern the other, non-Muslim (mostly Hindu) citizenry under the then-irrefutable Muslim rule. The idea of Muslim superiority was central to this premodern Islamic worldview. However, leading up to and in the post-1857 eras, these scholars found themselves shepherding a shrinking religious minority in a reality where Muslims were no longer at the helm of political power. Rather, adding insult to injury, Muslims were now living alongside a dominant Hindu majority. Just how did this traditionally educated Muslim intelligentsia navigate the tides of time and shifting political power to carve out a distinctly Muslim political thought while being enmeshed with Hindu thought and traditions? Using the concepts of friendship and sovereignty, Tareen examines how prominent Indian Muslim scholars understood and debated among themselves “the limits of Hindu-Muslim relations and friendship” in early modern and modern South Asia.
The book’s main audiences are scholars of religious, Islamic, and South Asian studies. But Tareen’s arguments hinge on two key concepts that might also interest sociologists—the way he conceptualizes the interactions between friendship and sovereignty. According to Tareen, “friendship is fraught with power” (p. 6). It is “a relationship or encounter of intimacy, collaboration, cooperation, or hospitality with the other that, while affording particular benefits, opportunities, and forms of power and pleasure, also renders untenable exclusive claims to the purity and sovereign ownership of the self” (p. 4). Based on this formulation of friendship, the Ulama has exercised a sovereignty of Muslim theology—one that, in the aftermath of Muslim political sovereignty and in the face of colonial modernity, was embedded and enacted in the performance of everyday rituals that were not imitations of other non-Muslim habits, practices, and traditions. As a result, Tareen notes that “somewhat paradoxically, the loss of political sovereignty made possible an expanded notion and sphere of politics and sovereign power that was not territorial or bound to the state, but was situated in the domain of everyday ritual practice and premised on the imperial logic of maintaining superiority over religious ‘others’ through the preservation of embodied difference and distinction” (pp. 9–10).
The book is divided into six chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion) that move chronologically from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Chapter One examines early modern Muslim understandings of Hinduism. Chapter Two moves to the late nineteenth-century British colonial context to examine the content and context of a major interreligious festival where Hindu, Muslim, and Christian missionary scholars in India congregated to debate the authenticity of their respective religious traditions.
Chapters Three and Four progress to the second decade of the twentieth century when the anticolonial Khilafat movement was taking place. This movement drew together prominent members of the Muslim scholarly and political elite including modernist scholars and traditionalist Ulema who allied with two of India’s greatest political powerhouses, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The goal was to pressure the British government to restore the Ottoman Caliphate. Focusing on the themes of interreligious friendship and intimacy, these two chapters show how the Muslim leaders passionately debated among themselves on just what it meant to maintain the sovereignty of Muslims (and self-perceived superiority over other religions) while making gestures and compromises toward their Hindu allies for the benefit of the larger anticolonial movement.
The book’s last two chapters present what Tareen claims to be “the first detailed examination of South Asian Muslim scholarly discourses and debates on the doctrine and application of reprehensible imitation in Islam” (p. 30).
However, it is Chapter Four, “The Cow and the Caliphate,” that is perhaps the most explicitly relevant to contemporary Hindu-Muslim relations. To Hindus, cows are sacred and believed to represent the cow mother of the Hindu nation, but they are a common animal sacrifice made in Allah’s name during Eid and other Muslim occasions. Tareen himself draws the connection to contemporary lynchings of Muslims by Hindus based on allegations of beef consumption. Symbolic both to Muslims and Hindus, the metaphor of the cow was just as deeply consequential for Muslim political survival and sovereignty as a religious minority in India during the Khilafat movement as it is today. Tareen makes this argument by using the issue of cow sacrifice to test the extent of Hindu-Muslim friendship, as debated by the Ulema at the time. “Should Indian Muslims,” the Muslim scholars had debated vigorously, “abandon or refrain from cow sacrifice and the consumption of beef as a gesture of hospitality for the Hindu community in their bid to salvage the Ottoman Caliphate by forging a unified front [with Hindus] against the British?” (p. 29) Or would such a gesture compromise the sovereignty and distinction of Muslim practices and render the community subservient to Hindus?
Perilous Intimacies is not an easy read—it is intellectual, nuanced, and thought-provoking. It challenges any simplistic notion of either Hindu-Muslim relations or a unified Muslim political thought. Although set in the history of South Asian Islam, it is an exemplary analysis of how a minority grapples with its identity in the context of diversity and threat of erasure (real or perceived) that will also be of interest to political sociologists of race/ethnicity, (de)colonization, and religion.