The Aga Khan Case : Religion and Identity in Colonial India / Teena Purohit.
Purohit, Teena, author.
2012
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Title The Aga Khan Case : Religion and Identity in Colonial India / Teena Purohit.
Author Purohit, Teena, author.
ISBN 9780674067707
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067707
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2012]
Copyright ©2012
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers 10.4159/harvard.9780674067707 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification 344.096
Summary An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West's understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court's ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge's decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)
In Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
E-BOOK PACKAGE THEOLOGY, JUDAISM, RELIGION 2012
E-BOOK PAKET THEOLOGIE,RELIGIONSWISS., JUDAISTIK 2012
HUP Complete eBook Package 2011-2014
HUP eBook Package 2012
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2013
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2014
HUP eBook Package Backlist 2000-2015
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Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Chapter one. Prehistories of the Isma'ili Sect in Nineteenth-Century Bombay
Chapter two. Sectarian Showdown in the Aga Khan Case of 1866
Chapter three. Reading Satpanth against the Judicial Archive
Chapter four. Comparative Formations of the Hindu Swami Narayan "Sect"
Chapter five. Sect and Secularism in the Early Nationalist Period
Conclusion
Notes
Index

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