Asim Roy, ed., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 224 pages.

This collection of essays consists primarily of the output of Australia’s first major conference on South Asian Islam, held in 1996.Most of the contributions to this somewhat delayed volume, then, were written by scholars working in the Australian and New Zealand academe. Editor Asim Roy has tried to close the intervening decade with an at times polemical introduction focusing on the Islamophobia that has been rising steadily since the conference was held.

The book opens with Francis Robinson’s conference keynote address. A professor at Royal Holloway in London and former president of the Royal Asiatic Society, Robinson is one of the most prominent scholars on (early) modern Islam in South Asia. His presentation discusses the shift from an “other-worldly” to a “this-world Islam” and the consequences that this inward turn had for the individual Muslim’s sense of responsibility. As the ulama lost their monopoly on the interpretation of Islam in this process, reformists and modernists – and Muslim women in particular – were all thrown back on their own devices for re-evaluating the role of religion in what had become, to a large extent, a disenchanted world.

In his meditation on self-instrumentality and self-affirmation, Robinson enters into a conversation with the writings of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, a leading thinker onwhat he himself termed “one of themost powerful ideas in modern civilization”: the centrality of “ordinary life” to self-fulfillment (p. 29). This open-ended new trajectory raises an array of previously unasked questions, such as what will be the outcome of “the sense of empowerment that comes with the knowledge that it is humanity that fashions the world” and whether it will lead theMuslim world toward a secularizing path (pp. 32-33).

The next two essays are dedicated to the historiography of South Asian Islam. Javeed Alam’s brief presentation revolves around the notion of the Subcontinent’s alleged “composite culture,” which is often attributed to a supposedly inherent Indian genius for synthesis. Central to his analysis is that “co-mingling” and “fusion” on folk levels were very much a feature of communal development in the pre-reflective stage, which only started to unravel as elites, states, and “spokesmen of dominant versions of orthodoxy” intervened (pp. 38-39). Discussing both the impact of Hindu and Muslim intrusions, Alam discerns a growing politicization of societal life that resulted in a “bifurcation of common concerns and interests” (p. 43).

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