Perilous Intimacies : Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire

Finalist, 2024 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies, American Academy of ReligionLonglist, 2024 Karwaan Book Award, Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration InitiativeFriendship-particularly interreligious friendship-offers both promise and peril.After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship?How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority?In this groundbreaking book, SherAli Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly discourse and debates on Hindu-Muslim friendsh