Rethinking Islamic Modernism: Religious Identity and Community in Colonial North India (McGill-Queen's Studies in Modern Islamic Thought)

Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim modernist thinkers and writers in South Asia demanded a reconciliation between Islam and European thought in response to a perceived crisis of Islam.In the ensuing modernist movements, newly founded voluntary associations and their lay members played a crucial role in popularizing and disseminating modernist ideas on the ground, transforming definitions of both religious identity and community in the process. Through an in-depth and multifaceted historical analysis of one of the foremost Muslim associations of colonial North India, the Society for the Defence of Islam (Anjuman-i Himayat-i Islam, established 1884 in Lahore), Maria-Magdalena Pruss proposes a nuanced understanding of Islamic modernism as a stream of thought, highlighting its internal diversity and complex development over a period of more than sixty years.The evolution of this influential association reveals the role and work of lay people, who a