30 – South Asian Islam and the World: In Search for a New Paradigm

October 2, 2025
8:30 am
Neue Aula
As global networks, diasporas, populism, political theology, and legal regimes take center stage in South Asian Studies, this panel gathers contributions that point out the salience of Muslim communities in South Asia for investigating such themes. The aim is to highlight approaches actively breaking down established area studies barriers which far too often associate “relevant” and “normative” Islam only with the Middle East. Instead, we are interested in contributions that both show how Islam in South Asia is perceptive of and open to global Islamic trends but also, crucially, how South Asian thinkers and movements have made premodern and modern Islam. Over the last decade, a rise in Indian Ocean Studies has demonstrated, for instance, how Muslim groups and Islamic law have shaped the Western Indian Ocean in terms of legal frameworks and trade. Similarly, attempts have been made to consider Deobandi Islam not only as an Indian and Pakistani phenomenon but to investigate how it has established itself in places such as South Africa, the UK, and Iran. Abu l-A‘la Maududi and his Jamaat-e-Islami are increasingly understood not simply as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood but become recognized for having established essential frameworks for Islamist thought worldwide. One should also mention studies that have identified South Asian Shi‘i scholars as towering interlocutors in modern negotiations of the faith. Yet, despite these encouraging signs in scholarship, there is limited effort to bundle these and other conversations into one single forum to make a convincing case for the centrality of South Asian Muslim approaches to global Islam beyond the Subcontinent. This ECSAS panel provides such an innovative angle and is also attentive, despite its focus on Islam, not to lose sight of broader conversations in South Asian Studies.

Convenor

Simon Wolfgang Fuchs

Presentations

Narratives of Environmental Justice and State-Making at the Margins in 2020s Indian Cinema
Dueholm Amalie Goul - Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
From the Masjid to the Maiḳhana: Satire in Deoband’s Tajallī, c. 1949–1974
Nawaz Sumaira - Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, New Delhi, India
Recasting religion in South Asia: tracing the global trajectory of Ahmadi movement.
KOKAB UMTUL ALEEM - INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DELHI, IIT DELHI, NEW DELHI, India
Pious Registers: Interrogating the Local/Global Dichotomy in South Asian Islam
Kabir Rushnae - Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
Engaging Global Islamism: The International Network of the Jamaat-e-Islami
Fuchs Simon Wolfgang - Department of Asian Studies and Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
“Sufi Defense” from India in Mecca in the Early Twentieth Century
Elah Muhammad Souman - UCLA, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States
Shia Voicings of History
Abro Mohammad Zubair - University of New Mexico, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States
Darzis (Muslim tailors) and their use of ‘mythic resources’ to stay on in post-partition Calcutta
Chowdhury Humaira - King's India Institute, King's College London, London, United Kingdom