48 – Orientalism’s ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South Asia

October 2, 2025
2:00 pm
H13
For our panel titled “Orientalism's ‘Other’: Islamic Studies, European Thought, and South Asia”, we invite contributions that explore the interactions between South Asian Muslims and European scholarship on Islam from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, with a focus on the impact and interpretation of Orientalism. Building on recent research, the presentations in this panel will examine the impact of European scholarship on Muslim discourses in South Asia, highlighting unexplored aspects of this intellectual entanglement and the categories of knowledge it produced, particularly in the construction of modern Islamic studies as an academic discipline. The papers assembled here investigate the shaping of knowledge production on Islam through interactions between European Orientalists and South Asian Muslim scholars, educators, reformers, and poets. Themes include, among others, contributions by South Asian thinkers to Islamic knowledge production with an emphasis on the translocal history of Islamic studies, careers of individual Muslim thinkers which highlight the blurry boundaries between Islamism, Muslim modernism, and other intellectual orientations in modern Islam, as well as the relationship between Orientalist translations of Sufi poetry and South Asian Muslim poets' responses during the colonial era, arguing for the discursive co-constitution of world religions and literatures in Islamic studies.

Convenors

Dr. Maria-Magdalena Pruss
Dr. Brannon Ingram
Dr. Francesca Chubb-Confer

Presentations

Networks of Exchange: South Asian Muslims, European Orientalism, and the Academic Study of Islam
Pruss Maria-Magdalena - Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany
Arabic and European Andalusi Histories in early-20th century Hyderabad Deccan: Loss, Temporality and Translation
Pandey Jaideep - University of Michigan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States
The Many Lives of Muhammad: Sirah Writing in London
Kidwai Abdul Sabur - Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
Mazheruddin Siddiqi (1915-1991): The (Not So) Strange Career of a Modernist Islamist Orientalist
Ingram Brannon - Northwestern University, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States
The “Indian Islam” through Egyptian eyes: Arab Orientalism and the formation of national Islams
Ferrand Antoinette - Scientific Member, French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, Cairo, Egypt
World Religions, World Literatures, and the Translation of Islam in South Asia
Chubb-Confer Francesca - Oberlin College, Oberlin College, Oberlin, United States
Some Experiments in the Laboratory of Islam and Beyond: Education in Fazlur Rahman’s Modernist Approach.
Bakhshi Muskan - Princeton University, Princeton University, Princeton, United States