Networks of Exchange: South Asian Muslims, European Orientalism, and the Academic Study of Islam

Abstract

Collaboration and exchange between South Asian Muslims and European scholars of Islam, and the joint production of knowledge on Muslim cultures and societies, was an important part of the British colonial enterprise in South Asia. Despite the fact that local scholars were more than just “native informants” to their European counterparts, their original contribution to Islamic studies as a discipline has remained underexplored. My presentation analyzes the writings by South Asian Muslims who were part of new educational institutions set up during the colonial period pertaining to the study of Islamic history, theology, and culture with a focus on the reception of European orientalism. I am asking the following questions: How was European orientalist scholarship received by South Asian Muslims? In which way was knowledge production on Islam shaped by interactions between European orientalists and local intellectuals? What image of “the Muslim world” and Islam was created through this dialogical process of appropriation and translation? How was the scholarship produced by these thinkers received at home and abroad, both by classically-trained scholars of Islam, the ‘ulama, as well as other academics? Where did the line between “classical” scholarship and academic research along “European” methods become blurred? By focusing on the reception of European orientalism in local South Asian contexts, the history of Islamic studies as an academic discipline, and the translocal entanglements between European and South Asian scholarly networks, my presentation contributes to the study of South Asian intellectual and cultural history, the history of modern Islamic thought, and a transregional history of religious ideas more broadly.