The “Indian Islam” through Egyptian eyes: Arab Orientalism and the formation of national Islams

Abstract

This paper will analyse the place of Muslim Indians in Egyptian public opinion and readership from the 1920s to the 1960s and explain their contradictory evocations (sometimes depicted as a backward community, sometimes as brothers in faith). It will examine how the well-known exchanges between Egypt and India contributed to the formulation of national Islam in Egypt, in other words, how the Egyptian knowledge of Indian Muslims fed into an internal political and religious debate.
This Egyptian Orientalism, or “Easternism” (Gershoni & Jankowski, 1986, 255), towards Indian Islam was shaped by Azhari delegations that have visited there, by the Muslim Congresses in the Middle East and Pakistan, but also by a continuous scholarly production that this paper aims to analyse.
This production shaped a category of “Indian Islam” that was mobilised on a national scale in the struggle to define Azhari Sunnism as religious knowledge and authority, at a time when the monarchical then republican powers were gradually taking control of the institution of al-Azhar.