By SherAli Tareen

The shallowness of Maaz bin Bilal’s review of my book Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire, published recently in The Hindu, competes fiercely with its unprofessionalism. The reviewer has made no effort to engage or even describe the main questions, actors, conceptual interventions, chapters, or key categories of the book, a task one might minimally expect of a book review, even, in fact especially, a critical one. Instead, the bulk of the review is devoted to the rather bizarre and insidious claim that the title of the book Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire is deliberately misleading, a ‘sleight of hand’ as the reviewer calls it, for which he holds responsible a joint collusion between the author, publisher, and even the book’s endorsers! If put in the most charitable terms possible, the reviewer’s central point in supporting this claim is that the book’s title contains the phrase “Hindu-Muslim friendship” even though it does not focus on contemporary lived aspects of Hindu-Muslim relations and does not address this theme from a comprehensively inclusive perspective not limited to the discourses and debates of Sunni Muslim scholars. Let me respond to this point.

The first part of the book’s title Perilous Intimacies, as I elucidate in the book’s Introduction, refers to the dual quality of friendship as a relationship that offers the highest possible virtue but also threatens to morally corrupt someone blindingly bound to a harmful friend. Friendship, especially interreligious friendship, thus presents promise as well as peril. Moreover, with this framing, the book is most interested in exploring the tension between friendship, a relationship that by its nature binds a person with the contingencies of the ‘Other,’ and sovereignty, an ideal that assumes the independent mastery and ownership of the self. How was this friction between friendship and sovereignty negotiated and debated by some of the most influential scholars of early modern and modern South Asian Islam during a historical period-from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century-defined by the loss of Muslim political sovereignty?

This is the central question of the book that I address and answer through a close reading of the texts (in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), contexts, and debates of a wide range of Muslim scholars from multiple ideological persuasions that continue to wield tremendous authority in contemporary South Asia. And the book is called Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire because it focuses on intra-Muslim scholarly debates on the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship at the heart of which was the thorny question of how one should interpret Islamic knowledge traditions such as the sharia or Islamic law that are grounded in the premodern context of Muslim imperial sovereignty in the modern colonial context when that foundational political assumption of Muslim empire was no longer available. This is what is meant by “after empire.” For the reviewer’s information, it is standard practice in scholarship (in fact I think it is good practice that I would recommend to early career scholars) to title a book in a manner at once expansive and yet connected to its core theme and argument. Titles are not supposed to be minutely specific and it is absurd to claim that one which is not so is somehow dishonest or participating in some sleight of hand. From the reviewer’s perspective, I guess a more accurate title for the book would have been “Intra-Muslim Scholarly Debates on the Boundaries of Hindu-Muslim Friendship from the Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century with a Focus on the Traditionalist ‘ulama’ and Muslim Modernists, with reference as well to Premodern Islamic Law and Theology and to Western Postcolonial Thought and Theory, and with an Epilogue on Contemporary India and Pakistan.” Such a title of course would be as ridiculous as the reviewer’s objection to the book’s actual title.

The reviewer reveals the underlying thrust of his unwillingness and incapacity to seriously engage with the book in his misleading and shallow claim that the lived experience of Hindu-Muslim relations in contemporary India has nothing to do with whom he dismissively calls Muslim “clerics.” For instance, while referencing the fact that the victim of the tragic and infamous 2015 Dadri beef lynching Mohammed Akhlaq had called on his Hindu friend Manoj Sisodia to save his life as the Hindu nationalist mob encircled him, the reviewer writes, “neither Akhlaq nor Sisodia would have consulted any ulama before these practical and ontological acts of friendship towards each other.”

This statement is quite telling of the reviewer’s theoretical ineptitude as well as his underlying bigoted bias against ‘ulama’ traditions of knowledge. First of all, the assumption that something called lived practice and human relationships remain detached and divorced from the intellectual traditions and debates of a society is both wanting and thoroughly outdated. Sure, scholarly discourses and debates cannot be perfectly mapped onto the practice of everyday life and are not always predictive or reflective of its rhythms and grammar. However, to assume that the contemporary Hindu nationalist cow protectionist violence is unconnected to the discourses and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arya Samaj scholars or that contemporary Muslim attitudes on how to respond to the Hindu nationalist challenge on the cow question are unrelated to debates on this question among Indian Muslim scholars a century ago is untenable.

Second, while focused on Muslim intellectual debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship, a large chunk of the book relates precisely to the place of everyday life and interreligious intimacies in South Asian ‘ulama’ imaginaries and contestations. Indeed, a central argument of the book is that with the loss of Muslim political sovereignty after 1857, everyday interreligious intimacies and the threat they posed to the distinction and distinctive ritual markers of Islam in the public sphere emerged as among the primary sites of intra-Muslim debate on the nature and location of Muslim sovereign power. And third, as a book of intellectual history emanating from the discipline of Religious Studies, obviously it’s not oriented towards an ethnographic study of contemporary Hindu-Muslim relations and friendship in South Asia, and it’s a fair point that such ethnographic accounts would add much to our understanding of this complex topic in ways that may not come across through my book. But the primary flaw in the reviewer’s thought process lies in his casual dismissal of the knowledge traditions and debates of South Asian ‘ulama’ as arcane relics of the past unconnected to the lives, relations, and ontologies of the present. Such an assessment can only be formed by someone who has not bothered to consider those traditions and debates with any depth or seriousness, a task to which I invite my readers as an intellectual and political exercise of utmost significance.

The reviewer’s critique of the absence of Shi‘i ‘ulama’ actors in the book is a fair and good critique though again it would have been productive for him to have cited particular scholars and texts who in his view would have amplified, nuanced, or modified the book’s argument. Though a fair point, it does not help overcome the breach of intellectual etiquette involved in doing such a perfunctory and misleading reading of a book as part of a review for a major outlet. Indeed, the most useful aspect of the review is that it will serve as an excellent case study for graduate students and early career scholars on how not to write a book review.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023).