An academic home for a distributed field

Important scholarship on Islam in India exists, distributed across history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, literature, law, art, architecture and South Asian studies. In 2020, a survey counted 38 Islamic-studies centres across the United States and Canada; none was dedicated to Islam in India.

An institute adds continuity: bringing that work together, sustaining research over time, preparing future scholars, and connecting institutions across disciplines and countries.

India’s Muslim population matters beyond its size, but the size is where the case begins. A population of 311 million, carrying a tradition this old, is a subject of study in its own right, and the scholarship, teaching and archives needed to understand it do not yet exist at the scale the subject demands.

The moment also favours the work. India is expected to play a growing role in Asia and in the international system, and interest in Indian society will grow with it. Universities, businesses, governments, journalists and civil society will need knowledge of India that goes beyond markets, elections and security, and a serious understanding of India includes the histories and present experience of its religious communities.

The North American context

Relations between the United States and India are widening across trade, defence, higher education, technology, energy, space and supply chains. In 2025, trade in goods and services between the two countries reached an estimated $239.6 billion, and both governments have set a target of $500 billion by 2030.

The relationship is sustained by people as well as by governments. The United States is home to roughly 5.6 million people of Indian descent, who contribute to higher education, medicine, technology, business, public service, philanthropy and civic life. Within that population is a substantial Indian Muslim community. Its precise size is not known, because the Census does not record religion, but its institutions are visible across the country: mosques, schools, professional networks, philanthropies and civic organisations, each sustained by living ties to India.

Indian American Muslims have built at every scale. What the community has not yet built is the institution that holds its collective memory: the scholarly home that documents this heritage, studies it, and represents it to the wider Muslim world and the wider public. The Institute is that institution. It does not replace what exists; it gives what exists a record that outlasts a single generation or a single city, and it gives the diaspora a place to contribute knowledge, archives and networks to the study of its own history.

Islam in India is not one subject but many, and the Institute treats it as a religious, intellectual, cultural, social and civilisational tradition. The field includes:

• The early Muslim communities of India’s coasts, where Islam took root centuries before Muslim political rule in the north.
• The intellectual cultures of Delhi, Lucknow, Bengal, Kerala, Kashmir, Gujarat, Hyderabad and the Deccan, each with its own idiom.
• Sufi orders and devotional traditions, and the seminaries and universities that carried faith into argument.
• Women’s scholarship and leadership, and the vernacular literatures in which Islam spoke in many tongues.
• Legal and theological debate across the centuries, and the reform movements of the modern period.
• The constitutional and civic questions of the present: citizenship, education, law, social mobility, political representation, urban settlement, cultural preservation and relations among religious communities.
• The Indian Muslim diaspora, carrying all of this beyond India’s borders.

No single one of these is the field. Together they give a fuller picture of Islam’s place in India, and of India’s place in the history of Islam. Without an institution to connect them, these subjects stay scattered across departments of history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, literature, law, art and South Asian studies. The Institute holds them together, and links scholars and institutions in India with researchers, students and diaspora communities in North America.

Islam in India is a tradition of argument as much as of devotion, and its consequential figures include contested ones. The Institute studies them as the tradition has always studied them: in the historical context that produced them, through their own texts, and under ordinary scholarly criticism.

Research, teaching and public scholarship at the Institute answer to academic standards alone. Questions are framed by the evidence, not by the controversies of the moment, and the Institute’s purpose is to widen the space in which Islam in India can be examined critically, independently and in full. A field read on those terms grows more plural the more closely it is read, and it is that plurality, rather than any single account of it, that the Institute exists to make legible.

Rigorous scholarship. Islam in India is a field spanning coastlines, cities, orders, seminaries and centuries of debate, and no institution currently holds it together. The Institute builds the infrastructure to do so, through research fellowships, archival preservation and publication, so that the field is studied with the depth its scale demands and so that global Islamic studies gains a centre treating South Asia as central to the discipline.

Public scholarship and media. Scholarship that stays inside the university reaches only part of its audience. This pillar carries research into digital archives, publications, podcasts and visual storytelling, so that accurate, historically grounded accounts of Islam in India reach the public in India, in the diaspora and across the Muslim world.

Diaspora and global engagement. The Institute is an intellectual home for the Indian Muslim diaspora: a place to study this heritage, contribute to it and draw on it directly. A diaspora that has sustained this heritage across generations now has an institution that documents it, publishes it and lets the diaspora help shape how it is understood.

Beneath all three runs a fourth commitment: training the next generation. Doctoral fellowships, teaching positions and mentorship turn an initiative into a discipline. The Institute trains the scholars who produce the research, the translators who carry vernacular and archival material outward, and the archivists who make sure it outlasts any single career.

An institution able to document and interpret the history of 311 million people needs to exist well before 2050, not be assembled after it. A single scholar can produce a body of work within a career; what makes that work a discipline is whether anyone trains successors, preserves the record and carries the field forward. The Institute is built to provide that continuity. Its work includes:

• Research and scholarly publications — monographs, peer-reviewed articles and edited volumes that bring together work now scattered across disciplines.
• University courses and certificate programmes — hybrid and credit-bearing, building a curricular pathway toward full degree programmes.
• Public lectures and academic conferences — bringing scholars, students and the public into the same room.
• Faculty and institutional collaborations — connecting departments across universities that now work on related material in isolation.
• Fellowships and visiting-scholar appointments — a structured path for early-career researchers and a base for established scholars.
• Digital archives and preservation projects — securing manuscripts, oral histories, vernacular literature and institutional records against loss and dispersal.
• International academic partnerships — with universities, libraries and research centres in India and across the Muslim world.

Within its first cycle the Institute expects to have established a published corpus in the field, a credit-bearing curricular pathway, an active fellowship programme, a working digital archive, and a network of partner institutions on three continents. The Institute serves students, scholars, educators, journalists, policymakers, religious leaders and members of the public seeking a deeper understanding of Islam and Muslim life in India.

The 2050 projection gives a timeline, but the case rests on more than demography: nearly fourteen centuries of history, India’s connections across the Indian Ocean, its growing international presence, its widening relationship with the United States, and a large diaspora ready to contribute.

The students who will teach, write, research and lead institutions in 2050 are entering schools and universities now. Building the academic infrastructure today gives them better-trained scholars, preserved archives and a field with a home. The Institute invites scholars, institutions, and members of the Indian Muslim community in India and the diaspora to build it together.