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 Muslims number more than 200 million today and, on Pew Research Center projections, will reach about 311 million by 2050, the largest Muslim population in the world. A population of that size, 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. A serious understanding of India, beyond markets, elections and security, includes the histories and present experience of its religious communities.

The North American context

The United States is home to roughly 5.6 million people of Indian descent, and its relationship with India now runs through trade, higher education, technology and research. Within that population is a substantial Indian Muslim community. Its precise size is not known, because the US 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.

What the community has not yet built is the institution that holds its collective memory. Building on the scholarship of universities and the mosques, schools and family collections that carried the tradition this far, the Institute works to give that inheritance a lasting record. The diaspora is part of that work we do at ISMII.

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. 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.

Questions are framed by the evidence, and followed wherever the evidence leads.

The Institute answers to academic standards alone, in research, teaching and public scholarship alike, working to give Islam in India the room to be examined critically, independently and in full. Read on those terms, through the Persian chronicle, the Urdu letter and the Mappila song, the field keeps growing, each source adding a voice or a region that earlier accounts had missed. That plurality is the finding, which the Institute exists to make readable.

The Institute’s work is laid out like a charbagh, the fourfold garden: four pillars around one centre, the field itself. The three commitments named above govern all four.

A. Research

Research fellowships, archival study and publication, so that the field is studied with the depth its scale demands, and so that global Islamic studies gains a centre that treats South Asia as central to the discipline.

B. Teaching

Courses, certificates, doctoral fellowships 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.

C. Preservation

Manuscripts, oral histories, vernacular literature and institutional records, in India and in the diaspora, secured against loss and dispersal. The diaspora contributes here directly: family papers, community records and the histories of its own institutions.

D. Public understanding

Scholarship that stays inside the university reaches only part of its audience. Through lectures, publications, podcasts and visual storytelling, the Institute carries historically grounded accounts of Islam in India to the public in India, in the diaspora and across the Muslim world.

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.

By the end of 2028, 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 Institute was founded in 2025. It is governed within the academic structures of American Islamic College, Chicago, and works in partnership with The Islamic Seminary of America.

Faculty, fellows and advisors

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 scholars who will interpret the lives of India's Muslims in 2050, when the community is projected to number about 311 million, are in classrooms today. They will need an institution already standing, its archives catalogued and its teachers in place. Built now, while they are students, it can give them training, sources and a home for the field.