Islam in Local Contexts: India

This offering studies India, and it studies one tradition within India rather than all of them. Its object is the Persianate and, later, Urdu scholarly tradition that runs from the Ghaznavid frontier through the Delhi Sultanate, the Deccan sultanates, Mughal Hindustan, Shiʿi Awadh and colonial North India into the Indian republic. That tradition is transregional rather than northern: it travelled south with the Chishtis after Timur, and Golconda, Bijapur and Hyderabad belong to it.

The syllabus runs across twelve sessions, each built around an argument that several thinkers conducted differently. Students meet figures inside arguments rather than as biographies, and every institution is introduced before the thinkers who worked inside it: who paid, who taught, who copied, who read.

Two decisions shape the syllabus and are stated rather than concealed. The course runs past 1947, because two of its arguments, the reckoning between reform and the household and the critique of caste from within the community, are not finished at Partition. And it does not teach the Arabic-and-vernacular formations of Malabar, the Coromandel and the Gujarati ports: separate traditions with their own chains of transmission, named in week three with one primary text from each.

Each live session pairs with a directed asynchronous segment of about forty-five minutes carrying the visual material: maps, manuscript pages, the layer-by-layer reading of a page of marginalia. Response papers on alternate weeks take one claim from the reading and state the strongest objection to it. A source-criticism exercise in March and a final essay in May ask students to adjudicate between incompatible positions, stating the position they reject in terms its own adherents would accept before evaluating it.

Three rules hold throughout: every position is stated in terms its adherents would accept before it is evaluated; where a scholar or organisation discussed is living, they are entitled to reply, and three sessions carry a standing invitation to a principal subject to address the cohort; and claims about pending litigation are limited to the record.