Volume I · Number 1 · Cover proof

The journal · Established 2026 · First issue December 2027

Indian Muslim

A double-blind peer-reviewed journal of the Institute for the Study of Muslims and Islam in India, published by Indiana University Press.

BiannualISMII · American Islamic College

Call for papers Aims and scope

The gap

“Indian Muslim” is a demographic fact and a political epithet, but not yet an academic category

Indian Muslims number in excess of two hundred million and have produced a substantial body of intellectual, religious, legal, social and political thought over many centuries. Scholarship on that work is dispersed: it appears across South Asian studies, Islamic studies, the sociology of religion, minority-rights law, development economics and comparative politics, and in each of these it appears as a case within a larger field rather than as a field of its own.

The consequence is a literature of real quality that does not accumulate. A scholar of Muslim personal law, a scholar of Pasmanda mobilisation and a scholar of madrasa pedagogy publish in different journals, address different readerships and rarely encounter one another’s work. There is at present no venue in which their shared subject is the organising principle.

Constitute the field

Establish the study of Indian Muslims as a coherent academic domain with its own venue, standards and cumulative literature.

Connect what is dispersed

Bring work separated by discipline, region, language and institutional setting into a single scholarly conversation.

Publish contributors, not only subjects

The literature on deprivation is necessary and the journal will publish it. It is incomplete without work treating Indian Muslims as producers of ideas, institutions, law and culture.

Build a durable record

Create, over successive volumes, a body of knowledge that scholars in coming decades can build upon.

Particulars

The journal at a glance

A journal of Indian Muslim scholarship, led by Indian Muslim scholars, open to all who write seriously in the field.
The editorial formulation

Title: Indian Muslim
Founding institution: Institute for the Study of Muslims and Islam in India, an institute of American Islamic College, Chicago
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Frequency: Two issues a year
Review: Double-blind, minimum two referees
Language: English, with a standing translation programme
Charges: No article processing charges
Managing Editor: Dr Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddiqui
Inaugural issue: December 2027

The editorial office

Who carries the journal between issues

Managing Editor, Indian Muslim

Dr Nizamuddin Ahmad Siddiqui

Adjunct Faculty of Law and Islamic Jurisprudence, ISMII · Founder, Project Mishkat · formerly Assistant Professor, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University

The Managing Editor holds the work that runs between issues: commissioning, the review workflow, the assembly of each issue and the relationship with the publisher. Dr Siddiqui takes a paper from submission through double-blind review to the printed number, and keeps the schedule that a biannual journal with an external press depends on.

He holds a B.A. LL.B. (Honours) from Aligarh Muslim University and an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from South Asian University, New Delhi. His scholarship centres on Islamic jurisprudence and the civilizational history of law, with particular attention to Muslim personal law, identity, and religion’s place in public legal argument — much of the ground the journal’s own areas of scope set out.

Aims and scope Submission and review The Institute’s people

The Editorial Board and the Advisory Committee will be listed here when their appointments are confirmed.

Aims and scope

Nine areas, and what each one holds

The areas are boundaries rather than a programme. The journal does not arrive with a settled thesis about what the questions in this field are.

Islamic thought and religious institutions

Theology, fiqh and usul in the subcontinental traditions; madrasa pedagogy and curriculum; the Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-i-Hadith, Nadwi and Shi’i formations; Sufi orders and their institutional histories

Civilizational and pre-modern history

Sultanate, Mughal and Deccan polities; Indian Ocean networks; intellectual and manuscript cultures; the historiography of Muslim rule

III

Law, citizenship and the state

Muslim personal law and reform debates; constitutional questions of religious freedom; citizenship and documentation; waqf administration and litigation

Caste, class and internal difference

Pasmanda scholarship and movement history; ashraf–ajlaf–arzal stratification; Article 341 and reservation; biradari, region and language as axes within the community

Gender

Muslim women’s institutions, education and labour; family law from the position of those governed by it; women’s religious scholarship and formation

Economy and development

Deprivation and its measurement; labour-market participation and discrimination; credit, enterprise and Islamic finance; philanthropy, zakat and endowment economics

VII

Space, settlement and violence

Settlement patterns and segregation; municipal provision and neglect; communal violence and its aftermath; displacement

VIII

Politics and movements

Electoral participation and representation; the histories of Muslim organisations and movements; youth networks; the contemporary political environment

Diaspora, literature and culture

Indian Muslims in the Gulf, North America, the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia; Urdu, Persian and regional literary traditions; media representation and Muslim media production

Indian Muslim is not a successor to Syed Shahabuddin’s Muslim India (1983–2009), the most sustained documentary effort of its kind, whose archive remains indispensable. That was a monthly record of documentation and advocacy; this is a refereed journal, institutionally held, and the biannual cadence marks the difference before a reader opens the first page.

For authors

Submission and review

General submissions open in the first quarter of 2028. Papers for the inaugural issue are commissioned through the 2027 conference.

7,000–9,000 words

Research articles

Peer reviewed. The journal’s principal form.

3,000–4,000 words

Interventions

Peer reviewed. A shorter form for scholars and practitioners whose knowledge is institutional, and for whom the conventional article form is ill suited.

One in each issue

Documents and sources

A translated and annotated primary text: a fatwa, a movement manifesto, a commission submission, a madrasa curriculum, a petition. Over successive volumes this constitutes an archive the field presently lacks.

Commissioned

Review essays and book reviews

Extended treatment of two or more works or of a body of literature; book reviews are commissioned by the area editors.

Peer review

All research articles are reviewed double-blind by a minimum of two referees, with a third appointed where the first two differ. The editorial office removes identifying material and routes submissions away from known institutional proximity, a matter requiring particular care in a field of this size. Authors have a right of reply on substantive disagreement.

Access

No article processing charges are levied. The journal’s readership includes scholars at institutions without subscription budgets, community institutions and independent researchers; charging authors would systematically exclude the scholars the journal exists to publish. Authors may deposit their accepted manuscript without charge.

Language

English is the language of publication. Scholarship in and about Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Persian and Arabic falls squarely within scope, and each issue carries at least one translated article or primary text, with a translator’s apparatus.

Independence

The journal is independent of political parties, of maslak and sectarian affiliation, and of any single institutional patron. The Institute funds the operation. It does not review, direct or veto decisions on individual submissions.

Inaugural conference · Call for papers

Who is an Indian Muslim?

An international conference, hybrid format, mid-2027. Papers presented, following the journal’s ordinary process of double-blind review, will constitute the inaugural issue.

Theological definitions of Indian Muslim identity after the post-partition settlement
The nation-state and the ummah: the terms of belonging, and their Indian interlocutors
Coalition with other marginalised communities: strategy, or a language of belonging?
Beyond the event: awqaf, mosques, madrasas, personal law, and the material conditions of community life
The diaspora’s view of Indian Muslim subjecthood
The state’s vocabulary of engagement with Muslim citizens
Political theorisation in India and the place of this category within it

The full call

The question

The theorisation of Indian Muslim identity in its positive aspect, public identity, community aspiration, institutional life and the terms of engagement with the state, remains thin by comparison with the literature on deprivation and marginality. The conference takes that question as its subject, across seven strands.

Format, dates and venue

Hybrid by design rather than by concession: an in-person component, and full remote participation so that scholars based in India take part on equal terms. Venue and dates will be confirmed in the first quarter of 2027, with invitations issued not less than six months in advance.

Host or support the conference

Path to first publication

2026 – 2028

Late 2026

Publication agreement concluded

Q1 2027

Editor-in-Chief appointed; conference venue and dates confirmed

Q2 2027

Editorial policies published; conference papers commissioned

Mid 2027

Inaugural conference, Who is an Indian Muslim?

Q3–Q4 2027

Peer review and assembly of the inaugural issue

December 2027

Volume 1, Issue 1

Q1 2028

General submissions open

Mid 2028

Volume 1, Issue 2

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