Islamicate Civilisation
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Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam
Omar Ali reposts an old review of Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam?, finding the book unclear about its aim but a good rebuttal to monochrome views of Islam. His verdict…
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Bin Qasim’s Thousand-Year Wound
X.T.M argues that India and Pakistan face a fault line over a thousand years old, dating to Muhammad bin Qasim’s landing in Sindh in 711. Each side now speaks only…
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Islamicate Civilisation is a Supreme Culture: But Who Stands to Inherit It?
The post argues that Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal high culture is a supreme achievement, yet Islamicate civilisation has no custodian state among some sixty Muslim-majority countries, unlike the West, China…
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The saffron and the crescent – why BP matters
The author argues that candid comments from Pakistani Muslim commenters on interfaith marriage and idol worship expose a Hindu-Muslim mismatch in worldviews that Indian liberals avoid confronting, and cites Pew…
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The 1000 Years Frame Erases 80% of India
Two of girmit’s sharpest comment-thread interventions: why the further application of the Two Nation Theory finds no liberal takers in India, and why the maximalist “1000 years of Islamic supremacy”…
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Why Hasn’t Pakistan Collapsed Yet?
X.T.M argues Pakistan has held together because it anchors a self-image drawn from the Lucknow-Delhi Indo-Muslim tradition, and that ownership of that legacy follows continuity among people, not territory, census…
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On the Question of Who “Owns” the Indo-Muslim Legacy
X.T.M, prompted by Sophia Khan’s piece on lost Muslim cities, argues Pakistanis with family roots in Delhi and Lucknow may fairly claim the Indo-Muslim legacy, since India itself selectively appropriates…
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The Hindification of Muslim Culture
X.T.M argues that India is seeing a slow Hindification of Muslim cultural inheritances, from khayal and Bollywood to cuisine, as Muslim political power recedes. He calls it succession rather than…
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Capsule Review: A History of the Muslim World
A capsule review of Michael Cook’s A History of the Muslim World, praised as an outstanding survey from the Prophet to the early twentieth century. The reviewer, interested in Indian…
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Browncast: North India 700 to 1200 AD.
Gaurav, Omar and Jay talk with Maneesh about how North India changed as Islamicate incursions began, from the Arab conquest of Sindh to Mahmud of Ghazna’s raids and the gradual…
