On this blog, I have put together six creative responses to weekly discussion readings. They deal with and express several different themes. Here I will pull out a couple of the major themes and discuss how my responses reflect these themes. They are: 1) authority and 2) the vernacular. First, let us talk about authority. […]
This is a watercolor painting that depicts some of the themes in Richard Eaton’s piece on Sufi folk poetry in the Deccan. In that piece, from our section “Religious, social, and cultural roles of Sufis in South Asia”, Eaton discusses the Deccan folk songs containing simple Islamic ideas created by Sufis. These songs were […]
In our week focused on pre-modern Muslim spiritual and political authority, one of the examples we looked at was that of Akbar and the Mughals. Asher’s article discussed how Akbar and his descendants drew on both their political power and the spiritual authority of the Sufis to legitimize their rule. Akbar’s advisor Abu al-Fazl […]
This mixed media piece is a response to Paula Richman’s “Veneration of the Prophet Muhammad in an Islamic Pillaittamil.” That article was from our “Boundaries in South Asian Muslim Literatures”, where we explored how South Asian Muslim authors found new ways to express “Islamic” ideas in South Asian vernaculars. I wanted to illustrate one of […]
My cartoon here depicts a theme I saw running throughout the course: the failures of religion as a sole identifier, as seen in the case of Pakistan. In particular, I am responding to the Bengali language movement articles by Lawrence Ziring and Rafiqul Islam that we read for the “Politics of language and […]
I was intrigued by Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr’s argument about the origins of Islamic Fundamentalism in his article we read for the “Emergence of Muslim communal identity and nationalism” unit. As he points out, we in the West interpret modern Islamic fundamentalism in many ways, but always as in opposition to the West, Western […]
Of all the readings we have done this semester, none struck me the way Jo Johnson’s Financial Times article “Radical Thinking” did. Part of our unit on “Being Muslim in contemporary South Asia: the Indian perspective”, it details the systematic discrimination and oppression that Indian Muslims face today and the potentially disastrous consequences […]