Contemporary Islam and Politics in India

Instructor:  Dr. Mohammed Sinan Siyech

Date/times:

October 25 - November 29, Sundays 10 AM - 12 PM US Eastern Standard Time

Course summary:

This course examines the contemporary political life of Muslims in India: how they organise, mobilise, contest, and negotiate their place within the world's largest democracy. It centres on the major Islamic movements, organisations, and institutions that shape Muslim political agency today -- from the Deobandi and Barelvi traditions to Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, the Ahl-e-Hadith, the Popular Front of India, and the region-specific formations of Kerala and Karnataka among others. 

The course is deliberately comparative and pluralist: it takes seriously the enormous diversity within Indian Muslim politics -- across sect, region, class, and ideology -- and resists any single narrative about what Indian Muslims want or how they engage politically.
One Major question it asks is how do Muslim organisations in India engage with the ideas of democracy, secularism and electoral politics, something we will be exploring from session 3 – 6.

Course objectives:

By the end of the course:

•    Analyse the contemporary political orientations, organisational structures, and strategies of major Indian Muslim movements and institutions.
•    Situate present-day Muslim politics within the historical formation of each movement -- understanding how 19th- and 20th-century origins continue to shape contemporary practice.
•    Identify and assess the diversity of Indian Muslim political life: regional variation (North India, Kerala, Hyderabad), sectarian difference (Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-e-Hadith, Salafi), and ideological range (from quietism to Islamism to civil rights activism).
•    Distinguish scripturalist/Salafi reform movements from revolutionary Islamist organisations, and evaluate the contested question of organisational overlap between them.
•    Develop the analytical vocabulary to distinguish between theological reformism, political Islamism, minority rights activism, and Muslim community organisation -- categories that are often conflated in both journalism and policy.

Course schedule: