A Forum on Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire

SherAli Tareen’s pathbreaking new book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award and  asks how South Asian Muslim scholars or ulama imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.

The book is a master class in how to open a dense intellectual archive to non-specialists. Although making imposingly erudite use of sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, Tareen always approaches these sources with a light touch. Often funny, Perilous Intimacies humanizes its ulama, even as it pays scrupulous attention to the complexities of their texts.

Columbia University Press, 2023

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Contributors

Perilous Intimacies: An Introduction J. Barton Scott University of Toronto

The Limits of Imperial Political Theology Supriya Gandhi Yale University

Friendship, Sovereignty, and Translation

Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst

University of Vermont

Hospitality and Hostility in Colonial South Asia

Elaine Fisher Stanford University

Sovereignty in Ruins: Rethinking Inter-religious Intimacies in India and Sudan

Noah Salomon University of Virginia

The Politics of Intimacy and the Intimacy of Politics: A Response

SherAli Tareen Franklin and Marshall College (author response)