REL 241
Muslim-Hindu Interactions in South Asia Spring 2014
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

This course will examine the long history of interactions between religious communities in South Asia that in the colonial period came to be defined as Hindu and Muslim. We will look at how religious traditions were constituted in pre-modern South Asia, how they interacted with and related to each other and finally, how they were transformed in the colonial period, giving rise to modern religious identities. The material we will examine will include poetry and stories from the Sufi, Sant, Bhakti and Sikh traditions, Sufi spiritual manuals that incorporate Yogic practices, Islamic theological and philosophical texts on Indian religions, Sanskrit and other indigenous sources on Muslims, liminal Ismai’li Muslim hymns of religious universalism, Sunni Muslim legal and political definitions of the other, colonial and Orientalist constructions of Hindus and Muslims, writings on the Two-Nation theory that led to the modern nation-states of Pakistan and India, Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, historiography, and postcolonial deconstructions of religious identity in South Asia.