Role of Ideas
Amit Dey
COMMUNITY AND CONSENSUS IN ISLAM: MUSLIM REPRESENTATION IN COLONIAL INDIA, 1860-1947 by Mushirul Hasan Imprint One, 2012, 255 pp., 750
July 2012, volume 36, No 7

The book under review represents a scholarly endeavour to analyse the role of ideas in the interpretation of Indo-Muslim politics since the time of its advent in the mid-nineteenth century till the vivisection of India in 1947. It challenges the established view at the time that Indian Muslim politics of the period could be explained in terms of pragmatic interests alone. Instead, Farzana Shaikh claims that the impact of ideas rooted in Islamic tradition must constitute a crucial dimension of any serious explanation of the determinants of Indo-Muslim political practice. In this seminal work the configurations of colonial politics in India are set against the backdrop of tensions involving two contrasting intellectual traditions—the Islamic and the liberal-democratic to demonstrate how their different assumptions about the proper ends of political action honed the opposition between diverse constitutional positions culminating in Partition.

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