Muslims communities of South Asia: culture and society

There is a growing realization that one of the glaring gaps in the sociology
of South Asia has been the scant attention which sociologists and social
anthropologists have paid to the study of Muslim communities. This is
perhaps particularly true of India. Students of comparative religion and
historians have of course been very active and for long, but the very excel-
lence of their work has been a long-standing challenge to sociologists to enter
the field and provide new perspectives. The task that has awaited them has
been the unravelling and interpretation of the encounter between the great
classical tradition of Islam and the local cultures of Asia. What makes this
task particularly important and interesting is the fact that in some of the
countries of the region (namely India, Nepal and Sri Lanka) the local cul-
tural tradition, whether Buddhism or Hinduism, has been dominant in
politics as well as in culture. In the other countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan,
the Islamic way of life has a distinctive character which sets them apart in
some ways from the Muslim societies of South-East Asia or West Asia. It
follows that while the Muslims of all these countries are of course part and
parcel of the universal Islamic brotherhood, they are also locally rooted in
historical cultures.
Conscious of the importance of this undertaking, the editors of Contributions
to Indian Sociology (New Series) decided to devote a whole volume of the
periodical (VI, 1972) to the subject of “Muslim communities of South Asia :
culture and society”. The general theme that was proposed to the contributors
(who included three Indians, two Americans, one Frenchman, one Pakistani,
and one Sinhalese) was that of identity formation: What does it mean to be a
Muslim? While most of the contributors addressed themselves directly to
this question, the others did so only indirectly. The outcome, the editors
thought, was altogether very satisfactory, not because any issues had been
resolved—that never was the intention—but because important questions,
both substantive and methodological, had been posed. From whatever res-
ponses we received, it was obvious that our readers thought that the
papers
contained many useful insights and provocative ideas.
Since the journal reaches only a limited readership, consisting of the
subscribers, and in view of the many inquiries received by us, the editors
and the publishers have decided to bring out the issue in a limited hard-
cover edition. It is thus hoped that this collection of exploratory papers will
reach a wider readership.