Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a scholar, most unique in the Islamic world. He is considered one of the most significant thinkers of the pre-modern Muslim world.

This is an anthology put together by the London and Sussex based Filippo-Caroline Osella team of anthropologists both having a keen research interest in South Asia.

John R. Bowen’s A New Anthropology of Islam addresses an ontological problem in sociology and social anthropology, one that pertains to the relationship between culture and tradition.

The volume under review, a fine-tuned and reworked doctoral thesis, is a critical narrative of the interpretation of everyday and ritual life of a Muslim shrine known as Hussain Tekri. Carla Bellamy took a plunge into this rather adventurous journey with passion driven by irrepressible intellectual curiosity.

This book is definitely a much-needed contribution to the study of the political philosophy of Allama Iqbal the poet. Iqbal Singh Sevea expends significant intellectual energy on the analysis of Iqbal’s well-known antipathy to the ideology of nationalism and the nation-state.

This book makes a major contribution to the literature on Indian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.

None of the ideas/ideologies of the modern age have aroused so much passion and emotion as has ‘nation-statism’. Despite the fact that it has caused unprecedented human tragedy in the form of genocide, displacement, dispossession, destructions and devastations; and despite the claims of its demise in the face of globalization, the nation-state continues to remain a dominant socio-political frame within which human beings organize themselves.

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age is an inward look into how the traditionally educated scholars or the ‘ulama have frequently invoked the idea and necessity of reform within their faith.