This book is about empirically testing the ‘incompatibility thesis’ on democracy and Islam or Muslim societies, through the study of non-Arab, Muslim-majority, Asian countries of Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia. In the Introduction, Zoya Hasan has presented the problem and the issues in a compact manner, with a brief background to the subsequent six country studies which are written by different scholars. The book challenges essentialist, ahistorical, monolithic constructions and stereotyping of Islam and Muslim societies by stepping away from textual sources and ‘cultural’ paradigm and, instead, adopting a ‘structural’ approach while empirically examining specific historical, imperial, economic, political and ethnic features in non-Arab Muslim societies.
Recent research on ‘lived Islam’ in India in particular and South Asia in general has focused, through micro-level studies, on syncretic or composite culture and fuzzy or liminal identities with emphasis on diversity through embeddedness in local culture and history.
This volume edited by Zoya Hasan adds one more dimension of diversity by raising the perspective to macro-level, with focus on broad social structure, colonial experience, inequalities and marginalization of a large section of the population, ethnicity related occupational distinctions, rise of political parties, nature of political elites etc.