Islam and the Army in Colonial India
Islam and the Army in Colonial India

Author: Nile Green

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-14

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1139479245

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Set in Hyderabad in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book, a study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India, focuses on the soldiers' relationships with the faqir holy men who protected them and the British officers they served. Drawing on Urdu as well as European sources, the book uses the biographies of Muslim holy men and their military followers to recreate the extraordinary encounter between a barracks culture of miracle stories, carnivals, drug-use and madness with a colonial culture of mutiny memoirs, Evangelicalism, magistrates and the asylum. It explores the ways in which the colonial army helped promote this sepoy religion while at the same time attempting to control and suppress certain aspects of it. The book brings to light the existence of a distinct 'barracks Islam' and shows its importance to the cultural no less than the military history of colonial India.

The Late Colonial Indian Army
The Late Colonial Indian Army

Author: Pradeep Barua

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-11-04

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1498552218

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The Indian Army was one of the most important colonial institutions that the British created. From its humble origins as a mercantile police force to a modern contemporary army in the Second World War, this institution underwent many transitions. This book examines the Indian Army during the later colonial era from the First Afghan War in 1839 to Indian independence in 1947. During this period, the Indian Army developed from an internal policing force, to a frontier army, and then to a conventional western style fighting force capable of deployment to overseas’ theaters. These transitions resulted in significant structural and doctrinal changes in the army. The doctrines, and tactics honed during this period would have a dramatic impact upon the post-colonial armies of India and Pakistan. From civil-military relations to fighting and structural doctrines, the Indian and Pakistani armies closely reflect the deep-seated impact of decades of evolution during the late colonial era.

Combatants of Muslim Origin in European Armies in the Twentieth Century
Combatants of Muslim Origin in European Armies in the Twentieth Century

Author: Xavier Bougarel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1474249434

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During the two World Wars that marked the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of non-European combatants fought in the ranks of various European armies. The majority of these soldiers were Muslims from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent. How are these combatants considered in existing historiography? Over the past few decades, research on war has experienced a wide-reaching renewal, with increased emphasis on the social and cultural dimensions of war, and a desire to reconstruct the experience and viewpoint of the combatants themselves. This volume reintroduces the question of religious belonging and practice into the study of Muslim combatants in European armies in the 20th century, focusing on the combatants' viewpoint alongside that of the administrations and military hierarchy.

The Language of Secular Islam
The Language of Secular Islam

Author: Kavita Datla

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2013-01-31

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0824837916

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During the turbulent period prior to colonial India’s partition and independence, Muslim intellectuals in Hyderabad sought to secularize and reformulate their linguistic, historical, religious, and literary traditions for the sake of a newly conceived national public. Responding to the model of secular education introduced to South Asia by the British, Indian academics launched a spirited debate about the reform of Islamic education, the importance of education in the spoken languages of the country, the shape of Urdu and its past, and the significance of the histories of Islam and India for their present. The Language of Secular Islam pursues an alternative account of the political disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, conflicts too often described as the product of primordial and unchanging attachments to religion. The author suggests that the political struggles of India in the 1930s, the very decade in which the demand for Pakistan began to be articulated, should not be understood as the product of an inadequate or incomplete secularism, but as the clashing of competing secular agendas. Her work explores negotiations over language, education, and religion at Osmania University, the first university in India to use a modern Indian language (Urdu) as its medium of instruction, and sheds light on questions of colonial displacement and national belonging. Grounded in close attention to historical evidence, The Language of Secular Islam has broad ramifications for some of the most difficult issues currently debated in the humanities and social sciences: the significance and legacies of European colonialism, the inclusions and exclusions enacted by nationalist projects, the place of minorities in the forging of nationalism, and the relationship between religion and modern politics. It will be of interest to historians of colonial India, scholars of Islam, and anyone who follows the politics of Urdu.

Religion in the Military Worldwide
Religion in the Military Worldwide

Author: Ron E. Hassner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1107037026

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This volume is the first to offer a comparative analysis of religion in militaries worldwide.

Bombay Islam
Bombay Islam

Author: Nile Green

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-03-21

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1139496638

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As a thriving port city, nineteenth-century Bombay attracted migrants from across India and beyond. Nile Green's Bombay Islam traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production of religion to show how Muslim migration fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers, as Christian missionaries competed with Muslim religious entrepreneurs for a stake in the new market. Enabled by a colonial policy of non-intervention in religious affairs, and powered by steam travel and vernacular printing, Bombay's Islamic productions were exported as far as South Africa and Iran. Connecting histories of religion, labour and globalization, the book examines the role of ordinary people - mill hands and merchants - in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works, and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, Bombay Islam unravels a vernacular modernity that saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay's industrial economy of enchantment.

Indian Army in the First World War
Indian Army in the First World War

Author: Alan Jeffreys

Publisher: Helion and Company

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1804516139

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The book addresses the important global role of the Indian Army during the First World War. It is an academic reassessment of the army by both established and early career scholars of the Indian Army, as well as naval historians. It looks at the historiography of the army - taking into account the recent work on the army (particularly on the Western Front in 1914-1915). The edited volume covers the traditional areas of the Indian Army on the Western Front, in Palestine, Mesopotamia and the defence of the Suez Canal; however, there are also chapters on combined operations; Indian prisoners of war in Germany and Turkey; the expansion of the officer corps; and the Sikh experience, as well as the mobilisation of the equine army at the beginning of the war and the demobilisation of the army in the period from 1918 until 1923. Three additional chapters are related to the theme, such as the role of the Royal Indian Marine; the Territorial Army in India; and Churchill’s portrayal of the Indian Army during the Gallipoli campaign in his account The World Crisis.

Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion
Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

Author: Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-08-14

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1786732378

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While jihad has been the subject of countless studies in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, scholarship on the topic has so far paid little attention to South Asian Islam and, more specifically, its place in South Asian history. Seeking to fill some gaps in the historiography, Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst examines the effects of the 1857 Rebellion (long taught in Britain as the 'Indian Mutiny') on debates about the issue of jihad during the British Raj. Morgenstein Fuerst shows that the Rebellion had lasting, pronounced effects on the understanding by their Indian subjects (whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh) of imperial rule by distant outsiders. For India's Muslims their interpretation of the Rebellion as jihad shaped subsequent discourses, definitions and codifications of Islam in the region. Morgenstein Fuerst concludes by demonstrating how these perceptions of jihad, contextualised within the framework of the 19th century Rebellion, continue to influence contemporary rhetoric about Islam and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent.Drawing on extensive primary source analysis, this unique take on Islamic identities in South Asia will be invaluable to scholars working on British colonial history, India and the Raj, as well as to those studying Islam in the region and beyond.

Faithful Fighters
Faithful Fighters

Author: Kate Imy

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1503610756

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During the first four decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Army possessed an illusion of racial and religious inclusivity. The army recruited diverse soldiers, known as the "Martial Races," including British Christians, Hindustani Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs, Hindu Rajputs, Pathans from northwestern India, and "Gurkhas" from Nepal. As anti-colonial activism intensified, military officials incorporated some soldiers' religious traditions into the army to keep them disciplined and loyal. They facilitated acts such as the fast of Ramadan for Muslim soldiers and allowed religious swords among Sikhs to recruit men from communities where anti-colonial sentiment grew stronger. Consequently, Indian nationalists and anti-colonial activists charged the army with fomenting racial and religious divisions. In Faithful Fighters, Kate Imy explores how military culture created unintended dialogues between soldiers and civilians, including Hindu nationalists, Sikh revivalists, and pan-Islamic activists. By the 1920s and '30s, the army constructed military schools and academies to isolate soldiers from anti-colonial activism. While this carefully managed military segregation crumbled under the pressure of the Second World War, Imy argues that the army militarized racial and religious difference, creating lasting legacies for the violent partition and independence of India, and the endemic warfare and violence of the post-colonial world.

Soviet and Muslim
Soviet and Muslim

Author: Eren Tasar

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0190652128

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Central Asia was the sole Muslim region of the former Russian Empire that lacked a centralized Islamic organization, or muftiate. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created such a body for the region as part of his religious reforms during World War II, he acknowledged that the Muslim faith could enjoy some legal protection under Communist rule. From a skeletal and disorganized body run by one family of Islamic scholars out of a modest house in Tashkent's old city, this muftiate acquired great political importance in the eyes of Soviet policymakers and equally significant symbolic significance for many Muslims. Relying on recently declassified Central Asian archival sources, most of them never seen before by historians, Eren Tasar argues that Islam did not merely "survive" the decades from World War II until the Soviet collapse in 1991, but actively shaped the political and social context of Soviet Central Asia. Muslim figures, institutions, and practices evolved in response to the social and political reality of Communist rule. Through an analysis that spans all aspects of Islam under Soviet rule-from debates about religion inside the Communist Party, to the muftiate's efforts to acquire control over mosques across Central Asia, changes in Islamic practices and dogma, and overseas propaganda targeting the Islamic World-Soviet and Muslim offers a radical new reading of Islam's resilience and evolution under atheism.