In the above binary of Good Islam/Bad Islam, followers of the Barelvi orientation are considered "good" due to their supposedly more Sufi orientation, whereas their rival Deoband are considered to be "bad" on account of their emphasis on Islamic law.— Şerşeh🍁 (@_titanslayer_) August 19, 2023
Shāh Muhammad Ismā'il when he was asked by the Mughal king why he didn't stand up in veneration for a relic of the Prophet ﷺ:"There can be no doubt that the word of God and the word of the Prophet ﷺ are more sacred than a garment once worn by the Prophet ﷺ. But despite-1/ pic.twitter.com/T64Enf08n4— Şerşeh🍁 (@_titanslayer_) August 19, 2023
For those who want to read the book, I have uploaded a copy onto my OneDrive https://1drv.ms/b/s!AlS27FkvFBy6gYsiaZMklYoSv6cGHQ For those who have read the book, please share your thoughts on it
"In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tendency to view such moments of intra-Muslim contest through the prism of problematic yet powerful liberal secular binaries like legal/mystical, moderate/extremist, and reformist/traditionalist. Tareen argues that the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic was instead animated by what he calls “competing political theologies” that articulated―during a moment in Indian Muslim history marked by the loss and crisis of political sovereignty―contrasting visions of the normative relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic charisma, and the practice of everyday life. Based on the close reading of previously unexplored print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu spanning the late eighteenth and the entirety of the nineteenth century, this book intervenes in and integrates the often-disparate fields of religious studies, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, critical secularism studies, and political theology."
