19/02/2026
A Forum on Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire
SherAli Tareen
Nov 22, 2024
SherAli Tareen’s pathbreaking new book, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award and asks how South Asian Muslim scholars or ulama imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
The book is a master class in how to open a dense intellectual archive to non-specialists. Although making imposingly erudite use of sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, Tareen always approaches these sources with a light touch. Often funny, Perilous Intimacies humanizes its ulama, even as it pays scrupulous attention to the complexities of their texts.
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Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire is a master class in how to open a dense intellectual archive. . .
