"[Sets] the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. . . . The volume breaks free from the polemics of present-day politics and historicist distortions that have seeped into most standard texts."--David Lelyveld, Cornell University

This collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other. Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic and Islamicate world views overlap and often converge in the premodern history of South Asia.

Contents

Part 1: Literary Genres, Architectural Forms, and Identities
1. Alternate Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal, by Tony K. Stewart
2. Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance, by Christopher Shackle
3. Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity: A Study of the Tamil Cirappuranam, by Vasudha Narayanan
4. Admiring the Works of the Ancients: The Ellora Temples as Viewed by Indo-Muslim Authors, by Carl W. Ernst
5. Mapping Hindu-Muslim Identities through the Architecture
of Shahjahanabad and Jaipur, by Catherine B. Asher
Part 2: Sufism, Biographies, and Religious Dissent
6. Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications, by Marcia K. Hermansen and Bruce B. Lawrence
7. The "Naqshbandi Reaction" Reconsidered, by David W. Damrel
8. Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar: The Majalis of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati, by Derryl N. MacLean
Part 3: The State, Patronage, and Political Order
9. Sharia and Governance in Indo-Islamic Context, by Muzaffar Alam
10. Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States, by Richard M. Eaton
11. The Story of Prataparudra: Hindu Historiography on the Deccan Frontier, by Cynthia Talbot
12. Harihara, Bukka, and the Sultan: The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara, by Phillip B. Wagoner
13. Maratha Patronage of Muslim Institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh, by Stewart Gordon


David Gilmartin, professor of history at North Carolina State University, is the author of Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan.

Bruce B. Lawrence, Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of Religion at Duke University, is the author of Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence and Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age, which received the 1990 prize for excellence in religious studies awarded by the American Academy of Religion.

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"This book's contribution to Islamic thought is to suggest a fresh look at the world's traditional compartmentalization into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb." "Its strength is its honest attempt to explore Hindu-Muslim interactions in a traditional matrix, which includes overlapping Islamic and Indic frameworks." - American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
--American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

" The significance of this volume goes well beyond South Asian studies." ; " Has much by way of comparative interest to offer to scholars and students of other pre-modern Muslim societies. This volume also suggests new ways of understanding how religious identities were articulated and negociated in pre-modern societies, even as it provides rich resources with which to compare such processes in the modern world."
--Journal of Islamic Studies

"Anyone wishing to understand the complexities and fusions of medieval India would be well advised to look at Beyond Turk and Hindu, edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence, (University Press of Florida, 2000). A collection of articles by all leading international scholars of the period, it shows the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian civilisation was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character, and the inspired interplay and cross-fertilisation of Hindu and Islamic civilisations that thereby took place."
--Guardian

"An excellent collection." "Beyond Turk and Hindu has recently updated the idea of the "composite culture
--The New York Review of Books

"An excellent collection of essays." ""Beyond Turk and Hindu has recently updated the idea of the 'composite culture.' The book shows the degree to which the richness of medieval Indian culture was the direct result of the inspired cross-fertilization of Indian and Islamic civilizations."
--The New York Review of Books