Academics

 
 

Publications

 

Books

 

Journal Articles

 

Research

 

Dr. Khan’s most recent specialisation has been on Islam and Muslims in South Asia including their corresponding networks and connections in the wider Muslim world. His doctoral research focused on the manner in which North Indian Muslims conceived of and wrote poetry about their identity as Indians between 1850 and 1950. The research explored the role of the physical spaces of reciting poetry, mushairas, as well as focused on the thematic changes in how India was viewed by a number of Muslim poets of this period. The PhD was published as a book by Oxford University Press in January 2020 and is entitled Poetry of Belonging: Muslim Imaginings of India 1850-1950.

Dr. Khan conducts research in a number of languages including Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Persian. Dr. Khan has presented his research at the Benares Hindu University (India), Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), University of Cambridge (UK), King’s College London (UK), University of Tokyo (Todai, Japan), University of Göttingen (Germany), UT Austin (USA), Sciences Po (France), Leiden University (Netherlands) as well as at other leading centres of education and research across the world.

 

Research projects

 

Dr. Khan’s interests have focused on matters of religious identity, democracy, culture and politics of both South Asia and West Asia (the MENA region). For the past seven years Dr. Khan has also been privileged to be a part of various civil society groups. Many of these groups focus on the role of religion in democracy, individual and human rights, the rights of minorities, concerns pertaining to terrorism and security, among other issues that have a direct bearing on public policy. In these fora he has had the opportunity and privilege of meeting and working with people from very different backgrounds, including civil society activists, bureaucrats, politicians and journalists, thus enabling him to identify ways in which to seek common ground and facilitate dialogue between people and group interests that otherwise might seem to have disparate interests.

If you would like to invite him for an event please write to ali@alimahmudabad.com.

 

Ongoing Research

Intimate Enmity: sectarianism in South Asia

There have been some scholarly works but generally speaking this remains a largely understudied area. Not only would this work help in unpacking Shi‘ism and Sunnism as epistemological categories in the South Asian context but this would also allow for a richer and fuller understanding of the way in which ideas travel and how the non-religious context effects Shi‘a-Sunni discourse as much as theological differences do. Given the increasing sectarian tensions in much of the Muslim world and particularly South Asia, it is hoped that this work will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Shi‘a-Sunni differences and will illustrate how perceived intractable differences are not as inflexible and inevitable as they are thought to be.

Indian Muslims and the sites and practices of religious harmony

This work will seek to centre its investigation around South Asia with occasional reference to greater West Asia. In particular the argument will be built around the physical spaces of harmony and the varied practices within these sites. Here harmony is deliberately used instead of tolerance because the liberal antecedents of the latter, although perhaps of use in Europe, has less theoretical and practical value in societies whose engagement with ‘others’ is anchored more in their particular contexts and histories rather than recent post-Englightenment theories of tolerance. ​

The work will be divided in into two parts. The first will outline the various ways in which certain contemporary Muslim scholars conceive of and articulate ways of ‘being’ in a multi-cultural society. One important aspect of this will analyse the ways in which Muslims, being a minority, engage with dominant political narratives in India, not only theoretically but more importantly in terms of practice. It will be argued that Muslims, by virtue of being a minority in a place like India, carry the burden of secularism, and interestingly, through popular usage secular has also come to be a synonym for tolerance in modern India.

The second part of the work will look at the physical spaces in which different communities, both social and religious, interact and participate. These spaces will include permanent structures such as shrines (dargāhs) as well as other more liminal spaces, like public processions (Muharram in India), cultural forms (mushā’irahs) as well as political spaces (rallies, national holidays). Both these sections will be placed in their historical contexts and indeed at times it will be argued that there have been shifts in the same spaces from harmony to a liberal form of tolerance because of social and religious changes and political exigencies. Furthermore, the hidden and indeed creative tensions that mark the sharing of these spaces will also be explored in order to not only highlight the constructive role played by these sites but also shed light on the ways in which there is often an unspoken discomfort with the ‘other.’

Apart from drawing on sociological and historical work, this research will use ethnographic work conducted at various sites as well as analysing ways in which the media, and specifically the language used, is a key interlocutor in promoting, or indeed at times discouraging, inter and intra-faith harmony.

Dalit and Hindu rituals during Muharram in North India

The advent of Muharram often marks heightened sectarian tensions in many parts of the world. Often these are the result of theological differences but as often they are to do with the assertion of control over public space as well as the economic, social and cultural disparities and inequalities. However, there are a few instances where these contested spaces are shared and inhabited by people from different communities and backgrounds.

This project proposes to explore Hindu rituals and observances of Muharram in Awadh. Every year the commemorations of Muharram in India and in particular in the region in and around Lucknow is witness to Hindus of various castes, not only taking part in processions and other rituals, but indeed also maintaining their own particular set of traditions. The majority of people who participate in these processions are actually Dalits and of course the resonance of the symbolism of the oppresses and the oppressors is part of the reason that Karbala hold such deep significance for them.

There are a number of unique aspects to these rituals including an unique oral literary tradition, chowki bharna or a set of practices that are unique to Hindu women who participate, taziyadaari or the keeping night vigils over bamboo and paper replicas of the shrine of Imam Hussain and many other rituals which are unique to Dalit commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain. Much of the work will be based on ethnographic work while the historical roots of these practices will provide the context for their development.

 

 

Teaching

Dr. Khan currently teaches courses in Political Science and History at Ashoka University (India). These are some of the courses that he has taught:

 

Political Thought in the Age of Nationalism

This course will seek to explore notions of the state, nation, citizenship and other related concepts as they took root in 18th and 19th century Europe. It will then trace how these movements and ideas travelled to South Asia as well as parts of the Middle East. This will allow students to not only understand the origins of today’s ‘dominant form of political representation’- the nation state-but will also give them an understanding of various nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the 19th century. Amongst others, the works of Herder, Fichte, Mazzini, de Tocqueville, Jamalludin Afghani, Bankim Chattopadhyay, Sati al-Husri, Tagore, Iqbal, Jalal aal-e Ahmad, Savarkar and Gandhi will be engaged with.

 

Non-Western Political Thought

This course will introduce students to non-European aspects of political thought with particular recourse to various parts of the colonised world. The course shall largely focus on the colonial and post-colonial periods in order to highlight to students, not only the reception of concepts like liberalism in the non-European world, but also explore how these concepts underwent changes and reinterpretations in new environments. A key concept that we shall be exploring throughout the course is the questions of what is modernity? An often-neglected aspect of the study of politics, is the study of the role of religion in the social and political formations of the non-European world and part of the aim of this course will be to highlight the continuing importance of religious thought to understanding wider political discourse. Importantly, the course will introduce students to major non-Western philosophers and thinkers. Apart from this the students will also understand how ideas travel and how these often disrupt the geographical imaginings that we often assume to be unassailable and fixed.

 

Critical Concepts in Islam

This course will offer students the chance to tackle individual concepts within Islam and then go into an in-depth analysis of their origins, changes in meaning and their relevance to the everyday lives of Muslims by using a longue durée approach. Furthermore, there will be a constant effort to underscore how these issues remain deeply relevant today and thereby introduce students to currents debates as well. Over the course of the term, concepts like Islam itself and its manifold manifestations, prophethood, revelation , shariah, fiqh, and many other such ideas and concepts will be deconstructed and analysed keeping in mind their relationship to broader political, social and religious formations in Muslim societies. By the end of the course the student should have a firm grasp of both scholarly debates and their location in contemporary discourse.

 

Political Islam- wherefore and when?

‘Political Islam’ is possibly one of the most overused yet analytically vague categories in the public sphere. Starting in 1798 with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and charting our way through the tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore seminal historical moments through a number of primary sources in order to understand the manner in which Muslim thinkers from across the world reacted to modernity in its various forms. The course will mostly focus on the 20th century and will analyse the rise of the Jamaat-e Islami in India and its eventual establishement in Pakistan, the Ikhwanul Muslimeen in Egypt and its subsequent spread to different countries, Velayat-e Faqih in Iran and of course the rise of various militarised extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda. We will ask questions about the local, national, trans-national dimensions of all these movements in order to see whether there is anything that loosely ties them together or not. During the course of the semster we will ask key questions to do with how important Muslim thinkers reacted to democracy, nationalism, liberalism, communism and socialism amongst other things. The course will have a heavy reading load. It will be restricted to students who have taken Critical Concepts in Islam. Furthermore there will be an entrance exam to secure a place in the course and there will be required reading before the semester begins.

 

Revolution

Students will be introduced to the concept of revolution as a political idea. The course will seek to unpack the political thought and historical context of revolutions as well as outline their origins, developments and outcomes. This will help in answering key questions about this often used but widely misunderstood word. The course will look at various historical and geographical examples in order to answer the broader questions about the nature of the links between revolution and civil wars, rebellions and uprisings. The course will use variours examples and begin in America in the 18th century and end in with a focus on Iran in the 20th century.