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What is the situation of religious freedom in contemporary Islam? What are the positions of conservative and reformist Muslims on blasphemy, apostasy and heresy? Are there any substantive differences between Sunnis and Shi‘is on the main points of this subject? What is this book’s original contribution to scholarship? Although the focus of this book is the critical analysis of religious freedom and the penalty sanctioned for the commission of blasphemy and apostasy from a Shi‘i perspective, this inquiry would be incomplete without a review of the general outline of Sunni Muslim positions on the same subjects. Thus, Section one of this Introduction explores the literature review on religious freedom, blasphemy and apostasy in contemporary Sunni Islam. Section two, which is more detailed, engages in a similar literature review, but from the perspective of contemporary Shi‘i Islam. These two sections allow a comparative study of Islam’s two major denominations, their exchanges, influences and effects. Section three describes the story of how this book unfolded, analyses the genealogy of the author’s ideas in detail, introduces novel ideas applied by other Sunni and Shi‘i thinkers, and highlights the original contribution made by this book.

This chapter critically analyses the challenges of traditional Islam in addressing the notion of human rights as it relates to women’s issues, and provides a solution using Quranic teachings. It starts with requirement of justice in women’s rights, and continues with the evolution of the approach of human reason in the arena of women’s rights and factors in the development of women’s rights. The chapter compares two different perspectives on women in Islamic texts: one view is more Qur’anic: woman is a different kind of human but she stands alongside man. No inferior characteristics are seen in this first view. The second view is more a view from the standpoint of fiqh. This viewpoint paints an inferior, a second-class person, vulnerable and needy picture of women who need the protection of men. The chapter addresses some of these rulings that consider women as an inferior creature, in three brief sections: Women’s Civil Rights, Women’s Criminal Law, and Women’s Political Rights. The chapter ends with the discussion of conditions for permanent Shari‘a rulings. Immoral, unjust, unreasonable or less functional rulings related to women in Islam cannot be accepted as a shari‘a ruling or an Islamic teaching.

This Chapter first appeared as the lead article in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 September 2014. It is a review of the historian Michael Cook’s Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic case in comparative perspective and Akeel Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. According to Cook, Islam has a greater tendency towards politicization than other religions, whereas Akeel Bilgrami is more disposed to find fault with Western policies than with Islam. Bilgrami underlines the need to listen to reformist voices from within Islam rather than the voices of outside critics. This leads the Chapter into a brief consideration of the prospects for large-scale institutional reform instigated by Muslims themselves, as opposed to sporadic reformist initiatives that do not crystallize into organized movements.

This chapter examines whether and to what extent there was a long-term tendency towards secularization, towards religion becoming a specialized subsystem which was distinguished from the other subsystems with regard to its institutions and the specialists involved. It also looks at how this development related to the growing importance of religion, particularly within the reformist Islamic movement. The first section explores this by contrasting the two most important Muslim colleges in northern India. The second section then traces the development of Delhi’s religious centres and the development of Madrasa Rahimiya’s teachings. It also looks at the retreat of Mirza Jan-e Janan’s successors from the public sphere and their rapprochement with Sufism. The final section focuses on efforts to secure the position of Muslims by developing an elaborate network of associations where spokespeople from the middle classes were now the authoritative representatives of the community of Muslims.

In this chapter the author presents a variety of religious views and the different devotional practices and communities to which they gave rise, as well as the boundary lines and the crossing of boundaries between them. The first section uses the establishment of an annual procession to the shrine of the Sufi Qutb ud Din at Mahrauli to present the devotional culture, the social basis, and the community building of the Chishti Sufi order. The second section looks at the Naqshbandi Sufi order and the reforms in Muslim devotional practice led by Mirza Jan-e Janan and his successors. The third section discusses the school of Shah Wali Ullah and the beginning of a new hardening of the boundaries between the religious communities and shifts in focus and priorities within the communities of Muslims in the nineteenth century.

This Preface contains six sections. The author analyses the works of the most distinguished thinkers of Islam and human rights: Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari and Abdulaziz Sachedina respectively in the first five sections. Each section has two parts: the first is a brief description of the thinker’s opinion on human rights, and the second is a brief critical analysis, reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of that opinion. Taha represents the Arabic literature on Islam and human rights in this review, Shabestari the Persian, and the other three the English-language literature. Mayer is the author of the most popular book on Islam and human rights from a non-Muslim and Western perspective. The other four could be considered to be the most outstanding Muslim reformist thinkers regarding Islam and human rights. The last section is the longest and contains four parts. The first outlines the author’s opinion on Islam and human rights, and the second compares his approach to the other five approaches. The third presents a comparative chronology of the six approaches, and the fourth and last part discusses the present book and the advantages of its English translation.

Gender history so far had laid a focus on the reform movements from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. This chapter attempts to push the boundary backward to the developments of the first half of the century. The first section claims that at least the women of the nobility had a much stronger position before colonial rule. It was the intervention of the colonial power which curtailed their possibility to inherit pensions and revenue and strengthened the position of the head of the family, thereby reducing them to a dependent status. The second section examines courtesans, who occupied a space on the threshold between the public and private spheres. The third section shows how reformist Islam addressed women through the medium of fatwas and tracts, looking at the text Tuhfa uz Zujain, the ‘Gift for the Spouses’, by Nawab Qutb ud Din.

This chapter looks at Lisa Oettinger's trunks, the contents of which unravel not one but two family stories, which Lisa purposefully joined: her own German-Jewish past and that of her husband's family, which is rooted in reformist Islam. The suitcases are therefore filled with the relics of German/Jewish/Muslim/South Asian bourgeois life and reflect one woman's efforts to make sense of her displacement by collecting objects from Germany and South Asia that “matched” or mirrored one another. Indeed, the carefully preserved intimate items are the material traces of a quite extraordinary migration story. Ultimately, Lisa Oettinger's collection saved two families from being forgotten: the Oettingers from Marienwerder and the Ur-Rahmans from Lahore. The collection allows them not only to live on in their things but also to join their family traditions in one box. For that reason, her collection is neither specifically Jewish nor specifically Muslim. It is in-between.

The chapter discusses the exceptional case of the mid–19th-century Muslim woman ruler Sikandar Begum in the princely state of Bhopal in central India, whose mother had also been the regent of Bhopal state and whose daughter followed her as ruler. The author depicts this as transition from an earlier local form of Islamic statecraft that did not shy away from the use of force and relied on a decentralized structure, to a new mode of more centralized administration following the British model. Instead of engaging in Sufism or in reformist Islam, Sikandar Begum personally practised what the author calls a protestant-style Islam, without, however, attempting to curb other denominational observances. There was no idea yet of a distinct ‘Muslim world’, rather a fusion of traditional and what was considered modern (administrative) practices from the top down, appropriating Mughal paraphernalia, without raising the issue of religious identity in any emphatic sense.