MUSLIM COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Seema Alavi

This book recovers the stories of five Indian Muslim scholars who, in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857, were hunted by British authorities, fled their homes for such destinations as Cairo, Mecca and Istanbul, and became participants in a flourishing pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires. Alavi traces this network, which became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility—a form of political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood today as it did in the previous century.

Harvard University Press, 504 pages, Rs 1,001