LIVED ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIAAdaptation, Accommodation and Conflict
Edited by Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld


334 pages 215x140 mm Hardback

Rs 695
ISBN 978-81-87358-15-2
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, RELIGION, CONFLICT, ETHNIC STUDIES
Pub date 2004

Also available as ebook at: http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/lived_islam_in_south_asia/

Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict is an extremely timely and important publication. Fourteen interesting papers, based on intensive fieldwork in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, explore a highly controversial subject. They touch on the everyday religious lives of the Muslims in these countries.

The book argues that Islam cannot be understood through the works of theologians alone, for whom it is a formal, uniform and rigid system of beliefs and practices. Popular Islam, or Islam as it is practised by millions of Muslims in South Asia, has an empirical validity and is a dynamic process of adjustment and accommodation as well as conflict with other religions, with which it coexists.

Imtiaz Ahmad is former professor of Political Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Helmut Reifeld is India representative of Konrad Adenauer Foundation, New Delhi.‘The articles…provide rich documentation of groups many regionally based, that may not be well known. They not only document ‘lived Islam’ but they are a fruit of ‘lived’ experience on the part of the authors themselves… .’

Biblio, Vol X, nos 7 & 8