136 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19:3 

Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious 

Identities in Islamic South Asia 

David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds. 

Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000. 354 pages. 

Beyond Turk and Hindu grew out of a collection of papers presented at a con­
ference on "Islam in South Asia," held at Duke University in April 1995. It 

has 3 sections, 13 chapters, 8 photographs, 3 maps, 2 tables, a glossary, and 

an index. The book deals with the broad subject of civilizational interfaces in 

the South Asian context. It belongs to the category of interfaith relations and 
is addressed to a general audience interested in the Hindu-Muslim dialectic. 

The authors do not accept the premise that interreligious differences in 

South Asia are set and irreconcilable. To quote the editor: "We vigorously 
contend that there is a larger point to make, namely, that the constant inter­

play and overlap between Islamic and Indic worldviews may be at least as 

pervasive as the Muslim-Hindu conflict ... " This position is a challenge to 

those scholars who view India and Pakistan as embodiments of two sepa­
rate religious identities. 

Section One contains three essays on textual analysis to assess the same­

ness and otherness of identity formation. The authors do not avoid the con­

troversies that are bound to emerge from the sometimes disparaging tenns 
used by Hindus and Muslims to refer to each other, or the animosities that 

have emerged from the desecration of mosques and temples: 

Arabic and Persian use of the term Hindu had a range of meanings that 

changed over time, sometimes denoting an ethnic or geographic referent 
without religious content. Similarly, Indic texts referring to the invaders 

from the northwest used a variety of terms in different contexts, including 

yavanas, m/ecchas,farangis, musafmans, and Turks. These terms some­
times carried a strong negative connotation, but they rarely denoted a dis­

tinct religious community conceived in opposition to Hindus. In and of 

themselves, however, such terms tell us little. To understand the usage of 

these terms, one must move beyond the terminology itself- beyond Turk 
and Hindu - to analyze the framing categories and generic contexts within 

which these terms are used. 

The authors illustrate the power of bidirectional cultural forces by offer­

ing the example of the Punjab's Bulle Shah and Bengal's mystical Satya Pir. 
Bulle Shah, a contemporary of Shah Waliullah of Delhi, lived in the late 







Book Reviews 139 

communities have been at each other's throats for over a 1,000 years. The 
answer, fortunately, is no. Hindus and Muslims lived, interacted, and coex­

isted for centuries before the British arrived. This interaction produced a 

vibrant Hindustani culture with elements borrowed from Persia, Central 
Asia, and Vedic lndia. Only with the arrival of the British in the "modem" 

period did the emphasis shift from cooperation and coexistence to "democ­

racy" and "communities," "majority" and "minority." 

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 weakness, however, lies in its title: Beyond Turk and Hindu . The 

use of Turk suggests that the subcontinent's Muslims were external invaders, 
when in fact they belong to the native soil just as much as any other religious 
community. Its strength is its honest attempt to explore Hindu-Muslim inter­

actions in a traditional matrix, which includes overlapping Islamic and Indic 

frameworks. 
Nazeer Ahmed 

Fonner Member of the Legislative Assembly 

Bangalore, India