This article explores Islamic networks, as constituted by migration of people, movement of saints and philanthropic institutional links, across the Indian Ocean. Linking Bombay, Hyderabad and the Muslim diasporas of East Africa, these transnational Shi‘i networks forge a print-based public sphere and determine routes for the circulation of media technology. Moreover, this article argues, that they deploy this technology to enable Islamic reformism in ways that are distinct to the local urban cultures in which they are set. The article examines two initiatives that apply technology towards different conceptions of Shi‘i reformism: while one reform initiative attempts to situate itself within a secular liberal public, another seeks to interrogate secular liberal assumptions by establishing an authentic Islamic society; both then, are underpinned by different goals, internal contestations and diverse trajectories. This article seeks to emphasize the ongoing impact of historically shaped networks of community migration and organisation: both the use of technology in mediating Islamic reform, and attempts to articulate a moral Islamic universalism, which have in practice been determined by these existing transnational networks.
This article thinks about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging newer relationships to modern time. It offers an ethnography of decline among the Shia community of Hyderabad old city, whose weakened political status by colonial modernity speaks in different ways of the experience of the contemporary as diachronic and not in succession with the past. These perceptions of decline describe the moral loss of the Shia community through the spatial decline of Hyderabad old city, as a fallen state that has been produced by Muslim actors in time. It reflects on the contradictory perceptions of decline that describes the deprivations produced by time as well as implicates community actors as offenders in time who persist with the performance of what appear to be meaningless rituals in the present context. What are the relations to time that make communities redefine culture in ways that are temporally meaningful to them is of interest here.
/ Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, 2 (2015): 255-286 ass that makes it a suitable representation of illnesses of various types. Following the writings of Deleuze and Derrida, there has been a heightened interest in using figures of animality to model different kinds of sociality and relationship. This edited volume is a novel addition to that body of literature and will appeal to a wide range of scholarly disciplines.
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