This review article examines Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic in light of the book's challenge to the notion that the sharia consists of Islam's orthodox core, and Muslim literary, artistic, and philosophical truths constitute a periphery. Written from a historian's perspective, it draws out the ways in which Ahmed is able to illuminate aspects of the past that might be unfamiliar to modern Muslim readers. It also shows how Ahmed's argument risks flattening Muslim pasts by failing to disengage with the dynamism of historical forces and with how historical texts are embedded in relations of gender and power.
T he seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw Portuguese colonial holdings (Estado da India) faltering in India because of competitors such as the English, French, and Dutch. Thoughts of quitting Goa altogether appear in Portuguese correspondence, as do reports of attacks at sea that harm colonial trade. 1 The eighteenth century also saw the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) balanced precariously around the possibility of collapse, a consequence of the rise of successor states and the political aspirations of European trading companies. In such a landscape, one Juliana Dias da Costa (d. 1734), a Portuguese woman who held enormous power and influence at the court of the Mughal king Bahadur Shah I (d. 1712), attracted the attention of many. Juliana gained the patronage of the Estado, with whom she kept up a steady correspondence from 1707 to 1715, secured an audience with the king for the Dutch East India Company in 1711, and drew the attention of the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (d. 1733), who visited
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