Some Classical Muslim Views of the Indian Caste System

Marlow, Louise

doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1995.tb03607.x

Cited by 2 publications

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“…These ideals were then transmitted and expressed as Islamic thought through the translations and adaptions of texts by Muslim authors. 31 Ideas of hierarchy have always been in vigorous contention with Islamic egalitarian ideals and the historical realities of Muslim societies.…”

Section: Castes Of Islammentioning

confidence: 99%

Casteist demons and working-class prophets: subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928

Uddin

2023

JRAS

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This article investigates the relationship between caste and Islam in Bengal at a time when they acquired heightened significance as markers of identity for the colonial state and between communities. Scholarship, mainly drawing on North India, has emphasised the contrast between the existence in practice of a hierarchical system of social stratification among Muslims and the ideals and traditions of Islamic egalitarianism. This article, however, shows that caste-based struggles and tensions produced a revolutionary Islam. I suggest that the subversive potential of Islamic egalitarianism, described in early Islam by Louise Marlow, was kept alive by low-caste Bengali Muslims. The social reality of caste enabled multiple understandings of what it meant to be a Muslim, and the more radical among them were subaltern ontologies—different meanings of what it was to be a Muslim in the world. Here, I analyse writings on caste by four unreliable narrators around the turn of the twentieth century—a British colonial ethnographer, an ashrāfī Muslim anthropologist, and two Muslim reformers—to describe the politics and lifeworlds of low-caste Muslim groups in Bengal. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of this period of Islamic reform and development, one that is conscious of the subaltern currents shaping its course. I show how a reformist politics of ‘rejection’ of elite Islam emerged as a response to the problem of caste inequality. These discourses and practices repudiating elite Muslim titles, centring histories of labour, and emphasising equality as an embodied experience reveal the revolutionary potentialities of a subaltern Islam.

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Section: Castes Of Islammentioning

confidence: 99%

Casteist demons and working-class prophets: subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928

Uddin

2023

JRAS

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Evolution of the figure of the Brahmin in early Muslim writings

Jalki¹

2023

OSLS

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When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty and the boasting Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts - such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata - do not talk about the caste system or the rule-setting priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. Whence is this idea of Brahmin then? Ever since Wilhelm Halbfass’s Imagining India (1990), a growing but a small number of Indologists talk about the 11th century Al-Bīrūnī as one of “the greatest scholars ever” to speak about the Indian caste system. There is, however, neither a comprehensive study to show what his contributions measure up to nor any attempt to dig into the Islamic culture that culminates in Al-Biruni’s quite detailed picture of the Brahmin and the caste system. This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’s time, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making crafty Brahmin that we confront by the 11th century in Muslim writings.

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Some Classical Muslim Views of the Indian Caste System

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Casteist demons and working-class prophets: subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928

Casteist demons and working-class prophets: subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928

Evolution of the figure of the Brahmin in early Muslim writings

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