Roundtable: The Muslim Secular

The King’s Religious Studies seminar is delighted to host a roundtable discussion commemorating the publication of The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India’s Partition (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr Amar Sohal (Cambridge).

Concerned with the fate of the minority in the age of the nation-state, Muslim political thought in modern South Asia has often been associated with religious nationalism and the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim Secular complicates that story by reconstructing the ideas of three prominent thinker-actors of the Indian freedom struggle: the Indian National Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, the popular Kashmiri politician Sheikh Abdullah, and the nonviolent Pashtun activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Revising the common view that they were mere acolytes of their celebrated Hindu colleagues M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Sohal’s pathbreaking book argues that these three men collectively produced a distinct Muslim secularity from within the grander family of secular Indian nationalism; an intellectual tradition that has retained religion within the public space while nevertheless preventing it from defining either national membership or the state.

The author will be in conversation with Professor Christophe Jaffrelot (King’s College London) and Dr Farzana Shaikh (Chatham House), chaired by Dr Taushif Kara (King’s College London).

All welcome. Tickets are free but registration is required. Reception to follow.

Dr Amar Sohal is an intellectual historian of modern India and Pakistan and an Early-Career Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Professor Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute. He is the author of numerous books on Indian politics, including Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (PUP, 2021).

Dr Farzana Shaikh is an historian of modern Pakistan and an Associate Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House. She has written widely on Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies and is the author of Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst, 2009).