I am very happy to announce the release of my book, A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India, published as part of the Global South Asia series by the University of Washington Press. This book was researched and written over several years, but I am happy—and sad—to report that its publication is still very timely. A Secular Need not only traces out the multiple dependencies that secular state governance in contemporary India has had on what I call ‘the Islamic non-state’—and, in particular a network of private Muslim courts that has operated in India for almost 100 years now—but also seeks to link this secular dependency to the widespread Islamophobia that has unfortunately distinguished Indian governance for the past many decades. In short, this book aims to describe and analyze the mechanics of the many interactions between non-state Muslim dispute resolution providers and secular courts and law in India, but also the larger affective economy operating here. And while the pandemic has partly obscured the pathologies and phobias marking secular governance in India, it is worth reminding ourselves that just two months ago the novel coronavirus was a distant issue for many in India. Instead, independent India’s perennial problem of communal violence was front and center.
Indeed, in late February, members of India’s ruling political party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), again engaged in communally-charged politicking, bringing their taunts and threats to the streets of India’s capital. Unsurprisingly, Muslims were the targets of these actors’ brazen bigotry, and Muslim neighborhoods and citizens were marked for death and destruction over the course of the next several days; at last count, over 50 people ended up dying in this Delhi mayhem at the beginning of 2020.
The introduction to my book traces other historical instances of such violence—in Indian streets, civil society, and courtrooms alike—while setting out the larger argument of the book. Chapter 1 provides history and data on the operations of non-state Muslim courts in India, while Chapter 2 traces a crisis point reached in 2005 when a petition was filed in the Supreme Court of India seeking to shut down these courts for the first time in almost a century. Chapter 3 uses a detailed case-study of a Muslim woman’s use of a non-state Muslim court to obtain a divorce from her husband to illustrate that it is not just reactionaries who have targeted Muslims using legal technologies, but that liberal ‘rule of law’ theory does so too. Chapter 4 explores the divorce dynamics undergirding Indian secularism broadly—domestically, regionally (in relation to Pakistan), and globally—and Chapter 5 again returns to a detailed case-study, this time of a Hindu plaintiff in a Muslim court.
The conclusion offers a sobering diagnosis of the anti-Muslim malady consuming contemporary India. Towards this diagnosis, what is often overlooked about secular sentiment in India is that this feeling—and there is so much feeling here—is not just a ‘hate project,’ but is also a ‘love project.’ As a result, we need to bring complex tools of analysis to bear on this kind of affect-laden governance. Indeed, it is the secular state’s dependence on non-state Islamic actors that generates this same state’s hate and love of Islam.
This is both an exciting and perilous time to be writing on Indian secularism, and my hope is that A Secular Need can help both sustain and enrich important debates across scholars, social actors, and borders about secularism and its multiple effects, affects, and antecedents.
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