In a series of legal battles starting in 1882, South Asian Muslims made up of modernists, traditionalists, reformists, Shias and Sunnis attempted to modify the laws relating to their places of worship. Their efforts failed as the ideals they presented flew in the face of colonial secularism. This book looks at the legal history of Muslim endowments and the intellectual and social history of sectarian identities, demonstrating how these topics are interconnected in ways that affected the everyday lives of mosque congregants across North India. Through the use of legal records, archives and multiple case studies Sana Haroon ties a series of narrative threads stretching across multiple regions in Colonial South Asia.

Frontier of Faith examines the history of Islam, especially that of local mullahs, or Muslim clerics, in the North-West Frontier, a largely autonomous zone straddling the boundary of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Haroon's book is also highly relevant to the present, given that it deals with the area said to be the hiding place of Al Qaeda and its local allies. The Tribal Areas was established as a strategic buffer zone for British India, but the impact of colonial rule was minimal. The autonomy that resulted emphasized the role and importance of the local mullahs, who jealously protected the powers they accrued to themselves. After Partition in 1947 the Tribal Areas maintained its status as an autonomous region, and for the next fifty years the mullahs contributed to armed mobilizations, in return for which nationalist actors protected their vested interest in regional freedom of manoeuvre. Thus the Frontier became the hinterland of successive, contradictory jihads in support of Pashtun ethnicism, anti-colonial nationalism, Pakistani territorialism, religious revivalism, Afghan anti-Soviet resistance, and latterly anti-Americanism. Frontier of Faith is thus essential reading for all those wishing to understand the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands today and the role played there by the mullahs and their allies.

In the West, media coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan is framed by military and political concerns, resulting in a simplistic picture of ageless barbarity, terrorist safe havens, and peoples in need of either punishment or salvation. Under the Drones looks beyond this limiting view to investigate real people on the ground, and to analyze the political, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. Understanding the complexity of life along the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can help America and its European allies realign their priorities in the region to address genuine problems, rather than fabricated ones. This volume explodes Western misunderstandings by revealing a land that abounds with human agency, perpetual innovation, and vibrant complexity. Through the work of historians and social scientists, the thirteen essays here explore the real and imagined presence of the Taliban; the animated sociopolitical identities expressed through traditions like Pakistani truck decoration; Sufism's ambivalent position as an alternative to militancy; the long and contradictory history of Afghan media; and the simultaneous brutality and potential that heroin brings to women in the area. Moving past shifting conceptions of security, the authors expose the West's prevailing perspective on the region as strategic, targeted, and alarmingly dehumanizing. Under the Drones is an essential antidote to contemporary media coverage and military concerns.

In a series of legal battles starting in 1882, South Asian Muslims made up of modernists, traditionalists, reformists, Shias and Sunnis attempted to modify the laws relating to their places of worship. Their efforts failed as the ideals they presented flew in the face of colonial secularism. This book looks at the legal history of Muslim endowments and the intellectual and social history of sectarian identities, demonstrating how these topics are interconnected in ways that affected the everyday lives of mosque congregants across North India. Through the use of legal records, archives and multiple case studies Sana Haroon ties a series of narrative threads stretching across multiple regions in Colonial South Asia.