Religion and Public Life Fellowship

For the 2020-2021 academic year I am a Religion and Public Life Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion. My guiding question during this fellowship is: does religion have anything to do with moral reasoning about our shared political life?

Existing scholarship suggests avenues for thinking about national and transnational community in terms of liberalism and secularism, and some have pushed these scholarly narratives toward a greater consideration of the Global South. However, these important, influential projects of extension and reframing have not integrated the contributions of South Asian Muslim thinkers into the broader scholarly narrative of how religious approaches might help us to build national and transnational communities seeking just political conditions.

With the help of this earlier scholarship, my work brings South Asian Muslim perspectives to bear on modern moral reasoning. During my year at the Center, I am focusing on arguments made by South Asian Muslim intellectuals in the twentieth century about what makes for good governance in pre-Partition politics marked by competing communal interests and colonialism.