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Ali Tareen

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Meat and Religious Difference in Colonial India: the Courage and Contradictions of Sayyid Ahmad Khan

This article conducts a detailed reading of the paradigmatic South Asian Muslim modernist scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s (d.1898) views on Indian Muslims dining with or eating the meat prepared and/or served by the British, as found in his Urdu/Arabic Text Rules on the Food of the People of the Book (Ahkam-i Ta‘am-i Ahl-i Kitab) composed in 1868. I argue that though Khan’s hermeneutic was saturated with Muslim traditionalist categories of inquiry and analysis, he ultimately remained wedded to a secular modernist privileging of a disembodied notion of religious authenticity that saw no harm in sites of embodied interreligious encounter like that of gastronomy. Conceptually thus, this article a) shows the impact and imprints of modern secular assumptions and desires on the thought of a Muslim scholar on a topic of profound ethical consequence, and b) highlights the limits but also the efficacy of the categories of modernist and traditionalist in the study of Islam.