Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages

Abstract

What have been the Historical Relationships Between the Islamic and Hindu religious traditions? Variations on this question inevitably come to mind in any attempt to assess the significance of the past dozen centuries of South Asian civilization, during which time significant Muslim populations have played important roles, interacting with Indian religions and cultures from a variety of perspectives. Although frequently this kind of question is posed in terms of assumptions about the immutable essences of Islam and Hinduism, I would like to argue that this kind of approach is fundamentally misleading, for several reasons. First, this approach is ahistorical in regarding religions as unchanging, and it fails to account for the varied and complex encounters, relationships, and interpretations that took place between many individual Muslims and Hindus. Second, it assumes that there is a single clear concept of what a Hindu is, although this notion is increasingly coming into question; considerable evidence has accumulated to indicate that external concepts of religion, first from post-Mongol Islamicate culture, and eventually from European Christianity in the colonial period, were brought to bear on a multitude of Indian religious traditions to create a single concept of Hinduism.