"The essays are united in the challenge they offer to the negative stereotypes that are current, for example, that Islam is inevitably politically militant, that Muslim women are particularly oppressed, or that Islam is a static tradition. The essays show the Islamic scholars of India and Pakistan as people engaged with issues of the modern world, pragmatically driven in their socio-political activities and not as blind reactionaries, as they are often described.

    "In the colonial period and after 1947 in India as well, there has been an absence, for the most part, of anything that could be labelled 'Islamic politics' or movements for an Islamic state. Instead, there is wide evidence of a firm commitment to democratic secularism and a-political spiritual renewal. The emergence of jihad-oriented movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the turn of the twenty-first century should not eclipse what have been more enduring and more pervasive patterns of Islamic activity in South Asia.

    "Nor should they distract from the other activities of the Muslims of the subcontinent like those discussed here, including the education of girls and boys, moral and spiritual guidance on the part of the holy men, the cultivation of Greco-Arabic medicine, poetry, and the production of pilgrimage accounts about Mecca. What remains constant in all of these diverse essays in the focus on individual Muslim lives, which gives this volume the feel of a vibrant oral history.

    "This collection will be of interest to scholars and students of modern South Asian history, and specifically of modern Islam. General readers interested in learning more about the cultural and political life of the world's largest Muslim population -- that of the Indian subcontinent -- will also find this collection absorbing."