This essay surveys the Arabic biographical writing of select South Asian Muslim scholars from the late Mughal to the colonial period to argue that, for scholars participating in transregional networks of hadith scholarship, Arabic biographical writing served purposes distinct from Indo-Persianate biographical writing. South Asian scholars chose to write Arabic histories to access pasts and construct communities that centered the ʿulama’ as a distinct class of Muslims who represented the continuity of Islamicate discursive traditions across time and space. Arabic biographical histories indicate a different sense of temporality and geography than Indo-Persianate histories by both marking the passage of time through the transmission of religious knowledge over generations and mapping transregional scholarly networks.1 However, this did not necessarily entail a disavowal of Indo-Persianate histories that placed greater emphasis on saintly miracles, blessings, and shrines.2 This productive tension between Indo-Arabic and Indo-Persianate writing is missed when only Indo-Persianate texts are examined.

In his learned and stimulating article that helps frame the contributions to this roundtable while also outlining directions for future work in this area, Nile Green notes the striking fact that it has been nearly a hundred years since the last substantial English survey of the field was attempted. That was M. G. Zubaid Ahmad's “Contribution of India to Arabic Literature,” completed as a PhD dissertation under the supervision of the noted Orientalist Sir Thomas Arnold (d. 1930) at the School of Oriental Studies (as it was then known), University of London, in 1929. It was subsequently published with a preface by another distinguished Orientalist, Sir Hamilton Gibb (d. 1971), and retains some scholarly interest to this day.1 That interest lies not only in the descriptions of the many Arabic-language works it lists—going well beyond Carl Brockelmann's classic Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur in this respect—but also, in hindsight, in the assumptions that guide Ahmad's work. Ahmad believed there was little in the Arabic literature surveyed that showed any originality, partly because there was not much remaining to be said in fields like Qur'anic exegesis, the reported teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), or law by the time Indian scholars began engaging seriously with these subjects. It was also partly to do with an intellectual decline well underway by the time relevant areas of inquiry had reached India. The intellectual landscape remained unrelieved whether one looked at religious or secular literature, or even at writings in Persian for that matter: “… in spite of the abundance of Persian literature produced in India, nothing original is found in these contributions.”2

This article explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted litigation that altered the course of administrative law and governance from the 1960s onward. By that time, the construction of the interstate system had become synonymous with the destruction of neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstates. Ensuing protests—“freeway revolts”—pressed for altered construction practices and participatory roles for citizens and communities in the state building process underway. This article explores the legal consequences of interstate highway protest, and advances two arguments. First, freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly when they produced the canonical Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe (1971). Second, despite the reformist inclinations present in Overton Park, the case created an unequal legal and physical landscape of state building. Contrasting Overton Park with Nashville I-40 Steering Committee v. Ellington (1967), a case dealing with racial discrimination and community destruction, reveals the mechanics of a legal regime that cemented racial and class hierarchies in place across long horizons of space and time via the interstate system's durable, nation-spanning asphalt limbs.

Rabiʿa Balkhi was a princess and poet who, according to medieval accounts, flourished in 10th-century Balkh. She gained wide popularity in 20th-century Afghanistan, where she has been the subject of books, poems, and movies. This article recounts the story of her grave's discovery in the center of Balkh's town park in the 1960s, the emergence of a shrine around it, and its integration with Balkh's landscape of antiquity. Drawing on parallels from across the Muslim world, I argue that Rabiʿa's shrine emerged through a dialogue between state officials and local forms of placemaking. But although initially motivated by nationalist sentiment, the Afghan state lost its ability to define Rabiʿa's life on nationalist terms. As Afghanistan fragmented through war, her shrine survived as a space where her life was constantly reinterpreted and where disputed visions over the nation's past and future played out.

This article explores the pre–World War I writings of the Najafi cleric Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani (1884–1967), situating them within the broader Islamic revival movement, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Arabic Nahda, and the Ottoman Shiʿi shrine cities in the years preceding the British invasion of Basra in 1914. It makes four arguments. First, al-Shahrastani's calls for constitutionalism, Islamic unity, revival, and the cultivation of the self were all attempts to respond to what he saw as the immediate and existential threat to his world posed by European imperial expansion. Second, he attempted in a variety of ways to mobilize what he called the Islamic social practices against this threat. Borrowing from his own theorization of these practices, I employ the concept of political sociality to gather his attempts to foster various social assemblages—of both newer and older provenance—that would cultivate Muslim subjects with the capacity to resist European aggression. Third, his conceptions of sociality and of political temporality, although often resonant with those of the more widely studied Sunni and Christian reformers of the Nahda, had specificities that I relate to his understandings of subject formation, the sense of impending calamity in his writings, and the borderlands context of the shrine cities. These conceptions were not necessarily affiliated with the nationalist and disciplinary project of the modern territorial state and were animated by a temporality of urgency rather than deferral. Finally, I consider how al-Shahrastani's theorizations of sociality and ultimately of revolution (al-thawra) reveal moments in the historical constitution of a reformist and soon-to-be insurgent Shiʿi public in these cities.

The integration of South Asia into a Persianate world or “Persianate cosmopolis” has proven to be a particularly popular framing of the study of South Asian history. In Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson describes the Persianate as follows:

This paper introduces mukaddesatçılık as a Cold War ideological position that reconciles Turkish nationalism, religious conservatism, and Islamist revivalism. Mukaddesatçılık channels senses of disempowerment and alienation among people with Islamic and nationalistic sensibilities to a sense of ressentiment against the Turkish modernization process. The paper analyzes mukaddesatçılık's ideational and emotional components based on the writings of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. In addition to being the name-father of the concept, Kısakürek was distinguished from other Islam-inspired conservative intellectuals by his appeal to popular mobilization around mukaddesatçı ideology through his eloquent and powerful speeches and poems. The paper argues that Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık reconstructed Muslimness as the political identity of the popular masses, who are the supposed victims of the Turkish modernization process, to mobilize them against the so-called Western-minded modernizing elite. Mukaddesatçılık informs the current populist policies of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government that seek to maintain the divisive polarization between religious and secular identities.