"[Sets] the stage for a rewriting of nearly a thousand years of history to create new understandings of the nature of cultural encounters. . . . The volume breaks free from the polemics of present-day politics and historicist distortions that have seeped into most standard texts."--David Lelyveld, Cornell University

This collection challenges the popular presumption that Muslims and Hindus are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably conflicting with each other. Invoking a new vocabulary that depicts a neglected substratum of Muslim-Hindu commonality, the contributors demonstrate how Indic and Islamicate world views overlap and often converge in the premodern history of South Asia.

Contents

Part 1: Literary Genres, Architectural Forms, and Identities
1. Alternate Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal, by Tony K. Stewart
2. Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance, by Christopher Shackle
3. Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity: A Study of the Tamil Cirappuranam, by Vasudha Narayanan
4. Admiring the Works of the Ancients: The Ellora Temples as Viewed by Indo-Muslim Authors, by Carl W. Ernst
5. Mapping Hindu-Muslim Identities through the Architecture
of Shahjahanabad and Jaipur, by Catherine B. Asher
Part 2: Sufism, Biographies, and Religious Dissent
6. Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications, by Marcia K. Hermansen and Bruce B. Lawrence
7. The "Naqshbandi Reaction" Reconsidered, by David W. Damrel
8. Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar: The Majalis of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati, by Derryl N. MacLean
Part 3: The State, Patronage, and Political Order
9. Sharia and Governance in Indo-Islamic Context, by Muzaffar Alam
10. Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States, by Richard M. Eaton
11. The Story of Prataparudra: Hindu Historiography on the Deccan Frontier, by Cynthia Talbot
12. Harihara, Bukka, and the Sultan: The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara, by Phillip B. Wagoner
13. Maratha Patronage of Muslim Institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh, by Stewart Gordon

David Gilmartin, professor of history at North Carolina State University, is the author of Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan.

Bruce B. Lawrence, Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of Religion at Duke University, is the author of Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence and Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age, which received the 1990 prize for excellence in religious studies awarded by the American Academy of Religion.