Hindu followers of Imam Husayn

islamoyankee

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting:

The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And so, these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition, or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it was truly possible to be a bit of both ‘Hindu’ as well as ‘Muslim’ at the same time.

What are the processes at work in determining religious identity at the communal level? While looking specifically at Islam, and the pernicious influence of the Wahhabi belief, are there similar currents in other religious traditions (contemporary, not historical)?

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One thought on “Hindu followers of Imam Husayn”

  1. “What are the processes at work in determining religious identity at the communal level?”
    Some form of communal ritual has to be included. Hindu-Muslim interaction in India has given us the bakhti movement, as well as other “Islamised” practices whose origins are from India. Shared devotion is also part of the “shaabi” popular religion in Egypt. Christians and Muslims will, for example, visit the same shrine of a well-known saint.
    “While looking specifically at Islam, and the pernicious influence of the Wahhabi belief, are there similar currents in other religious traditions (contemporary, not historical)?”
    Well, the Wahhabis are also an historical group, so I don’t see your point here.

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