Abstract
Treading through the interconnections between Islamic and ‘modern’ worlds, this book—an ethnography of Muslim youths of Jamia Nagar in Delhi—traces its argument by invoking two conceptualisations of identity. The first regards identity as fixed, which over time has strengthened in response to the ubiquitous presence of modernity coupled with loss of political power. The second sees identity as fluid, borrowing from both Islam and the west to creatively engage with changing times. Referring to them as ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘hybridity’ respectively, the book argues for a third perspective where, rather than withdrawing into the provinciality of cultural particularity or accommodating to western values, young Muslims of this neighbourhood have resorted to constructing their own ‘alternative modernity’, one that brings them closer to the ‘mainstream’.
In order to substantiate this argument, the author illustrates the many ‘contradictory’ elements found in the lives of Muslim youth, like watching MTV along with the Islamic channel Peace TV, wearing jeans and jackets with the stereotypically ‘Muslim’ dress of kurta and hijab within corporate working culture. The intersection of these ‘oppositional’ tendencies of consumerist globalisation and resurgent Islam (p. 41) reveals endless possibilities in the process of crafting selfhood within the paradigms of modernity, without giving up Islamic identity. Since western modernity is also associated with powerful cultural centres, this alternative modernity—or in the author’s term ‘convoluted modernity’—locates new power centres in the Middle East which offer not only job opportunities to Muslim youth, but combining consumerism and Islam, are also associated with new global aspirations and desires (pp. 29–30). Hence many markers of what the author describes as western modernity can endlessly be combined with elements of Muslim identity. In balancing these contradictory aspects, the author places the question of agency. The argument is further developed by exploring online spaces that have provided youth with spaces of freedom to not only build experimental and alternative identities but also to assert their rights.
A major contribution of the book lies in exploring the shifts that have occurred in the practices and symbolism of the current generation. In comparison to their forefathers, Muslim youth today are more open and outward-looking with respect to modern culture, albeit with a distinctive and agentive bent expressed through their newfound take on Islamic identity. With opportunities arising due to economic liberalisation, these young men and women are competing in the global market without any religious restrictions or cultural sanctions. Material success and independence seem to be stronger driving forces than a religious worldview. Religious identity thus becomes not a ‘resurrection of inherited but undermined past’ but is located in ‘new circuits of communication, travel and exposure’ and is connected to global Islam through satellite television and internet (p. 42). In contrast, Muslims of the previous generations are characterised by images of segregation and provinciality. Their response to ‘pressures of unquestioned assimilation into the dominant culture’ was comprised of insisting on the ‘Islamic way’ which, for the author, also amounts to a ‘withdrawal from the mainstream’ (p. 67). This led those Muslims to their segregated way of life confined within urban enclaves marked by their own ‘provincialism’ and made them complicit with discriminatory regimes that kept them in their closed and segregated spaces (ibid.).
Though the book seems to be preoccupied with the question of closedness/openness and inside/outside of the Muslim community, it is not properly able to explain why Islam of the past is necessarily taken as withdrawal into segregated space. What elements are constitutive of what the author calls the ‘mainstream’ and why are they incompatible with ideas of Islam as articulated and practiced by Indian Muslims in the past? Moreover, does religion itself mean separation from the dominant version of modernity, or is there something specific about Islam that makes it radically incompatible with the modern world? Also, is Islamic separated-ness determined solely by the degree of contact with the outside world (p. 186) so that it could only be breached through satellite television and internet? The book tells us that the younger generation harbours no anxieties regarding the continuity and perpetuation of Muslim culture, but it does not tell us how the burden of those anxieties played out in the past.
Take the question of Urdu as discussed in the book. For the author, Urdu became the language in which some tenets of the ‘Islamic way’—disciplinary norms of adab (etiquette), akhlaq (ethics) and tehzeeb (discipline or civilisation), as well as the unique sensibilities of a Muslim mahaul (environment)—have been cached. The new generation’s inability to read or write in Urdu has made this ‘rich’ heritage inaccessible to them. Such an argument demands consideration of two critical questions. First, how far can the Urdu of ‘Islamic’ literature be taken as the expression of the community as a whole, especially when Urdu was also the language of many unorthodox voices like the progressive movement? Second, at least part of this literature has been translated into English and other vernaculars and a plethora of new writings have appeared elucidating ‘the Islamic way’. Many of these publication houses are located in Jamia Nagar. The ethnography could have been much more interesting if along with television and internet these publishing houses were also included.
The question of community also needs to be critically examined if the major part of the argument is based on the idea of youth breaking away from it. It might not be enough to take disciplinary literature of previous generations as metonymic voices of ‘community’ as a whole since a lot lies in the gap between what a society preaches and what it practices. Additionally, the notion of community—one that Muslims in India are burdened by as much as they find it a secure enclosure—lies less in the self-expression of Muslims and more in the techniques and discourses that are employed to render them governable. Notions of community in cultural, political and architectural forms—read segregated housing—that exist today may be read as a product of the very ‘modernity’ that the book puts it up against. Moreover, since television and internet media is one of the main foci of the book, its argument might have been enriched if it would have also explored the role of media in reproducing and strengthening the notion of community along with its role in enabling the youth in transcending it.