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Book Cover
E-book
Author Asif, Manan Ahmed, author.

Title A book of conquest : the Chachnama and Muslim origins in South Asia / Manan Ahmed Asif
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 250 pages) : illustrations
Contents Frontier with the house of gold -- A foundation for history -- Dear son, what is the matter with you? -- A demon with ruby eyes -- The half smile -- A conquest of pasts
Summary How did Islam come to India? Why is this question of such great significance to formations of political thought in South Asia? This book examines the longue dureé history--from the early thirteenth century to the twenty-first--of a particular text, Chachnama, written in Uch Sharif. The Book of Chach (Chachnama) was written in 1226 CE and provided an account, in Persian, of the 712 CE conquest of Sind by the armies of Muhammad bin Qasim. This early regional history became the foundation for British colonial efforts to cast Muslim rule in India as one of despotic foreigners--a rule to be replaced by the benevolent British one. Asif explores an interconnected Indian Ocean geography which linked sailors, merchants, and literati across divisions of religion and polities. In Chachnama, we find one of the earliest articulation of a political theory that was demonstrably polyglossic, multivalent, and deeply embedded in both the Indic and the Islamic ethos. This examination of Chachnama informs a reconstruction of a intermingled political world at the heart of the text--a world that is subsequently recast by colonial historiography in terms of stark difference alone: Muslim invaders versus Hindu subjects. This work is a bold rearticulation of a medieval imagination that reconciled power and politics in ways that appear incongruous to our present day politics. It takes aim at the fundamental way in which the modern state of Pakistan imagines itself--as a polity ideologically founded in "712 A.D." by the "First Citizen" Muhammad bin Qasim, and has implications for our contemporary understanding of religious difference and theologically based nationalisms.-- Provided by publsiher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record
Subject Kūfī, ʻAlī ibn Ḥāmid, active 13th century. Chachnāmah.
SUBJECT Chachnāmah (Kūfī, ʻAlī ibn Ḥāmid) fast
Subject Islam and politics -- South Asia
Islam -- South Asia -- Historiography
HISTORY -- Asia -- India & South Asia.
Islam and politics
Islam -- Historiography
Politics and government
South Asia -- Politics and government
South Asia
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780674972414
0674972414