Megan Eaton Robb will be giving a virtual keynote lecture for the Rare Book School on the evening of July 23rd. Please stay tuned here for more details, including the final title of the talk and the registration link.

In this panel, scholars address how South Asian Islamic modernities were (and continue to be) written by Muslims, non-Muslim colonial actors, and in conjunction or opposition with others. Taken together, these papers aim to demonstrate the construction of South Asian Muslim identities through representations, emotive and affective responses, and praxis. These papers similarly ask questions about how writing Islam as or against modernities shaped and reshaped not just Islam but definitions of religion; in each, questions about the study of religion, religious knowledge formation, and boundaries of religion and religions are centered. Each paper addresses a distinctive textual practice--theological writing, newspapers, and colonial treatises--and in so doing make a case for multiple Muslim publics, definitions, and modernities.

While there exists a proliferation of work on the reformist writings and women’s periodicals of the late colonial period, this article extends analysis of print periodicals into the postcolonial period through consideration of continuations and ruptures in the genre. The primary archive for this paper is Akhbār-i Khavatīn (Women’s Newspaper), a Karachi magazine edited by a journalist named Mussarat Jabīn, MA from 1966, original copies of which are held in the Asian Studies Reading Room of the US Library of Congress. Claiming an audience of over 140,000 readers each week (see issue 10 September 1966) the magazine followed in the footsteps of its colonial-era namesakes in many ways: the magazine displayed a global outlook, discussing traditional topics such as marriage, education, and the global comparisons between East and West.