Review of SherAli Tareen’s Perilous Intimacies — Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire: Deep scholarship with sleights of hand

SherAli Tareen’s new book Perilous Intimacies is a work of deep scholarship on the debates around the possibilities of Hindu-Muslim friendship. The subtitle of the book ‘Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire’ is the main culprit and source of ambiguity and confusion that led to a sense of betrayal of expectations for this reader. This impression is added to by one of the key endorsements by the esteemed professor Talal Asad, renowned scholar of the anthropology of secularism, religion and particularly Islam, who claims Tareen’s book is ‘a learned and thought-provoking contribution to the question of whether there can be a friendship between Hindu and Muslim communities in South Asia.’ In complete contrast, Tareen opens his book by stating ‘this book explores the question of how South Asian Muslim scholars, especially traditionally educated Muslim scholars known as the ulama, imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Rifts within Tareen later adds and admits: ‘the ultimate objective of this book is to showcase and detail the depth and complexity as well as the fissures and contestations of Muslim scholarly traditions in South Asia.’ One wonders why only the case study of the book makes it to the title and not the actual motive.