This essay is an enquiry into the context, nature, and significance of militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan. The parties to the conflict are the Sunnis, who constitute the majority of Muslims in Pakistan, and the Shi‘a, a small but influential minority. Conflict between these two religious communities has deep roots in the history of Islam and of South Asia. In Pakistan, which aspires to be in some sense an ‘Islamic state’, sectarian conflict is part of, and interacts with, broader issues concerning the place of Islam in public life. This essay seeks to analyse some of factors which have contributed, especially in the past twenty-five years or so, to militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan and to assess the significance of this rather neglected form of Islamic radicalism.

The madrasa is one of the many institutions which have seen recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times. 1 Given the centrality of this institution in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa is crucial to the construction of religious authority. Profound changes in Muslim societies in modern times have not necessarily marginalized this institution, but such changes have frequently raised questions about the position and function of the madrasa in society and of the ˜ulama reared in it, about whether this institution ought to be reformed, and if so, to what end, how, and by whom. Debates on such questions have received some scholarly attention with reference to several Muslim societies. 2 South Asian Islam has hitherto been much neglected in this regard, and though the role of the madrasa as an agent of reli-294

Among traditionally educated scholars in the Islamic world there is much disagreement on the crises that afflict modern Muslim societies and how best to deal with them, and the debates have grown more urgent since 9/11. Through an analysis of the work of Muhammad Rashid Rida and Yusuf al-Qaradawi in the Arab Middle East and a number of scholars belonging to the Deobandi orientation in colonial and contemporary South Asia, this book examines some of the most important issues facing the Muslim world since the late nineteenth century. These include the challenges to the binding claims of a long-established scholarly consensus, evolving conceptions of the common good, and discourses on religious education, the legal rights of women, social and economic justice and violence and terrorism. This wide-ranging study by a leading scholar provides the depth and the comparative perspective necessary for an understanding of the ferment that characterizes contemporary Islam.

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