Review by Choice Review
Its title may be the only problem with this extensively researched, carefully argued, and historically revisionist book, which is less about the external roots of North Indian Shiism than about the internal development of a new Shii-oriented ideology among one segment of North Indian Muslim elites. Shiis coming from outside India contribute to this development but they contribute as members of a uniquely South Asian political cadre. The target group of this study never exceeded 200,000, or less than 3 of the North Indian Muslim population, according to late-19th-century British census takers. Yet their influence was enormous, and Cole has succeeded in documenting their claims to legitimacy as a state-supportive rather than oppositional clerical hierocracy. Superficially this work could be compared with Volume 2 of S.A.A. Rizvi's A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna Ashari Shi'is in India (Canberra, 1986), but the similarity ends with the common subject matter. Cole's canvas is more restricted than Rizvi's, both regionally and temporally, while at the same exceeding Rizvi's--and that of every other scholar of North Indian Shiism--in conceptual breadth and explanatory yield. The density of subject matter is made accessible through pictures, diagrams, maps, and tables that recur throughout this pioneering monograph. Recommended for graduate students and faculty, upper-division undergraduates, and also general readers concerned with the various expressions of Islam as religious culture. -B. B. Lawrence, Duke University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
