It is a secret in the Oxford sense: you may tell it to only one person at a time. ———Oliver Franks (Sunday Telegraph 1977) Common sense commodifies the secret, alienating the value of its content from its social context. But a secret perfectly kept dies in its circle of initiates. Few secrets, however, are dead on arrival, since their seduction lies precisely in their revelation. Most things said to be hidden are in fact nurtured through the processes of calculated concealment, allusion, and revelation, the secrets propagating themselves through circles of conspiracy, rumor, and gossip. As Tim Jenkins observed, “What is concealed, and the reasons for its concealment, serve to distract attention from the dynamic of the secret: what at first sight appears to be static and indeed dead, possessed by and known to only a few, kept in some dark place, in fact has a life and movement of its own; the secret propagates itself through a structure of secret and betrayal” (1999: 225–26).

A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India

With the increasing Muslim diaspora in post-modern Western societies, Sufism – intellectually as well as sociologically – may eventually become mainstream Islam itself due to its versatile potential, especially in the wake of what has been called the failure of political Islam world-wide. Sufism in the West provides a timely account of this subject and is primarily concerned with the latest developments in the history of Sufism and elaborates the ideas and institutions which organise Sufism and folkreligious practices.

Sufism in the West

Range and Limit of Geographical Indication Scheme: The Case of Basmati Rice from Punjab, Pakistan

This essay examines the little-known representation of female-female romantic and sexual relations in early nineteenth-century Urdu Rekhti poetry in north India. Rekhti is poetry written mostly by men, in "women's language," and with female personae. Women's language was not spoken by women alone—it was the language of non-elites and was adopted by poets to represent an indigenous urbanity. Focusing on the terms used to represent and debate female-female sexual relationships, I contest the view that Rekhti is obscene verse written for male titillation alone. I argue that its virtual disappearance from the canon is due not only to its homoerotic content but also to its nonjudgmental adoption of literary conventions and social customs drawn from non-Persianate and Hindu sources. After the politics of nationalist social reform led to the identification of Hindi with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims, these sources were denigrated as anti-Islamic.

Female Homoerotic Relations in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India

For long centuries, India, in a memorable phrase, was " on the way to everywhere " (Abu Lughod 1989). Trade brought Arabs to India' s southern seacoasts and to the coasts of Sri Lanka, where small Muslim communities were established at least by the early eighth century. These traders played key economic roles and were pa­ tronized by non-Muslim kings like the Zamorin of Calicut (Kozhikode) who wel­ comed diverse merchant communities. The coastal areas had long served as nodal points for the transshipment of high value goods between China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, in addition to the spices, teak, and sandalwood lo­ cally produced. The Muslim populations grew through intermarriage, conversion, and the continued influx of traders. The Portuguese, who controlled the Indian Ocean by the early sixteenth cen­ tury, labeled the Sri Lankan Muslim population " Moro " or " Moors. " Sri Lankan Muslims are still known by this term, whether they are by origin Arabs, locals, Southeast Asians (who came especially during the Dutch dominance from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century) or Tamils from south India (whose numbers increased under the British Crown Colony, 1796 – 1948). One account of early Islam in Malabar on the southwestern coast is the Qissat Shakarwati Farmad, an anonymous Arabic manuscript whose authenticity may be disputed by contemporary historians but which continues to be popular among the Mapilla (" Moplahs ") of the region. In this account, Muslims claim descent from the Hindu king of Malabar, who was said to have personally witnessed the miracle of the Prophet Muhammad' s splitting of the moon (Friedmann 1975). Similarly, Tamil-speaking Muslims of the eastern coast claim that they too repre­ sent a community whose members embraced Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet; mosques in the area date at least from the early eighth century. Figure I.1 shows a mosque built in the local style, located in the west coast city of Calicut. Not only traders, but also rulers, scholars, and literati in the south looked more

Introduction: A Historical Overview of Islam in South Asia

The Adventures of Hir and Ranjha, the immortal love story, is regarded as a classic of Punjabi literature. It speaks of the unbounded love that two souls have for each other, how they defy the taboos of their society, face the vicissitudes of fortune and yet remain true to each other. But they are also star-crossed lovers and ultimately united only in death. More than the story, it is the presentation of Waris that has immortalised the romance in the classical literature of India. The tragic love story of Hir and Ranjha has been a favourite theme with poets and writers for centuries. It was a well-known story that existed long before Waris Shah penned it down (around 1766) in the same way as the Faust legend existed long before Goethe.

Waris Shah

Papers

The Adventures of Hir and Ranjha