Author: T N Madan
Editor: T N Madan
Publisher: Manohar
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 600
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8173040907
Description
The present volume of 16 essays, drawn from the files of Contributions to Indian sociology, is offered to interested readers to stimulate research.The essays deal with a number of subjects from a variety of perspectives, and are all very rich in data and theoretically mature.
There are more Muslims in South Asia today, numbering almost 400 million, than in any other region of the world. Only Indonesia has a large Muslim population than India, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. Divided into a number of subregional and national communities, the interaction of Islam and the Indian environment has played a crucial role in the making of their history and sociology.
While historians have for long regarded South Asia as an area of immense interest from the Muslim point of view, and many approaches and schools of historiography flourish, high-quality sociological studies of these Muslim communities are rather rare. Some improvement in this regard ahs been noticeable, however, in recent years.
Contributed mainly by sociologists and social anthropologists, and also by historians, the volume is a noteworthy interdisciplinary effort. It also represents international collaboration in scholarship, with nine contributors from South Asia and seven others from England, France and the USA.