Manan Ahmed Asif is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and the author of A Book of Conquest (Harvard).
This is an innovative, refreshing, and provocative intellectual
history that makes a major intervention in debates surrounding the
question of Islam’s ‘advent’ in the South Asian subcontinent. In A
Book of Conquest, Manan Ahmed Asif aims at dismantling the dominant
origin myth that portrays Islam’s encounter with India as a
conquest.
*Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University*
A Book of Conquest is an important study that joins a growing
conversation about precolonial India, moving beyond both colonial
and nationalist tropes concerning the place and origins of Muslims
in Indian society. Manan Ahmed Asif’s radical re-reading of the
Chachnama aims to correct portrayals of the Muslims of India as
descendants of foreign conquerors.
*Richard Eaton, University of Arizona*
Ahmed’s re-reading will no doubt provoke scholars in both Pakistan
and India. It cuts against the grain of the way the Chachnama has
been discussed and taught for centuries. Though its rigorously
argued style may not help win the readership it deserves outside
academia, the book comes at a pivotal time.
*The Hindu Business Line*
A thorough and detailed study of the early-thirteenth-century
Persian narrative Chachnama, by Muhammad Ali Kufi of Uch. Asif’s
reading of the narrative seeks to dislodge earlier—particularly
colonial and nationalist—interpretations that labeled the Chachnama
a book of conquest…By reading the Chachnama as a whole and within
its context, Asif convincingly argues that it is a political tract
focused on the ethics of political and social relationships and
accommodating sacral and other differences.
*American Historical Review*
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