Iqbal Akhtar

It is a particular pleasure to offer these reflections in honour of Bachamiya Abdul Hussainmiya, whose scholarship first taught me to see Sri Lanka not as a bounded island but as a crossroads of the Indian Ocean world. In the spring of 2022, I had the privilege of hosting him at Florida International University, where he spent much of that year as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in our Department of Religious Studies. Over those months, in seminars and in long conversations, I came to appreciate that his life’s work the patient recovery of the Sri Lankan Malays, a small Muslim community descended from the soldiers, exiles, and royal retainers of the Dutch and British empires was never merely antiquarian. It was, in its quiet way, an argument about how difference can be lived. His Lost Cousins (1987) and Orang Rejimen (1990) restored to visibility a people who for centuries maintained a distinct language, faith, and memory while soldiering, marrying, trading, and worshipping alongside Sinhalese, Tamils, and Moors. To honour him, then, I want to think with his materials about a question that has become newly urgent for his homeland: after a generation of war, how might Sri Lanka repair its plural order? My argument is that the repair Sri Lanka needs is best named by a framework that has emerged over the past decade in the study of religion and public life: ‘covenantal pluralism’. Reparation after ethnic and religious violence is often imagined as either a constitutional problem of rights, devolution, and accountability or a cultural problem of prejudice, memory, and neighbourly trust. Covenantal pluralism refuses that separation. It holds that a healthy plural society requires, at once, a legal order of equal citizenship and a lived culture of mutual respect, and that neither can substitute for the other. Read against Sri Lanka’s post-war decade, the framework does more than describe an ideal; it diagnoses why earlier peace efforts have faltered and suggests where civic renewal must begin.

This article examines the history and significance of the Slidell Masjid in Louisiana. Founded in 1967 by Imam Lawrence Abdul Haqq, a man of Chahta (Choctaw) and Creole heritage, the mosque emerged from the Nation of Islam during the height of the Civil Rights era in St. Tammany Parish, a region with a documented history of extreme racial violence. This article argues that the Slidell Masjid represents a critical, yet overlooked, chapter in U.S. religious history. Its multicultural Sunni Muslim community provides a powerful counter-narrative to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the tensions between African American and immigrant Muslim communities. Furthermore, the article posits that by carving out a physical and spiritual space in defiance of both vigilante racism and state-level political repression, African American Muslims in Slidell were not merely beneficiaries of religious freedom but were active pioneers who, through their own struggle for survival and dignity, helped expand the practical meaning of the First Amendment in the American South.

This study examines one of the most consequential debates within contemporary Islam: whether the tradition can accommodate genuine religious pluralism, and what the political and economic implications of that accommodation might be. The core thesis is that Islamic civilization historically demonstrated a remarkable capacity for diversity, what might be called “civilizational Islam,” but that modern political Islam has narrowed this tradition in ways that undermine both democratic governance and economic development. Pakistan presents a particularly instructive case study of these tensions, where uncertainty over the meaning of Islamic identity has corroded the country’s economic foundations while straining its social fabric. The study proceeds through six interconnected themes: the theological problem of salvation and religious others, the post-colonial challenge of living without traditional dominance structures, the relationship between religion and state ideology, Pakistan’s specific difficulties with minorities and integration, potential pathways forward, and the promise that a more pluralistic Pakistan could represent.

This interview examines the concept of surrender as it is understood within the Islamic and Sufi traditions, framed around the theological observation that the word Islam itself denotes submission to God. Iqbal Akhtar distinguishes two complementary orientations within the tradition: a legal-observant path centered on fidelity to divine law—prayer, fasting, and ritual practice—and a mystical (Sufi) path oriented toward the experiential dissolution of the ego into God. He traces the early emergence of Sufism among the saints of Iraq and situates it within the post-prophetic routinization of charisma and the foundational Sunni–Shia question of authority, arguing that Sufism is best understood as an orientation that cuts across sectarian lines rather than a separate sect. Surrender, on this account, is realized less through ascetic self-denial than through the disciplined remembrance of God (dhikr), the melodic recitation of the Qur’an, gratitude, and service to others, culminating in fleeting states of ecstatic union and, ultimately, in self-annihilation (fanāʾ). Akhtar contrasts the Islamic affirmation of attachment to family and community as a ground of spiritual realization with the renunciatory logics of Hindu and Buddhist asceticism, reframes suffering as a divine test that deepens devotion rather than an end in itself, and affirms a robust place for divine grace and prophetic intercession alongside human works. He closes by addressing distorted Western perceptions of Islam, commending the call to prayer and Qur’anic recitation as accessible openings onto the tradition’s contemplative depth.

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India.