South Asia, the Middle East, and Muslim Transnationalism

Abstract

The conclusion revisits the extent to which Pakistani Shi‘is have been increasingly drawn into the circuits of the Shi‘i international in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. It argues that both Sunni and Shi‘i scholars have not been satisfied with merely being relegated to peripheral positions. Rather, Pakistani Muslim thinkers have been actively carving out spaces of influence for themselves. They continue to insist on the historical intellectual contributions of the Indian subcontinent and at times even claim hermeneutical hegemony for the region. The conclusion also takes a comparative look at India, where Shi‘i intellectual life was significantly less disrupted than in Pakistan. The conclusion calls for a new research paradigm that would take seriously the importance of bidirectional flows of thought between South Asia and the Middle East. Such a novel perspective has the potential to fundamentally reshape existing understandings of present-day phenomena such as Islamism.