Perilous Intimacies

Finalist, 2024 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies, American Academy of Religion 

Longlist, 2024 Karwaan Book Award, Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative

 Tareen’s book is a learned and thought-provoking contribution to the question of whether there can be friendship between Hindu and Muslim communities in South Asia. It draws intriguingly on Derrida on the fragility of political friendship. For anyone thinking seriously about the problem of secularism and sovereign power, this book is strongly recommended. — Talal Asad, author of Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason This innovative study brings much depth and insight to our understanding of how South Asian Muslim scholars have viewed friendship across religious boundaries. It illuminates new facets of Islamic thought in colonial India and authoritatively introduces styles of argumentation long characteristic of Muslim scholarly culture. Tareen’s book is important, timely, and accessible, and it deserves to be read widely. — Muhammad Qasim Zaman, author of Islam in Pakistan: A History Perilous Intimacies challenges any simplistic notion of either Hindu-Muslim relations or a unified Muslim political thought. Although set in the history of South Asian Islam, it is an exemplary analysis of how a minority grapples with its identity in the context of diversity and threat of erasure (real or perceived) that will also be of interest to political sociologists of race/ethnicity, (de)colonization, and religion..Intellectual, nuanced, and thought-provoking. — Tahseen Shams, author of Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World A book of sweeping breadth and incredible depth, one worth reading (and rereading). Offers a detailed, pointed, sustained examination of theoretically complex topics like sovereignty, translation, and friendship. It is unique scholarship that deliberately and almost languidly submerges the reader within the South Asian Muslim matrix of writing, speeches, commentary, and history across several centuries. — Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst, author of Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion Perilous Intimacies is a model for boundary-crossing and theoretically informed scholarship for those working in any discipline, South Asia or otherwise. — Elaine Fisher, author of Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India