ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to understand an important moment of transformation in the history of Muslims in Kerala. This effort must be seen in the present intellectual context of scholars opening up layers of discussion on Islam and Muslim communities in south Asia and their relations with modernity, secularism, Islamism, colonialism, transnationalism, and resistance. The efforts of scholars in Kerala to address these issues have been infused with ideological polemics in the regional language, Malayalam. This has resulted in some nineteenth-century scholars, who have been neglected in the larger historiography and in Muslim social life, making a comeback in the emergent argumentative Islamic sphere of Kerala for various malevolent reasons. Such argumentative spheres, religious and secular, have recreated selective ‘invented individuals’. This chapter moves beyond such rhetoric around Sayyed Sanaulla Makthi (1848-1912), the ‘first modern Muslim reformist’ of Kerala, whose significance in the early modern history of Kerala has not been examined in the detail it deserves.
