ABSTRACT
Two genres of literature were introduced by the Bengal Muslim literati in the nineteenth century in their efforts to create and configure a collective imagination for the Bengali Muslim community. These genres would, by positing the sacred as the basic condition of modernization, convey to the people valid and viable forms of Islamic identity in Bengal and also claim the authenticity of national literature (jatiya sahitya) that formed the collective belongingness of the Muslim community. These were the biography (jibani) and history (itihas) genres, which would advance the sacred life of Prophet Muhammad as the ideal template for the community to follow and imbibe and the originary moment of Islamic history as the ideal time. These literatures represent the discursive project of the Muslim literati in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries that reclaimed the sacred as the core of modernization of community (ummah) and identity. This chapter looks at the writings of Maulana Abdur Rashid, Shaikh Abdur Jabbar (Sudhakar), and Maulana Akram Khan and Gholam Mustafa (Mohammadi) to explore how they received and interpreted various sources – Arabic-Persian scriptural texts, Orientalist discourses, and their counter-narrative written by the North Indian Urdu-speaking intelligentsia to formulate a Bengal Muslim identity.
