ABSTRACT
As Islam in South Asia has, in its twelve-hundred-year history, manifested most of the varieties of response to the proclamations of the Qur’ān and the life of the prophet Muhammad that are found in other parts of the Islamic world, “South Asia” might appear to be merely geographers’ shorthand for a physically distinct region inhabited by large populations (approaching 240 million) of professing Muslims. The temper of their religious responses has ranged, as elsewhere, from the violent, pietist, and assured to the pacific, introspective, and tentative; and the setting of those responses has been, as elsewhere, the individual conscience and conduct, the life of the sect, order, or community, the courts of kings, the councils of legislators, or the conferences of politicians.
