ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts focus on the important roles played by newly educated political actors and their discourses in modern nation building, which seeded Islam as a modern institutional political religion. The central argument of the chapter is that Islamic modernist currents (or reformist Islamic resources) from especially the Indian subcontinent influenced these new discourses. The idea that ‘Islam’ when properly understood was not only compatible with modern political reforms but also a superior basis for what the new political elites called ‘civilization’ (thahzeeb aai thamadhdhun) was central to the new reformist discourses. Hence, they supported political modernization within broadly an Islamic political framework. Instead of jettisoning Islam, they favoured its transformation into modern institutional forms in many ways consistent with their modernist sensibilities. Similarly, their reformist discourses underpinned ‘civilization’ for a Muslim nation. Hence, they deployed Islam to reconstruct a distinctly modern Islamic identity for the state and people through the modern institutional apparatuses of constitutions and law, as well as through new nationalist discourses. The chapter therefore aims to establish the links between reformist Islam and modern nation building by detailing these new reformist discourses and how they shaped the modern nation-building processes.
