The normative foundations of the religion depended on the existence of the caliphate. In his excellent and ambitious book Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, Peter Gottschalk convincingly argues that a dominant logic and discourse of scientism was central to the political and epistemic infrastructure of British colonial rule in India. In a certain sense, I have imagined this project as itself an encounter between specific aspects of the Muslim humanities, as refracted from ulama worldviews and discourses, with emerging discourses and conversations animating the North American Humanities. So at the present moment the seventh Manvantra is proceeding. The discursive archive of premodern Muslim legal and theological traditions is populated by a fair number of polemical moments.
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