Together but separate: How Muslim scholars conceived of religious plurality in South Asia in the seventeenth century

The Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya Al- Alamjiriyya is a compendium of Islamic anafi law. It was written in South Asia during the second half of the seventeenth century with the goal of filling the gap between local social reality and Islamic legal theory. In order to establish an authoritative ruling, the authors compared the views of Central Asian scholars on anafi law, like those from Balakh and Bukhara, with the opinions held by the Iraqi scholars, in particular Abu anifa and his two disciples. This paper argues that the South Asian scholars shared more similarities with their Iraqi colleagues than with the Central Asian branch of the anafi school of law, although the latter were closer to them chronologically than the Iraqi scholars. Furthermore, the South Asian scholars' “permissive” point of view regarding non-Muslim residents may be ascribed to the pressure of the social reality in South Asia, which pushed them to search for a compromise between the population's ruling Muslim minority and the non-Muslim majority.