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Muhammed Niyas Ashraf (Year 2015)

muhammed-niyas

Entanglements of Print Culture and Trajectories of Community Formation: Mappila Muslims of Kerala, 1867 - 1956

Entanglements of Print Culture and Trajectories of Community Formation: Mappila Muslims of Kerala, 1867 - 1956

This study is a social history that deals with the relationship between Mappila community formation and print culture in Malabar. The Mappila community is one of the first Muslim community in South Asia and the largest in the state of Kerala, India. I will consider the series of changes that were brought about by print in their society from 1867 to 1924. In this study I will attempt to analyze two important dimensions of Muslim print culture in Kerala: The contents of printed texts in Malayalam and Arabic-Malayalam (Malayalam written in Arabic script), and print or printing as an institution. Moreover, I wish to show how these texts played a significant role in defending Islam (preserving the glory and virtue of the Islamic faith), enhancing Islam (reviving as well as reforming Islam and reasserting Muslim-ness) and vernacularizing Islam (translating Islamic theological and polemical Islamic texts). They also helped proliferate the idea of Islamic Protestantism (revivalism through scriptural Islam and the rejection of all kinds of innovations in Islamic ritual practices), and thereby affected the Muslim political sphere.

 

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Torsten Tschacher

Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag

Third Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gudrun Krämer

Publications

Muhammed Niyas Ashraf, "Saints Textualized: Pious Commemoration of 'Friends of God' and Vernacular Hagiographies in the Nineteenth Century Malabar". In Media Technology and Cultures of Memory: Mapping Indian Narratives, edited by Elwin Susan John and Amal P Mathews(New York: Routledge, 2023).