Abstract: Perilous Intimacies explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book tries to illuminate the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions of South Asia on the question of Hindu-Muslim friendship. This event will engage some key fragments of this recently published book.

SherAli Tareen is professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). It was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award.