This ethnographic study addresses two interrelated questions in light of the growing scholarship on caste among non-Hindu communities in South Asia. First, how do we understand the formation of caste and hierarchy among Muslims? Second, how do we contend with the prevalent notion that ‘there is caste among Muslims in India, but there is no caste in Islam’ (p. xvi), or is caste Islamic? By the end of the book, P. C. Saidalavi demonstrates that if the term ‘caste’ is used to describe hierarchy among Muslims, it must be understood as operating differently from Hindu caste formations. The book’s central claim is that hierarchical distinctions among Muslims in Malabar cannot be analytically collapsed into Hindu caste schemas nor understood through the secular language of caste employed by the post-colonial state. Rather, hierarchy must be situated within lived practices, Islamic moral reasoning, and discursive negotiations grounded in Islamic values. Through an attentive ear for the voices of marginalised Muslims (here, barbers/ossān) in Malabar, Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy details how bodily service, ritual obligations, patronage networks, genealogical status, endogamous preference, and negotiations of religious authority are mediated through Islamic idioms. These generate forms of hierarchy that resonate with, but are not reducible to, Hindu caste imaginaries.

The book’s most compelling chapters move fluidly between mosque committees, barber shops, and Muslim households as well as historical and exegetical engagements with genealogical narratives and jurisprudential texts. The first chapter intervenes in long-standing debates by insisting that caste must be situated as a structural feature of South Asian life, while also arguing that Muslims enact and contest hierarchy through idioms and moral vocabularies internal to Islam. Chapter two draws on archival texts, local histories, and genealogical memories to understand narratives of conversion, lineage, and status among various Muslim social groups in Malabar—Thangals, Mappilas, barbers, and fisherfolk—and emphasises the centrality of landed authority and patronage in organising ritual, religious authority, and kinship in Malabar. The empirical heart of the book lies in chapters three and four, where, through ethnographic recollections of barbers within Muslim patron–client systems of the 1970s and earlier, the author demonstrates how they occupy a paradoxical position: they are religiously indispensable, performing ritual grooming, preparing religious bodies, and facilitating domestic and collective piety, yet this very dependence produces enduring forms of humiliation, stigma, and spatial exclusion. This relationship is conceptualised as ‘hierarchical intimacy’, a form of caste-like reciprocity that is intimate yet asymmetrical, and which is internal to Muslim society. Chapter four strengthens this argument by tracing how genealogical memory and occupational stigma are transmitted across generations, which in turn shapes marriage choices and everyday relationships among barbers. Chapter five turns to the discursive domain, tracing how endogamy and genealogical status are articulated through Islamic ethical values, such as kufūʾ (compatibility) and nasab (kinship indicator locally taking the form of taravād). Saidalavi demonstrates how barbers themselves mobilise Islamic normative reasoning to articulate claims to equality and dignity, contesting the assumption that their occupational labour is incompatible with Islamic ethics. Chapters six and seven examine contemporary transformations, with the emergence of barber trade unions, liberal economic policies, and access to secular and religious educational institutions. While barbers achieve relative mobility, claim dignity (antassu), and move away from patronage relations, collective stigma persists. Unlike Dalit and Pasmanda Muslim mobilisations elsewhere that are oriented towards the state, Saidalavi shows that contestations over dignity, marriage, and religious authority in Malabar are largely internal and articulated through Islamic moral vocabularies rather than secular or caste idioms.

The book’s central argument is that the classical anthropological understanding of caste in India, most emblematically articulated in Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, is a uniquely Hindu value system (based on purity and pollution) that was ‘received’ by non-Hindu communities through acculturation or diffusion. Saidalavi rejects this essentialist and diffusionist model, instead aligning with scholars such as Nicholas Dirks, Susan Bayly, Sumit Guha, and Bernard Cohn, who have demonstrated that caste must be understood as historically variable and shaped by political economy, colonial knowledge production, and regional configurations of power. He departs from them, however, by arguing that Islamic traditions—rather than colonial knowledge or Hindu ritual authority—shape ‘lived’ hierarchy among Muslims. Drawing on Anastasia Piliavsky’s understanding of hierarchy as a value rather than merely a structure,Footnote ¹ Saidalavi treats hierarchy not as something Muslims simply ‘suffer’ as an externally imposed system but as an ethical field through which both inequality is articulated and dignity is demanded. Through undertaking an ethnography of intra-Muslim relations, the book argues that internal religious values—rather than external ritual schemas—shape the everyday reproduction and negotiation of social difference among Muslims.

To a great extent this argument is a welcome corrective to the historiography of caste and Islam in South Asia. Yet ethnographic vignettes from the book would seem to complicate this religiously bounded framing. In a striking case set in Malappuram in 1970, Saidalavi recounts how a Muslim barber allowed a Cheruman (Dalit Hindu) to sit in a barber’s chair, provoking outrage among Mappila patrons who then vandalised the shop and humiliated the barber (p. 139). This act of domination required no Islamic justification and was intelligible across Muslim publics without invoking religious idioms. This episode raises critical questions about studying hierarchy exclusively within Islamic moral reasoning. The event suggests that the simultaneous humiliation of a Dalit body and a Muslim barber in physical proximity was operationalised through an ambient regional caste habitus, historically structured by Hindu landed authority, ritual segregation, and patronage. How might caste appear if the ethnographic lens shifted from intra-Muslim relations to interactions between Muslims and other religious groups? How would Malabar’s history as a region of extreme caste segregation—where landless Mappila Muslims laboured alongside lower castes and Dalits under Hindu landlords—complicate a religiously bounded account of Muslim hierarchy? If hierarchy can operate with full legitimacy and affective force without invoking Islamic discursive justification, Islamic reasoning may be better understood as a language through which hierarchy is later rationalised rather than as its structural origin.

If hierarchy is shaped and contested within various religions according to internal religious authority, values, and idioms—such as varna and karma in Hinduism, and piety, kufū’, and nasab in Islam—one might ask what makes caste commensurable and legible across regions and religious groups? It is essential to acknowledge here the enduring role of the Hindu caste order in structuring regional hierarchies in South Asia. While Islamic and Christian traditions furnish internal moral vocabularies to articulate hierarchy, the regional caste habitus through which Muslims and Christians live is sustained by conversion narratives and genealogical memory that distinguish Brahmin, Nair, prophetic, or saintly lineages from occupationally marked groups historically cast as Dalit, enslaved, or service-based. Saidalavi himself notes that the Mappila community—over 80 per cent of Malabar’s Muslims—is a historical case of religious consolidation that gradually erased internal caste differentiation. Yet if religious community formation has relatively dissolved caste markings among Mappilas, it becomes analytically pressing to ask why barbers and fisherfolk were excluded from this egalitarian horizon. Their sustained subordination cannot be explained solely through internal Islamic reasoning. Rather, Malabar must be understood as a regional caste formation in which Brahmins and Nairs, historically occupying a primacy in land ownership, ritual authority, and patronage, and Brahmanical notions of purity, touch, service labour, and domestic intimacy continue to shape social interaction across religious communities.

Here, Isabel Salovaara’s recent study on caste in post-liberalisation India offers some insights. Salovaara conceptualises caste as a recursively unfolding process continually resignified through new moral idioms.Footnote ² Through selection, commensuration, and bracketing, the caste hierarchy appears modern, mobile, ‘meritorious’, respectable, or cultural, even when its underlying logic remains unchanged. Just as privileged castes reframe patriarchy as ‘Indian culture’, elite Muslims and Mappilas in Malabar recode endogamy and genealogical hierarchy through Islamic virtues such as kufūʾ. Rather than understanding theological internalism as an autonomous phenomenon, it may also be read as a modern and politically inflected desire to differentiate Muslim life from Hindu life. If Saidalavi tends to argue that the Muslim hierarchy in Malabar is predominantly Islamic in meaning, Salovaara’s processual framework helps us to read that Islamic discourses are not the origin of hierarchy but its most contemporary interpretive garment. Here, we can distinguish Asad’s conception of Islam as a discursive field from what is simply termed ‘Islamic’, such that the discursive tradition is a historically grounded mode of ethical reasoning, not the claim that every practice, value, or social relation articulated through Islamic idioms belongs to Islam. Barbers’ continued subordination despite economic improvement and unionisation confirms that occupational stigma persists because caste, as P. Sanal Mohan argues, is materially anchored in labour regimes and embodied servitude, which discursive reinterpretation alone cannot undo.Footnote ³ For scholars of South Asia, Islamic studies, and caste, Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy is an important contribution and will generate further debate on the relationship between religion, regional power, and the enduring infrastructures through which caste continues to shape everyday life.