Ayesha Jalal’s Muslim Enlightened Thought in South Asia is a fresh contribution to the study of modern South Asian poets, educationists, reformists, literary figures, and philosophers. While studying the Urdu texts of modernist Muslim figures, Jalal’s key interpretive lens that distinguishes her work from others is the notion of roshan khayali (Muslim enlightenment). Roshan khayali is synonymous with azad khayali/damaghi wasaat (independent thinking/broadmindedness) and is defined as “an attitude of mind displayed by multiple generations of Muslim enlightened thinkers from the mid-nineteenth century onward” (p. 9). Using this lens, Jalal studies the thought of Mirza Ghalib, Sayyid Ahmed Khan, Maulvi Zakaullah, Muhammad Husain Azad, Abdul Halim Sharar, Altaf Husain Hali, and Muhammad Iqbal. Her goal is to move beyond the notion of the “apologetic modernity” of Muslim modernists or “theological rigidity” of the ‘ulama through which modern Muslim intellectuals have been studied.

Studying these Muslim modernists and ‘ulama separately reinforce the segregation between “secular” and “religious” thought, which Jalal aims to emphatically problematize in her case studies. However, in a few examples, one might argue that the distinction between roshan khayali and “theological rigidity” becomes unclear. Still, while giving voice to roshan khayal Muslim intellectuals in colonial India, particularly the those less studied, such as Muhammad Husain Azad, Abdul Halim Sharar, and Shibli Nomani, Jalal introduces these new figures in the secondary literature. In doing so, she situates these figures in a way that shows their brilliant oscillation with the local context and colonial pressure. For instance, she mentions how Maulvi Zakaullah was “socially conservative” and enlightened at the same time.

The book consists of three parts and eleven chapters in total. The first part, “Empire and the Transcreation of Religion,” delves into the roshan khayali of Mirza Ghalib and Sayyid Ahmed Khan. Jalal shows how Ghalib is situated between appreciating the emergence of scientific knowledge and liberality of thinking in colonial Calcutta to the melancholy over the destruction of Muslim urban centers such as Delhi, where no upper-class Muslims were left after the coming of the British. Similarly, Jalal’s reading of Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s texts, such as Tabyin-ul-Kalam or The Mohomedan Commentary on the Bible (1862), displays how Khan showed compatibility between Christianity and Islam as the key protagonist of Islamic renaissance. In Khan’s enlightenment project, it was reason that took precedence over emotion or religion.

Additionally, Jalal also studies figures such as Maulvi Zakaullah from Delhi College, whose contributions added to the free thinking of Muslims in India. Zakaullah is important as an example because, on one hand, he did not study English and was “socially conservative,” however, on the other hand, he was still a roshan khayal, according to Jalal. This makes him, and probably Muhammad Husain Azad, the most compelling case study of Jalal’s work. Zakaullah avoided narrow sectarian debates and wrote on ethics, for example, in his work Tehzeebul Akhlaq Arya-i Hind (1892), while seeking inspiration from Hindu ethicists. At the end of the first part, Jalal analyzes the fictional narratives written by Muhammad Husain Azad and Nazir Ahmed that shed light on issues related to sectarian ethics and women. Thus, according to Jalal, these figures operated beyond the colonial Hindu–Muslim divide and showed a harmonious attitude towards religion as reflected in their works.

In part II, “Historical Imagination and the Displaced Muslim Self,” Jalal studies the works of Shibli Nomani, Syed Ameer Ali, Sayyid Ahmed Khan (again), and Abdul Halim Sharar. These figures achieved multiple objectives vis-à-vis producing modern Muslim thought in India. For instance, according to Jalal, Shibli Nomani applied Western historiographical methods to the study of Islam and wrote new Urdu biographies of the Prophet Muhammad. Syed Ameer Ali and Sayyid Ahmed Khan wrote texts to counter orientalist polemics that disrespected the Prophet Muhammad. Maulvi Zakaullah wrote systematic universal histories in Urdu. Muhammad Husain Azad wrote a compelling history of the Mughals in his work Darbar-i Akbari (1898) to prove the British arguments of Muslim bigotry wrong. In short, these authors engaged with polemical colonial works while also applying modern methods in history, literature, and poetry. They performed two key roles as a result: rewrote their own histories in a new language (i.e., Urdu) and showed their scholarly and literary brilliance to colonial scholars by engaging with their thought rather than embracing it.

In part III, “Roshan Khayali in the Late Colonial and Post-Colonial Era,” Jalal moves to the intricacies in the personality of Iqbal, his encounter with Atiya Fyzee (a female intellectual born in Istanbul who contributed to reformist journals such as Tahzib un-Niswan [1898] and Khatun [1904]) when he was in Germany, as well as the memorialization of Iqbal through the postcolonial artistic contributions of Sadequain. Moving beyond the male and nationalist gaze through which Iqbal is mostly studied, Jalal summarizes Iqbal’s encounter with Fyzee in Europe, when both discussed Western philosophy and Persian poetry. Jalal particularly delves into Iqbal’s contribution to the theory of time and his critiques of Western theories and theorists such as Bergson and Nietzsche. Iqbal showed how the message of Islam was universal, and how the West can also learn from the East particularly on the matters of racism and slavery. Later, in these chapters, Jalal also sheds light on the issues with Pakistani Islam, such as Islamism and a rigid interpretation of the Islamic tradition, that have lost the track of roshan khayali laid down by its pioneers.

Overall, two things must be appreciated in Jalal’s recent endeavor: its close readings of a variety of roshan khayal Urdu texts and the lens through which these texts are read, i.e., roshan khayali. Additionally, one must also admire the engagement with the understudied works of Azad, Nomani, and Sharar, as they open a new archive in the study of modern Muslim thought in India. This is particularly important to mention because other figures—such as Ghalib, Khan, Iqbal, and Hali—have already been studied, for example in Mushirul Hassan’s fascinating work, A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (2005).

However, despite the significance of studying these figures, focusing primarily on roshan khayal Muslim intellectuals reinforces the binary of “secular” versus “religious.” It does so because the ‘ulama are cast as “irrational” and the roshan khayals are compared with the ‘ulama as if there was a clear boundary between the two. Scholars such as Barbara Metcalf, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Asad Q. Ahmed, Brannon Ingram, and SherAli Tareen contest this binary or have countered it by showing that the ‘ulama had their own inner logic to the tradition that also evolved in the colonial period. Also, the theology created and argued by the ‘ulama was not “rigid,” contrary to what Jalal argues, because it gave rise to new debates, polemics, movements, and institutions. As an example, these scholars argue that religious institutions, such as Deoband, focused more on individual piety and the cultivation of the “self” rather than adherence to blind customs and practices. To scholars such as Francis Robinson, it was already an “enlightenment” (or even a protestant) project in which modern Muslims cared more about individual piety as opposed to Sufi intercession and an understanding of religion rooted in community. So, the point is that the liberality and dynamism of thought are extended across both ‘ulama and non-‘ulama intellectuals.

Most importantly, it is pertinent to define and clarify who is a roshan khayal, who is not, and where exactly the boundary of roshan khayali ends and “theological rigidity” begins. For someone like Shibli Nomani, who was a principal (1908–1913) at the Darul Ulum Nadwatul Ulama, a madrasa in Lucknow, one might argue that he was an ‘alim or an “‘alim-historian,” as Mohsin Ali puts it in his dissertation.Footnote ¹ Jalal’s work is an important intervention, but a fuller picture of Muslim intellectual life in colonial India requires us to read roshan khayal and the ‘ulama voices together, rather than as opposites.