Afsar Mohammad's book, The Festival of Pirs, is a richly detailed study of a popular shrine in the village of Gugudu in Andhra Pradesh, South India. The shrine is dedicated to a Sufi Saint, Kullayappa, who is revered by Hindus and Muslims—Sunnis and Shi'is—in ways that map the story of Karbala and the martyrdom of the Shi'i hero Husayn onto the local geography of South India. This surprising merger is even more striking given that the largest number of devotees are village Hindus, for whom clear boundaries between a global Hinduism and a global Islam are incomprehensible. Though pressured by these larger discourses, this devotion persists and provides us with a glimpse of the sort of religion that must have been quite prevalent among many South Asians in the medieval and early modern periods. This is not a matter of “tolerance” between Hindus and Muslims, but of a truly common religious world shared among people of numerous castes for whom identification with cosmopolitan religious traditions is weak, and commitment to the local shrine is paramount.

The strength of the book is Mohammad's immersion in the Telegu-speaking culture of South India and his ability to convey the flavor of this rural culture. The fluid religious culture, transcending our usual boxes, is built into the religious language. We read phrases that seem to be a merger of Hindu and Muslim terms—din govinda (religion [of] Krishna/God), piru swami (master, using the word for a Sufi saint or spiritual teacher, and the Sanskrit word for lord or master), Khuranu (Qur'an) mantram (Qur'anic mantra [verse or spell])—but to those who use these phrases, that hybridity is undetected.

In Gugudu, Kullayappa is the older brother of Husayn, and once upon a time he visited this region of South India. Mohammad sees this story as a sort of “localized Islam.” He is at pains to distinguish “localized Islam” from what other scholars might call “local Islam” and resists the use of other terms (e.g., hybrid, creole, syncretic) that might suggest a negative valuation of this distinctive tradition (pp. 4–15). Some of this theoretical discussion is murky, but the overall value of The Festival of Pirs rests on the close attention Mohammad gives to the particulars of this devotional tradition, articulated by people who use a distinctive religious vocabulary.