Z. Fareen Parvez’s Politicizing Islam: The Islamic Revival in France and India is an excellent contribution to the sociology of religion. For one, it deals squarely with Muslims in order to explain and analyze their lives and struggles, as opposed to situating them as a problem to be explained. Propelled by the rise of Islamic militancy, and situated in a larger Orientalist discourse that posits Islam as the Other of the West, it is this latter trope that has characterized the bulk of work on Islam within sociology of religion in America. The aim of this work has been to explain Islamic religious movements, fundamentalism, religious nationalism, political Islam, and the like. Politicizing Islam is a breath of fresh air in that, instead of focusing on Islamist movements and their penchant for violence, it situates Muslims as ordinary social actors who grapple with social issues that are, in a sense, globally shared.

Yet, Muslims face circumstances that are distinct. Politicizing Islam begins by noting that there is “a global trend toward the routine surveillance of mosque communities and arbitrary policing of persons associated with Islam” in countries where Muslims form a minority such as France and India [2]. The underlying assumption of this surveillance is that “Islamic piety has grave political consequences” [2]. The goal of Politicizing Islam is to examine how Muslims in these contexts mobilize to improve their situations through Islamic revival, and what types of claims they make on secular states in societies in which they live as minorities. Parvez addresses these questions through a comparative ethnography of Lyon, France and Hyderabad, India. The major finding of the book is that Muslim communities do not seek to Islamize either state or society. However, while Muslim communities in France have “withdrawn from the state” through “the expulsion of politics altogether” and by practicing “antipolitics”, Muslim communities in Hyderabad are “tensely divided between those who accepted the need to ‘integrate’ and work with the state and those who thought focusing on recognition neglected the needs of the poor and working class” [5]. These finding are based on ethnographic research “into the everyday lived experiences of religion and politics of Muslims in Lyon and Hyderabad during the post-9/11 era on the global War on Terror” [3].

The major strength of the research design lies in its comparison between India and France. Typically, such comparisons between Western liberal democracies and countries that hail from the developing “Third” world are not undertaken, especially within sociology of religion. Instead, comparisons are made among Western countries, typically United States and Western European countries, usually with the aim of deciphering and explaining the “varieties” of secularism and their contingent outcomes such as levels of religiosity, state-minority relations, etc. This has the effect of normalizing the supposed difference between the secular West and the religious Rest. Yet, this “difference” is untenable, especially when we consider a country like India which has explicitly and consistently held fast to its own version of state secularism since its independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Furthermore, a comparison between France and India points to a critical aspect of a shared and global political modernity that is underwritten by the structural form of the nation-state. The fact that every country today is virtually required to articulate and seek allegiance for an almost mythical narrative of its origins and essence means that some citizens within that country will invariably find themselves marginalized within the nationalist narrative. This is as true of France as it is of India.

Where Politicizing Islam is less successful, in my view, is its theorization of politics. The notion that withdrawing from politics is antipolitics is problematic, to say the least. However, I will restrict my comments to Parvez’s deployment of Hannah Arendt’s notion of politics to theorize Muslim politics in Hyderabad. As Parvez acknowledges, the Arendtian notion of politics refers to noninstrumental politics wherein engaging in public life is an end in itself [26]. However, Arendtian politics entails significantly more than this minimalist criterion.^{Footnote 1} For example, Arendtian politics entails the articulation of principles that are not beholden to private interests and motivations. That is, according to Arendt, political principles ought not to be justified through subjective experiences but instead through reference to norms and reasons that transcend private and individual subjectivities. Central to this inter-subjective dimension is the concrete realm of public deliberation in which different notions of the public good are debated. One must be able to articulate political principles aimed at the betterment of the entire political community and not for a particular section therein. The aim is to establish these as the shared public values of the political community. Furthermore, these deliberations ought to make an impact ultimately within the realm of government itself. This can be done at the national level or at more local levels such as city councils. In sum, Arendtian politics entails public articulation of political principles for the good of the larger political community through deliberation with the end of informing governance practices. As many critics of Arendt have noted, this is, at its heart, a highly elitist conception that rests on a keen idealization of classical Greek democracy practiced in Athens.^{Footnote 2}

Based on this fuller understanding, it is not certain whether Muslim communities in Hyderabad are indeed engaged in Arendtian politics. Parvez richly describes the community life of Muslim men and women in Hyderabad. She examines a wide array of Muslim organizations and communities, ranging from Muslim philanthropists and associations to Muslim women’s gatherings in which they discuss women’s rights in shari’a and define honor through learning new skills and forming community. Elsewhere, Parvez describes how Muslim communities engage in Hyderabad’s electoral politics. Here, the practice of making claims on the state is geared towards enhancing the quality of Muslim communal life. In all the various scenarios sketched by the author in chapters 3 and 4, we witness that Muslims in Hyderabad, across class and gender, are engaged in politics towards particularistic aims and not towards a transcendental politics that seeks to introduce novel and original principles for a larger political community that is not defined by religious identities. Rather than Arendtian politics, we see the workings of a civil society in the sense described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, albeit in a markedly different cultural context.^{Footnote 3}

Ultimately, Parvez’s Politicizing Islam is a magnificent contribution to existing debates and orientations within American sociology of religion. It leads the way in generating novel comparisons, in re-orienting the study of Muslims towards more fruitful directions, and in undertaking a novel and rich ethnography in hitherto uncharted domains.