Most scholars of modernity, colonialism, or religion rightly place the quest for origins among the “innovations” of Orientalist, racist, Euro-American scholarship in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. To read against a narrative that has done damage both to its subjects and to its objects—and to those of us who inherit this frame—is an important task. In A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia, Manan Ahmed Asif seamlessly weaves critique of historiographical frameworks across imperialist and nationalist legacies by rereading and resituating a thirteenth-century text, the Chachnama. This book is theoretically savvy and historically rich, and it provides a poignant intervention.
Its intervention feels all the more vital in a moment when the legacies of imagining Muslims as inherently foreign to India have erupted, violently, as we witness in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Acts and the National Registry of Citizens across India,...
