Seeking Allah’s Hierarchy is forthcoming in November 2025 from the University of Pennsylvania Press. This is a monograph developed out of my PhD thesis submitted to Anthropology program in Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
In the book, I investigate how an occupational community of Muslim barbers in south India sought to transform their work from a patronage system into that of market relations in the second half of the 20th century. Through an ethnography of these transformations in south India, I make two arguments. One, I challenge the received wisdom that social hierarchy among Muslims is a replica or a watered-down version of caste among Hindus. Instead, I argue that we need to analyse how Muslims make sense of their hierarchical practices within the discourses of egalitarianism in Islam, but also shaped by the larger economic, cultural, and political environment including that of Hinduism. Two, I tussle with recent anthropological scholarship on Islam which tries to locate Muslim social life within the rubric of either normativity or everyday. I argue for understanding Islam as a lived tradition.
Image credit: Aharika Bhaskar