Disputes around the Babri masjid have been crucial for understanding the Muslim subject position in India. I read the legal proceedings of the Babri masjid dispute leading to the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2019. Focusing on the theological and secular claims of Hindu and Muslim litigants, I look at the differential approach to belief and historical claims within the legal adjudication. I especially analyse two strategies, disruption and description, that significantly led to the changes in the attributes of the mosque. I make a comparative reading of the dispute with the case of the Malappuram mosque in the eighteenth century. It would discreetly give an idea of the practice of secularism in India, which, as different scholars contend, systematically erases Muslim religiosity from the public space. I suggest reading the anchoring of Muslim claims in secularism as pointing to the crucial changes in the Muslim subject position that is decisively framed through excessive powers of the modern nation-state.

The framework of ‘lived Islam’ overshadows the study of Islam in South Asia, presupposing a ‘local Islam’ against a ‘global Islam’. In the post-9/11 context, the global is immediately associated with the political and the political with the undesirable. On the other hand, the local is portrayed as peaceful, accommodative and, hence, desirable. Such teleological approaches produce a priori desire for the local and undermine the political, foreclosing Muslim political legitimacy. By shifting attention to the Muslim movements in Kerala, I emphasise the significance of the political and jurisprudence in the exploration of Muslim lives. I conclude that while the Muslim subjectivity is decisively framed within the constraints of security concerns, Hindu sensibility and modern citizenship, jurisprudence enables the Muslim subject to engage substantially within and beyond these constellations of power, imagining a sovereign register of Islamic ethos.

New Muslim movements in South India, such as the Solidarity Youth movement, re-formulated Muslim priorities towards human rights, democracy, development, environmental activism, and minorities. I read Solidarity Youth Movement as proposing an ethic of  Islam’s conception of justice, while also drawing inspiration from the influential Islamist Abul A’la Maududi. Focusing on  jurisprudential debates, I look at the ways in which Maududi’s intervention informs the praxis of Solidarity Youth Movement. This  paper seeks the possibility of examining their activism as an instance of juristic deliberation, linked to the revival of maqāṣid al-sharī’ah in the latter part of the twentieth century. I suggest a reading of their maqāṣid approach, born out of praxis in a Muslim minority  context, as potentially informing the development of fiqh al-aqalliyah.

This chapter foregrounds the social aspect of democracy, taking the political mobilisation of Muslims after the 1990s as an entry point. Rather than understanding democracy as a mode of governance that can be imported or exported, the chapter focuses on the developments within the mobilisations to demarcate the immanent forms of democratic expressions. Examining the possibility of expanding Rajni Kothari’s idea of caste federation to the Muslim democratic politics through a comparative analysis of caste and community, the chapter offers a critique of Kothari’s position on minority politics. The writings of Ambedkar and Deleuze are also evoked to make sense of the praxis of Muslim democratic politics, thinking beyond constitutional safeguards.

After the 1980s, a whole new set of Muslim movements emerged in South India, with regional and social articulations. Through these new movements, Islam has acquired renewed appearance in South India in the last three decades, as an Islamic ethos penetrated the contours of public avenues. These movements framed a social space with renewed interpretations of Islamic principles, through nuanced Islamic language and working modalities, which expands to the environs of secular space. Are these movements at the verge of a 'post-Islamist turn', trying to overcome the public limit of religion through reified re-interpretations and thereby transcending the ‘proper place of religion’ in public? Or do these re-interpretations by Muslim social movements just contribute to, as Saba Mahmod has argued, ‘producing a particular kind of religious subject who is compatible with rationality and exercise of liberal political rule’, which, as the project of the empire, becomes a ploy in marketing Islamic liberalism? Or are they succumbing to becoming 'Islamic constitutionalists'?