Abstract
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’?
