Persian literature was central to shaping Muslim conceptions of ethics, sexuality, and selfhood from the early modern to the colonial period in South Asia. Centering on Saʿdi’s Gulistān (Rose-Garden, 1258)—arguably the most widely read text in the Islamic world after the Qurʾan—the dissertation explores how this classic of adab (refined conduct and eloquent expression) became a site for negotiating the boundaries between ethical cultivation and erotic experience. What moral and linguistic lessons were drawn from its homoerotic tales, and how did those lessons transform under colonial modernity?

A history of tarbiyah or Muslim education and ethical cultivation, The Ethics of Erotics reconsiders the relationship between Islam and the Persianate, between textual tradition and lived practice. Islamic education was Persianate education, and its reach was regional and cross-confessional. Drawing on manuscripts and printed texts, official and unofficial documents, and sources in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, I show the limits of accounts that rely on elite texts—often in Western languages—to paint linear narratives of the “transition to modernity” in the Muslim world, where premodern attitudes seamlessly give way to European sensibilities. Instead, it reveals how erotic discourse was central to Muslim ethical reflection and how Persianate humanism offered resources for navigating colonial modernity. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to wider discussions in the critical humanities, showing that moral selfhood in Islam was formed in conversation with desire.  

This article sheds light on the relationship between different print technologies and different traditions of engaging premodern Perso-Islamic literature in colonial India. The print histories of Saʿdi’s Gulistan, I argue, reveal two distinct traditions of engagement with Persian literature in nineteenth-century India. Each of these traditions was expressed and made possible by two different print technologies. A colonial tradition centered on typography engaged Persian classics such as Gulistan instrumentally, holding little regard for their aesthetic and ethical value. By contrast, a Persianate tradition printed on lithography continued an early modern tradition of engaging Persian classics. By focusing on the aesthetic and visual features of nineteenth-century books, this article reveals an essential link between print technology and ideology in colonial India.

Scholars of modern South Asia have remained divided on the role of religion in the creation of Pakistan. Many have argued that Pakistan’s “founder,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a secularist, his argument for Pakistan resting on an abstract notion of Islam within an Enlightenment framework of conceiving minority, nation, and state. Why, then, did madrasa-trained Muslim scholars, the ulama, support his demand for Pakistan? This article explores the political thought of the most influential Muslim scholar immediately before partition, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (d. 1949). I argue that Usmani viewed Pakistan as a particular kind of Islamic democracy. While he drew on medieval Muslim juridical and political discourses, Usmani’s readings reveal his debt to Western political categories. By paying attention to the tensions and opportunities offered by this encounter of modern political conditions with Islamic intellectual thought, this article outlines an Islamic vision of the political that resonates beyond the politics of colonial India.

This article uses digital humanities tools to present an interactive map of manuscripts and commentaries of the Gulistan of Sa'di circulating in early modern India. It argues against the thesis of an alleged ‘elitism’ of Persian culture in India. The reception of Persian texts like the Gulistan can therefore give insights into the cultivation of ethics, gender and sexual norms in precolonial South Asia.