The authors in the edited work—The Islamic Connection—have offered a nuanced understanding of the common present of these two geographies, dominated by the contemporary geo-politics of war, security, terrorism, fundamentalism and ideology.

The book starts with an intellectual journey of how the medieval history of Islamic connection dominated by Sufi brand of Islam which later lost to Salafi-Wahhabi tradition and ultimately became a victim of Iranian Shia crescent vs Saudi’s Wahhabi ideology. The book brings us an ultimate tale of how the Sufi mystic traditions helped the Islamic tradition to glued with local faith and developed a pluralistic society by a common culture. The book reveals that no Mughal king or Sufi saints till the reign of Aurangzeb ever went for a Haj because for them, this land is as sacred as the birth place of Islam.

The sacredness of their own land in the imagination of large sections of Indian Muslims during Mughals found a different trajectory when they lost their power to British empire. Till then there was no such thing as pan-Islamism in political sense rather as author calls it an “Indo-Islamic civilisation”.

Till the reign of the Mughal empire, the ‘caliphate’ never had a deep resonance among Indian Muslims who were guided more by Sufi brand of Islam and located in Indian traditions. Even the ‘Khilafat Movement’, as the authors argue, were a “quest for pan-Indian Islam and less pan-Islamic” and the book finds the basis of this narrative even in the works of Iqbal and Maulana Azad and their ‘de-Arabisation of Islamic consciousness’.

The book bases its argument on two premises: first, until the British came to rule India, the Islamic Connection between South Asia and the Gulf created an Indo-Muslim civilisation only “loosely related to Arabia and deeply connected to Persia”. The second premise is that globalisation of Muslim networks are largely influenced by Saudi-Iranian rivalry. This premise is what anchors the contemporary history of Islamic Connection. The encounter between this connection created an Islamic revivalism emanating from Saudi Arabia in the name of Wahhabism after the abolishment of Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and on the other hand the ‘Shia Crescent’ after Islamic revolution in 1979.

One significant contribution that book provides is the genealogy of Arabisation of South Asian Islam. The influence of Wahhabi, Ahl-i-Hadith and Deobandi school on South Asian Islam muted the Sufi character of South Asian Islam and aroused a fear in the Muslim consciousness that this land has become Dar ul Harb. Later such fear helped the birth of Pakistan but the purification process as imagined in post Arab influence brought this narrative of Jihad as a Muslim Identity. This false consciousness killed the Muslim cosmopolitanism and brought the fundamentalist narrative as a central discourse and dominant character of Islam; an alien experience in its own land.

The authors brilliantly portray the jihadists rise and its deep presence in this region but more significantly how their call for purifying the land became dominant though various networks. These chapters eloquently explain the Gulf connection with South Asia especially its linkages with contemporary Pakistan.