In some ways Maryam Wasif Khan's Who Is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms is an elaboration of Aamir Mufti's argument (in Chapter 2 of Forget English! [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016]) that the idea of a modern Muslim identity in colonial India emerges out of the orientalist scholarship of British philologists William Jones and John Gilchrist. For Mufti, it is at Fort William College, Calcutta during the first half of the 19th century that British orientalism distills the precolonial common tongue of North India into two distinct print-languages marked with religious difference: Hindi in the Devanagari script for Hindus, and Urdu in the Perso-Arabic Nastaliq for Muslims. British orientalism, Khan argues, “quite literally invent[s]…the idea of a modern religio-political Muslim identity” in colonial India (p. 4); and it does so in and through literature. Like Mufti, Khan's theoretical and methodological posture is Saidian.

What becomes the “Muslim” in Urdu fiction over the course of the 19th century, Khan shows, used to be the “Mahometan” in the 18th-century oriental tale, a genre that gained popularity in England after the publication of the Grub Street translation of Antoine Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuits (c. 1707). In the first two chapters of Who Is a Muslim?, Khan looks at how the figure of the Mahometan in the oriental tale travels from the European Republic of Letters to the colony to become the Muslim. She does so with the help of the chronotope, a Bakhtinian theoretical category that refers to the representation of the interconnected nature of time and space in a literary genre. For Khan, the organizing principle of the oriental tale is the Mahometan chronotope whose spatial dimension is “the Mahometan Orient,” a European imaginary in which diverse Islamic empires—Persian, Ottoman, Mughal—are amalgamated into a single spatial whole, which exists in “false time,” a temporal imaginary that is against and outside of European “civilizational time” (p. 37). The Mahometan protagonist is based on Mahomet who in the European imagination is a sly, itinerant merchant and an imposter who invents a new religion (p. 29). Itinerancy and masquerade, therefore, become the two indispensable motifs of the oriental tale that render the Mahometan in “non-national” terms (p. 27). The figure of the Mahometan arrives in India, Khan argues, in and through the scholarship of Jones and Gilchrist who not only appropriate the Mahometan chronotope in their own work but also patronize its absorption in a vernacular like Urdu. Jones imagines India through the chronotope of the indigenous in which the Indic Orient is conceived as a single, continuous cultural entity rooted in Vedic texts and subjected to subsequent Mahometan invasions. This orientalist construction of the Indic Orient, therefore, renders the itinerant Mahometan/Muslim an alien in India.

As a theoretical category the Mahometan chronotope is extremely useful; it enables Khan to challenge Srinivas Aravamudan's anti-Saidian notion of “Enlightenment Orientalism” in which the oriental tale is considered not an orientalist instrument but a site for European self-critique. This argument works, Khan points out, only if we assume that the oriental tale ends in England out of what Aravamudan calls “generic exhaustion.” It, however, does not end there; instead, it travels to the colony as Khan demonstrates persuasively. However, Khan's assertion that it was an orientalist invention that rendered the Mahometan/Muslim an alien in India is not convincing enough. Cynthia Talbot has shown that Sanskrit inscriptions presumably written by Brahmans from the 14th century represent Muslims as alien invaders although they are referred to as Turks. Further, the assertion that “the realm of language and textual practice” in pre-colonial India was “a fluid, regional complex evolved from Indo-Persian-Arabo-Turkic exchanges” —a common enough occurrence in scholarship on colonial India—needs certain qualifications (p. 54; emphasis added). First, despite the assumed “fluidity” in the realm of spoken language, the two distinct scripts—Devanagari and Nastaliq—predate the colonial encounter. While many Hindus, especially those associated with the courtly culture, could read and write Nastaliq, it is unclear if any Muslims felt the need to acquire proficiency in Devanagari. Second, any assertion of “fluidity” must recognize the impenetrable social stratification of the Varna/Jāti system in pre-colonial India. Equally important is to recognize the urban/rural divide with regard to the spoken tongue: Urdu was largely an urban variety while what would later become Hindi was mostly spoken in rural areas. Third, this “fluidity” can only be celebrated from within the hegemonic logic of an urban, Mughal-Muslim courtly culture. To these points I will also add a minor quibble: in the introduction, Khan writes that the Fort William College was “founded by John Gilchrist in 1800” (p. 10). It was founded by Lord Wellesley. That said, Khan makes impressive use of primary sources in these chapters and demonstrates theoretical astuteness even if her argument is admittedly an elaboration of Said's and Mufti's positions.

In Chapter 3, Khan shows how the oriental/colonial notion of Muslims as non-national itinerants in India gets reenacted in Nazir Ahmad's Urdu fictions, which benefitted immensely from colonial patronage (p. 89). The Mahometan, Khan argues, becomes the “Musalman” in these fictions. While Khan's close readings of Ahmad's and Altaf Hussain Hali's works are theoretically sophisticated there is some ambiguity regarding the Mahometan chronotope since one can argue that Ahmad's Mirat ul-ʿArus (The Bride's Mirror, 1869)—a realist, domestic fiction—inaugurates in Urdu what Benedict Anderson calls “homogenous, empty time,” the chronotope of the realist novel. Further, Ahmad's novels were modeled after conduct books (Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton [1783–1789] and Daniel Defoe's The Family Instructor [1715]) and not the oriental tale. If we understand Ahmad's and Hali's fictions as having incorporated certain motifs of the oriental tale instead of the Mahometan chronotope, Khan's formulations become clearer and argumentation sharper.

This chapter makes two significant interventions. First, the argument that novels by Ahmad, Hali, and Abdul Halim Sharar play a crucial role in the construction of the modern Muslim identity challenges renowned Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal's hasty dismissal of the 19th-century Urdu novel in favor of Urdu poetry (Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 [London: Routledge, 2000]). To show the limitations of Benedict Anderson's now classic argument about the role of the newspaper and the novel in the formation of imagined communities, Jalal argues that in the context of colonial India “Urdu poetry is an excellent source from where to begin exploring the early narratives of Muslimness.” While Urdu poetry is an excellent source, it is not the only source in this regard. The Urdu novel played a crucial role in the way a Muslim community was imagined in colonial India, and we have much to lose if we dismiss it the way Jalal does. Khan's arguments provide a useful corrective to Jalal's assertions. The second intervention concerns Partha Chatterjee's well-known argument that anticolonial nationalism accepts colonial superiority in the outer/material domain but keeps the colonial state out of the inner/spiritual domain, which is symbolized by women. While Chatterjee's argument may be valid with regard to Bengali Hindus, Khan shows that it is inapplicable in the case of Indian Muslims. If upper caste Bengalis insisted on keeping Hindu women insulated from colonial interference, ashraf Muslims like Ahmad and Hali invited the colonizer inside the inner domain by creating female characters who, Khan argues, were “openly conciliatory, at times admiring” of colonial rulers (p. 111). Surprisingly, however, in a chapter that explores the embourgeoisement of Muslim ashraf through Urdu literature, Khan does not engage with Margrit Pernau's book Ashraf into Middle Classes: Muslims in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). Equally surprising is Khan's lack of engagement with Nasir Abbas Nayyar's scholarship in Urdu, particularly his two books: Mab‘ad Nau Ᾱbadiyāt: Urdū Kai Tanazur Maiṉ (Postcolonialism: In the Context of Urdu [Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013]) and Urdū Adab Kī Tashkīl-i Jadīd (The Modern Construction of Urdu Literature [Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2016]). Another quibble: Khan translates the Urdu expression farẓī qiṣṣe as “‘obligatory’ stories” when it should have been “fictional stories” (p. 119).

In Chapter 4, Khan puts forward an original argument, which is at once provocative and illuminating. According to the received wisdom in Urdu studies, the most important development during the first half of the 20th century is the establishment of the anticolonial, left-leaning All-India Progressive Writers Association. While it is true that the Progressives have had an enormous impact on Urdu literature, scholarly attention to their work comes at the expense of low brow, but immensely popular and influential, fictions of writers like Rashid ul-Khairi, Nasim Hijazi, and Razia Butt. Khan challenges this orthodox view that dismisses the works of these writers as “non-literary,” and writes them out of the canon of Urdu literature (p. 167). This exclusionary gesture, Khan argues, shows that scholars of Urdu “have invented a canon in accordance with Western literary and political teleologies” (p. 130). If the Progressive literature is considered a “rupture” from the colonially patronized reformist works of Ahmad and Hali, Khan shows that the works of Khairi, Hijazi, and Butt are “continuous” with the reformist fictions (pp. 126–127). Khan's insertion of these low brow novels into Urdu canon overturns Mufti's repeated assertion that the novel is not a dominant or canonical literary form in the history of Urdu literature. Khan's analysis of the kind of Muslim nation that gets imagined in and through the novels of Khairi, Hijazi, and Butt is particularly deft and discerning. The discussion about how Hijazi projects the Muslim nation back in historical time could have benefited further from an engagement with Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991).

The last chapter looks at the contemporary Pakistani Urdu novel, which, Khan argues, is the latest iteration of the colonially inflected and infected version of Islam. Bestselling writers like Umera Ahmad, Farhat Ishtiaq, and Nimra Ahmad whose popular, low brow novels are serialized in digests and frequently adapted for television are “immediate heirs” of writers like Hijazi and Butt (p. 166). Khan asserts that her reading of the female agency in these contemporary fictions confronts Saba Mahmood's well-known argument that the notion of agency should include Muslim women's acts of religious submission. Mahmood's argument, Khan writes, “is premised on assumption of a fixed [Islamic] past,” which is an orientalist construction (p. 15). How formidable a challenge Khan poses to Mahmood is for scholars versed in the latter's argument to decide; however, her argument that the agency of these popular novelists and their female characters endorses a version of Islam that is anxious of Western modernity and intolerant of religious minorities is compelling. Khan ends the book with a ruminative but hopeful epilogue in which through a reading of Fehmida Riaz's genre-defying work she shows what an alternative and “secular history or experience of Urdu, Muslimness, and even national identity might look like” (p. 210).

Written in a clear and accessible language and organized chronologically, this is a thoroughly researched book that makes an original contribution to the field of Urdu studies. It will be a useful resource for courses on the English oriental tale (Chapters 1 and 2), Muslim nationalism in colonial India (Chapter 3), and Pakistani Urdu literature (Chapters 4 and 5).