Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism

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Teena Purohit's new account of Muslim modernism is distinctive in that she seeks to highlight something that has gone unnoticed in previous accounts of the Muslim modernist story: it has had a decided Sunni bias and has been linked to calls for suppression of minority Muslim communities. Such communities, including the Shi'a, Ismailis, Ahmadis, and Bahai's, have often been disparaged in Muslim modernist thought as sectarian or deviant and thus as not fully or authentically Muslim. In this book, Purohit reveals how a succession of key Muslim modernist thinker-activists from the colonial, anti-colonial/nationalist, and post-colonial/Islamist eras shared an obsession with Muslim "unity" that implicitly relied on a Sunni majoritarian perspective. Not coincidentally, this perspective was also held by European orientalist scholars of Islam who, like the Muslim modernists, were deeply influenced by notions of sect and heresy that had their origin in Christianity. .