The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India

The Aga Khan Case straddles several disciplinary boundaries, including history, textual analysis, religious studies, and anthropology. Her ambition is to examine change in religious tradition through legal and historical textual analysis. She traces the transformation of the Khoja Satpanth (true path) from an Indic “dissonant” Islam at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a modern, reformist, and sectarian (or what she calls “identitarian”) Islam in the middle years of the twentieth century. She locates the initiation of this change in the legal dispute of the Bombay Khojas known as The Aga Khan Case