Peter Hardy (historian)

Peter Hardy (1922-2013) was a lecturer, and later reader, at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 1947 to 1983. A specialist in the history of Islam, the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India, he had particular expertise in Indo-Persian historiography.

Quotes

• In 1920–2 Abdul Kalam Azad and the Jamiyat were advocating the mental partition of India.
  • quoted in The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience,translator=Cynthia Schoch ,Oxford University Press 2015

• The Muslim reform movements of the nineteenth century helped to transform Muslim attitudes towards Hindus. They were essen¬ tially rejections of medieval Islam in India in favour of early Islam in Arabia. They were not movements confined to the library and to the study; their exponents did not merely formulate intellectual positions against monism, but went out and preached against the customs which so many Muslims shared with Hindus - intercession at the tombs of saints, consultation of Brahmins, even vegetarianism and aversion to the remarriage of widows. Muslims in India were to be made aware of what they did not share with their non-Muslim neighbours. India could be made by the reformers to feel not like a home, but like a habitat.
  • [1] "The Muslims Of British India" also in Jain, M. (2010). Parallel pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim relations, 1707-1857.

• The very few references, over a period of 500 or 600 years, in the religious literature to "conversions" suggest in their contexts and perhaps in their very rarity, that the Muslim religious did not postulate the quality and strength of man's response in South Asia to the call of Islam to be proportionate to the numbers of those calling themselves, or called by others, Muslims.
  • Hardy, P. (1977). Modern European and Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey of the Literature. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2, 177–206.

• To attempt to penetrate the field of the study of the growth of the Muslim population in South Asia is to attempt to penetrate a political minefield.
  • Hardy, P. (1977). Modern European and Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey of the Literature. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2, 177–206.

• ...We find one influential Muslim writer in Bengal thinking the Muslim convert in Bengal to be a political liability. In 1891 Khondkar Fazl-i Rabbi, dTwan to the Nawwab of Murshldabad, published HaqTqat-i Musalmdn-i Bangala, intended to bring the "ruin" (tibah) of "high Muslim families" (khwas khandani musalman)82 to the notice of the British-Indian government. That government had, Fazl-i Rabbi argued, remained indifferent to the existence of such families and to their need for entry into the public services on honourable, not to say advantageous, terms, partly through an official preference for Hindus. Moreover, it had recently, in the person of Mr. Beverley, held Muslims up to ridicule by publishing the mis taken belief that the overwhelming majority of Bengal's Muslims were descended from low-caste Hindus who had embraced Islam. Such beliefs as Beverley's encouraged the present indifference to the "high and ancient" Muslim of Bengal, who was therefore sinking lower for want of government employ. Once the government was properly informed of the facts, to wit, that the generality (aksar) of the Muslims of Bengal was descended from immigrant Iranians, Afghans, Arabs, and Mughals, it might give the high and ancient families, descended from such immigrants, their due. In the course of his argument Fazl-i Rabbi showed a lack of fellowship for that minority of Bengal's Muslims which, he conceded, was descended from converts following lowly occupations.
  • Hardy, P. (1977). Modern European and Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey of the Literature. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2, 177–206.