Cover HIMALAYA Volume 38.2

We are excited to bring you issue 38.2 of HIMALAYA, with its emphasis on exploring the diversity of Islam across the Himalayas. This special issue foregrounds the heterogeneities among Muslim populations in the Himalayan region, as well as the complex ideological, ritual, and spiritual worlds that unite them. This volume is particularly exciting because it will likely take our readers into unfamiliar worlds, illuminating communities and lifeways that have not received adequate attention in the past. With this issue, we move a step closer towards our goal of expanding the ambit of the journal by including areas and communities that have remained marginal in dominant scholarship on the Himalayas, despite their centrality to global and regional politics. Our guest editors, Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jacqueline H. Fewkes, have curated articles from multiple disciplinary perspectives to explore the ways in which Islam shapes people’s conceptions of piety and politics, and informs their ethical and moral universe. The rising Islamophobia across the globe has tended to conflate Muslimness with terrorism and religious radicalism, and perpetuated dangerous stereotypes about a complex religion. This issue foregrounds the lived histories of Islam in the Himalayan region, and is an urgent corrective to reductive conceptions of Muslims that have become ubiquitous in our public narratives.

Published: 21-Dec-2018

Editorial

Special Section Guest Editorial