REZAVI

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi At a time when serious attempts are being made to distort India’s past, compressing six centuries into an indistinguishable age of Hindu-Muslim strife; when the Mughals are either invisibilised or reduced to demonic carnivores; when Vikram Sampath’s works normalise the self-professed ‘Veer’ Savarkar as a genuine nationalist; when Sanjeev Sanyal rewrites early history on…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi On 12 August 2026, Professor Irfan Habib completes ninety-five years. This is an extraordinary milestone in the life of a historian who has profoundly influenced the study of India’s past. Equally important has been his defence of history as a critical and secular discipline. For more than seven decades, his presence has been felt in classrooms and seminar rooms, in the…

Review: Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina: A Novel. New York: Beaufort Books, 2008. 372 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8253-0518-4. Historical fiction occupies an uneasy space between documented history and literary imagination. The best examples illuminate the past without claiming to replace it; the weakest blur the line between evidence and invention until readers can no longer distinguish one from the…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Najmul Hoda, for those unacquainted, is an Indian Police Service officer, an Urdu writer and scholar, and a man of many parts. He is also, it appears, the latest authority on what historians should and should not do. Who better to instruct the discipline on its proper limits than a policeman who once wrote that Indian Muslims must “rewrite their victim mindset”? After all,…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi The enthusiasm with which much of India’s Hindutva ecosystem celebrates Israel’s assault upon Gaza cannot be explained by strategic partnership alone. It springs from ideological recognition: in the militarised ethnonationalism of the Israeli state, the Hindu Right sees an image of the country it wishes India to become. Israel offers a model of a religiously defined…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi As the Chehlum of Imam Husain falls on 4th August in India, we present this essay before you as a reminder of a shared heritage that transcends religious boundaries. The fortieth day of mourning, known as Chehlum or Arba’een, commemorates the endurance of Imam Husain’s message and the steadfastness of his companions. It is an occasion that, as the following pages…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi If the earlier chapters of this memoir were about discovering history, this one is about discovering that becoming a historian was, in itself, a rather long historical process. One might even say it required the patience of a medieval scribe and the constitution of a Mughal revenue collector. Those were the days when the academic system was very different. Admission was…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi On 1 August 2026, as we commemorate the birth centenary of Professor Rahi Masoom Reza (1926–1992), there is a curious irony that deserves reflection. The man who spent his entire life resisting labels has himself become imprisoned within a single cultural memory. For millions of Indians, Rahi survives chiefly as the writer of the television serial Mahabharat (1988–90),…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi The uproar over Priyanka Gandhi’s speech in Parliament reveals far more about the condition of public discourse in India than it does about the speech itself. Within hours, an entire ecosystem had mobilised to accuse her of insulting a distinguished academic. Television debates, social media campaigns and partisan commentators all converged on a single phrase she used.…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Few concepts have assumed greater prominence in the contemporary discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran than Jihād al-Tabyīn (‘the Struggle for Clarification’), and few books attempt to present this concept as systematically as Tabyeen: The Neglected Obligation. Published by the Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission (AIM), this substantial volume gathers speeches delivered by…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi The historiography of women and gender in South Asia has undergone profound transformations over the past four decades. Early scholarship sought primarily to recover women who had been marginalized or overlooked in conventional historical narratives. More recent work has shifted towards interrogating the very categories through which femininity, masculinity and sexuality…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Few books capture the moral energy, intellectual seriousness and emotional texture of a social movement as compellingly as David Halberstam’s The Children. Although widely recognised as one of America’s greatest journalists, Halberstam was also a historian of remarkable sensitivity. In this monumental work he reconstructs, with extraordinary narrative power and meticulous…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Let’s be honest about what just happened. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister wasn’t some gracious political gesture. It was a surrender. A government that had spent years brushing aside student grievances finally found itself cornered by the very people it had ignored. And that is what makes this moment historic. Not the fall of one minister, but the…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Matthew Pierce, Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. ix + 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-73707-5. Matthew Pierce’s Twelve Infallible Men is an ambitious and methodologically innovative study of the collective biographies of the Twelve Imams. Rather than reconstructing their historical…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Today’s edition of The Hindu carries an excellent lead editorial column written by Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, titled “An Education System’s Collapse, Young India’s Trauma.” In the piece, she delivers a blistering critique of the government’s handling of the ongoing student protests, accusing it of responding to young people’s demands for…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi Looking back over the many twists and turns of my life, I often feel that I have made remarkably few important decisions myself. Most of them seem to have been taken for me by circumstances, by chance encounters, or by people who somehow knew what was best for me long before I did. The earlier chapters of this memoir recounted how I drifted almost accidentally from the…

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi History stands among the most misunderstood of all academic disciplines. Because everyone possesses a past, many assume that anyone who reads widely, collects anecdotes and narrates events can legitimately claim the title of historian. Few assumptions are more misleading. History is not the mere narration of what happened; it is the disciplined investigation of what can be…