Muslims and the Minority Question across the Indian Ocean: A Conversation With Roy Bar Sadeh
August 5, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 1940, as the British Empire in India was fracturing, the scholar and politician Abul Kalam Azad asked a question that cut to the heart of modern politics: Could nearly 90 million Muslims be reduced to the status of a political minority? The question was not rhetorical. It was a protest against a new way of organizing the world—one that treated numerical difference as political destiny. Azad’s question, and the global debate it belonged to, is the subject of Roy Bar Sadeh’s forthcoming book Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947 (University of Chicago Press). In a conversation with Ahmed Al-Mazmi and Mohamed Issa Dery on the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast, Bar Sadeh reconstructs how thinkers, merchants, pilgrims, and exiles across the Indian Ocean world refused to accept the minority label as their political fate.
The Minority Category Is Not Timeless
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Welcome and Central Paradox** - Introduction to the Indian Ocean world and the minority question in South Asia.
- 2 (02:43) **Origin of the Research** - How Roy Bar Sadeh came to study South Asia, Arabia, and Eurasia together.
- 3 (05:26) **The Minority Category as a Modern Invention** - How earlier Muslim societies managed religious difference without numerical frameworks.
- 4 (10:15) **Harnessing Pre-Modern Legacies** - How Muslim thinkers invoked Islamic history to address the rise of demography.
- 5 (16:07) **Food, Halal, and the Sovereignty of Everyday Life** - How shared eating and slaughter practices reveal political coexistence beyond constitutions.
- 6 (23:27) **Connecting Everyday Sovereignty to State Transformation** - The double move of reclaiming everyday life and transforming the state.
- 7 (25:28) **Bombay, the Gulf, and Al-Manar as an Indian Ocean Institution** - How merchant networks and logistics shaped intellectual history.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gulf to Cairo and Mecca—and onward to Moscow and Geneva—merchants, scholars, activists, and political exiles debated a question that still feels urgent: how can different communities live together without being reduced to permanent majorities and minorities?
Bombay sits near the center of our story. Under British rule, it was a major imperial port. But it was also a meeting place where Indian Ocean merchants financed publications, hosted traveling scholars, and helped ideas cross borders.
At the same time, British censuses and representative politics produced a striking paradox. South Asia contained the world’s largest Muslim population, yet Muslims were increasingly classified as a political minority within India.
Dr. Roy Bar Sadeh is a historian of modern South Asia and the broader Islamic world, joining the University of Oxford in September 2026 as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History and at St Antony’s College. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Manchester.
His many articles and forthcoming book with University of Chicago Press, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History of South Asia, 1856–1947, follow the people who refused to accept that minority label as their political destiny. Along the way, we’ll talk about food and language, Gulf pearl merchants and printing presses, rival plans for Mecca, an unlikely Soviet-Saudi partnership, and the search for protection beyond the nation-state.
Host: Dr. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi, an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Co-host: Dr. Mohammed Alsudairi, a Lecturer of Politics and International Relations of the Arabic-speaking world at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.
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