Abstract This review examines Abir Bazaz's Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir (Cambridge University Press, 2023), the first sustained critical study of the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi (1378 to 1440), the founder of the Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufism and the most revered figure in the vernacular literary and spiritual imagination of Kashmir. Bazaz argues that the shruks of Nund Rishi, short aphoristic mystical poems composed in medieval Kashmiri, instantiate a negative theology that is simultaneously a negative political theology: a mode of thinking death, nothingness and the apocalyptic that opens onto an existential politics of radical equality and interreligious co‐existence in the turbulent Kashmir of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The book is organised into four chapters, devoted respectively to the Sahaja Islam of Nund Rishi, the theme of death, the theme of the Nothing and the theme of vernacular apocalypse. Throughout, Bazaz situates Nund Rishi within the Indo‐Persian world of medieval Sufi thought and within the broader comparative context of negative theology across monotheistic and non‐monotheistic traditions. The book is a work of considerable philological and philosophical range, and it constitutes a major contribution to the study of Kashmiri literature, South Asian Sufism and the intersections of mysticism and politics in the subcontinent. Its sustained attention to the Kashmiri text, its rigorous deployment of continental philosophy and its urgent awareness of the contemporary political stakes of recovering this inheritance make it an indispensable contribution to the field.
Abstract This article discusses the concept of the Judeo‐Islamic God as a substantive and defensible alternative to the problematic concept of the “Judeo‐Christian God” in popular, political, and academic Western discourses. It argues that the transcendent monotheistic deity of Islam, Allāh, is a direct continuation of the composite deity of Rabbinic Judaism, El‐Yahweh. By discussing the presence of Jews in ancient Arabia, this article analyzes how Jewish beliefs and traditions shaped early and formative Muslim conceptions of God. As a result, readers are urged to reflect on why the Judeo‐Islamic God is not a normative term in religious studies and to question the motivations behind the popular use of the term “Judeo‐Christian God” in its stead.
Abstract This article examines three recurrent tensions in contemporary interreligious engagement in Malaysia: the meaning of religious pluralism, the relationship between dialogue and daʿwah, and the place of minority rights within a credible framework of coexistence. Drawing on qualitative library research, it argues that current debate often conflates the sociological fact of religious diversity with a stronger theological claim that all religions are equally true or salvifically equivalent. For the Malaysian context, pluralistic coexistence is a more precise term than religious pluralism, because it allows communities to live together under a shared civic order without requiring the relativization of doctrinal truth claims. The article further argues that daʿwah and dialogue should not be cast as simple opposites. The more relevant distinction is between dialogical witness and polemical contestation. Finally, the article contends that minority rights are not a secondary issue within interreligious relations but one of the conditions of meaningful dialogue itself.
