Does barracks Islam exist today?
Many of the features of the Islam the book describes belong to an Islam that does still exist for millions of Muslims in South Asia to this day, an Islam of miracles and holy men. But the time of a specific ‘barracks Islam’ that had high status through its patronage by the soldiers of empire is long gone and largely forgotten. How did it lose its status? Partly, this was the process of modernity itself. In this, the army played a role by encouraging the literacy of its Indian soldiers and exposing them to new ideas by moving vast numbers of them to fight overseas in the First World War. So the Indian soldiers were taken away from their ancestral villages and holy men and experienced in a wider world in which their old religion of the barracks no longer worked. There was also the process of Islamic reform emerging in the same period. And this type of Islam, which is much more soberly text-centered and opposed to saint cults, miracle stories, intoxication, and often music — opposed, then
