Debating Islam, nation and belonging: Nigār magazine and Muslim publics in late colonial India

Abstract

This article examines Islamic modernism in colonial South Asia through the lens of Urdu print culture, focusing on the magazine Nigār (1922–63), edited by Niyaz Fatehpuri. Situating Nigār within the expansion of Urdu print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the article analyses how Fatehpuri used the magazine as a platform to articulate a rationalist reinterpretation of Islam grounded in ethical reform and naturalist reasoning. Drawing on close readings of editorials, polemical essays, and reader correspondence published in Nigār during the 1930s and 1940s, the article reconstructs debates over religious authority, reason and public life within an emerging Muslim vernacular public sphere. Rather than treating Nigār as a neutral forum, the article argues that the magazine functioned as an editor-driven intervention that actively shaped intellectual contestation and forms of Muslim public reasoning in late colonial North India.