Perilous Intimacies explores the question of how traditionally educated South Asian Muslim scholars, known as the ulama, imagined and contested the boundaries of Islam in relation to Hinduism from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Anchored in the theoretical framing of muwalat (loosely translated as friendship and encompassing relationships of intimacy, loyalty, and intellectual collaboration) as a moment of formation for religious identity and difference, this book charts multiple instances in which Islam’s encounter with the Hindu other fermented critical debates about the limits of Muslim identity in South Asia during the region’s transition from the late Mughal to the colonial and late colonial periods. In both eras the debates were inflected by the theme of Islamic sovereignty, while at the same time they also reflected fissures within Islam. The book considers such sites of engagement as Muslim scholarly expositions on Hindu thought, Hindu-Muslim doctrinal polemics, and adoption of the habits and customs of non-Muslims. The continuities and ruptures of Muslim identity demonstrated in this montage of microhistories reveal major fractures and tensions within this intellectual tradition as it sought to delineate its boundaries in a variety of venues such as interreligious politics and human-nonhuman animal relations, fractures and tensions that cannot be sorted along a single analytic binary such as liberal/conservative or traditional/modern. Based on close readings of a large archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu texts, correspondence, juridical opinions, narrative histories, newspapers, and interreligious translations, SherAli Tareen investigates how identity debates, rooted in a presumption of an imperial Muslim political theology, took shape within critical contexts including the gradual yet decisive loss of political sovereignty and the developing conditions of colonial modernity. The book’s architecture is thematic rather than historical, each chapter uncovering less traversed theoretical registers within a particular moment and issue of encounter, collectively providing a conceptual framework for a Muslim humanities–