PhD Candidate
Advisor: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Research Interests: Modern South Asia, Islam, Intellectual History, Political and Religious Movements
Research Summary: Suvaid is currently a 2021 Mellon/ACLS dissertation completion fellow for his project Islamic Intersections: Religion and Politics in Kashmir in the Long Twentieth Century. His project examines Muslim reform movements, colonial modernity, and literary cultures in Kashmir in the long twentieth century. Based upon vernacular, subaltern records across colonial and postcolonial periods, it challenges the conventional dichotomies between “reformist orthodoxy” and “popular Sufism” in the historiography on Islam in the Indian subcontinent as well as the theoretical binaries between “religious” and “secular.” Studying Islamic revivalist movements like the Ahl-i Hadith and the Jamaat-e Islami in Kashmir on their own terms, the project charts “intellectual histories from below” and makes a case for recuperating wide-ranging forms of political imagination and modalities of religious thought, as well as transregional movement and local politics.