Beyond textual acts of translation

Analysing the reception of Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahab’s eighteenth-century Arabic text in its Urdu translation, this paper highlights the importance of the cultural context of the original text and the impact of its translation within the discursive framework of Indian Islam. In the process of its production and consumption, this translation took on a mythic value that transformed the text from a monograph to a signifier of a specific Wahabi political subjectivity that has had direct consequences for Indian Islam, both in its colonial and postcolonial phases.