SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study examines the ways in which a convert to Christianity from Islam, a former Sunni 'a lim, attempted to strengthen the Christian faith of other Urdu-reading Christian converts in the thirty-year period following his own Christian baptism and ordination in the Punjab in the mid-1860s. He retained his Muslim name, "'Imad ud -din;' 1 "pillar of the faith;' after baptism, because it was perceived to be as aptly symbolic of his new role within the Christian community as it had been of the role ascribed to him by his Islamic education and his family's reputation for Islamic scholarship in the community into which he was born. His active and highly public life within the North Indian church certainly made him a "pillar" of the nascent Punjabi Christian community during the volatile last quarter of the nineteenth century. The ordination of 'Imad ud-din thrust him into a situation of strident public disputation not only between Christianity and Islam, but among spokesmen for the various revivalist movements that were emerging within the Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities of the Punjab region.