Islamic Traditionalism in a Globalizing World: Sunni Muslim identity in Kerala, South India* M. S. VISAKH School of Global Studies, University of Sussex Email: visakhms@gmail.com R. SANTHOSH Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras Email: rsantho@gmail.com C. K. MOHAMMED ROSHAN Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras Email: ckmroshan@gmail.com Abstract In our ethnography among traditionalist Sunni Muslims of Kerala, South India, we observe the emergence of new intellectual critiques of Islamic reformism and a revival of ‘traditional’ Islamic articulations. A new class of traditionalist Sunni ulama, claiming to be ‘turbaned professionals’, plays an instrumental role in providing epistemic sanctioning to ‘traditional’ Islamic piety while simultaneously grounding it within the discourses and processes of neoliberal developmentalism. Such assertions of traditionalist Sunni Muslim identity challenge the conventional understanding of Islamic reformism as a hallmark of the progressive understanding of faith and traditionalism as its ‘anti-modern’ other. The article argues that this discursive shift of Sunni Islamic traditionalism in Kerala since the s from defensive to more assertive forms has to be located in the context of wider socio- economic change within the community facilitated by structural as well as cultural * The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. They also thank Dr Nandagopal Menon and Dr Torsten Tschacher for their valuable comments on the earlier drafts of the article. Thanks are also due to Dr Eleanor Newbigin for her constant support and insightful suggestions throughout the review process. Modern Asian Studies () page  of . © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press doi:./SX  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X20000347 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 42.109.158.205, on 02 Feb 2021 at 04:33:20, subject to the Cambridge Core