This is a book about the content, rhetoric, and ambiguities of social and religious criticism in modern Islam. There is considerable contestation in many Muslim circles today on precisely what the “crises” are that afflict Islam and Muslim societies, at whose doorsteps the blame for the provenance or persistence of these crises should be laid, what Islamic norms, institutions, and practices need to be reformed, and on what authority such reform would take place. Muslims of varied intellectual orientations have long discussed such matters, and the debates continue, indeed with especial vigor, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Despite their centrality to any sophisticated understanding of religious and political thought, many crucial dimensions of these debates remain little understood, however. What are some major themes in reformist discourses on Muslim institutions, norms, and practices as they have been articulated in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? What accounts for the persistence of some of these themes over the course of more than a century and in quite different locales? How do discourses on reform in South Asia and in the Arab Middle East – two regions of great historical, political, and intellectual significance in the modern world – compare with one another? In what ways has the Islamic tradition served simultaneously as the object of social and religious critique as well as the ground on which such critique has often rested? Put differently, what forms has “internal criticism” taken in modern Islam, how does it relate to the specificities of the social, economic, and political context in which it is articulated, and what questions of religious authority are at stake in such criticism? These are among the questions I propose to address in this volume.