Book excerpt: Popular knowledge generally operates with the notion that "Hindu" and "Muslim" as polarized religious identities have existed from the moment Muslims entered northern India in the eleventh century. The essays for this volume interrogate this idea. They focus on Islamicate traditions in their interaction with coterminous Hindu ones in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. They examine a wide tableau of sites and modes of interchanges, allowing the texts to speak in their own languages, whether these are assimilative, antagonistic, or indifferent. Given the charged nature of Hindi-Muslim relations today, a fresh study of these relations in their regional and temporal specificity along with a renewed attempt to closely interrogate the language in which we talk about them is absolutely vital in order to contest powerful and contemporary "clash of civilizations" narratives in South Asia as well as elsewhere.