Ali Usman Qasmi (LUMS, Lahore) has reviewed In a Pure Muslim Land. Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East along with Umber bin Ibad’s Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State. The Making of an Islamic Identity (London, 2018) and Farhat Haq’s Sharia and the State in Pakistan. Blasphemy Politics (Oxford, 2019). He writes: “With his jaw-dropping erudition, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, working with Arabic, Persian and Urdu sources, charts an intellectual biography of Shia religious identity formation during the colonial period, its subsequent developments in the postcolonial context of living under a Sunni majoritarian state and the influence of the Iranian revolution on intra-Shia discourses and sectarian interactions since the 1980s. Although the intellectual range of Fuchs’ work is broad, it is through the prism of religious discourses that he looks at the processes of Shia identity formation during the British period and beyond. In particular, it is the wider, cross-regional connections of madrassahs, circulation of ideas and contestations of religious authority that is the focus of Fuchs’ work.”
You can read the entire essay here: https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-29826