Ayesha Jalal

"Like many of the north-Indian ashraf classes, Hali too considered Muslims to be the descendants of foreign conquerors... 'We were fire O Hind', he exclaimed, 'you've turned us into ash.'... Intended to invigorate his dejected co-religionists, not erect walls of antipathy against non-Muslims, these self-projections of a member of the north-Indian ashraf classes were susceptible to serious misinterpretation by those who had always questioned the loyalty of the Muslim to their adopted homeland."