The research is centrally concerned with understanding religious identity formation in a globalizing world, even as it takes on the specific socio-temporal context of the traditionalist Sunni Muslim identity formation in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. One observes the emergence of new intellectual critiques of Islamic reformism and a revival of ‘traditional’ Islamic articulations among the Sunni Muslims of Kerala. A new class of traditionalist Sunni ulama, claiming to be ‘turbaned professionals,’ play an instrumental role in providing epistemic sanctioning to ‘traditional’ Islamic piety while 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 contemporary articulations of Islamic traditionalism entail a reconfiguration of authorizing discourses, cultural practices, and modes of socio-political and economic engagements of Sunni Muslims. This discursive shift of Sunni Islamic traditionalism in Kerala from defensive to assertive has to be located in the context of the wider socio-economic change within the community, facilitated by structural as well as cultural forces of globalization, viz. heightened transnational connections, global cultural and intellectual flows, proliferation of electronic media and digital communication technologies, and the growth of a neoliberal economy. The process of Sunni Muslim identity formation hence traverses the local, national, and global scales of identification resulting in intense negotiations between local identifications and ‘true Islamicate global imaginations.’The structural and cultural conditions of globalization have not only unsettled the conventional religious-spiritual, economic, and political orientations attached to Sunni Islamic traditionalism in Kerala but also force us to locate the question of their identity formation within the theoretical framework of late modernity, beyond the boundaries of nation-states and the communities ensconced within them.

Key Words: Islam, Globalization, Tradition, Late modernity, Kerala.