Abstract
Naveeda Khan’s book offers a radical reading of the relationship between Islam and Pakistan as experimentations in identity within a postcolonial milieu inherited by the Pakistani state since its inception in 1947. Combining political theology and philosophy with ethnography from the late 1990s and the middle of 2000s, Khan takes fraught moments of contestations over Islam in independent Pakistan, sketching and recasting these moments from the lens of plentitude as modalities of self-making and moral self-perfection whereby the individual is linked socially within a national register.
The book, in particular, presents a range of ethnographic and philosophic insights internal to Pakistan’s self-expression, which is accessed through popular culture, legal debates, theological exchanges, literature, affective gestures of argumentation, debate, rhetoric and everyday contestations around mosques. Taking her cue from W.C. Smith’s early insights on the aspirational tendencies in Pakistan, Khan argues that the aspiration to strive as Muslims is part of ‘striving toward a determinate end while maintaining the notion of further ends and an open future’ (p. 55), despite questions of who is a Muslim or what kind of Islamic state one seeks to strive for remaining obscure. With this insight, she urges her readers to suspend judgement while taking on board questions of tolerance, sectarian violence and the question of difference in the relationship of ‘selves’ to ‘others’—questions that hitherto have heuristically been viewed in terms of lack, particularly in the common use of metaphors of Pakistan as a failed Islamic state.
Instead, the book via the political philosophy of poet Muhammad Iqbal—considered as Pakistan’s spiritual founder—sees contestations around Islam through the language of experimentation put on course by an Iqbal-inspired striving to be Muslim with the possibility of recasting Islam as an open religion with possible futures. The genealogy of aspiration undertaken in the book, by means of Iqbal’s poetry and political philosophy, grounds Iqbal’s ideas in connection with Muhammad Asad and Maulana Syed Abulala Maududi, two of his contemporaries who moved to Pakistan after Independence and exerted considerable influence upon its political formation, to show that Iqbal’s picture of Muslim aspiration was among several on offer for Pakistan. The brilliance of the engagement with Iqbal throughout the book is the inflection of his ideas through a translocal engagement with Henri Bergson’s thesis on time as becoming—in which life is seen to act towards perfection characterised by continual striving—as well as Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence that is seen to accord Iqbal’s quest an understanding of how ‘…one might relate to Prophet’s time, project it forward, yet not introduce the death grip of finality upon future’ (p. 180).
Khan insightfully brings to bear these philosophical exchanges to the important question of co-existence explored in the book. In fact, it begins with everyday disputations and expressions of religiosity over the nature of the Prophet’s body after his death, setting the stage for ferociously held views on affective relations such as ecstatic love, reverence and emulation forged with the Prophet, that in many ways defines differences not just between the Sunni and Shi’a forms, but within the different Sunni paths (maslaq), between the Deobandi, Barelwi, Ahl-e Hadis, alerting the reader to the varied topography of Islam in South Asia.
The diverse milieus of doctrinal contestations over maslaq differences are explored in their spatial manifestations in lower and middle-class neighbourhoods in Lahore around fights over mosques in the first chapter titled ‘Scenes of Muslim Aspirations: Neighbourhood Mosques and Their Qabza’. Using instances of qabza or violent seizure/violent usurpation of voice of three neighbourhood mosques in Lahore, set apart in time and space, the chapter lays out the complex interlay of shifting local, personal, social and doctrinal relationships. The long-term ethnography tracks the changing nature of these relationships, charting aspiration and striving in claims made around the space of mosques in desires to stake a claim on a new nation-state or produce an exemplary Islamic state within Pakistan.
The significant question of co-presence is explored through the Ahmedi question in an impressive chapter titled ‘Inheriting Iqbal: The Law and the Ahmedi Question’. Being a movement that emerged in the 19th century in colonial India under Mirza Ghulam Ahmed—claimed as the new Prophet of Islam—the Ahmedis’ were deemed as a non-Muslim minority and apostates by the state of Pakistan, denying the community access to Muslim insignia and institutions. The chapter traces changing contours of the state’s position on the Ahmedi question, eventually striving to fulfill a desire Iqbal had expressed in 1935—of moving Ahmedis from the status of Muslims to that of minority in order to protect Islam. The chapter looks at legal debates and constitutional arguments noting the creative and affective Muslim relation to law. This is brought out in discussions of the Munir report of 1954 that confronts the Ahmedi belief in a Prophet after Prophet Muhammad, in which the state deflected the question of what the proper relationship to the Prophet ought to be, focusing instead on who is a Muslim. Further, the amendment of the Penal Code in 1984 harnesses the language of copyright and trademark to the Ahmedi question, seeking to establish a propriety right on the correct mode of relating to the Prophet, rendering it a crime if Ahmedis continue to refer to themselves as Muslims. Registering the violence inflicted on the Ahmedis, Khan approaches the accusation of intolerance of the Pakistani state by asking what tolerance is after the event of exclusion and engages an Iqbalian notion of tolerance of appreciating a different form of faith, while jealously guarding the frontiers of one’s own faith. She reads Iqbalian inspired notions of striving in these state-led debates as ways in which the state secures its authority on behalf of Islam by possibly engaging in a form of striving of its own and inflecting Muslim aspiration in everyday life, of returning to ‘past actions, submitting them to scrutiny that could perpetuate striving by re-accommodating Ahmedis’ in everyday life’ (p. 119).
In a fascinating parallel with coterminous existence, the chapter titled ‘The Singularity of Aspiration: A Father, a Child and a Jinn’ explores the indeterminate relationship to faith by narrating the story of a pious family’s encounter and dependence on a creature of ‘smokeless fire’ or a jinn, despite the family’s avowed commitment to Deobandi pathway within Sunni Islam that emphasises reason and face-to-face learning from the religious authorities. The chapter emphasises the necessity of approaching the relationship between Islam, the self and nation from the perspective of different versions of self, internal to one’s being, as expressed in the story of a father abdicating his position of authority within his family to attend to his daughter’s words of guidance, taking cues from a faceless and voiceless jinn with the child as an interlocutor, and later returning to his position of authority when he decides not to attempt to bring back the jinn.
In thus emphasising the postcolonial Pakistani state’s aspiration of striving towards perfection, the book places its analysis squarely within a Deleuzian frame of becoming and stays true to it, notwithstanding differences in the material it presents. In chapter five ‘Skepticism in Public Culture: From Jahil Maulvi to Mullahism’, Khan offers Iqbal’s concept of Mullahism to refer broadly to the transmission of ossified religious knowledge and looks at its reception in the figure of a mullah loathed, feared, parodied in popular jokes and comic strips. In the chapter, Khan turns jokes around in themselves to explore instances in which people assumed the posture of a mullah, claiming privileged knowledge. Here she tackles the question of orthodoxy, that has been defined in the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and others, as being central to a discursive Islamic tradition, presenting three moments in which the striver attempts a bid for orthodoxy, indicating that ‘striving to be a better Muslim bears a relationship to orthodoxy’ (p. 155). These instances appeared to me as moments and enclaves of orthodoxies, neatly explained by placing them casually in relation to the notion of the mullah within. This is despite the engagement with figures of authority—Maulana Yusuf Ludhianvi, Mufti Abdul Wahid and Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi as producers of evaluative statements and vibrant diagnostics on the state of spiritual health of lay Muslims in everyday life that serve striving, which is explored in the sixth chapter ‘Skepticism and Spiritual Diagnostics: Iqbal, the Ulama, and the Literati’. At the end, however, I was left with a sense of a reticent approach to the question of orthodoxy within the register of striving and open futures, despite presenting many instances of orthodoxies, which in their striving towards perfection were shown in continual and multiple states of becoming. This was even whilst the book offered an extremely complex picture of Pakistan’s relationship with Islam, with a potential to bring orthodoxy in conversation with multiplicity, rather than seeing the two apart or in opposition.