Abstract
What do situations of chronic violence and resulting polarizations do to civility, and especially to its more horizontal forms? Using an account of everyday pluralism in an impoverished Christian neighbourhood of Karachi, this article addresses this question by examining how marginalized groups of that embattled city have been cobbling together forms of coexistence in the midst of ethnic and sectarian conflicts. Focusing in particular on the moral career of a local strongman, the practical and ethical dilemmas encountered by populations surviving at the margins of the city are considered, as they try to engage with others while struggling with the often violent economy of scarcity that structures their experience and vulnerability. In doing so, this article makes a case for a conceptualization of civility as a matter of building bonds as much as setting certain limits, in relation to identity and violence in particular. Civility, here, does not amount either to the preservation of peaceful coexistence or to the orderly reproduction of society. It thrives on various forms of connections and multiplicities, contesting hegemonic discourses on difference; instead of being external to violence, it operates within a world of violent possibilities, to which it aims to put some bounds.
Jawad Miyan, this city is an extremely quarrelsome one: Sindhi, Punjabi, Balochi, Pathan, Muhajir … our friends have not made a city, they have cooked up a khichri! […] Rivers from across the length and breadth of Hindustan came tumbling and gurgling to meet the sea. But they did not merge in the sea. Every river says: ‘I am the sea’. Intizar Husain, Aage Samandar Hai (The Sea Lies Ahead) (2007 [1995])
The second instalment in a trilogy about the displacements brought about by the 1947 Partition of India, Intizar Husain’s Aage Samandar Hai [The Sea Lies Ahead], depicts the trials and tribulations of a number of Mohajirs (post-Partition Urdu-speaking migrants from North India) 1 in post-colonial Karachi. The city where these migrants strive to make a home is an assemblage of ethnic groups (qawms) evoking the khichri, a popular North Indian dish made of rice and lentils, and long-used as a metaphor in Urdu literature for all sorts of linguistic and social mixtures. In the eyes of upper caste Mohajirs who feature prominently in the narrative, however, this mixed dish of a city consistently refuses to melt into a whole – it is a non-cosmopolitan, conflictive urban society, where rivers converge from the four corners of the subcontinent but decline to empty into the sea. As the years pass by, struggles for survival shift gear: the most pressing need is no longer to find a roof over one’s head but to secure one’s life and properties, now threatened by the reign of terror unleashed by thieves, trigger-happy policemen and political goons. For the narrator and his entourage of Urdu-speaking literati, the anxieties resulting from the escalation of crime and political violence across the city cannot be reduced to their material components, however. They form part of a deeper moral crisis, triggered by the rise of a more ruthless, plebeian culture. In a post-colonial environment set between ‘mushairas and Kalashnikovs’, as a character in the novel puts it, the latter seem to be gaining the upper hand over the genteel ethos of upper caste Mohajirs, epitomized in their poetry recitals.
This widely acclaimed novel by a major figure of Urdu literature posits Karachi’s postcolonial predicament as a crisis of civility in at least two distinct ways. First and foremost, the social and political rise of the plebeians – following the access to power of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the late 1980s – comes as a challenge to Urdu-speaking elites’ ethics and aesthetic of everyday life. Second, the escalation of political and criminal violence, in a city where inter-ethnic relations were already under strain, nurtures a deeper urban malaise. Here, it is no longer the place of upper caste Mohajirs and their ethos of genteel civility that is challenged but, rather, the very possibility of pluralistic urban living in a city at war with itself. This double-sided crisis hints at two distinct, yet overlapping registers of civility, approximating what Edward Shils referred to as ‘civility as good manners or courtesy’ and ‘civility as the virtues of civil society’, that is, as participation in the affairs of the polis (Shils, 1997). More specifically, Husain’s elegy for Karachi puts the urban form – both as an idea and a set of interconnections – at the heart of the battles for civility.
Upper-caste ruminations such as those running through Intizar Husain’s work, which anchor it in the late-Mughal genre of the shehr-e-ashob (lament for the city), 2 do not exhaust the engagements of Karachiwalas with civility. The routinization of violent conflict, especially in the city’s lower income areas, has also led to the emergence of a new ethos of coexistence: in fact, Karachi’s fractures and convulsions seem to have brought about their own brand of civility – a disclaimer to liberal theories of civility, according to which this art of pluralistic living tends to be equated with the smooth re-production of social order and civic values. Rather than the alleged crisis of the ethos of Urdu-speaking cultural and economic elites, it is these experiments at cobbling together new forms of coexistence, in the midst of ethnic and sectarian conflicts, that interest me here.
What do chronic violence and resulting fragmentations do to civility, especially to the more horizontal forms that concern us here? In the context of Karachi’s volatile and deeply polarized lower income areas where I have been working, I understand civility as a social relationship through which disenfranchised individuals strive to survive and possibly to improve their condition by establishing connections with various others. While building upon cross-cutting networks, and sustaining them, these forms of coexistence are neither exclusive of ascribed identifications nor of frictions, collisions, or even open confrontations. On the contrary, this politics of coexistence finds its urgency in the looming threat of discordance, which it regulates rather than entirely dissipates.
If civility, then, is ‘a politics which regulates the conflict of identifications between […] a total and a floating identification’ (Balibar, 2002: 29), what are we to make of Karachi’s entangled conflicts? As the editors to this issue of Anthropological Theory emphasize in their introduction, the main merit of Balibar’s writings on civility lies in their frontal engagement with violence. Civility, here, is not the sole prerogative of civil(ized) polities celebrating their pacification by liberal values. For Balibar, the kind of politics associated with civility does not suppress all violence; it does work, however, towards the exclusion of its most extreme forms in order to create and sustain the possibility of a space for emancipatory and transformative projects (Balibar, 2002: 30). Balibar’s writings on civility do have their shortcomings, however. Besides remaining attached to a state-centric epistemology of fixed borders/boundaries and institutionalized violence, they show little concern for the concrete situations of social agents. In what follows I seek to address these shortcomings by exploring critically some individual pathways on which – and across which – this politics of civility was tested and reasserted against the various odds of Karachi’s unforgiving streets. The bulk of this article is thus devoted to the moral career of Yaqub, a young Christian strongman, striving to survive and flourish without losing himself in a notoriously volatile part of the city. What makes Yaqub’s trajectory and seemingly idiosyncratic engagement with the politics of civility so relevant for the present discussion is his positioning at the intersection of various social worlds and loyalties. While standing out among his co-religionists (because of his level of education and political connections) or among his fellow party workers (because of his ethnicity and religion), Yaqub is not a loose cannon or a sociological anomaly. He has been confronted with similar forms of exclusion and structural violence as his co-religionists: his practices of association, for their part, are not as unusual as they seem. Despite the polarization of local politics over the past three decades, political affiliations in Karachi have never been neatly indexed according to ethnic or sectarian identities. Within political parties engaged in particular in militant activities, the presence of ethnic ‘others’ (that is, of individuals recruited beyond the main support base of these parties) has sometimes been considered a strategic asset. 3 One should also keep in mind that political affiliations never encompassed the entire social persona of party workers. Family ties, neighbourhood solidarities or business interests occasionally cut across, and disrupted, political demarcation lines. In the lower income locality of Liaquatabad, for instance, which was reputed to be a bastion of MQM militancy during the mid-1990s, militants affiliated with rival groups, who often happened to be childhood friends, ‘ate, went on cinema trips and hung out together’ (Khan, 2010: 132). Furthermore, as in many civil wars of the recent past (Andreas, 2008; Picard, 2005), activists of warring political groups have also been engaged in commercial transactions founded on shared interests and complementarities – for instance, by trading guns for stolen cars (Gayer, 2014: 109). Far from being an oddity, Yaqub’s own sociabilities with members of adverse factions are therefore an opportunity to reflect upon wartime ‘domains of commonality’ (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2016) challenging the idea of bounded and bounding conflict lines.
In addition to the case of Karachi, Yaqub’s moral career and experiments with everyday pluralism provide an opportunity to reflect upon larger practical and ethical dilemmas encountered by populations surviving at the margins of the urban economy, as they try to engage with others while struggling with the ‘combination of violence and want’ that structures their experience and vulnerability (Das and Randeria, 2015: S12).
Karachi, a non-cosmopolitan city of migrants?
With a population estimated at between 15 and 25 million in 2017, Karachi is Pakistan’s only megacity. The capital of the country between 1947 and 1959, it remains the country’s largest port and financial centre, as well as a major industrial hub. It is also Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse city, with a strong presence of Mohajirs (who were estimated to represent 44% of the total population of the city in 2011), Punjabis/Seraikis (17%), Pashtuns (14%), Sindhis (8%) and Balochis (4%). This ethnic diversity resulted from successive waves of migration since the founding of the city in 1729. Whether that diversity translated into full-blown urban cosmopolitanism – in the normative sense of an ‘ethical idea of living together with others’ (Mayaram, 2013 [2009]: 9) or in the more descriptive acceptation of a space ‘belonging to all kinds of people’ (Anderson, 2011: 3) – has been a matter of debate, however.
Some authors have argued that Karachi did develop a cosmopolitan urban culture in the decades after Partition, especially around the multi-class and multi-ethnic places of entertainment of the central area of Saddar and adjacent parts of the Old City (Khuhro and Mooraj, 2010; Hasan, 2017). The religious festivals of the city’s Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities also provided grounds for interactions across denominational divides (Hasan, 2017). Against this narrative, other commentators have argued that Karachi never was a cosmopolitan city. Rather than embracing an inclusive urban culture, post-Partition migrant communities – starting with Mohajirs – would have fallen prey to qawm parasti (parochialism on the basis of language, city/region of origin, etc., translated into various social and spatial forms of ethno-religious clustering) early on. It is also this parochialism, epitomized by a frenzy of mushairas selecting poets on the basis of their city of origin in India, that Aage Samandar Hai chronicles with both sympathy and irony. Such literary works and social commentary converge with recent contributions in the field of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, which argue that displacement does not mechanically sustain cosmopolitan attitudes and may, in fact, generate various forms of closure (Glick Schiller and Irving, 2017 [2015]: 3).
The spatial organization of the city and its political economy certainly contributed to the estrangement of various communities. The tendency of the city’s diverse populations to regroup themselves around ethnic clusters endured after Partition, with Urdu-speaking refugees from India regrouping on the basis of language, sect, region and sometimes city of origins, while Pashtun workers who migrated from the North West during the 1960s relied upon kinship and village-based networks to find accommodation and work in the nascent industrial sector. The distribution of white-collar and blue-collar jobs on ethnic lines since the industrialization of the city in the 1950s and 1960s has generally worked against the formation of strong class identifications superseding ethnic and linguistic bonds. As architect and sociologist Arif Hasan writes, ‘more often than not, ethnicity determined people’s status’ (Hasan 2017: 174). During the first decades of industrialization, Urdu-speaking Mohajirs were over-represented among high-skilled industrial workers, as well as in clerical and government jobs, whereas the bulk of unskilled industrial workers came from the Pashto-speaking Swat Valley. This ethnic division of work was reproduced in the labour movement. In the decades after independence, urbanized middle-class Mohajirs came to dominate the leadership of trade unions and, if the unions provided a meeting ground for various ethnicities (Asdar Ali, 2015), the reformist language of Mohajir labour leaders was often incomprehensible to freshly settled Pashtun workers from upcountry – quite literally. The progressive language of Urdu-speaking leaders was often lost to factory workers, until the most literate among them started translating Marxist concepts into Pashto and setting them to the tunes of folksongs. 4 In later years, the repression unleashed by the civilian government of ZA Bhutto (1971–1977) and later on by the military government of General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988) signed the death warrant of Pakistan’s labour movement.
The country’s return to democracy at the end of the 1980s was not conducive to a resumption of class-based politics and cosmopolitan imaginings. Rather, it was marked by an escalation of ethnic frictions into outward confrontations – especially between the MQM, which claimed to represent and defend Mohajirs, and the so-called Pashtun land, drugs and arms ‘mafias’. This process of violent escalation was precipitated by major shifts in the city’s political economy, under the influence of transnational flows of drugs, weapons, cash and refugees prompted by the Afghan Jihad. 5 Cold War politics, massive displacements caused by the Afghan war and various projects of enrichment capitalizing on these disruptions collided to produce a new regional economy centred on the heroin trade. Under the patronage of Pakistani and American intelligence agencies, Pashtun tribes controlling the transport routes and fleets between Afghanistan and Karachi (Afridis, in particular) built upon their professional specialization and transnational networks to take control of the drug trade. The most successful criminal entrepreneurs then reinvested their huge profits in the unofficial land market and tapped into the reservoir of cheap labour of Afghan refugee camps to build private armies and impose a reign of terror in the city’s slums.
The new rules of tenancy and the coercive methods of these violent entrepreneurs gave rise to major disruption of patterns of occupation and inter-ethnic relations in the city’s unofficial settlements. In 1985–1986 a series of riots and massacres centred on this new slum economy contributed to making ethnicity the dominant framework for socio-economic conflicts and political mobilizations in the city at large (Tambiah, 1996; Gayer, 2014). These economic transformations unfolding at the interface of global politics, wartime transnationalism and real-estate development also contributed to the militarization of the local political scene and to the intermeshing of ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ violence for the years to come. While disrupting the rules of coexistence in the most underprivileged parts of the city, we will see further that this nexus of political militancy and violent entrepreneurship also opened up new ‘domains of mutuality’ across denominational divides, as well as limited (and high-risk) possibilities of upward social mobility for disenfranchised youths such as Yaqub.
While accounting for the role of violent conflict and the various forms of partitioning – of space, work, welfare institutions, etc. – that it sustains in such conflict-ridden societies, one should avoid fetishizing violent transformation by presuming the pervasiveness of violent occurrences and endowing them with the capacity to make sense of every individual conduct, at all times (Lubkeman, 2008: 13). In Karachi, crucial developments happened autonomously, if not in opposition to the militarization of local politics and practices of accumulation. Once again, the situation of the industrial labour market offers a powerful lens to scrutinize these urban transformations and their potential for new networks of association. While the working poor have often tried to find additional revenues, in a context of rising inflation, in the informal service sector, this protracted economic crisis has also brought new workers to the factories (most of which were established by the mercantile groups that have dominated the city’s industrial sector since Partition: the Gujarati-speaking Memons, the Urdu-speaking group of the Delhi Saudagaran and the Punjabi-speaking Chiniotis). While this diversity can sometimes prove explosive, when it is instrumentalized by political parties and religious groups to assert their dominance within certain factories, it has also provided the grounds for new forms of solidarity. Thus, all the protest movements that have emerged in Karachi’s manufacturing sector over the past few years – particularly in the garments industry – involved male and female workers of various ethnicities, who did not deny the relevance of their respective identification but strove to articulate a form of politics overcoming ethnic divides – something akin to the ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ discussed by Shail Mayaram and others, through which subordinated groups come to identify with other ‘oppressed’ communities across ethnic, religious or even national divides (Mayaram, 2009; Featherstone, 2012).Whether in mixed work environments or in impoverished ‘colonies’, the routinization of violence has not entirely eradicated the pluralism of city life and the possibility of a politics of civility. It is to these forms of coexistence, in and around an impoverished Christian basti (settlement) of in southeast Karachi, that I now turn.
Conjuring marginality and insecurity in Yusuf Nagar
The neighbourhood which I call here Yusuf Nagar is a Christian-majority basti located in the working class/lower-middle class neighbourhood of Landhi, in the southeast of Karachi. The entire colony consists of 372 houses and a population of roughly 3000 people. All the residents are lower-caste Punjabi Christians whose families migrated to Karachi during the 1960s, in search of job opportunities. 6 The neighbourhood was specifically developed for Christian sanitation workers by the Karachi Development Authority (KDA), which allotted 80 yards plots for a nominal fee (15–20 rupees) to impoverished Christians. Unlike the residents of katchi abadis (informal residential areas developed on state land), the population of Yusuf Nagar can at least take comfort in land tenure security. Despite being an officially planned neighbourhood, however, Yusuf Nagar now has almost all the attributes of a slum, and it is particularly stigmatized due to the ‘polluting’ occupations of its residents. To this day, most of them (both male and female) are involved in sanitation work – a high-risk activity 7 that tends to be despised because of its association with the dirt of others (O’Brien, 2012: 249). These workers are deeply embedded within the city’s export-oriented industrial economy. The first employers of Yusuf Nagar’s residents are the surrounding factories of Korangi and Landhi’s Export Processing Zone. Employment in these industries has opened up various possibilities of social interactions, including romantic liaisons, with ethnic or religious others. However, it has also entrapped this vulnerable workforce in a global apparatus of domination reinforced by local structures of subjection, setting Christians at the bottom of the pay scale and at the forefront of the most degrading and dangerous tasks.
As lower caste members of a religious minority, who continue to be largely perceived as ‘untouchable’ (achut) due to their traditional occupations, Punjabi Christians are caught in the double-bind of social and political marginalization. On the one hand, caste-based prejudices inherited from Hinduism remain widely prevalent within Pakistani society (where Islam is practiced by 97% of the population). On the other hand, the emphasis on a religious rather than territorial definition of the Pakistani nation has induced a ‘mirage of citizenship’, where Muslims and non-Muslims are theoretically entitled to equal social and political rights, but where the central – though contested – role devoted to Islam in the formation of the nation and the state ‘has served as a channel of exclusion that has led to the erosion of the rights of non-Muslims and furthered their disenfranchisement as citizens’ (Sheikh, 2009: 70).
While facing the ‘slow knife of everyday structural violence’ (Das and Kleinman, 2001), the residents of Yusuf Nagar have been living between the rock of MQM militancy and the hard place of state terror. As with Landhi at large, this particular basti has seen its fair share of political violence over the years. Until recently it was a common hiding place for MQM militants escaping from the police and the paramilitary Rangers. As a result, law enforcement agencies frequently raided the area in search of ‘terrorists’. This routinization of violent conflicts has made fear a ‘way of life’ in many neighbourhoods of Karachi over the past decades (Gayer, 2014; Kirmani, 2016). The chronic state of insecurity prevailing in Yusuf Nagar is only partially related to political or sectarian violence, however. Besides jihadists, political militants and law enforcement agencies, local residents tend to be wary of their Muslim neighbours, employers, and occasional business partners.
In addition to the lurking threat of conversions, which is regularly actualized by controversial inter-religious marriages, the Christian residents of Yusuf Nagar live under the shadow of the ‘295’, as Pakistani blasphemy laws are colloquially referred to – that is, by those who dare mention the issue, always after lowering their voices. Article 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, which was introduced by the military regime of Zia-ul-Haq, is a sword of Damocles over the head of every Christian, who knows that virtually any Muslim can sentence him to death by merely suggesting that he ‘defiled the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad’, ‘by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly’. This dramatically raises the stakes of coexistence between the Christian residents of Yusuf Nagar and their Muslim neighbours.
Tensions between these communities are almost as old as the neighbourhood and feed on shared but contested uses of ‘public’ amenities (which often happen to be unofficially privatized). These tensions are materialized by the boundary wall erected by the Muslim residents of a neighbouring locality as early as the mid-1960s (see Figure 1) – a symbolic and physical demarcation that remains a focal point of tensions, if only because it disrupts access to the water pipes located in this Urdu-speaking Muslim-dominated colony. Access to electricity, for its part, is primarily through the illicit kunda system (lit. a ‘hook’). This fuels tensions with the residents of another neighbouring colony, dominated by Sindhi Muslims and crossed by 220 V power lines, out of which most of the electricity used in Yusuf Nagar is being siphoned.
Christian residents of Yusuf Nagar greeting each other after the Sunday service. The boundary wall erected by Muslim residents of the neighbouring locality in the mid-1960s, and recently raised up, can be seen on the right.
Education is also a breeding ground for communal tensions. For Yusuf Nagar’s residents, religious prejudices (ta’asub) on the part of the Muslim majority would explain the high drop-out rates of Christian children. Because there is no Christian school in the vicinity, local children are obliged to enrol in ‘Muslim’ public and private schools, where they would systematically be teased by other students and denigrated by the teaching staff. Girls tend to put up better with these constraints and to pursue education longer than boys. As a result, girls (and women) are said to have access to better employment perspectives, but are more exposed to romantic or professionally-motivated conversions – a threat bordering on the existential that would expose the Christian community to the risk of being deprived of its ‘better’ women. As the pastor of a local evangelical church once told me, more than sanitation workers in factories – who are also be exposed to this ‘danger’ because of their lack of secular and ‘spiritual’ education – educated women working in offices would be the most prone to change their religion. Once recruited into such offices, they would systematically be enjoined to convert to Islam in order to move up in the hierarchy. Fusing anxieties about women’s upward social mobility with larger concerns about the survival of the Christian community in a hostile environment, everyday stories about conversions also speak of the sense of ‘agonistic belonging’ of Yusuf Nagar’s residents, in which ‘one locked in conflict with another at one level might find that there are other thresholds of life in which one becomes, despite all expectations, attracted to that other’ (Das, 2010: 399).
‘Our women cover their heads during the azaan’: words and practices of civility in Yusuf Nagar
While peaceful coexistence is a pressing concern for the residents of Yusuf Nagar, there is no vernacular term, whether in Punjabi or in Urdu, that fully captures the notion of ‘civility’ as we understand it here. During the informal conversations or focus group discussions I had over the years with residents of the neighbourhood, in private homes or in local churches, the most commonly used terms conveying this ethos of coexistence, with its requisite of mutual respect between intimate strangers, were those of ta’avun and ehteram. While, in everyday usage, these terms generally refer, respectively, to ‘cooperation’ and ‘respect’, their semantic field is in fact much larger. Ta’avun can also have the sense of assistance and mutual aid, which suggests a spirit of benevolence towards the other. More rarely, it can also refer to the act of conspiring, hinting at the darker side of relations of association. Ehteram, for its part, can carry many nuances, from simple attention to reverence or even veneration (Platts, 2006). Ta’avun speaks of more horizontal, symmetrical relations of association than ehteram, which suggests a form of deference towards a respected other. The question of mutual respect between Christians and Muslims is central to these discussions and to the relations between communities. It is because they carry an element of deference that vernacular conceptions of ‘respect’ have to be mutual – otherwise, they would amount to the endorsement of asymmetrical power relations between neighbours of different denominations. This is precisely what Christian residents of Yusuf Nagar complain about: their gestures of respect are not reciprocated and, as a result, threaten to be markers of their dominated status rather than signs of goodwill.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the recurring conflicts over the aural landscape of the area. Both churches and mosques use loudspeakers to mark their presence over their respective neighbourhoods and to emphasize communal identity. In the case of Muslims, this is mainly the case during the azaan (the call to prayer), while in Yusuf Nagar entire services – which can often last several hours and are systematically accompanied by music and devotional songs – are ‘broadcasted’ in this way. Each of these religious performances can easily be heard by neighbours from the other denomination, and this nurtures serious tensions. While the diffusion of sonic content across religious boundaries attests to their porosity, despite the walls separating Christian and Muslim neighbourhoods, this proximity is here a factor of conflict rather than rapprochement. According to the residents of Yusuf Nagar, it is mainly Muslims who are to blame. They do not accept the ‘freedom’ (azadi) of Christians and would frequently complain about noise pollution from the Christian side. According to Joseph, a 30-something Assistant Deputy Manager in a Karachi-based company, Muslims more specifically argue that ‘their children and other members of their families [gharwale] can hear Christian devotional music’, as if this music had a deleterious effect on them. Joseph claimed that, on the contrary, Christian women in Yusuf Nagar systematically cover their heads with their dupatta (veils) during the azaan, be they in the streets or behind the four walls of their houses. On several occasions, these sonic conflicts threatened to escalate into violent confrontations but, according to a local pastor, Yaqub – of whom more will be said later – managed to ‘keep things under control’ and to ‘cover’ for the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, this remains a major irritant between communities, while highlighting the instability of the relations of ‘civility’ considered here – which are not merely contested in practice but in their very substance, since the lack of respect attributed to Muslims by their Christian neighbours casts doubt over the nature of the Muslim neighbours’ politics of coexistence.
This is not to say that the residents of Yusuf Nagar have a systematically confrontational relationship with Muslims. Over the past few years the neighbourhood has become a popular destination for working class Muslim men and women, who come here to attend healing sessions (shifaya). Two local churches organize such services every Friday, catering to the various physical and mental ailments of both Christian and Muslim ‘patients’ (mariz). I participated in one of these sessions during the summer of 2016, which was attended by an elderly Pashtun man and two of his female relatives. Yaqub and I were enjoying a cup of tea on the main square of the neighbourhood when we saw the three of them arrive on foot – the main mode of traffic in Yusuf Nagar, where ‘gullies’ are generally too narrow to let vehicles go through. They seemed utterly disoriented and Yaqub immediately offered them help, suspecting that they were here for the shifaya: for him, these three visitors could not have any other valid reason to have ventured so deep into the basti.
Once inside the church, the man joined the side of the Christian male participants while his womenfolk sat on the women’s side, at some distance from the Christian women. The man tried to adjust to the gestures of Christians throughout the ceremony – standing up and sitting down whenever they did, although his corporal hexis betrayed an Islamic ritual habitus (in conformity with the Sunni Hannafi tradition, he placed his hands under the navel while standing, whereas the Christians prayed with their arms out and palms open). The two women did not make the same effort to fit in (they did not stand up when the Christian women did), but this did not seem to be a source of concern for the audience. However, when the healing session formally began, the three visitors sat shoulder to shoulder with the Christian patients, listened to the same verses from the Book of Revelations, and let the pastor place his hand on their heads like everyone else. These physical contacts between a Christian man and Muslim women – and, a fortiori, women from the Pashtun community, reputed for its strict rules of purdah (female seclusion) – would have been simply unthinkable in other circumstances (see Figure 2).
A local pastor places his hand on the head of a Muslim woman during a healing session at a church of Yusuf Nagar (2016).
Shifaya rituals seem to be another terrain where a form of civility is currently the subject of experimentation across denominational divides, however awkwardly. Clearly, this church was not a ‘cosmopolitan canopy’, in the sense of a setting offering diverse peoples an opportunity to come together peacefully, to relish the spectacle of the others’ differences, and to learn about them through forms of ‘folk ethnography’ (Anderson, 2011). As always, the co-presence of Christians and Muslims was not devoid of tension – of fear, even. While these Muslim visitors were visibly uneasy, I learnt during further discussions with local pastors that these healing rituals were laden with dangers. I was told that Christian cable channels such as Isaac TV and Gavahi (Testimony), which frequently broadcast testimonies of Muslims ‘miraculously’ cured by Christian evangelists, have contributed to popularize these rituals among Muslims. However, the same pastors are wary of falling prey to accusations of proselytism. As one of them told me, ‘We don’t preach any religion’, before insisting that the evil spirits affecting Muslims and Christians were all the same. Whether you called them jinns, bad rooh (literally, ‘wicked souls’) or sar katta (a particular type of headless ‘ghost’), these were all shaitans (demons); these evil spirits did not discriminate on the basis of religion – for them, there were only humans (insan). This lesson from the invisible world has not been lost to those who have started gathering around these newly shared sacred sites. To date, however, it remains hardly audible beyond this community of suffering.
While I did not conduct a systematic ethnography of the neighbourhood – my main field sites have been in the inner city of Lyari (nestled between Karachi’s main port and its business district) and, more recently, in Pashtun working class localities of Western Karachi – I have been visiting Yusuf Nagar regularly for the past decade or so. During each of my yearly visits to Karachi I have been spending several days in the locality, mostly to visit my friend Yaqub, whom I met in 2006 when I was researching the MQM and struggling to get access to the rank and file of the party in its historic bastions. At that time, he worked as the handyman and bodyguard of a local leader of the MQM, and it is on the occasion of a meeting with the latter that I became acquainted with Yaqub. His ethnicity and religious affiliation brought us closer. As a Punjabi Christian, he was never accepted as a ‘full-blown’ (pakka) party worker of the Mohajir-dominated MQM. This led him to develop a somewhat loose attachment to the party and made him more outspoken than all other MQM cadres and workers I had encountered until then. In the years that followed our first meeting, I learnt much from him about the embedding of the party in this impoverished and volatile part of the city. More recently, we started working together on labour conflicts and union-busting practices in Landhi and in the adjacent industrial area of Korangi. My visits to Yusuf Nagar, as well as our movements across the city, were the occasions for long conversations on the transformations of the city, of his place in the changing political and economic scenario, as well as the fate of Christian communities in Karachi and Pakistan at large. These conversations, and the puzzles they confronted me with, constitute the main source of inspiration for this article.
Searching for connections
Ever since I first knew him, Yaqub has been searching for ‘connections’ (taluqat) outside his marginalized community – an aspiration to ‘con-viviality’ that, as Fiona Ross suggests in her study of a very impoverished community of Cape Town, speaks of the ‘alertness and liveliness to life’s contingency’ in the poorer urban neighbourhoods of the so-called Global South. This aspiration to relatedness is premised on the conviction that social and physical survival in these territories of relegation ‘is accomplished alongside and through others’ (Ross, 2015: S100). In urban Pakistan the search for relational capital (sifarish, literally, ‘recommendation’ or ‘intercession’) is seen as essential to social navigation, especially while engaging with the bureaucracy and the judicial system. The poorest sections of society, however, often lament that they ‘have no sifarish’, and that this compromises their chances to obtain justice whenever they are engaged in a dispute or any form of claim-making. These social networks are generally activated discreetly, in order to convert a public relationship into a quasi-private one, where special treatment is requested from government servants in the name of their personal obligations towards other (generally more) influential people (Hull, 2012). On some occasions, however, these personal connections have to be publicized, and it is precisely through their visibility that they acquire efficiency.
While this culture of patronage has become ubiquitous in Pakistan, it does not entirely capture Yaqub’s relational work, which unfolds at the intersection of private interests and public commitments, the licit and the illicit, violence and civility. Far from serving an unequivocal logic of self-aggrandizement, this search for connections across moral and denominational lines has pushed Yaqub to engage with others in creative ways, both in the heat of interactions and in the more reflexive moments following them. More than the interactions themselves, it is these reflexive moments to which I was privy – and that I also encouraged and oriented by my willingness to listen to my friend’s confidences and to accompany him in his attempts to restore some sense of order in his eclectic social relations.
The twists and turns of Yaqub’s professional and moral career echo the turbulence of his surrounding urban environment, where political alliances and business deals are made as quickly as they fall apart -- so much so that, at each of our yearly reunions, I found my friend exploring new sources of income, in partnership with an entirely different sector of people. To some extent, this versatility has been imposed on him by circumstances beyond his control. He was born in 1977 into a relatively well-off family; his father had earned some money as a migrant worker in the Gulf. This enabled Yaqub to pursue his education up to university level. Interruption of his studies before their completion occurred less for economic than political reasons: after intervening in a brawl between two student factions, he feared possible retaliation by an influential Islamist student union and dropped out of college.
This incident proved to be a turning point in his life – it prevented him from completing his education and embracing the engineering career he felt himself destined for, leading him to explore other venues for upward social mobility. At first, he tried his luck in the army, but left after confronting on a daily basis the hostility of Punjabi non-commissioned officers who, according to Yaqub, ‘never like to have a Christian sitting at their table’ (because his presence would be considered ‘polluting’). Following his return to Karachi, after a few years with the Pakistan Coast Guard in Balochistan, he resigned himself to ‘time-pass’ while waiting for a new opportunity to present itself to him. What he tried to avoid at any cost was being reclaimed by the traditional specialization of his co-religionists and becoming involved – even as a contractor – in sanitation work. His luck seemed to turn with the reform in 2001 of local bodies, following the implementation of the Sindh Local Government Ordinance (SLGO). This reform transferred new competences – and financial resources – from the provincial government to local bodies (the Karachi Municipal Corporation, as well as the Towns, and Union Councils representatives), and opened up new opportunities of upward social mobility to low income but educated youths such as Yaqub. By this time the MQM leadership seemed determined to break away from the radical nationalism of its beginnings and was particularly eager to recruit non-Mohajirs, as well as to co-opt Christians to showcase its secular credentials. Moreover, after allying itself with former President Pervez Musharraf, the MQM was now more powerful than it had ever been and no other political group in the city could offer such a promising career option. This did not entirely alleviate Yaqub’s persistent sense of unease within the MQM, however, which was reflective of the wider dilemmas faced by Christian politicians throughout Pakistan: how one is to remain loyal to one’s own when the only way to attain political representation is to be co-opted (and to turn one’s co-religionists into a vote bank), and hence always suspected of duplicity.
Yaqub’s election as a councillor allowed him to build relations with local entrepreneurs, and he once confided that he had taken bribes ‘from builders, contractors, everyone’. These practices of accumulation proved to be short-lived, however. Yaqub’s lack of experience in matters of graft quickly inspired suspicion and earned him serious enmity. Soon enough, he was denounced to the party – probably by one of his own relatives following a dispute with him – and was forced to resign. After making amends, however, he resumed his political activities and was noticed by a party cadre who took him under his protection. In 2005, this leader became a Union Council Nazim (local representative) of the MQM and Yaqub seemed well positioned to accompany him in his rise towards the upper echelons of the party. However, a few years later, Yaqub’s patron was murdered by the rival Haqiqi faction. For a while he considered leaving the party, where he felt discriminated against for his religion, caste and ethnicity. Instead, however, he became increasingly involved in his party’s militant and illicit activities.
During the summer of 2011, as the ruling parties fought each other over new reform legislation on local governments, Yaqub was repeatedly sent to battle it out with local activists of the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party (ANP), who maintained close links with a local criminal group involved in the drug trade. Besides these occasional street battles, Yaqub was involved in vote-rigging operations during the 2013 elections, and in the early months of 2015 he recruited a few local badmash (rogues) to set up a vigilance committee at the behest of the MQM. Such committees seemingly operated under the authority of the MQM’s markaz (headquarters), rather than under the command of local units, and they were entrusted with delicate tasks – enforcing discipline within the ranks of the party and sanctioning deviant activities on the part of the larger population. Practically, as Yaqub explained, this meant that, ‘at night, around 1 or 2 am, we’ll go to his [the target’s] house, take him out to a remote place, then teach him a good lesson’.
Yaqub’s growing involvement in the party’s dirty work made his life increasingly edgy. During one my visits in 2012, one of his sisters requested that I convince him to quit politics altogether. I conveyed these anxieties, which I shared, and Yaqub told me he would seriously consider an exit plan. At that time he was toying with the idea of opening a photo store and I encouraged him in this direction. This plan did not materialize, however. It was only after his house was sprayed with bullets the following year – probably by a rival sectarian group which had lost a provincial seat in Yaqub’s constituency due to the vote rigging operations he had been a part of – that he started distancing himself from the party. In order to avoid being reclaimed by his political connections, he stayed with relatives in their village in Punjab for a few months.
Meanwhile, the political scenario in Karachi changed dramatically. In September 2013 the federal government launched a massive crackdown against the various armed groups operating in Karachi, which gradually evolved into a primarily anti-MQM operation at the behest of the army. By 2016 the MQM was reduced to a shadow of its former self. In Landhi itself the party structure was to a large extent dismantled – including in the most literal sense of the term as buildings housing the units and sector offices of the party were bulldozed on the orders of the army. Once again, this new bifurcation in Yaqub’s life was less the outcome of a well-thought plan than an adjustment to uncontrollable circumstances. Thus, Yaqub did not really retire from politics: more accurately, the whole political system that he had been a part of collapsed in front of his eyes, leaving him – and his community – politically orphaned.
If it took so much time for Yaqub to distance himself from the dangerous world of party politics, this is essentially because, despite the risks involved, his association with the MQM gained him respect and authority in the neighbourhood – a status largely derived from his direct access to the local leadership of the MQM (the units-in-charge and sector-in-charge), as well as to a number of representatives of the party at the provincial and national assembly. These political connections allowed him to appropriate some of the ‘performative politics’ of the MQM; that is, its capacity to ‘deal with everyday problems rapidly, visibly, and though rarely aimed at transforming institutions or practices, with some immediate effect’ (Hansen 2005 [2001]: 116). However, even as he tried to put his political connections to best use, especially to solve disputes between the Christian residents of Yusuf Nagar and their Muslim neighbours, Yaqub did not hesitate to cross enemy lines.
These forays were mainly to explore new ‘money-making ventures’, as he called them. In 2012, he took part in some land grabbing operations along the National Highway. This particular operation was overseen not by the MQM but by a prominent Sindhi nationalist leader, and the fact that Yaqub was recruited into it attests to the porosity of party affiliations among the participants in Karachi’s unofficial economy. The middlemen who recruited him were probably aware of his party affiliation but they chose to ignore it, focusing instead on his religious identity. Indeed, the whole modus operandi of this particular qabza (land grabbing) group rested upon the co-optation of impoverished Christians, who were provided accommodation at a subsidized rate on the illegally encroached land. The occupation of the land by members of a minority group would make it harder for public authorities to oppose its development, because any attempt to evict poor Christians would meet with public outcry – which suggests that the minority status of Christians can also be a protection, even if it can be converted into yet another instrument of exploitation. Yaqub was well aware that such qabza operations served the electoral and larger strategic interests of the rivals of the MQM by helping them to strengthen their vote banks along the National Highway, while allowing them to keep an eye on the goods – legal and otherwise – entering the city.
More than his contribution to an operation working against the interests of his own party, what seems to have upset Yaqub was the instrumentalization of the weaker sections of his community. He complained that Christians were being used because of their vulnerability and, as the operation went on, his sense of unease seems to have grown – so much so that within a few days he backed out of the operation. Doing otherwise would have compromised his self-image, which he had been cultivating with great constancy over the years – that of a moral subject loyal to his kin and determined to obtain justice for his marginalized community. This ethical commitment provided him with a moral compass that helped him navigate the murky waters of his urban environment and infuse meaning into his actions. Through the ‘exhilaration of self-transcendence’ (Lambek, 2010: 12) Yaqub seems to have found a sense of consistency in a volatile world, as well as a sense of worth in a situation of disenfranchisement combining structural marginality with a more personal feeling of stagnation and incompleteness. Indeed, for a long time Yaqub remained unmarried (he only married in 2017, at the age of 40) and his lack of a stable job position added to his anguish, exposing him to a ‘truncation of social being’ (Vigh, 2006: 37). Maintaining and projecting (to others, including myself) an image of himself as a loyal defender of his kith and kin certainly helped him cultivate a certain sense of worthiness.
Beyond the lines: civility and its thresholds
If Yaqub makes a claim to morality in his public engagements, to what extent can these actions be understood as a form of civility? Doesn’t compromising with violence, identity politics and the promotion of private interests automatically deny them any civic value? In order to answer these questions, I return to Balibar’s conception of civility as a form of organization of coexistence, between the extremes of exclusive identification and the anomie of disaffiliation. Moving one step further, I engage with Balibar’s more arcane developments on the relations between civility and violence, questioning in particular the relevance of his writings on ‘cruelty’ to the concrete situations confronting the perpetrators of violence.
Civility, between extraversion and self-restraint
By exploring different routes towards upward social mobility, from the army to party politics to real-estate operations, Yaqub has consistently been resisting the tyranny of identification. Each of these ventures has brought him into contact with social milieus and ethnic groups different than his own. While all these experiences left him with a sense of frustration, because he felt systematically that he did not belong, we still must account for his ability to navigate across a deeply fragmented social space and to build relations across denominational divides. It bears testimony to the fact that, even after three decades of endemic conflicts and mutually reinforcing polarizations, the ethnic, political and sectarian partitioning of urban space remains incomplete in Karachi and does not prevent some forms of interaction across these divides. This is particularly true in the economic realm, as licit and illicit spheres of activity remain an important terrain of intermingling, if not of formal class-based solidarities. ‘Cityness’ – this capacity for different people, spaces, activities, and things ‘to interact in ways that exceed any attempt to regulate them’ (Simone 2010: 3) – has not been defeated by Karachi’s unending, slow-burning civil wars, although these conflicts place considerable hurdles in the way for those involved in daily operations of coagulation. Incidentally, as Yaqub’s case exemplifies, the same actors can contribute to perpetuating these conflicts while getting involved in everyday labours of peace – these ‘micromechanics of coexistence’ which, in every neighbourhood of the world confronted with chronic civil strife, prevent a full-fledged explosion (Ring, 2006: 6).
How does this apparent ambivalence fit in the understanding of civility to which we subscribe in this issue of Anthropological Theory? More specifically, to what extent does Yaqub’s prolonged involvement in violent operations on behalf of an ethnic-based political party compromise his eligibility to the status of a civic actor? At this point, it seems useful to return to Balibar’s conceptualization of civility in relation to identity-based conflicts. Let us recall that the issue of violence – and more specifically of extreme violence, exceeding institutional regulations, if not political rationalities altogether – is central to Balibar’s understanding of the politics of civility. As a form of ‘antiviolence’, civility does not consist in turning away or protecting oneself from violence, but in facing up to it, and in particular to its more ‘inconvertible’ forms – those practices of ‘cruelty’ evading the conversion of violence into ‘a means of taking power and consolidating it’ (Balibar, 2015: 24; Balibar, 2002: 26). It is not immediately obvious how this particular take on civility can help us account for Yaqub’s engagement with violence. Balibar’s discussion of ‘cruelty’ remains essentially preoccupied by the institutionalization of violence, be it by the state or by revolutionary organizations. Individual perpetrators of violence and their concrete situations find no place in this discussion. Moreover, it indexes ‘cruelty’ – especially in the shape of atrocities characteristic of ethnic or religious conflict 8 – on a friend/enemy dichotomy (what Stathis Kalyvas refers to as a ‘Schmittian’ ontology of conflict (Kalyvas, 2003)) that is clearly at odds with the forms of conflictuality peculiar to Karachi. True, the political parties involved in Karachi’s turf wars have all been involved in atrocities against rivals. Until recently, these groups maintained ‘torture cells’ where their henchmen detained, maimed and killed opponents; yet these practices of cruelty never prevented political bargains and economic transactions between warring parties. Here, the surplus of violence characteristic of cruelty derived from the disjunction between the forms of violence inflicted upon rival groups and the pragmatic politics of party leaders. ‘Cruelty’, in this context, was less violence evading institutionalization than a transcendence of party politics, elevating power struggles to an absolute – that of political communities engaged in an endless fight of epic proportions against tyranny. While the rhetoric of party leaders and party literature (especially the Urdu poetry of the MQM) exemplifies and legitimizes this transcendental overdrive by celebrating excess as excess (Gayer, 2014: 95), this does not explain, however, how some party workers – and not others – became involved in performances of ultra-violence.
On the basis of a unique ethnography of a group of MQM killers, Nichola Khan has tried to make sense of these acts of extreme violence by suggesting that these young men acted in a state of ‘madness’ – a ‘collective enthrallment with atrocities’, nurtured by a political culture simultaneously deploring and relishing accounts of brutality. This interpretation bears the imprint of Khan’s training as a psychological anthropologist and, as such, tends to neglect more sociological dynamics such as the role of small group dynamics and emulation, or even competition between virtuosos of violence (Gayer, 2011; Collins, 2009). However, Khan’s account does raise an important question to make sense of dynamics that allowed some individuals, such as Yaqub, to face up to this violence without letting themselves be carried away by it. In Khan’s own words, ‘what can violence reveal about the frontiers and limits a culture or a self is open to?’ (Khan, 2017: 53). Balibar also encounters this ‘question of borders’ in his discussion of the relations between violence and civility. For him Civility essentially raises the following question: ‘where are we to set limits?’ (Balibar, 2002: 26, 138) – not only because social and territorial borders are a stage for ritualized performances of violence but also because of civility’s relation to identity and violence.
It is this part of Balibar’s discussion that interests me the most, because it may hold an important interpretative key to Yaqub’s brand of civility. What makes Yaqub’s trajectory appear so erratic, besides various contingencies beyond his control and more structural forces working to reassign him to his ‘natural’ position of marginality, is the balancing of his successive political and economic ventures by practices of self-restraint. As far as his engagement with the MQM was concerned, for instance, Yaqub consistently avoided being made into a full-time ‘shooter’ or ‘target killer’, refusing to answer the call of party leaders who invited their followers to let themselves be carried away in an ‘ecstasy of violence’ (Gayer, 2014: 95). This led him to retreat, discreetly, from certain scenes of conflict when he found that these did not fit with his war ethics – for instance when, during the street battles of 12 May 2007, he was asked to fire upon a rival group from a roadway fly-over, which he equated to the inglorious practice of ‘duck hunting’. This also explains why he kept his past experience in the army a secret from his handlers in the MQM, something which might otherwise have resulted in him being promoted to the party’s killer elite.
Both his transgressions (of hegemonic discourses on ethnic difference) and self-imposed limitations (on the use of violence as well as on his desire for economic accumulation) constitute Yaqub as an agent of civility. His cultivation of proximate relations with ethnic and religious others, as well as his repeated attempts to engage them on their own turf, pertain to what we could refer to as the promiscuous foundations of civility; that is, the felt need (and the ability) of certain groups and individuals to diversify their relationships and to sustain these engagements with others through ‘a performance of possible ad hoc sociabilities and convivialities’. As Filip De Boeck emphasizes in his work on Kinshasa, such performances tend to be short-lived, ‘but at least it gives an indication of the possibility of overcoming differences and generating temporary copresences or at least the intention thereof’ (De Boeck, 2015: S156).
No less essential, at least from the analytical perspective adopted here, is the element of self-restraint displayed by Yaqub in his engagement with violence and practices of economic accumulation. I deliberately fuse these two domains of action, not only because both the use of force and the display of greed do not sit easily with theories of civility, but also because these are largely inseparable in the context of Karachi, where political mobilizations have systematically intermeshed with forms of violent entrepreneurship. Moreover, in one of our most recent conversations, during the summer of 2017, Yaqub implicitly suggested that the sources of his restraint in matters of war and graft were the same: he did not have ‘a heart of stone’. He made this claim after we paid a visit to his latest employer – a Christian real-estate agent, with whom Yaqub had been working intermittently for about a year and with whom he had developed a severe enmity. According to Yaqub, his boss was trying to rip him off by claiming the greatest part of a 300,000 rs. commission (about €3000) on the sale of a plot in which he had played no role whatsoever. For Yaqub, his boss felt entitled to do this because, despite being a Punjabi Christian himself, he felt that he belonged to a ‘superior class’, which provided him with a sense of impunity towards weaker Christians.
While Yaqub had made good money over the preceding months selling plots in upscale gated communities being developed in the outskirts of the city – in fact, it was the first time that I saw my friend with so much cash at his disposal – this incident convinced him to call it a day. In his own words, he just ‘didn’t have what it took’ to succeed in this line of work. This statement puzzled me but, at the time, I did not pay greater attention to it. Months later, as I sat down to write these pages, far from the rumble of Karachi, I started wondering if this confession did not provide a new interpretative key to Yaqub’s ‘self-restraint’. Could it have been that what I had recently interpreted as an imperative of consistency with his ethical principles was in fact an ethics by default – a moral rationalization of his resentment at failing to be a killer, a criminal or a ruthless businessman?
Finding a response to that question is not my concern. Being the archivist of my friend’s feats and desires does not entitle me to look into his heart. Yaqub’s reaching out to me, beyond the barriers of class and status, has been an integral part of his attempts to find himself through cross-connections, which has made me a part of my data, so to speak. Taking his ethical pretensions seriously – and letting him know – has been a way for me to acknowledge the mutual dimension of our relationship, and my contribution to his moral striving. I do not claim that he always acted and spoke in good faith. Contemplating the gaps and cracks in his narrative, however, I see him as a moral subject striving to reconcile opportunism, idealism, and limited social resources. Like other disenfranchised young men navigating contemporary terrains of conflict, he is simultaneously a political actor carrying on an agenda of social reform, an economic agent with material interests, and an ethical individual striving to realize himself through particularly demanding forms of labour (Hoffman, 2011: 111–112).
The problem of mutuality
Besides the issue of intentionality – does being civil require self-conscious acts and can there be ‘wrong’ reasons for them? – every theoreticization of civility has to face the problem of mutuality. Should relations of civility necessarily be symmetrical? Then, what are we to do about the class, gender or generational identifications mediating these relations? The ‘problem of mutuality’ I have in mind, here, concerns the possibility of asymmetrical power relations masquerading as civility. These are exemplified by lopsided joking relationships, where only one side is allowed to deride the other. Such joking relationships have a long history among Karachi’s working classes and have been a benchmark of harmonious inter-ethnic relations in a particular workplace, organization or basti – all these potential sites of friction and cross-positioning for the city’s subaltern groups. In this light I would now like to discuss an incident that I was a witness to during my last visit to Karachi, in the summer of 2017.
One day, after I had spent some time at Yaqub’s house, he decided to introduce me to one of his Muslim friends. Abdullah owned a small pharmaceutical store in one of the main markets of Landhi. I already knew his brother, Asif, who worked as a part-time driver for Uber and with whom Yaqub and I had visited various touristic spots across the city. Yaqub knew the two brothers from childhood – his mother occasionally took him to buy medicine from the store – and he deeply respected their father, who had recently passed away. The late Waseem sahab, besides working as a pharmacist, was also a part-time real-estate agent and shortly before his death had been commissioned by Yaqub to identify some ‘parties’ who might be interested in buying his house, which he had wanted to sell for a long time. The deal did not materialize but Yaqub’s bond with the family remained.
After the usual introductions, we started engaging in conversation with Abdullah over a cup of tea. Soon enough, Abdullah opened up about his passion for animals. Besides the cats, chickens and goats that he had bought, he frequently provided shelter to wounded or simply malnourished stray dogs. Further, even if the small pharmacy that he had inherited from his father did not do so well, his door was always open to canine visitors in search of a meal or a cure for various ailments. Abdullah liked to photograph his pets and, soon enough, he started showing us photographs of them on his smartphone. Pictures of snow-white Persian cats and mangy pariah dogs bore testimony to his indiscriminate affection for all kinds of animals. Each of these pictures was the occasion for Abdullah to narrate the story of his encounters with these wonderful creatures.
And then, suddenly, a completely offbeat image appeared on the screen. A medium-built man with a flourishing beard was soaking his feet in a river, in what appeared to be a rural setting. Such incongruous irruptions are the rule – and the charm – of this kind of screenings, and I probably would not have paid more attention to it if Yaqub had not sarcastically commented upon it. Turning to me, he smiled and said, ‘As you can see, his relatives in the interior are real bigots [kattar]. But Abdullah’s ok, he’s not like that’. The remark was not to Abdullah’s liking. He didn’t seem very happy at having his Tablighi 9 cousin mocked in front of a foreigner whom he had just met. But he tried to put on a smile and the conversation moved back to the stray dog Abdullah had recently rescued and which, he believed, had been stolen by one of his neighbours.
Meanwhile, Yaqub seemed equally oblivious to what had just happened, although this was probably more than a simple jab between friends. By publicly deriding the faith of a Muslim, Yaqub had run the risk of provoking an outrage. In today’s Pakistan, where blasphemy laws have been used to discipline religious minorities and settle personal accounts with their members, such seemingly innocuous jokes can swiftly take an ominous turn. Nothing of the sort happened in this instance, however; and while the friendly relations between Yaqub and Abdullah prevented any further escalation – after making the ironical comment possible in the first place – there was more to this swift appeasement than met the eye.
A few days earlier Yaqub had told me that, after their father’s recent demise, he had lent some money to Abdullah and Asif, who were struggling to make ends meet. The two brothers were now indebted to my Christian friend. Besides building upon these relations of economic dependency to assert himself over his (even) less privileged friends, Yaqub was not immune to ethnic bias. Abdullah and Asif were Sindhis – a community long derided by the supposedly more ‘martial’ Punjabis as meek, effeminate and socially backward. Yaqub’s reference to the overt religiosity of Abdullah’s cousin was also an implicit commentary on the backwardness of Sindhis from ‘the interior’ (i.e. from the rural areas of the Sindh province), who tend to be perceived collectively as country bumpkins (paindoos) by non-Sindhi residents of Karachi.
This ethnographic vignette bears testimony to the complexities of inter-ethnic and cross-sectarian everyday engagements in contemporary Karachi. It speaks of a politics of civility where civility is episodically revealed and tested through its breaches, be they outward negations of the principle of equality enabling coexistence, or seemingly more innocuous ethnic jokes – a form of profanity which, as Andrew Sanchez suggests in his study of shop-floor relations in an Indian automobile plant, express a form of anti-communal sociability through a language of cultural intimacy that distances itself from the ‘politics of sanctity’ (Sanchez, 2016). In the situation sketched out above, Yaqub’s jibe transcended ethnic and religious boundaries while simultaneously acknowledging them. The very fact that he allowed himself to deride publicly the religiosity of a Muslim attested to the possibility of mutualities, however freighted they can be with unequal power. At the same time, Yaqub acknowledged the danger of this transgression, if only for the future of his relationship with Abdullah, and controlled it so as to build further intimacy with his friend (‘he is not like that’). Instead of operating through the levelling and disciplining of Karachi’s plural world, this brand of civility carries its own negation and finds itself both jeopardized and invigorated by the looming threat of discordance. This is not exclusive of certain restrictions over language, bordering on self-censorship (knowing when and what to keep silent). During our road trips with Asif, Yaqub himself would occasionally pause in the middle of a sentence and tell me that it would be better for him not to ‘talk about such things’ in front of his Muslim friends. This was especially true of controversial issues related to Christian–Muslim relations (such as conversions or blasphemy cases), but also of topics that could throw ‘a bad light’ on the Christian community (such as the corruption of Christian community leaders or the issue of drug addiction among Christian youths).
One may then wonder what is really being shared in such communities of speech, and to what extent they are not exclusionary in nature, premised as they are on a derogatory regime setting particular ethnic others apart from their peers – as Yaqub did with Abdullah. The kind of common world acknowledged through his jibe was not a universalistic one. If Abdullah could take his critique as a joke rather than an insult or, worse, an act of blasphemy deriding the majoritarian faith, it was essentially because he ‘was not like them’. While clearly demarcating the common world acknowledged here, Abdullah’s exclusion from the larger Sindhi Muslim community proceeded through what Asef Bayat refers to as a process of ‘individual differentiation in judging the other’, which in Bayat’s view provides some guarantee against sectarian divides and dissension (Bayat, 2008: 199) – provided, of course, that such differentiation is reciprocated, which once again returns us to the problem of mutuality.
What complicates this issue further, here, is the asymmetrical power relation mediating a seemingly pluralistic culture of intimacy. The two dialogical modalities of civility sketched out above – a language of excess on the edge of incivility and a language of restraint relying upon the conviction that some things are better left unsaid in front of ethnic others – are unevenly distributed across the social spectrum, including among subaltern groups. While Yaqub and his Sindhi Muslim friends are all lower-middle class residents of an impoverished neighbourhood, the fact that the two brothers were financially indebted to Yaqub – and furthermore the fact that he had given up on reclaiming that money – complicated their relationship and did not fit well with a model of civility premised on strict mutuality.
Conclusion
The ethnicization of Karachi’s politics, on the part of its political parties and violent entrepreneurs, has challenged the Pakistani state’s claim to monopolize the framing of collective identifications. At the same time, the predominance of ethno-linguistic forces in electoral politics and their violent confrontation in the streets of the city have further marginalized alternative discourses that acknowledge the place of pluralism, mutualities and cross-cutting connections in the everyday fabric of the city – those social relationships contesting the very existence of clear-cut boundaries between ethnically or religiously defined groups. Yaqub’s social and political trajectory challenges the hegemonic discourses within which he lives. Far from being an isolated case, his trajectory speaks about larger processes of cityness. Indeed, each of the social, political and economic sites explored by Yaqub along the years has been a terrain of multiplicities, beyond the core group trying to regulate them.
Yaqub’s journey also sheds light on the transformations of Karachi’s political economy over the past decades and of the multi-scalar nature of identity politics in the city. Shaped by successive waves of internal and transnational migration, by regional wars and geopolitical tension, by global supply chains and the more recent phenomenon of Uberization, Karachi is an ‘other global city’ (Mayaram, 2013). Even as various forms of transnationalism, licit and otherwise, contributed to structure the struggles for the city, these remained rooted in a local economy of scarcity, centred on the control and allocation of land, water and electricity. It is this multi-scalar urban economy that Yaqub and similar disenfranchised youths craving for upward social mobility have been navigating at great risk. On the way, they experimented with paradoxical forms of pluralism, such as those associated with violent entrepreneurs, who challenged ethnic, political or religious lines though their recruitment policies while simultaneously reinforcing them through their coercive ways and territorial strategies.
How much space did these multifarious and multi-scalar struggles for the city leave for a politics of civility, and what are we to learn from them in a comparative perspective? The kind of civility discussed in this article essentially pertains to subaltern urban populations and their circulations, with all their potential for connections and collisions. This practice of civility rests on the conviction of these marginalized populations that it requires all sorts of means and relations to take on the city. If civility and urbanity are inseparable here, it is essentially because surviving (in) the city is a matter of reaching out to others, in order to establish solidarities or to defuse everyday frictions – a reminder that coexistence is not always a peaceful affair and, on the contrary, often involves managing disputes arising from social and physical proximity. Like most residents of Yusuf Nagar, Yaqub sees conflict and the possibility of violent escalation as a fact of life. Instead of being external to violence, civility here operates within a world of violent possibilities, onto which it aims to impose some bounds.
Setting limits is indeed central to these practices of civility, which challenge exclusivist identifications without necessarily endorsing a form of cosmopolitanism or universalism. Like his partners in various political and business ventures, Yaqub remains attached to his ethno-religious background and makes a claim to morality indexed on loyalty to ‘one’s own’. What establishes these disenfranchised city dwellers as agents of civility is their repudiation of communalism – that is, of the pretension of neatly bounded communities to monopolize the affects and the interests of their members. Similarly, ‘facing up’ to violence, in situations of chronic civil strife, is a matter of drawing lines – not to restore certainty to a fuzzy moral landscape but in the sense of denying communal violence the political or aesthetic transcendence it aspires to: its surplus of meaning, its beauty in excess.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by a research grant from Sciences Po, Paris, and by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) as part of the "Conflits-TIP" project, headed by Gilles Dorronsoro between 2006 and 2009.