But historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreetlike the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”1
Naturalizing Muslim Pain
Why has injury come to govern so much of the contemporary academic discourse about Muslims? Why are pain and hurt the affective labels by which the outrage of some Muslims over disrespect for Islam are represented? Why is the response to what is loosely termed “blasphemy” used to constitute a Muslim polity by people who claim to represent “the Muslim community” and also, more surprisingly, by academic theorists? The quick answers that suggest themselves seem both obvious and inadequate: Hurt expresses the effects of the relentless racism and xenophobia faced by many Muslims in the West. It does not take much to see that after September 11, 2001, the word injury, even when conceived as discursive or “moral,” implicitly summons connotations of the physical wounds inflicted by Western-led wars on a range of countries in which Muslims are a majority. Injury and pain are the conditions of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and parts of Pakistan.
Moreover, in the academic context, in the age of identity, Muslims have to be identified by some act of affiliation. But since Muslims have now become the intellectual object against which practices assumed to be constitutive of the modern secular order are critiqued—perhaps even constituted—a mode of identification and (communitarian) subject production has to be found that cannot be coded as “choice.” For “choice” is an umbrella word by which a cluster of modern fictions—individualism, neoliberal economics, the free market—that sustain the structure of a globalized, increasingly homogenized and fundamentally inequitable late capitalist modernity are now organized together. In what one might consider the philosophical slang of capitalism, one chooses to be poor, deprived, or politically oppressed. Capitalist modernity is like the abusive lover who beats his beloved, tears streaming down his face, claiming with every brutalizing blow, you make me do this and you can stop it any time. Academic antiliberalism thus requires a way of coding Muslim affiliation in a form that cannot be read as choice; “injury” can do this work. “Injury” makes identity ontological, without being, as we shall see, precisely biological. The one word can encompass the spectrum of violence against Muslims and link that violence, discursive and physical, in a form that then speaks to the ontological status of Muslims. When adduced in response to what is sometimes called blasphemy, injury is able to connect the discursive and unbodied representational and semiotic acts that might be construed as attacks with the affective response of hurt, to enable a slide from discursive injury to embodied response.
The aim of this chapter is to think about the transnational, indeed planetary, effects of linking injury, blasphemy, religious pain, and Muslim identity together. One effect might already have become visible: Injury and pain are also the conditions of Christians, Hindus, and Jews in countries bombed by the coalition, but I have hidden the violence inflicted by Empire on non-Muslims (even the description non- produces them only through negation) in “Muslim” lands in the way I have begun this chapter. Daisy-cutters, depleted uranium, and cluster bombs are no respecters of religious difference; they do not inquire of bodies, before they tear them apart, whether they are atheist or Christian, or Bahai, or Muslim, whether they are secular, or “post,” but in bringing together religious pain, identity, and empire in my framing of the problem, I have replicated a civilizational divide and erased the violence done to minorities in these lands.
Let me begin by looking closely at two academic representations of the varieties of Muslim hurt. One is a consideration of Muslim responses to the Rushdie affair and another to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons. Both are concerned with the specificity of Muslim pain in response to insults to the Prophet of Islam.
But, first, a caveat is in order: It is crucial to distinguish the two controversies, even as furor subsequent to the publication of the Danish cartoons followed patterns established in the Rushdie affair: the riots, death threats, assertions of the embattled, intrinsically European virtues of free speech, counter-assertions of the European blindness to Europe’s own taboos (witness, the critics of the free speechers would say, the crushing oblivion meted out to Holocaust deniers), the travel of Islamists from Europe seeking solidarity in rage from Muslims elsewhere. The mockery in the cartoons is distinct from the use of a novel, by racists, to goad Muslims enraged by an “apostate” Muslim who had written a novel about apostasy and the destruction of a believer’s mind upon thinking the unthinkable, by thinking, in other words, the prohibited thoughts that can lead to apostasy.
The first example I want to consider is Tariq Modood’s discussion of Muslim pain in an essay first published in 1990 and reprinted in Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (2005). Modood argues that those who make a case for the right of publication of The Satanic Verses on the grounds of the necessity of allowing free speech simply do not understand the nature of the violence experienced by Muslims when they encounter insults to their prophet.2 Perhaps, more significantly, he wants to claim that the Rushdie affair cannot be addressed by speaking about racism:
“Fight racism, not Rushdie”: the stickers bearing this slogan were worn by many in 1989 who wanted to be on the same side as the Muslims. It was well-meant but betrayed a poverty of understanding. It is a strange idea that when somebody is shot in the leg one says, “Never mind, the pain in the elbow is surely worse.” Why should reference to the real problem of racism lessen religious pain.” (MP, 103)
The consequence of this claim for Modood is profound. He wants to reconceive the ways of thinking about how ethnic minorities inhabit Britain: “in their understanding of race, Muslims are wiser . . . than radical antiracists: in locating oneself in a hostile society one must begin with one’s mode of being, not one’s mode of oppression, for one’s strength flows from one’s mode of being” (MP, 107). Of course, for Modood, the mode of being is Muslim and should not be confused with racial or regional self-understanding. It could be said, then, that what is conceived as hostile is, in fact, produced by the mode of being. The specificity of the injury has to do with the specificity of Muslim self-constitution. Even more so it has to do with forms of devotion particularly strong among South Asian Muslims of rural, peasant background (MP, 106–7). Antiracists simply fail, then, when they demand other forms of political solidarity, or when they subsume Muslim pain to racist anger. Modood is insistent that this mode of veneration of Muhammad is quite distinct to South Asians. In addition, it is important, according to Modood, to remember that, aside from Teheran, the demonstrations were held in Johannesburg, Bradford, Bombay, and Islamabad (MP, 106).
At the same time the social conditions in Britain and India exacerbate the pain (he does not mention Pakistan here):
It was not the exploration of the religious doubt but the lampooning of the Prophet that provoked the anger. This sensitivity has nothing to do with Qur’anic fundamentalism but with South Asian reverence of Muhammad (deemed by many Muslims, including fundamentalists, to be excessive) and cultural insecurity as experienced in Britain and even more profoundly in India. (MP, 106)
So social oppression is important, but it should not be coded in terms borrowed from the racists because of the distinctness of South Asian Muslim immigrant identity. My suggestion that injury is a useful term because of racism would not be quite right according to Modood because it misrecognizes the ontology—the mode of being—that is the source of this Muslim group’s identity. Although Modood does not specify the group, presumably he means to refer to Barelvi attachment to the Prophet. To the extent that this group is denied rights and persecuted, the persecution feeds sensitivity that is already in place because of this very particular form of regionally identified reverence. More than fifteen years later, it is significant that in his response to the Danish cartoons Modood does not emphasize religious pain or a South Asian aspect of a particularly intense form of very personalized religious devotion. He does point out that arguments such as his have become normalized since the publication of The Satanic Verses, as evinced by the fact that many British papers did not reprint the cartoons. It is a normalization in which Modood has played an important role; and, for his contribution, he has been recognized by the British government with an MBE.
Saba Mahmood, too, talks about religious pain in her essay on the Danish political cartoons, although she does not cast the veneration Muslims feel for the Prophet as merely regional. Her discussion of religious pain is reprinted (from Critical Inquiry) in a volume called Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, whose contributors include some of the most vociferous critics of secular liberalism on the theoretical scene: Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, and, of course, Talal Asad.3
As is to be expected, Mahmood’s is a more theoretically inclined discussion than Modood’s; it also has a different conceptual prompt. Mahmood was “compelled,” she says, to write the essay because of the “immediate resort to juridical language” by all sides in the controversy (RR, 36). Both defenses of the cartoons and opposition to it “remained rooted in ‘identity politics’ (Western versus Islamic) that privileges the state and the law as the ultimate adjudicator of religious difference.” Mahmood’s project, then, is to “think critically about the ethical and political questions elided in the immediate resort to the law” (RR, 67). Mahmood is insistent that her aim is not to “provide a more authoritative model” for understanding Muslim anger over the cartoons since the motives for the protests were “notoriously heterogenous” and cannot be explained through a “single causal narrative” but instead to “push us to consider why such little thought has been given in academic and public debate to what constitutes moral injury in our secular world today” (RR, 70).
It might not be unfair to say, then, that the object of intellection in the essay is something called a “modern secular order.” More interestingly, to the extent that all current law is modern, it is also secular and liberal. This is evident in Mahmood’s discussion of Hussein Agrama’s analysis of the Abu Zayd trial, in which the Egyptian state incorporated a notion of hisba from classical Sharia but in which the form it took apparently “differed dramatically” in that it came “to be articulated with the concept of public order and the state’s duty to uphold the morals of the society in congruence with the Islamic tradition” (RR, 87). What’s most significant to Mahmood is the “striking resemblance between the Egyptian legal argument and those of the ECtHR” in the case of the Otto-Preminger-Institut versus Austria (RR, 87), where the court upheld the Austrian decision to ban a film offensive to “Christian sensibilities” (RR, 84). In both cases, Mahmood sees the law as upholding majoritarian interests—as she does in the case of the ECtHR decision to uphold a Turkish ban on a book deemed offensive to the majority Muslim population (RR, 87). So Muslims, who resort to the law, simply “remain blind” to the normative disposition of secular-liberal law to majority culture (RR, 88). Since Mahmood does not say so, I do not know if she believes that there is a nonsecular, nonmodern, illiberal juridical tradition that does not privilege the majority or if this is a problem that is constitutive of the law itself. In other words, it’s not clear if there is something in the very process of the codification necessary to law that then simply means that law favors order—emanates perhaps from the need for order—and that order itself can only be maintained by catering to a majority whose cooperation is its necessary adhesive force. On this reading, codification requires normalization and normalization requires social adhesion, which can only be achieved by catering to, perhaps even morally bribing, the majority. In the conceptual terrain in which Mahmood’s argument is articulated an attendant and crucial question is: What precisely is an illiberal state in modernity?
As it stands, it seems as if the interchangeability of secular, modern, and liberal marks the redundancy of secularism as a descriptor. What is really being contested, then, is the structure of actually existing institutions, which by the fact of their currentness are secular. Moreover, all those interchangeable things are also Protestant-Christian “in contour.” If the argument seems a little circular, it does because it is.4
The other side of Mahmood’s argument is the explanation of moral injury, and how Muslims experience it. The argument is motivated as an address to liberal confusion. “Moral injury,” as felt in the Danish cartoon controversy, is something liberals don’t understand, and to them it must be made intelligible. Interestingly enough, the person who is presented as most baffled is Tariq Ali, liberal only in some rather philosophically elastic conceptual universe and increasingly a reluctant proponent of radical Muslim groups, like the Taliban, for their “anti-imperialist” tendencies; in this way the argument accrues and grows, gathering different groups and persons of various affiliations, so it includes progressives, liberals, or anyone who does not get it, yoked together by a puzzled secular orientation. Mahmood’s project is to show a way out of such puzzlement.
The conceptual resources Mahmood draws upon to explain how Muslims experience the moral injury that leads to religious pain come with a peculiar inadvertency. There is a certain care with which Mahmood points out that there were “heterogenous impulses” at play in the controversy and that no “single causal narrative” can explain the events that ensued upon the publication of the cartoons; and yet, despite these cautions and caveats, a figure of a “devout” Muslim is produced in negative contrast to whatever is modern, liberal, secular, Protestant. This contrast, then, stabilizes a notion of a Muslim identity constituted by religious pain and a particular susceptibility to the kind of moral injury sustained in the Danish political cartoon affair. The stabilization occurs as a consequence of Mahmood’s procedure in establishing why the moral injury is unintelligible to the puzzled, and of the way she produces a map of the impasse between liberal confusion and Muslim pain through an account of what she designates a “semiotic ideology.” This semiotic ideology, then, is what separates the two sides in the controversy and makes moral injury unintelligible to those of a secular, liberal disposition.
In order to explain how this ideology functions, and to provide a way of transcending its limitations, Mahmood turns to Webb Keane’s work on Protestant missionaries, W. J. T Mitchell’s notion of images and icons, and Kenneth Parry’s discussion of Aristotelian notions of schesis and their use in the second Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. It is an impressive, even dizzying, marshaling of secondary conceptual resources. Keane’s work on Protestant missionaries enables the insight that there are limits to a Protestant “semiotic ideology,” most clearly evinced by the “shock” experienced by “proselytizing missionaries” on first contact with natives for whom material objects were invested with “divine agency.” These natives apparently considered the exchange of material objects an “ontological extension of themselves.” In the process they managed to dissolve the “distinction between persons and things” (RR, 72). The missionaries’ “dismay” at the “moral consequences” of “native epistemological assumptions” has “resonances with the bafflement many liberals and progressives express at the scope and depth of Muslim reaction over the cartoons today” (RR, 72–73).
A way out of this confusion is ostensibly offered by Mitchell’s understanding of icons. Mitchell’s insistence that vision is not reducible to “language, or sign, or discourse” and that the field of “visual reciprocity” is constitutive of social reality is of great use to Mahmood (RR, 71). Mahmood’s gloss on this is to suggest that “not all semiotic forms follow the logics of meaning, communication, or representation” (RR, 71). This explains, then, the inability of liberals and missionaries to understand what precisely it is that images do. The point for Mahmood is that “a devout Muslim’s relationship to Muhammad is predicated on an “assimilative” model rather than a “communicative or representative” one (RR, 76). This devout Muslim’s relationship with the Prophet is based not just on following his utterances as collected in the form of the hadith but instead on emulation. In what is essentially an explanation of how Sunnah functions, she describes how “devout Muslims” “try to emulate how he dressed; what he ate; how he spoke to his friends and adversaries; how he slept, and so on” (RR, 75). At this point, an astonishingly sacramental quality creeps into Mahmood’s prose: “These mimetic ways of realizing the Prophet’s behaviour are lived not as commandments but as virtues where one wants to ingest, as it were, the Prophet’s persona into oneself” (RR, 75; italics mine). This is remarkably and significantly in line with discussions of affective piety and traditions of imitatio Christi. The metaphor of “ingestion” seems to derive from a notion of communion, shared by the Eastern and Catholic Churches, except that in this context the transformation it theorizes sets up a bodily merge between Muhammad and devout Muslims, instead of Christ and Christians.
Mahmood’s metaphor also reminds us of the intellectual contexts of the 1980s and 1990s that saw a resurgence of interest in European Catholicism and premodern notions of Christianity. It is this milieu, which must also, I think, be taken into account when the framing of contemporary arguments about religion is being analyzed. Talal Asad’s work is very much part of this intellectual moment. A fundamental conceptual strut of Mahmood’s position is based on an argument Asad popularized in the late 1980s. He suggested it is a modern and thus, on Asad’s terms, necessarily colonially inflected concept of religion that suggests that religion requires belief and assent to a set of propositions. Asad is perhaps one of the major disseminators of a critique of this concept of religion, particularly as it may pertain to misunderstandings of Islam and very much a part of the intellectual context of the fin de siècle of the twentieth century. For Mahmood, one of the reasons liberals and Protestants do not understand native/Muslim (the conflation is slowly consolidated) attachment to images or religious figures is that they are too reliant on this Protestant-modern notion of religion.5 Mahmood’s metaphor of ingestion is the very antinomy of this ostensibly modern notion of religion. Ingestion gives you transmuted being, not discursive belief. But as Mahmood’s metaphor makes clear such a critique of modern religion is itself part of a certain Christian nostalgia that undergirds the contemporary turn to religion, and links it also to another, Modernist, context. The idea of a different, unruptured mode of religious identification, one that overcomes relations between subject and object, thought and feeling is what T. S. Eliot argues for when he laments the “dissociation of sensibility” that ostensibly sets in at the end of the seventeenth century. Once we remember the Modernist context, even the turn to Byzantium seems overdetermined—one has only to think of Yeats.6 As I suggested in the previous chapter, the intellectual formation of which Asad and Mahmood are leading proponents is as much driven by Modernist and Anglo-Catholic anti-Reformation thought as it is by Weberian conceptions of the relation between the rise of Protestantism and the consolidation of the modern capitalist order.
Mahmood supplements the notion of ingestion with Kenneth Parry’s reading of the importance of Aristotelian notions of schesis in Byzantine iconophilia in the second iconoclastic controversy. What this reading of Byzantine Christianity is supposed to offer is a precedent for understanding modes of identification between subject and object of veneration that do not attribute arbitrariness to the attachment between image and deity or native and image/object. A different model of relation along with the metaphor of ingestion allows for completion of a different semiotic ideology—one that can provide a counter to the liberal-Protestant version.
It is particularly the iconophiles’ defense of their doctrine of “consubstantiality” against charges of idolatry that interests Mahmood. The relation between image and deity is one, as she presents it, in her reading of Parry of “homonymy and hypostasis: the image and deity are two in nature and essence but identical in name” (RR, 77). In order to explain this further, Mahmood turns, very briefly, to a historian: “In the words of the historian Marie-José Mondzain, to be the ‘image of’ is to be in a living relation to” (RR, 77). Mahmood’s expansion of this is that schesis “captures this living relation because of its heightened psychophysiological and emotional connotations and its emphasis on familiarity and intimacy as a necessary aspect of the relation” (RR, 77).
What one might expect after this is a discussion of images of Muhammad and their living relation to the Prophet and of the Danish political cartoons as some particularly offensive perversion of such iconographic impulses, since Mahmood has already told us it is not the representation per se in the cartoons that is objectionable—an argument, in any case, that would be hard to sustain given Mahmood’s conceptual recourse to iconophilic rather than iconoclastic thought. But Mahmood has also already set up the meaning of icon as metaphorical and not literal: an icon is not just an image; it can also be “a cluster of meanings” that can suggest “a persona, an authoritative presence, or even a shared imagination” (RR, 74). The icon is thus “a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or imaginary” (RR, 74).7 In any case, once the icon is established as any sanctified relation between entities, things, or persons, it is perhaps not a complete surprise when Mahmood takes the template of Parry’s discussion of Byzantine uses of schesis to apply to the relation between Muhammad and the Muslim rather than Muhammad and his image. Mahmood begins the paragraph that follows the one about the relation between image and deity with the following sentence, and it is the execution of the shift that intrigues me here: “What interests me in the iconophile tradition is not so much the image as the concept of relationality that binds the subject to the object of veneration” (RR, 77). At this point, it is not at all clear whether the relation in question is between the image and the deity, which is what the preceding sentence is about, or between Muhammad and the believer. What, in other words, is the object of veneration here? Is the relation of image to deity a relation of veneration? Moreover, is image to the Muslim as Muhammad is to the deity? How does one map one relation onto the other without careful elucidation? Is the Muslim, on these terms, the image of Muhammad?
The passage that follows is, in my view, one of the two cruces of the essay, and in it Mahmood begins to attempt to clear the way for what is nothing less than a new theory of Muslim worship. I will quote it at length.
This modality of relationship is operative in a number of traditions of worship and often coexists in some tension with other dominant ideologies of perception and religious practice. The three Abrahamic faiths adopted a range of key Aristotelian and Platonic concepts and practices that were often historically modified to fit the theological and doctrinal requirements of each tradition. In contemporary Islam, these ideas and practices, far from becoming extinct, have been reconfigured under conditions of new perceptual regimes and modes of governance—a reconfiguration that requires serious engagement with the historical relevance of these practices in the present.
Schesis aptly captures not only how a devout Muslims relationship to Muhammad is described in Islamic devotional literature but also how it is lived and practiced in various parts of the Muslim world. (RR, 77)
It is still not clear which modality of relation is at play here, or even before we get to its modality, which relation is at stake here. Is it the relation between image and deity or prophet and follower? Or both, or is it that one can substitute for the other?
The more intriguing line running through this passage is the quiet creation of this mode of Muslim worship as nondominant, and potentially a minority, within Muslim global practice—a minority also within a group of Muslims who start out in the article as the offended minority within Europe. At the same time, Mahmood’s procedure allows for the creation of this mode of worship as potentially representative because it is intended to explain “religious” and “Muslim” pain, not the pain of some Muslims. As Mahmood will argue later in the article, it is in relation to this, not necessarily representative, form of Muslim self-constitution that the “Judeo-Christian sensibilities that undergird secular liberal law” might have to be changed in order to accommodate the Muslim minority in Europe. (I will return to this fascinating moment later.) In this passage, the modes of devotion Mahmood describes in the essay are “new” “reconfigurations” at odds with “dominant” largely unnamed ideologies, and these modes are not confined to European Muslims—the prime players in the controversy. In fact, some of the most important mobilizers in the Danish cartoon affair are not mentioned at all.8 It turns out that these modes of worship are spread through a variety of largely unspecified Muslim contexts—although as a source of evidentiary material, Egypt runs large through the article and its footnotes.
Mahmood is creating a new-old Muslim mode, which names a global polity through a complexly analogical procedure. What Byzantium offers is a precedent for understanding antiliberal/ anti-Protestant modes of identification between subject and object of veneration. The use of Aristotelian notions of relation combined with the metaphor of ingestion allows for the completion of a different semiotic ideology. This counter-ideology could be said to comprise a Catholic-Byzantine mode of thinking as opposed to a Protestant one. An intriguing side effect is a remerging of the Eastern and Catholic Churches through the creation of a Byzanto-Catholic Islam offered in response to modern/liberal/Protestant/secularism, and created through this analogical assembling of a semiotic counter-ideology. There is a reciprocal creation, thus, of a counter-Enlightenment, even Counter-Reformation, mode of European affective, constitutively embodied, thought offered as a mode of antisecular, anti-Protestant, antiliberal religiosity and of a Muslim mode of affective embodied devotion and ethical thinking also offered as a mode of antisecular, antiliberal, anti-Protestant being. These modes of thought and being are both connected through Abrahamic variations on Platonic and Aristotelian thought and illuminated through an assemblage of Catholic-Byzantine concepts.
In addition, what this recourse to Byzantium and ingestion and icon also enables is for Mahmood to assert that to insult the Prophet is to actually hurt a Muslim. In other words, to inflict a pain a Muslim has no choice but to feel, or perhaps only the devout or the nondominant Muslim has no choice but to feel. Those who adhere to the “normative conception of religion as belief” tend to assume that “the epistemological status of religious belief” is “speculative” and thus “less ‘real’” than the materiality of race and biology” (RR, 81). Mahmood aims to reconceptualize the materiality of “religious belief” in order to explain the nature of the injury felt by Muslims. Religious offense is moral injury that causes a pain it would be wrong to see as merely psychic (hence the term psychophysiological) and is in fact akin to racial assault but not entirely reducible to it, yet the pain turns anything perceived as offensive into physiological as well as psychic attack—that the theological premise of such identification itself might be considered idolatrous, and thus hugely suspect, by radical, militant, yet minority (depending on regional and national context), or state-sanctioned or state-complicit branches of Sunni Islam is something that she registers only in her passing invocation of dominant ideologies.9
The form of the analogical procedure here works not only to produce an affinity between colonizing missionaries and present-day liberals and progressives but also to occlude the iconoclasm of many contemporary and historical forms of Islam, including those professed by many of the actors in the Danish cartoon controversy. Would the dismay of the Protestant missionaries have been distinct from that of Muslims encountering Hindu “idols” or Muhammad’s relation with “false gods” in Mecca? What are we to make of the Taliban’s hostility, bafflement, or, for that matter, affective response to the Bamiyan statues or the Saudi establishment’s hostility to the pilgrims who look for graves of revered figures from the Muslim past in Mecca and Medina, an act that is considered idolatrous by the establishment. In other words, who is akin to the missionary here, and how many degrees of separation does that confer from the liberals? What of the desecration of Muhammad’s gravestone by the Wahhabis as far back as 1804?10 What also of those who today blow up Sufi shrines, or attack Shia Ta’aziyeh processions? Can liberal “bafflement” be shamed into understanding by an embarrassing, or worse, genealogical association? Can, in turn, such a procedure externalize a notion of an iconoclastic “semiotic ideology”—shared by segments of modern and early Islam and, equally, resisted and transformed by other segments—as somehow only an arid symptom of a liberalism or modernity or secularism, or all of the above (at this point I am simply not sure what to call it), Protestant-Christian in its contours? In other words, can an Islam conceived in Byzantine-Catholic terms, stabilized by opposition to liberal, Protestant, secular modernity, do away with some of the most intense and consequent divisions, precisely over icons and iconic attitudes, in a range of diasporic and Muslim-majority contexts today?11 As we shall see in the next chapter, the use of aesthetic iconic traditions from Catholicism and Byzantium is instead being used to contest neo-orthodox Islamism, which is frequently perceived to have radically iconoclastic impulses. A more interesting question might be: How does a presumptively Barelvi notion of Islam—referred to by Modood in the context of The Satanic Verses—merge with Wahhabist, Salafist, and perhaps even Deobandi strands in the metropolitan context, and how are the Wahhabi influence and colonial context of Deobandism forgotten? In other words, it might be worth pausing over how the historical affinities and differences are reswirled into just “Islam” in the metropole.
If the production of this countersemiotics is to enable better, and equal, coexistence across lines of “religious difference” it raises a host of difficulties. The “devout Muslim” produced through an analysis of his or her “religious pain” is one who feels an injury unintelligible to liberal, modern, Protestant seculars, shares a relation to icons and iconic objects and imaginaries that are akin to, and even share, Byzantine-Aristotelian notions of the icon, manifests a late-twentieth-century semiotic theory advanced by Mitchell and an epistemology (held by tribal natives) akin to that which confused early Protestant missionaries. But this Muslim then gets to stand in as representative for Muslims in general, and his or her pain is invited to begin to set guidelines for how Europe should learn to deal with its migrants.
In the second of, what I think of as, the two cruces of this essay, Mahmood brings together the antilegalism of her critique of secular modernity and the consequences of her explication of moral injury and Muslim pain. She argues, as against positions advocated by Modood, that Muslims who turn to the court or to the state simply do not understand that to turn this kind of injury into a legally prosecutable crime is to fundamentally transform or destroy that very “religiosity.” Given its predication on entirely different conceptions of the “subject religiosity, harm and semiosis” to turn it over to the “logic of civil law is to promulgate its demise (rather than to protect it)” (RR, 88). This leads, then, to what is either the bold naming of an impasse or the equally bold, though implicit, suggesting of a solution:
Ultimately, the future of the Muslim minority in Europe depends not so much on how secular-liberal protocols of free speech might be expanded to accommodate its concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the Judeo-Christian population that undergird the cultural practices of secular-liberal law. (RR, 89)
Since secular-liberal law, even when it upholds Muslim majoritarian interests (as in the ECtHR decision in the case of Turkey), is Judeo-Christian at the level of “cultural and ethical sensibility,” it will, in fact, transform Muslim religiosity. I am not interested here in disagreeing with Mahmood on the efficacy, let alone ethics or politics, of turning to the law to impose various forms of censorship; I am interested in trying to understand what, if anything, is being advocated. Since Muslims apparently share some sensibilities with Jews and Christians, which sensibilities would require transformation on the terms of the essay? Should Jews and Christians become less Jewish and Christian? Should Christians become iconophilic affiliates of the Eastern Church or more Catholic? What are Jews to do? Is it instead that the underpinnings of the law need to become more Eastern Christian/Catholic and thus potentially more Muslim? Since it is the shared, if refracted, Aristotelian and Platonic strands of thought that run through the Abrahamic religions which are used to explain Muslim practice, it is not clear whether law has to become less Judeo-Christian or more in line with the kind of Islam in line with aspects of law assumed to be more consonant with anti-Protestant strains of Christianity.
The problem manifest here runs through the essay. When I try to describe Mahmood’s analogical procedure, I am not at all suggesting that it is comparison per se that ought not be undertaken. Neither do I wish to deny similarities and continuities between the three religions. Of course, there are shared philosophical traditions and theological impulses in the three Abrahamic religions, and to the extent that both Asad and Mahmood are attentive to these, the turn to religion of which they are part is intellectually useful. But my intention is rather to question the way in which Mahmood’s procedure covers divisions within societies and turns them into historical monoliths, which so conceptualized are then made to do analogical work that, in turn, occludes consequent divisions and the complexity of political formations in the present. A procedure that shows the contestations that attend repeated divisions over icons and iconoclastic thought in Byzantine and Western Christian societies—the iconoclastic controversies and post-Reformation struggles—that shows how similar divisions are lived in Muslim contexts, and how they might be reproduced through contact and emulation in different Islamicate societies and diasporic contexts, is very different from a procedure that uses anticolonial and anti-imperial sentiment in order to stabilize (and create) monolithic identities even while parenthetically disavowing such monolithicism.
Moreover, my point is not at all to question Mahmood’s skepticism about enshrining anti-Protestant religious impulses into civil law (which she has also suggested is immanently Protestant), or to question her mention, in passing, of the problem of the nation-state as it cross-cuts the issue of minorities. Indeed, once one shifts locations, critiques of the entwinement between religious concepts and law, foregroundings of the problem of the nation-state’s relationship with minorities—especially as it intersects with colonial history, postcolonial crisis, and a newly explicit imperialism—acquire crucial though very different, if connected, valences. It is to these that I would now like to turn.
Regimes of Feeling
In the context of Pakistan, the question of the relationship between minority, identity, and law gets at the very heart of the problematic of the postcolonial nation-state. The battle around what is called the “blasphemy law,” although the word “blasphemy” does not occur in it, confronts us with the most challenging questions that comprise the predicament of the postcolonial state: how are institutions to be formed or re-formed in the context of decolonization? How are the configurations of law and sensibility within structures of colonialism to be rethought, or even undone? In the age of renewed religious nationalism, how are we to configure, or for that matter even recognize, what is indigenous? How is religious indigeneity to be secured? What is its relation with religious orthodoxy?
Postcolonial critics and theorists of South Asia have tended to focus on the Indian state’s relation with religion and religious minorities. From this perspective it is the avowedly secular state’s failure to incorporate religious minorities, while honoring their difference, that marks the limit or failure of secularization. According to Gauri Viswanathan’s subtle and inflected account of belief and conversion in modernity, secularization in India has always been a “fraught process,” in large part because parliamentary reform has not been able to absorb religious minorities as “citizens.”12 For Viswanathan this is because, in India, state formation is “basically incorporation of the subjects into a colonial state”; after independence this process transforms into absorption into a “hegemonic state in which the social relations sanctioned by colonialism continue virtually uninterrupted.”13 The continuities between the colonial and postcolonial state are important. Equally important, however, is that religious conflicts in South Asia seem also to have intensified in ways that reveal the reconfigurations of power in the post-Independence states. In the Indian context the destruction of the Babri mosque and the violence in Gujrat may be the most extreme signatures of this intensification. These postcolonial reconfigurations invite more sustained study of majoritarian action, agency, and responsibility within the not quite new nation-states.
The postcolonial state’s combination of rupture and continuity with the colonial state requires more work on what the postcolonial state has added to these social relations, and the global, Cold War context of these additions. In Pakistan, the Sunni Muslim majority has come increasingly to define the denominational inflection of the state; and the marginalization of minorities as citizens does not emanate from the failure of state-sponsored secularization to ensure “absorption.” It issues instead from attempts to secure the religious underpinning of the postcolonial state, under conditions of the large-scale, Cold War–enabled decimation and neutralization of progressives opposed to these attempts, combined with the addition of the sensibilities of a specific religion to penal laws designed to manage colonial populations by letting them have their religion. Increasingly, it is a state with a particular Islamic inflection that deprives minorities of their status as citizens, sometimes because it is attempting to secure a particular meaning of Islam and to create a proper Muslim persona—by way of the control of the image of the Prophet—in and through the structures of the state. The most powerful instrument of this consolidation has been a military government’s addition of a series of amendments to British penal law. The centrality of the military’s shaping of state structures itself invites a more sustained conceptualization of the praetorian element in structures of governmentality than is possible here. The peculiar combinatory of normalization through the juridical sphere of the law and the sovereign power of the military in the process of promulgating the law throws up a paradox, for it suggests the normalization of the exceptional. The military’s relationship to the National Assembly during the Zia period, and more generally over the national history, suggests the ongoing necessity of conceptualizing the role of structures of state, including militaristic ones, in the formation of the juridical sphere.
Viswanathan has been critical of the reduction of religion to “wounded sentiments” in the Rushdie affair and has, in my view, rightly seen a recourse to the language of the wound as a “permissible secular gesture” that has the virtue of not “pandering to religious absolutism” on which these sentiments are based.14 Such a privileging of “the subjectivity of sentiment over the objectivity of creed steers clear of antiheretical presumptions while still holding fast to the ideal of cultural relativism.”15 It is not incompatible with Viswanathan’s argument to emphasize that, in the Anglophone context, the language of the wound, when invoked in relation to the religions of South Asian former subject populations, issues from colonial law, shaped in turn by the need to produce a governable population.
It is, of course, not surprising to say that the protection afforded the religious feelings of the colonial subject is entangled with the need to produce a more governable polity and that such governance was assumed to require managing relations between the different religious populations of the Indian subcontinent. As far back as 1785, in his oft-quoted preface to Charles Wilkin’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, drawing upon the idiom of English sentimentalism, Warren Hastings connected the “conciliation” of “distant affections” with the “exercise of dominion.” The mode of this conciliation was the gathering and dissemination of local knowledge; it was indeed in the guise of what one might characterize as a certain “respect” for indigenous religious knowledge that the consolidation of colonialism was to occur:
Every accumulation of knowledge and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity: in the specific instance which I have stated, it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the heart of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence.16
What is often emphasized in the discussion of colonial law is the production of knowledge and its relation with colonial conquest.17 A more systematic understanding of the colonial production of religious affect and its imbrication with the institutions of religious knowledge, “custom,” and code is also required. The relation between sentiment and subjection would underpin an emphasis on indigenous law and custom, and this foundational entanglement of affect and the consolidation of conquest was to prove extraordinarily consequential in the codification of Hinduism and Islam in India. The explicit entanglement of knowledge, the “right of conquest,” and the need to find a way to win over the affections of the people in Hastings’s introduction is remarkable. The production of such conciliating knowledge is also part of the project of a creation of a fiction of reciprocity in the figure of colonial “benevolence” to be imprinted on the “heart” of the English. This benevolence is to be fortified by the “virtue” rather than the “ability” of the employees of the East India Company, for it is on this virtue that the Company must rely for the “permanency of their [sic] dominion.”18 English virtue and the conciliation of native affection are to remain forever connected. Bernard Cohn has made the case that Hastings invented the emblematic figure of British imperialism, the colonial administrator who knows the natives.19 One might add that the political use and efficacy of this figure lies in his anthropological knowledge of native difference, a knowledge undergirded by a blend of benevolence, virtue, conciliation, and domination. The anthropological administrator thus invented is a sentimental figure.
That this sentimental idiom would explode into Burke’s sensational rhetoric, which was attended by visions of abject Indian suffering and famously of female bodies, wrenched from homes made sanctuaries by religion, so brilliantly discussed in Sara Suleri’s seminal essay on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, is a symptom of the ubiquity of the idiom in the formation of “imperial sensibilities,” even in their ostensibly critical guise.20
The law configures the subject population as a body to be engaged and humored (“conciliated” one might say) at the level of feeling; that is, it produces an understanding of the native’s relation with religion as a series of affects, a mesh of feelings rather than principled commitments or propositions, even as the knowledge produced in colonial institutions fixes and codifies religious practice and belief. On the terms of the colonial state, it is these feelings that required protective governance; the penal code is to assist in the management of the realm of native emotion. Conquest and plunder were to be followed by conciliation.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the first draft of the code was authored by a law commission chaired by Thomas Macaulay in 1837.21Sentimentalism and liberalism converged in the juridical sphere of the colony, shaping the discourses of law and knowledge, creating religious affect as a mesh of relations of power—of the colonizer to dispense the salve and of the colonized to demand and exercise power by avowing religious feeling—and, in the postcolonial aftermath, enabling the discursive power of the praetorian state under Zia-ul-Haq, whose addition of five amendments to the British colonial code is central to the state’s attempted capture of its citizens’ Muslim persona—indeed, to its creation of an affective sphere in which every citizen is required to develop a relation of feeling to the icons of Islam chosen by the state.
Of the four articles in the chapter (XV) pertaining to “Offences Against Religion” in the Indian Penal Code of 1860, two explicitly invoke religious feelings. In article 297, the object is to protect “funeral ceremonies,” places of burial, potential desecrations of the dead from people who have “the intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person, or of insulting the religion of any person, or with the knowledge that the feelings of any person are likely to be wounded, or that the religion of any person is likely to be insulted thereby, commits any trespass” in any place that might be associated with burial or funeral ceremonies.22
In article 298 the solicitude for the religious feelings of the colonized is more central to the juridical aim:
Uttering words, &c., with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person.
Whoever, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person utters, any word or makes any sound in the hearing of that person, or makes any gesture in the sight of that person, or places any object in the sight of the person, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both. (IPC, 139)
The only amendment added by the colonial government (295–A) in 1927 was in response to the conflict that ensued upon the publication of the pamphlet, Rangīlā Rasūl (The Libertine Prophet), when the article most explicitly committed to containing communal public disorder was deemed inadequate to convict the author of the text.23
The original article 295 reads as follows:
Injuring or defiling a place of worship, with intent to insult the religion of any class:
Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons, or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defilement as an insult to their religion shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both. (IPC, 138)
Amendment 295-A adds outraging “religious feelings” back into the article where in the original article the crime is “intent to insult.” Perhaps most significantly, it links these feelings to religious “beliefs.” In the Pakistan Penal Code, the substitution of “the citizens of Pakistan” for “His Majesty’s subjects” for those whose religious feelings need to be protected establishes it as the most ecumenical of the amendments, for, unlike the post-Independence amendments, it configures those who can be injured as Pakistani and not only Muslim:
Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs:
Whoever with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of the citizens of Pakistan, by words, either spoken or written or by visible representations insults the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, or with fine, or with both. (PPC).
Reading the language of the colonial code helps dispel a certain confusion that might have been felt around the Rushdie affair, the rhetorical field of which comes increasingly to seem like part of the long afterlife of colonial law. At the time, commentators, such as Roald Dahl, critical of Rushdie, were prone to say that Rushdie “knew” what he was doing. One might have wondered: What is it that he should have known? What was the stake of such knowledge? Why, in an age that was otherwise so comfortable with the unconscious prompts of speech, action, or writing, was knowing so important? Article 295 clarifies the genealogy of that use: in the article, the punishment is for anyone who acts “with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defilement as an insult to their religion.” Article 295-A adds the written text to the list of injury-causing objects. It becomes clear that knowing as conscious knowledge, as that which should have activated a prohibition within himself that would have negated Rushdie’s writing of the novel, is related to the legal requirement of “intention” that, in these articles, attends prosecution. “Knowing” in this context suggests a normalization of the law, the linguistic adaptation of the juridical aim of containing trangression and keeping social order while managing unruly subject populations. “Knowing” also relies on an assumption that as a former “native,” Rushdie has particular access to the feelings of his people and is thus particularly culpable. This proximity then ensures his status as traitor.
Lingering access to the language of the law, shaped by complex processes of historical diffusion, feeds into contemporary British policies of official multiculturalism that seek to turn the management of Britain’s racially different populations over to religious community leaders, and into also the recourse to the notion of religious pain by a proponent of state-sponsored multiculturalism such as Modood, which then is explained in its “Muslim” variation, almost two decades later, by a Foucault-inspired critic of legalism such as Mahmood.24
After Independence, the colonial laws come to play a complex role in securing the identity of the nation as Muslim. In their current form, the Pakistani laws regarding offenses against religion, consisting of five amendments added under the military dictator General Zia-ul Haq and the original articles and one amendment of chapter XV of the colonial code, represent an attempt to fill in a particular Islamic content to the religious feelings mentioned in the original code. They do not represent an erasure of colonial liberalism’s protection of the natives from religious pain, simply its attachment to a particular group. The praetorian state attempts the creation of the proper Muslim persona and its relation to Muhammad through military-executive fiat, that is, through the militarized sovereignty of the state, through, in effect, the militarized control and production of iconography and of the citizen’s relations with icons and iconic objects. Perhaps the amendments that do so most explicitly are the ones pertaining to the Prophet and his family:
295-C: Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine. (PPC)
The first amendment to 298—the article originally most directly concerned with protecting religious feelings from being wounded—specified that those who are not to be insulted include the family, the caliphs (in a clause that seems intended to target Shias who tend to be critical of the first three caliphs), and the friends of the Prophet, using the same language of implication and innuendo: “Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred names of any wife (Ummul Mumineen), or members of the family (Ahle-bait), of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him), or any of the righteous Caliphs (Khulafa-e-Rashideen) or companions (Sahaaba) of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him)” (PPC). The punishment is imprisonment of up to three years, a fine, or both.
It is 295-C that is usually referred to as the “blasphemy law,” when the term is used in the singular, and one might argue that it represents an attempt to give full juridical force to attachments to Muhammad. The ones that also incurred life imprisonment (295-B and 295-C) and, in the case of insults to Muhammad (295-C), now the death penalty, are used disproportionately in accusation against Christians. The vagueness of its language makes it a particularly useful weapon in the hands of those seeking to settle petty disputes.25 The mandatory death sentence, added under Nawaz Sharif’s first government, suggests that it is this very vagueness of “Imputation, insinuation, and innuendo, directly or indirectly,” that requires the punishment of death in the framing of the amendment, as if the ephemerality of the accusation demands the ultimate corporeal finality for its complete and proper embodiment, perhaps even its reality—as if only the death of the accused can secure the truth of the accusation.26 The refraction of the spirit of the law in the social imaginary is represented by the fact that although none of the accused have been executed by the state, many have been murdered during trial or on release. The addition of the two amendments to the one added after the Rangīlā Rasūl controversy reveals a haunting of the Pakistani imaginary by a colonial history of religious strife, a trauma endlessly to be replayed on the bodies of the nation’s minorities. The minority’s identity as citizen is erased through the production of the citizen’s proper relation with the icon.
A constitutional amendment, which is a crucial precursor to the additions to the penal code attacked the Ahmaddiyya minority through an act of theological targeting.27 Thus when Zia embarked on his process of Islamization, and instituted the changes to the penal code, which was an attempt to reconstitute every aspect of Pakistani society, the space for those legally declared minorities, the Christians, Ahmadis, Parsis, Sikhs, and Hindus, had already shrunk significantly. The space for minorities began to be whittled away with the passing of the Objectives resolution of the Constituent Assembly of 1949, with its emphasis on Islam as the grounds of the state.28 Subsequent negotiations over the question of the sovereignty of Islam in the state in the three constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973 further normalized the marginality of minoritarian citizenship.
In the amendment, Ahmadis are defined as non-Muslim through theological targeting. The amendment devolves on the proposition that Muhammad is the last prophet. The doctrinal name for this proposition is Khatm-e nubūwwat (the finality of prophethood), evident in the third part of the amendment:
3- Amendment of article 260 of the Constitution.
In the constitution, in article 260, after clause (2) the following new clause shall be added, namely—A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophethood of Muhammad (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law.29
The density of Ahmadi belief, practice, and theology has been reduced, by those opposed to the Ahmadis, to what is presented as one theological essential. The Ahmadi belief that their leader, though subordinate to Muhammad, received a revelation is placed against their self-understanding as Muslims, and the finality of Prophethood is invoked to declare them non-Muslims.30 The offense and injury, caused by perceived or actual challenges to the finality of prophethood, are modes of expressing a passionate attachment to the Prophet. They now haunt the national imagination and are a cause of considerable anxiety and fear for Ahmadis and Christians.31
As if performing the centrality of the Ahmadi question to the project of the nation-state, two of the five penal amendments are constructed to target and exclude a particular religious group, the Ahmadis, from the Muslim religious fold and manifest a rather sustained attempt to manage attachments to the Prophet, disallowing those excluded from any attachment or affiliation to him and arrogating to the state the power to curtail its forms and representations. The detail is exhausting, but the amendments are worth reading in full. The sheer length of the articles and the compulsive list of prohibitions emphasize the centrality of the Ahmadi question to the enterprise of securing the content of the Islam forming the ground of the state. The detail suggests, moreover, a will to power that requires the complete eradication of the grounds of the perceived enemy’s religious being. It is not the privatization of belief and practice but its complete confiscation that is at work:
298–B: Misuse of epithets, descriptions and titles, etc., reserved for certain holy personages or places: (1) Any person of the Quadiani group or the Lahori group (who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name) who by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation- (a) refers to or addresses, any person, other than a Caliph or companion of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), as “Ameer-ul-Mumineen”, “Khalifatul-Mumineen”, “Khalifa-tul-Muslimeen”, “Sahaabi” or “Razi Allah Anho”; (b) refers to, or addresses, any person, other than a wife of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), as “Ummul-Mumineen”; (c) refers to, or addresses, any person, other than a member of the family “Ahle-bait” of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), as “Ahle-bait”; or (d) refers to, or names, or calls, his place of worship a “Masjid”; shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, and shall also be liable to fine. (2) Any person of the Qaudiani group or Lahori group (who call themselves “Ahmadis” or by any other name) who by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation refers to the mode or form of call to prayers followed by his faith as “Azan”, or recites Azan as used by the Muslims, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, and shall also be liable to fine. (PPC)
298–C: Person of Quadiani group, etc., calling himself a Muslim or preaching or propagating his faith: Any person of the Quadiani group or the Lahori group (who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name), who directly or indirectly, poses himself as a Muslim, or calls, or refers to, his faith as Islam, or preaches or propagates his faith, or invites others to accept his faith, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, or in any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years and shall also be liable to fine. (PPC)
Promulgated in what was called Ordinance XX in 1984, the attachment of these amendments regarding Ahmadis to the article most concerned with protecting the religious feelings of various groups suggests that the very act of being an Ahmadi inflicts a wound on Muslims, that any claim to being Muslims by Ahmadis is a cause of Muslim religious pain. When I first drafted the preceding sentence, I was responding merely to what I saw as the rhetorical logic of the framing of the amendments, but since then I have discovered that this equation has a diffuse social circulation. In 2010, Nawaz Sharif, announcing his sympathy for Ahmadis following suicide bombings of two mosques, in which eighty were killed, called them “brothers and sisters.” There was condemnation from many clerics for his declaration of such kinship. From across the border in India, the Ahrars, a militant group formed in 1929, ferociously opposed to the Ahmadis, apparently insufficiently occupied with the discrimination against Muslims there, found time to respond. Their leading cleric declared that Nawaz Sharif had “hurt the sentiments of Muslims” by calling the Ahmadis brothers. Showing a blissful lack of anxiety about mediatic representation, they provided this information through an article from the Hindustan Times prominently displayed on their website. The news functions as a mode of self-declaration, indeed, as a form of promulgation.32
At stake is a precise conception of Muslim interiority and an attendant assumption regarding its transparency to the state. The gauge of the authenticity of Muslim interiority is thus a commitment to a doctrinal proposition. On the one hand, the amendments seem to privilege an orthopractic understanding of religion, and Islam, whereby even engaging in a practice is a way of usurping its identity; on the other hand, by their very commitment to the doctrine of the finality of prophethood, they insist that such a practice is dependent on a content assigned to belief—that is, a theological claim with propositional content that requires assent.33 The amendments encode the attempt to strip any possible expression—in practice or utterance—of being Muslims from Ahmadis and thus to take away their very identity. The requirement that Ahmadis have to be prevented from “posing” as Muslims is a complete denial of the ontological possibility of them being Muslim; that is, they can only impersonate Muslims.34 While impersonation is the only action possible by Ahmadis it can turn Muslims away from being Muslim because it invites others, through proselytization and presumably the seduction of emulation, to engage in similar posing. It is this apparent impersonation that then has to be prevented by stripping language from them. Even as the very language of devotion is taken away, they are the ones construed as inflicting the injury.
The genealogy of the word posing in the anti-Ahmaddiyya amendments both demands an attention to the question of belief’s content and illustrates with particular trenchancy the problem of the transformation of minority and nationalism over the course of decolonization. “Posing” comes directly from Abul Ala Mawdudi’s English-language version of the 1953 polemic, “The Qadiani Problem.”35 The pamphlet was written to demand the removal of Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, the foreign minister at the time and the author of the Pakistan Resolution:
But Qadianis penetrate into the Muslim Society posing as Muslims; they propagate their views in the name of Islam; start controversies everywhere, carry on proselytizing propaganda in an aggressive manner and continuously strive to swell their numbers at the expense of Muslim society. They have thus become a permanent disintegrating force amongst Muslims. How can it, therefore, be possible to show the same kind of toleration towards them as is shown towards other passive sects?36
Mawdudi appended two documents by Muhammad Iqbal to authorize this sense of a threat to Muslim society from the group: a letter to The Statesman, which had published Iqbal’s original, 1934 pamphlet against the Ahmadiyya (“Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims”) and a response to Nehru (“Islam and Ahmadism,” also published as “Reply to Questions raised by Pundit Nehru”) who had asked why Iqbal had felt the need to write the first piece, published in 1935. Although Iqbal’s complete oeuvre is more aesthetically and philosophically complicated than these essays suggest, and can even be taken to authorize certain notions of Muslim selfhood and dignity, one might speculate that it is a complex double pressure that leads to this very dark contribution to the status of minorities.37 The first lies in the necessity of an unruptured Muslim identity. The second is in the effect of English on the position he articulates. He produces these statements in Anglophone texts, Mawdudi circulates them in English as well as Urdu, and the law itself is in English. In this Anglophone context, Islam becomes subject to a defensive language of differentiation and becomes permeated by the exigencies of power in the colonial state. Paradoxically in the postcolonial context the Anglophone frame is crucial to the violence of the law, whose defenders repeatedly cast it in anti-Western and anticolonial terms—in terms, in other words, entirely determined by a “Western” audience. The genealogy of the law reminds us that the colonial administration was the first audience to whom Iqbal addressed his demands.
It must be said that, in these essays, Iqbal’s fear is not of secularism or of religion’s expulsion from the modern world but of more, other, religions. In “Qadianism and Orthodox Muslims,” he presents both Bahaism and Ahmadism as instances of pre-Islamic Magianism, which, according to Iqbal, relies on a “constant expectation” of prophets because continuity of prophethood is necessary in the Magian context (QM, 92). The result of the “Magian attitude” is the “disintegration of old communities and the constant formation of new ones by all sorts of religious adventurers” (QM, 92). The return to the pre-Islamic past in such practices entails permanent communitarian revolution and ensures the possibility of new religions. For Iqbal, “since Islam . . . claims to weld all the various communities of the world into one single community” it cannot “reconcile itself with a movement which threatens its present solidarity and promises of further rifts in human society” (QM, 92). What makes Ahmadis so threatening to this solidarity is the challenge they pose to the Muslim community because “the integrity of Muslim society is secured by the Finality of Prophethood alone” (QM, 92). Because Ahmadis claim to be Muslim and engage in practices that are associated with Muslims they undermine the community from within; they are, in other words, internal threats that very locally undermine the vision of global homogeneity—the world as one single community—that constitutes Iqbal’s utopia in these essays.
Ayesha Jalal has argued that within Iqbal’s thought the insistent opposition to Ahmadis issues from the effects of the internal politics of the Punjab.38 On my view, that regional issue intersects with a very precise conception of interiority and a theological intimacy, which shapes the intensity of the disavowal and makes it so necessary to ensure that the “externals” of practice be shown to be at odds with Ahmadi inwardness, that Ahmadis be shown only to be capable of posing as Muslims, since “Qadianism” “retains some of the more important externals of Islam with an inwardness wholly inimical of the spirit and aspirations of Islam” (QM, 93). This denial of the possibility of inwardness is predicated on the importance of the proposition of prophetic finality to Muslim interiority.39 For Iqbal, Ahmadis can only appear to be Muslims because their belief puts them at odds with Islam, and thus their practice must be empty: they cannot possess, what is to Iqbal, a specifically Muslim interiority. Their very intimate challenge comes from their ability to seem Muslim in practice and even in utterance.
The problem of appearing Muslim then becomes a crucial challenge to what Iqbal calls “the parent community” (QM, 96). For this, he says bitterly, figuring colonial adjudication as “care,” “the liberal state does not care a fig” (QM, 95). It is the religious proximity of Ahmadis that makes them so much of a threat despite their very small number. “Parent community” figures religious heresy and theological difference as a disruptive child, and as a child, moreover, with the potential to take over, devouring the parents as it grows up. This figuration is an effect of what Mufti has identified as the “mapping” of the Indian Muslim ashraf “ideology of familial descent” from non-Indic sources on to “the political community or qaum” as a whole during the process of the “nationalization of society.”40 An ideology of familial descent produces a notion of the community as family—a rather tight-knit one, if Iqbal’s rage is to be comprehended. Within this configuration, Iqbal’s constitution of the Ahmadi threat is a way of ensuring that the Muslim community, imagined in kinship terms, remains intact. Iqbal’s dismissal of Mirza Gulam Ahmed as “an Indian prophet,” as opposed to the true Arab one, is rhetorically and politically continuous with the claim to non-Indic roots.
As Jalal suggests, Iqbal’s involvement with the militant group, the Ahrars, is significant, as is the fact that, as she sardonically suggests, “basing Islam’s much-vaunted unity in difference on the logic of internal exclusion was a novel invention for which Punjab’s urban middle-class leadership can rightfully claim credit.”41 But I would emphasize that this local entanglement and its relationship with anticolonial struggle, through the Ahrar’s desire to be more central in the politics around Kashmiri liberation, to which they felt marginal, and to which marginality they reacted with an attack on the All-India Kashmir council when an Ahmadi was appointed president, is articulated through a theological position.42 That the Ahrars went on to fight with Shias in Lucknow suggests that the question of policing the boundaries of theological orthodoxy powers the intensity of the opposition.43 It is, moreover, this theological claim that allows for the subsequent globalization of Ahmadi persecution.
The regnant theories of religion have tended to play down the propositional content of belief.44 Such underplaying issues in part from a contemporary interest in embodiment and practice, but, as Viswanathan has suggested, engaging questions of heresy, blasphemy, and apostasy requires that belief’s content also be recognized. For Iqbal, it was certainly important in these essays, and that importance has proved historically consequential. He is even more clear and insistent about the propositional importance of the finality of the prophethood in “Islam and Ahmadism,” his response to the baffled questions Nehru posed in “The Solidarity of Islam.”45“This simple faith” is, for Iqbal, based on two propositions (RQ, 115). One is, of course, the doctrine of finality; the other is that “God is One” (RQ, 115). “The solidarity of Islam . . . consists in a uniform belief in the two structural principles of Islam, supplemented by the five well-known ‘practices of the faith’” (RQ, 137). It is a similar commitment to doctrine and to keeping practice free of “heretical” innovation that motivates Mawdudi and the framers of the amendment.
Any political engagement with the status of religion has to confront what is to be done (or not done) when a belief is assumed to have been compromised. Framing the question of secularism as a problem of religious sentiment versus free speech, where free speech is assumed to be free secular speech and thus an expression of a hegemonic liberalism opposed to the religious other, simply deflects attention from the conceptual stakes and underpinnings of the political status of belief. It is not surprising then that one of the primary modes of this deflection has been a displacement of the problem onto artistic expression, the valuation of which is, in turn, figured as a residue of the aggressive Enlightenment valuation of man. It is perhaps equally unsurprising that Rushdie has become central to this deflection.
Iqbal’s defense of the practice of the clerical designation of kufr (which he translates, strangely, as “heresy”)—in cases of “minor theological points of difference as well as extreme cases of heresy” against “present day educated Muslims” who deplore the practice—sits oddly with his charge that Ahmadis should only expect to be treated badly as they declare everyone kāfirs (nonbelievers). On his own view, that practice might be construed as an extension of an orthodox habit. Yet, arguing in some sense against himself, he is insistent that these present-day, educated Muslims are wrong to see the practice as a sign of the “social and political disintegration of the Muslim community” (RQ, 116). For the “history of Muslim theology shows that the mutual accusations of heresy for minor points of difference has so far from working as a disruptive force, actually given impetus to synthetic theological thought” (RQ, 116). Declaring each other “outside the fold” ensures intellectual movement and becomes an engine (providing “impetus”) of a project conceived, inconsistently, in Hegelian terms of attaining theological “synthesis.” What, one might wonder, would be the antithesis?
Iqbal, one need hardly point out, is not a traditionalist. He celebrates reformers from Wahhab to Al-Afghani and attacks, in bullet point form, and, in this order: “Mullahism,” “mysticism,” and “Muslim kings” (RQ, 128–29). But for him acceptable designations of other people’s heresy are those that ensure that the Muslim community stays itself, especially since Western colonialism has so endangered it. The problem is one of limits to community, what must be excluded, and to imagination, to the structures of thought, language, filiation, and affiliation that enable the self-policing, or ongoing self-creation, of that limit. In the sustenance and clarification of that limit the Ahmadis seem to play a crucial role in this late stage in Iqbal’s thought.
For Iqbal, political humiliation and the embattled condition of Muslims worldwide is combined with the problem of Muslim minority in India, and it is this connection that allows him recourse both to an analogy with the German state that arose after the defeat by Napoleon at Jena and to Jews in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.46 The separation of Ahmadis from the Muslim majority that he wants the colonial government to institute is justified by an invocation of Spinoza: “Situated as the Jews were—a minority community in Amsterdam—they were justified in regarding Spinoza as a disintegrating factor threatening the dissolution of their community” (RQ, 112). Mawdudi’s “disintegrating force” in The Qadiani Problem is, of course, a slight modification of Iqbal’s “disintegrating factor.” Iqbal is careful to distinguish the leader of the Ahmadis from Spinoza—there is apparently no comparison of intellect between Mirza Ghulam Ahmed and the philosopher (RQ, 111); and, moreover, the Ahmadis are a bigger threat (RQ, 112). The example clarifies what is acceptable in order to ensure the cohesiveness of the community. Expulsion from the group—disinheritance—is an acceptable price for solidarity: “Politically, then, the solidarity of Islam is shaken only when Muslim states war on one another; religiously, it is shaken only when Muslims rebel against any one of the basic beliefs and practices of the faith. It is in the interest of this eternal solidarity that Islam cannot tolerate any rebellious group within its fold. Outside the fold, such a group is entitled to as much toleration as followers of any other faith” (RQ, 137; italics mine).
For Iqbal eternal solidarity is fundamentally related to what looks like his equivocation on nationalism. In response to Nehru’s question about whether Iqbal’s objection to Indian nationalism extends to Ataturk, that is, to nationalism per se, Iqbal gives a remarkable answer. It is worth quoting at length:
It is not difficult to see the attitude of Islam towards nationalist ideals. Nationalism in the sense of love of one’s country and even readiness to die for its honour, is a part of the Muslim’s faith; it comes into conflict with Islam only when it begins to play the role of a political concept and claims to be a principle of human solidarity demanding that Islam should recede to the background of a mere private opinion and cease to be a living factor in national life. In Turkey, Persia, Egypt and other Muslim countries it will never become a problem. In these countries Muslims constitute an overwhelming majority and their minorities, i.e. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, according to the law of Islam, are either “People of the Book” or “like the People of the Book” with whom the law of Islam allows free social relations, including matrimonial alliances. It becomes a problem for Muslims only in countries where they happen to be in a minority and nationalism demands their complete effacement. In majority countries Islam accommodates nationalism; for there Islam and nationalism are practically identical; in minority countries it is justified in seeking self-determination as a cultural unit. In either case, it is thoroughly consistent with itself.” (RQ, 136–37)
It might be argued that no matter what the “eternal” and majoritarian claims here, Iqbal is writing very much from within his position as a religious minority in a colonially governed empire, in which the regnant nationalism, Indian nationalism, cast in terms of territory or defined in terms of regional belonging, nonetheless cannot accommodate Muslim difference. One might see Iqbal’s recourse to an “eternal” Islam as an attempt to transcend the limits of the material conditions of Muslims in post-Rebellion India. On such a reading the transcendent escape is a response to a worldly dilemma. The guarantee of a permanent eternal union can only be a deferred promise but one that mirrors the pre-Independence condition of the Muslims.
One might argue, then, that the demand for solidarity comes from the phenomenological inconceivability of Muslim emancipation even as it is articulated as a fierce aspiration. But, in the context of the postcolonial nation-state carved out for many of the Muslims of India, this call for solidarity acquires a different cast. I do not wish to suggest an inevitability to the way Iqbal’s views on Ahmadis are adopted. They could, and but for a series of decisions made by Bhutto and Zia, they might well have been ignored. If “Muslim” participation in Indian modernity has always included the claim of being non-Indian, as Mufti has argued, progressive culture in Urdu (historically contiguous with Iqbal) has also included the attempt to reveal “the Indian environment of this claim.”47 Yet if the persecution of Ahmadis is an effect of empire, then theories of empire and of anti-imperialism need to find a vocabulary for the cannibalization of the perceived internal enemy in situations of disempowerment. Equally important is an account of what happens when memories of disempowerment do not catch up with reconfigurations of power and domination.
Mawdudi’s use of Iqbal’s attack on the Ahmadis and its complete codification by Zia’s military regime suggest that it is the (militarized) sovereignty of the state as Islamic in a particular way that is to be ensured by the designation of the theological enemy. As this genealogy demonstrates, the relentless and systematic persecution of the Ahmadis issues from the need to ensure control over the parameters of the ground of the Islam that will form the basis of the Pakistani state’s sovereignty.
The proposition that Muhammad is the last prophet has come to shape the boundaries of the nation and of the state.48 That is, a variety of pan-Islamism, which is antinationalist (in that it is opposed to Indian nationalism) but which yet forms the grounds of the Pakistani nation-state, took a proposition regarding the finality of prophethood and made it central to securing the boundaries of Islam. After Independence, designating the Ahmadis outside the fold is to help resolve the tension between the “eternal solidarity” of Islam and the borders of the nation-state. The relation between the Ahmadis and Muhammad devotion suggests that the Muslim persona and the state’s limit are both bounded by a legally sustained (one might even say juridically manufactured) relation to the icon.
Wounded Iconoclasts, Surreptitious Iconographies
In one of the most stunning passages in the chapter “Religious Criticism” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in the Christianity and Islam, correcting yet another Western misapprehension about the traditionalism of Muslims, Talal Asad writes:
Actually, innumerable foreign techniques were absorbed into Saudi society before the oil boom in the seventies with little or no objection from the ‘ulama: new forms of transport including paved roads, new modes of building and printing, electricity, new medicines and types of medical treatment, and so forth. Clearly, something more complicated is involved here than a traditional opposition to modernization by the ulama. As a start I would propose that what the ulama are doing is to attempt a definition of orthodoxy—a (re)ordering of knowledge that the “correct” form of Islamic practices. In effect, what we have today is essentially part of the same process by which long-established indigenous practices (such as the veneration of saints tombs) were judged to be un-Islamic by the Wahhabi reformers of Arabia (see Abdul Wahhab A.H. 1376, 124–35) and then forcibly eliminated. That is, like all practical criticism, orthodox criticism seeks to construct a relation of discursive dominance.
I argue that the critical discourses of Saudi ulama (like those of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab before them) presuppose the concept of an orthodox Islam. Muslims in Saudi Arabia (as elsewhere) disagree profoundly over what orthodox Islam is, but as Muslims their differences are fought out on the ground of that concept. It is too often forgotten that the process of determining orthodoxy in conditions of change and contest includes attempts at achieving discursive coherence.49
The passage starts out with a seemingly simple refutation of a factual error on the part of Western commentators, who appear not to understand the modernity of the Saudi clerics. But it transforms into a defense of orthodox erasures of Muslims perceived to be otherwise. Asad is sanguine about the forcible elimination of indigenous religious practice, since like all “practical criticism” orthodox criticism seeks to construct a relation of “discursive dominance.” The destruction of lifeworlds is just an effect of “practical criticism,” which itself is emptied of content by being abstracted into all practical criticism. One can only assume that the alternative to religious criticism is the “secular criticism” advocated by Edward Said. Twenty years later this implicit opposition, and the crucial role of Said’s secular criticism as the negative delineation of Asad’s conception of religious criticism, is laid bare in his contribution to Is Critique Secular? in which the “worldly critic”—the critic, in other words, of Said’s The World, the Text, the Critic—stands as the figure against whose purported excesses the argument is made.50
There are two moves that are particularly significant here. The first is the reduction of Islam to “orthodox” Islam. According to Asad, Muslims disagree widely over “what orthodox Islam is.” He does not say that they disagree over what Islam is—which, obviously they do. Not every practicing Muslim aspires to orthodoxy or even to antisecular criticism. The slide from “religious” to orthodox Islamic to simply Islamic is, I’m going to have to say it, puzzling. More significant is the argument that, as Muslims, their claims are fought out on the ground of that concept. It is the very presupposition of the stability of that ground that is at issue even when orthodox clerics fight among themselves. Otherwise the practice of declaring each other kāfir would be unintelligible. It should be added that orthodox practices in Saudi Arabia are linked to the Pakistani ones that motivate attempts to secure the discursive dominance of the orthodox upon the legal code. The Jamaat-i-Islami, the party that was central to the bid to persecute and marginalize the Ahmadis, has always sought to emulate Saudi practice, as, of course, did Zia-ul-Haq. In fact, Asad’s article is written at the end of an eleven-year period in which Zia secured these practices in Pakistan while strengthening the relationship with Saudi Arabia, at the same time, of course, as being strengthened by Saudi help—a period in which the assassination of Shias by militias had begun in the Punjab.
To understand Asad’s disregard for the cost of such orthodox practice, one might turn to a passing reference to Shi’is in his polemic against Rushdie: “No Sunni collection contains a hadith prohibiting the consumption of prawns, a prohibition followed only by Shi’is. . . . The question that an informed reader may want to ask is why the rules of the hadith are presented as having been revealed by Gabriel, and further why sectarian rules are presented as though they were accepted by all Muslims.”51 Setting aside for a moment the question of referential literalism, one might yet wonder why it is that a Shia prohibition is presented as sectarian. If Islam is not a monolith, as Asad frequently reminds us, then why does a practice associated with a particular group have to be produced as sectarian? Why is it not just one more Muslim practice? But, as I have suggested throughout this book, the ostensibly antiessentialist project of questioning the monolithicization of Islam has simply come to attach itself to securing the equation of orthodox or radically conservative Islam, in some cases just even Sunni Islam, with Islam as a whole. Challenges to that equation are either to be discredited by some association with the Enlightenment, or the West, or colonial modernity or, as witnessed here, to be renamed as “sectarian.” It is not that the term sectarian does not apply in some cases; it is rather that in this particular case the word is used to dismiss a practice’s association with Islam. In light of Saudi Arabia’s complicated relationship with its Shia population and Asad’s reproduction of Sunni orthodoxy as Islamic orthodoxy such a detail is consequential. There is nonetheless something contradictory here. In 2011, defending the Muslim Brotherhood in the face of skepticism about their role in the Egyptian revolution, Asad mentions his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the Shia militant group in Lebanon.52
On terms that concede the importance of religious pain as a socioethical and political category, the erasure to which Ahmadis are being subjected in the amendments to the penal code is an effect of the priority given to the religious pain of the majority. This “pain” is caused by their ostensible disregard for, or alleged defilement of, a theological proposition presented as fundamental to orthodoxy, and is itself predicated on the complete denial of the possibility of Ahmadi religious pain. The persecution of Ahmadis is further normalized in passport and identity card applications. Citizens applying for either are asked to sign a statement declaring Ahmadis non-Muslim. The signature is a remarkably explicit example of “hailing,” indicating the systematic interpellation of Pakistan’s citizenry, through the targeting of one group. The national community is to be secured through this collective attestation.
More than twenty-five years later and in a context made ever more violent by the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, such interpellation works in tandem with the extrajudicial but fully juridical power evident in a pamphlet demanding the conversion of Ahmadis to Islam from a group giving its location in Faisalabad.53 The document’s chilling openness about its religious vigilantism deserves a close reading. The group, which calls itself the World Congress for the Protection of the Finality of the Prophethood, is happy to give its address and phone number, revealing the impunity with which it functions even as it issues a notification of imminent murder (Fig. 1). Combined with the unselfconscious declaration of coordinates, it is the inadvertently parodic tone—produced through a combination of menace and the creepily caressing generosity of Bollywood gangsterism—that allows it to represent the normalization of the persecution it unleashes and of which it is a part.54
The pamphlet is framed as an invitation from “good” (acche) Muslims to Ahmadis to become “true” (ḥaqīqī) Muslims. The unselfconscious sense of moral superiority and of entitlement is perhaps most evident in the recurrence of the word da’vat (in this context literally “invitation”). It occurs eight times in the page-long pamphlet. Da’vat can mean an invitation to Islam, a call, a more general invitation, and a feast. It is no surprise that it is derived from the Arabic dawa (to call). In everyday use it frequently suggests an invitation to a party or a feast. The generosity and hospitality such linguistic associations suggest are dear to the writer of the pamphlet:55
Tārīkh gavāh hai ke Musalmānon ne ghair Musalmānon ke sāth acchā bartā'o karte hū'e unko Musalmān hone kī da’vat dī aur voh Musalmān ho ga’e aur jin logon ne Musalmānon ke acche bartā’o ke bāvujūd Islam kī da’vat qabūl nahīn kī unkā hashar bhī tarīkh men maujūd hai. Is līye ham āp ko acche Musalmān hone ke nāte ḥaqīqī Musalmān hone kī da’vat de rahe hain. Agar āp ne is ākhrī aur qīmtī mauqe ko hāt se ganvā diyā to tum logon kā bhī vahī anjām ho gā jo Murad Cloth House aur dūsre murtid aur kāfir Mirzā’iyon vālon kā hū’ā thā
History is witness that, treating them well, Muslims invited non-Muslims to become Muslims and they converted. And the fate of those who did not accept the call, despite their being treated well by Muslims, is also available in history. This is why, as good Muslims, we are inviting you to become true Muslims. If you squander this valuable, last chance you will face the same fate as the owners of Murad cloth and other apostate and infidel Ahmadis.
The author’s sense of being a “good” Muslim is fundamentally linked to his or her perception of the historical generosity of Islam, and the group is presented as a historical conduit that will further the teleological ends of missionary largesse. The “invitation” to convert is a form of rescue from the punishing judgment of history: “jin logon ne . . . Islam kī da’vat qabūl nahīn kī in ka hashar bhī tarīkh men maujūd hai” (the fate of those who did not accept the call to Islam . . . is also available in history).
The word da’vat allows a certain historical inversion to become visible. The pamphleteer threatens a few lines down to report the targets to the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, the Taliban, the Jaish-i-Muhammad, and all the “religious organizations” (mazhabī tanz̤īmen). The fear intentionally solicited by the reference to the murdered Ahmadi owners of Murad Cloth House in Faisalabad is then fortified with the threat to give the names of the targets to the militant groups. The jihadi groups the pamphlet names are profoundly anticustomary. They object to all the forms of lived and customary Islam in South Asia. The Bakhtinian concept of carnival is useful here. The very aspects of festive sociality that allow for the occasional suspension of social rigidities in South Asian shrine culture and Sufi Islam are anathema to them. They are ferociously iconoclastic and opposed to the carnivalesque sociality the word summons. Da’vat restores the sense of a fundamental fissure in Pakistani society, a fissure created by the denial of customary, religious urban and rural social practices. The illusion sometimes created is that these groups are accessing some historically authentic Islam and thus accessing a premodern cultural formation, but their claim to revival is fundamentally modern, anticommunity, anticustomary, and indeed anticultural.56
A Shift in Sensibility
Such a genealogy as I have undertaken in the previous pages yet provides insufficient resources for minorities working from within the context of the nation-state and its multiple institutional and ideological apparatuses. Following the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Christian Member of the National Assembly, Asiya Nasir, gave an extraordinary speech in the National Assembly. Complexly steeped in a history of progressive Urdu literature and Jinnah’s claims about secular citizenship, crossbred with the blood-soaked language of national sacrifice, it offers a tragic compendium of a vernacular history of the aspiration for emancipation and citizenship from the position of those who are not numerically strong enough nor sufficiently politically powerful to demand a nation of their own. Nasir’s speech embodies the paradox that it is from the ground of the nation that the minority framed by law must speak and the simultaneous fact that that act can call that very ground into question.
Both Bhatti’s and Taseer’s murders were seen as responses to the most recent attempts to repeal the laws initiated by a democratically elected representative in the assembly. For those who supported the murders, they were caused by the attempt to repeal Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. If Taseer’s murderer was celebrated by some, in terms borrowed from Iqbal’s commemoration of the murderer of the man who had authored Rangīlā Rasūl, as a Ghazi (surely an invitation to the grimmer yields of genealogy), Taseer himself could be assimilated into a narrative of a secular-liberal, flamboyantly Anglophone elite. Underlying such an assimilation is the specter of “decadence” as a cultural symbolic substitute for a more socially analytic conception of the dynamics, economic and cultural, of class and power.
Availing himself in particularly heightened rhetoric of the ventriloquial discourse of a variety of media analysis—in which the attribution of a view to the media is enough to put it outside the pale of subscription by the right sort of radical—“liberal” “elite,” and “pro-Western” are indeed the terms in which one commentator in Counterpunch excoriates Pakistan’s Anglophone media after Taseer’s murder: “Pakistan’s English print media faux liberal and elitist have been in furor over the recent political murder of Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab, by his own bodyguard.”57 Moreover, the author implicitly defends the laws by suggesting that the problem is with their “abuse,” not with the particular law (295–C) under which Aasia Noreen, the woman whose case Taseer had chosen to take up, was convicted and sentenced to death. In the process, he represents attempts to repeal it, and outrage at the murders, as emblems of imperial complicity: “Pakistan’s wealthy and faux liberal elites, by carrying their treachery to extremes, by agreeing to rain death on Pakistanis from the skies, are losing the argument in Pakistan. Going off on a limb, the governor began attacking Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has been abused by some Pakistanis to settle personal scores. Is it a fault in the law or its execution?”58 One need hardly defend the impressively rapacious and frequently culturally deracinated wealthy upper class of Pakistan in order to defend the cause of the minorities, but the invitation to equate the two is overdetermined by the invocation of Rushdie: “Pakistanis worried that this was only the start of a campaign to repeal the law and open the floodgates for Salman Rushdi-style [sic] smearing of the Prophet.”59 The author’s linking of concerns about the Rushdiesque “blasphemies” that might be unleashed with related speculation that the initiative to “repeal the laws” might have been inspired by “foreign embassies” is part of a political shorthand in which Rushdie’s name can work to summon a vast network of subliminal associations of treachery. Within this paragraph, this system of association is locked down by suggesting that the “law maker” who introduced the bill was a part of the “pro-Western Pakistan People’s Party,” which party, the author does not point out, was also democratically elected; neither does he tell the reader that the party abandoned Taseer on this issue.60
The form of circulation of Rushdie’s name in a context such as this and in the banner in which the pope and Rushdie are associated (see Figs. 2 and 3), as those who have insulted Muhammad, is difficult to name, especially when one recalls the case, one of those over which the Pakistani bishop John Joseph committed suicide in a bid to get the blasphemy law overturned in 1996, in which a Christian man had been accused of praising The Satanic Verses.61 In the banner both the pope and Rushdie are called “disrespectful dogs,” and viewers are asked to throw shoes at them and earn divine reward. Most striking is the effect that putting Rushdie next to the pope is meant to induce. The children looking at the images are being invited into an oppositional collectivity, a dark sociality, through their indignation at the insult to the Prophet: the confirmation of the insult lies in the presence of Rushdie’s image. The photographs were taken on the Prophet’s birthday, and the banners turn that occasion of customarily festive and generous piety into a punitive one.
As I suggested in the first chapter, at play is a new, inverted form of what Foucault identified as the author-function. In this new function, the name of the author does not certify or elevate his own work but serves in an equally transformative and occlusive way to simultaneously certify and obscure acts of violence—in this case, ones (at least initially) underwritten by the state.62 The intellectual history informed by Foucauldian skepticism about the ostensibly emancipated autonomy of the author, which was very much part of the autocritique of literature in the 1980s and 1990s, has seeped into political commentary in ways that allow this inverted author-function to produce its alchemical effects.
Shahbaz Bhatti’s murder is, however, less easy to assimilate into the elites against internal subaltern narratives that have come to underpin critiques of secularism. Bhatti’s own position as a Punjabi Christian does not carry the same Anglophone aura, and given the language of caste that is used in anti-Christian discrimination cannot be subsumed easily to the same elite cultural position—neither, of course, can Nasir’s speech. Elected to a seat reserved for minorities, affiliated with the conservative Islamist party, the JUI, clad in a black chador, she addressed, eerily, the portrait of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and spoke to it, and him, as might an accusatory petitioner. For thirteen devastating minutes she embodied and revealed, without necessarily intending to do so, the contradictions of the status of religious minorities in the nation-state. Nasir’s speech, which deserves the close and careful attention she demands of her fellow assembly members and, implicitly, in her shifting address, of the entire nation, is in some ways an elegy produced from within the space of complaint. Of Jinnah, she asks, why did you ask us to join you on the endeavor to build Pakistan? Of the constituents of the assembly, she asks why there had been no prayer for Bhatti and, instead, only a two-minute silence. The complaint is also part lament for the impossibility of elegy in the absence of recognition of the dead, an attempt, in other words, to notice the national conditions within which, to use Judith Butler’s very suggestive idea, a life is ungrievable.63 Within the parallel economies of metropolitan anti-imperialism and “local” religious nationalism, it is the murder that cannot be called itself. Nasir’s speech is thus Antigone’s demand for a proper burial for the man she names her brother (“merā bhā’ī qatal hū’ā hai,” “my brother has been murdered”).64
Nasir flanks her speech with extended quotations from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and then, as if in an allegory for the relation between political rhetoric, narration, and politics, which must culminate in the necessary banality of political action, she starts again to declare an ending with a symbolic “token” “walkout.” After reading a long section from the Faiz poem, “ham jo tārīk rāhon men māre ga’e” (We Who Were Killed in the Dark Lanes), Nasir goes on to say that she will not address the speaker or the house or the PM and turns to the portrait of Jinnah, points to it, and says:65
Mohammad Ali Jinnah āj main tum se mukhātib hūn kyūnke mera bhai qatal hū’ā hai. Āp ne ham se kahā tha ke āo ek ghar banāte hain. Us pāk sar zamīn ka nām Pakistan rakhen ge aur us pāk sar zamīn par na ko’ī Hindu hoga na ko’ī Christian hoga na ko’ī Musalmān hoga balke ek parcham ke sā’e tale ham sab ek honge. Qā’id-i Ā’z̤am āj main āp se sawāl kartī hūn ke jab Pakistan kī takhlīq ho ga’ī aur jab ham āp ke kehne par is ghar men āga’e tho hamāre sāth kyā salūk ravān rakha gaya? Janāb-e ‘speaker’ main is aivān se pūchna chahūngī ke kyā qusūr tha mere bhai ka? Sirf yehī ke voh is mulk-e Pakistan ko Qā’id-i Ā’z̤am ka Pakistan dekhna chāhtā tha?
Mohammad Ali Jinnah: today I address you because my brother has been murdered. You said to us: “come with us together we will make a home. We will name that pure land Pakistan. And on that pure land, there will be no Hindu nor Christian nor Muslim instead we will all be one in the shade of one flag.” Quaid-e-Azam, today I want to ask you: once Pakistan’s creation was complete and once we had arrived here, on your suggestion, what kind of treatment were we given? [then she shifts her address to the Speaker] Mr. Speaker I would like to ask this assembly: what was my brother’s fault? Only this: that he wanted to see this country- Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam’s country” [as the country envisaged by Jinnah].66
The epigraphic invocation of Faiz, figuring the subject as the one killed in the dark lane, is poised against the shade of the flag and an intimacy in the imagined invitation from Jinnah. If the darkness disappears the subject, dispersed and wandering in the lane, by disappearing the very fact of murder, the shade of the flag, under which rest is to enable the making of a house, figures a national space offering the comfort of a community configured in familial terms—the connotation of “ghar”” is both home and house. “Sā’e tale”” (under the shade) is moreover a tender image, one that registers the intensity of a yearning to be allowed to belong in one’s own home—a belonging suggested by the possibility of rest, and of the creation of conditions for that rest: a building of a home together in the shade. The invitation of the shade is a contrast to the wandering travel in dark roads, a wandering that acquires an additional valence through the explicit fear of exile and religious cleansing that Nasir raises, later in the speech, when she asks if Pakistan is only a nation for Muslims, as, she says some “extremist” (intihā-pasand) journalists are arguing in the media, and whether the Christians should leave and take up residence elsewhere. Significantly, the word Nasir uses to indicate residence elsewhere, “thikānā,” has little connotation of comfort.67
Nasir’s use of an imagery of shade and rest is an attempt to take back the language of community configured in familial terms in Muslim ashrāf ideology, and to expand the ambit of the family, to stretch what was already a metaphorical inscription to provide a more secular understanding of nation imagined as family. What makes the unity of this community possible (“ham sab ek honge,” “we will all be one”) is the dissolution of religious identity into political identity, promised by Jinnah in his speech on August 11, 1947, a part of which she quotes in translation: “na ko’ī Hindu hogā, na ko’ī Christian hogā na ko’ī Musalmān hogā” (no one will be Hindu, or Christian or Muslim).68
The lines from Jinnah that are so often quoted might be said to go against the very grain of metropolitan multiculturalism, which cannot imagine political action as distinct from the articulation of difference and identity, in fact, from assertion of difference as a political claim. The presence of Jinnah’s lines in Nasir’s speech, so fully absorbed into a vernacular history, reveals a paradox: such a call for the recognition of difference may, in fact, not be intelligible without the possibility of a secular separation of state and religious identity. The reference to Jinnah functions as an assertion of the necessity of preserving, or perhaps even creating, the conditions in which religious difference is publicly and safely possible.
The contrast between Jinnah’s speech and Nasir’s claim that minorities are more than able to protect the last prophet makes it strikingly evident that the difference Jinnah sought to protect in his speech is publicly inaccessible to her even as she invokes these words. Her implicit allegiance to the finality of prophethood in her designation of Muhammad as the last prophet, “ambiyā’-e ikhtitām,” is a measure of this unavailability of religious difference, against which her invocation of Jinnah remains grimly poised:
“ham ambiyā’-e ikhtitām aur namūs kī hifāzat karnā baṛi acchī tara se jānte hain ko’ī masīhī ya aqlīyat ye tassavur bhī nahīn kar saktā ke ham kisī nabi kī shān men gustākhī karen.”
We know very well how to protect the honour of the last prophet. No Christian or minority could even imagine that we [sic] would insult the glory of any prophet.69
The equation of the acceptance of the doctrine of finality with respect for the Prophet is quite remarkable when expected of minorities who recognize other prophets. What is sometimes argued is that Islam recognizes other prophets and monotheists as people of the book. The Muslim notion of respect for the people of the book relies on the fact that Muhammad completes history and supersedes the prophets who have preceded him—that they are part of a history conceived as Muslim through a conception of Islam as the teleological end. It needs to be asked: What does it mean for the state, or its inhabitants, to require Christians to accept the teleology on which this idea relies?
In addition to the two Faiz poems, Nasir quotes a few lines from a poem (“Khūn phir khūn hai”) by Sahir Ludhianvi, written upon the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.70 It might take a while to realize upon hearing the speech that the quotations are all transcribed and sometimes mistranscribed from a short and harrowing documentary, Burning Alive, about the attack on Christians in an incident in Korian, a village near the town of Gojra, in which more than forty houses and two churches were torched and seven Christians burned to death.71 Incited by clerics who also called the Christians “American agents,” the mob attacked while the police failed to intervene. In the film, the poems from Faiz are rendered in his own voice, but significantly the documentary concludes with Ludhianvi’s poem and a final declaration of the inauguration of a new struggle. The documentary begins with a rolling text image of a verse from the Bible superimposed upon a scene of houses burning, which is followed by some of the details of what transpired. Then as a prelude to the narration we hear Faiz, to whom the narrator later refers as “umīd o zindagi ke numā’indah shair” (the exemplary poet of hope and life), reciting a section of “ham jo tārīk rāhon men māre ga’e” (We Who Were Lost in the Dark Lanes). The film concludes with another segment of Faiz reading from “Lahū ka surāgh” (Trace of Blood), another one of his poems; and then the narrator mentions Ludhianvi whom he calls a fellow traveler of Faiz, more precisely a “ham qāfilah shair” (a poet and fellow traveler) and concludes with a quotation from Ludhianvi.
Even as footage rolls of looted homes, houses burning, the burned bodies of those killed being carted away, and of the police milling about as the violence unfolds, the narrator poses some telling questions:
“Ijtimā’i qatal magar qātil kaun?” (Collective murder, but who is the murderer?)72
Before that, picking up on the Faiz poem with which the short began, he asks:
“Tārīk rāhon ka safar kab tamām ho gā?” (When will the travel on the dark roads end?)73
The first question demands an answer from all of society, for if a murder is collective, the question of collusion, of participation, indeed of what allowed the collectivity to come about, requires direct moral confrontation. The second draws upon Faiz and Ludhianvi to articulate its protest. The documentary thus stages a confrontation between two collectivities, both constituting aspects of the Pakistani public:
1. The group opposed to the existence of Christians, fully socially constructed on the documentary’s terms, by the law—as the narrator says “‘dictator’ to khair ‘dictator’ hote hain lekin siyāsati hakūmaton ne bhī mujrimānah ghaflat ka muzāhirah kiya unhonen na sirf takfīrī qavanīn ko khatm karne men sanjīdagī ka muzāhirah nahin kiya balke in qavānīn se paidah hone vāli sūrat-e hāl ko bhī samajhne kī kabhī koshish nahīn kī” (After all dictators are dictators, but even elected governments have displayed criminal negligence. Not only have they shown no seriousness in removing these laws, but they have also not tried to understand the situation arising from them).74 One might call this group a fully juridical collectivity authorized by penal laws that have a colonial genealogy.
2. A second group constituted by a critical claim to citizenship articulated by turning to poetic expressions of critiques of the state, of the failures of nationalism, indeed of tyranny, injustice, and cruelty, attempting instead to use Faiz and Ludhianvi to argue for repairing a torn collective self. The poetic imagination serves thus to create a collectivity that attempts to imagine a more inclusive notion of citizenship. Figures such as Faiz both comprise such collectivity and enable its ongoing constitution.
Nasir’s transcription of the poems from the documentary contributes to an archive whose foundations are stabilized through citation and repetition.75 Nasir appears not to have read the poems in a text but in fact heard them in the documentary and used them accordingly; her transcription reveals, moreover, how the poetic imagination can circulate to create a collectivity—however momentary and fluid the existence of such a formation.
Nasir’s first quotation—from a poem that Faiz wrote in prison, after being arrested for the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, inspired by the letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—restores the Cold War history, shared by Pakistan and the United States, through a collusion between the military and the United States, that has so shaped the present within which Nasir speaks. A history that has now turned in fully upon itself, of which the dramatically visible early moment is the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. In the documentary, the exacerbation of the persecution of Christians is linked to that event, although the narrative makes clear that the persecution far precedes 2001.
Faiz’s extraordinary ability to write about the Rosenbergs while in prison himself, to identify their loss of each other as an exemplary loss, is figured in a classically Urdu idiom. The identification is presented through a kind of affiliation, evident in the use of “ham” (we) of “ham jo tarīk rāhon men māre ga’e” (we who were killed in the dark lanes/highways).76 That larger sense of a polity, which crosses boundaries, brought together by injustice makes it into Nasir’s speech, via the documentary, surfacing as a demand for recognition and justice within the national space. A demand reinforced through the (slightly misremembered) quotation from Ludhianvi, where she substitutes the word used for blood, “khūn,” in the poem with “lahū,” in one of the moments in the speech where, overcome, she speeds up, stumbles, or misspeaks:
zulm tho [sic] zulm hai baṛhtā hai tho mit jātā hai
lahū tho lahū hai tapke gā tho jam jā’e gā.
Cruelty is cruelty if it increases it gets erased
Blood is blood if it drips it will congeal.77
She goes on to pick up the concluding line of the film that this congealed blood will prove a point of departure for a new struggle, but what she chooses to conclude with is the penultimate quotation from Faiz, from a poem that mourns the erasure of the unimportant dead—as if Bhatti’s murder and Aasia Noreen’s plight reinforces for her the despairing sense of ongoing erasure to which the documentary seeks to bear witness:
kahīn nahīn hai kahīn bhī nahīn lahū kā surāgh
na dast-o nākhun-e qātil, na āstīn pe nishān
na surkhī-e lab-e khanjar, na rang-e nok-e sīnān
na khāk par ko’ī dhabbā, na bām par ko’ī dāgh
kahīn nahīn hai kahīn bhī nahīn lahū kā surāgh
pukārtā rahā be-āsra yatīm lahū
kisī ko bahr-e sama’at na vaqt tha na dimāgh
na mudda’i na shahādat hisāb pāk hū’ā
ye khūn-e khāk-nashīnān tha rizq-e khāk hua
Nowhere, nowhere at all is there any trace of the blood
Not on the murderer’s hands, nails, or sleeve
No redness on the lip of the dagger or on the tip of the spear
No stain on the soil and no blot on the rooftop
Nowhere, nowhere at all is there any trace of the blood
The helpless, orphaned blood kept calling out,
Noone had the capacity to listen, nor the time or mind for it
No plaintiff no witness so the account was purified (closed)
This was the blood of those who dwelt in the dust and was consumed by the dust.78
These lines from Faiz are from a poem he wrote in 1965, after the elections, which Fatima Jinnah ostensibly lost, followed by riots in Karachi in which many were killed by the government. The poem mourns murder and injustice through a deployment of metaphors of blood that has not stained the murderers, their weapons, or their clothes. The blood, which keeps calling out (“pukārta raha be asra yatīm lahū”/“the orphaned hopeless blood kept calling out”), disappears back into the earth, to which it is closer for it is the blood of the lowly. The poem courts the implication that all the dead must revert to the earth. Yet because it is the blood of those who are considered beneath notice, the murders disappear as murders because those killed are not worthy of justice. The poem provides the witness unavailable in the realm of injustice it indicts.
Through these quotations, Nasir invokes what one might call a literature of disappearance—a literature that attempts to figure the particular kind of loss that comes with the politics of disappearance, which might be the exemplary form of Cold War state power, with its peculiar combination of surveillance—which seeks to peer at that which is least visible—and invisibility. Disappearance paradoxically demands continuous grief—as within the matrix of that kind of power, the dead cannot be laid to rest—and simultaneously installs, even institutionalizes, the ungrievability of the dead because disappearance cannot be accompanied by burial. It institutionalizes thus an absence of rest. Within this larger matrix of ungrievability, grief is inescapably repetitive, not, it must be said, because of a remembered trauma, but because of an ongoing one.79
But if the absence of blood from the weapons of the murderers represents the impossibility of justice—for not only is there no sign of guilt, there is no sign, no evidence, of the murder—Nasir’s demand for the recognition of the contribution of Christians to the nation, which is also, and fully, a plea, is itself presented through a metaphor of blood: “ham ne iss dhartī ko apne lahū se sīnchā hai” (we have irrigated this land with our blood).80 This incarnadine irrigation then establishes a relation that is fundamentally corporeal between the human body and the world’s body, through the transformation of blood into water that keeps the land alive. This connection is meant to overcome the ideality of the theologically bounded conception of nation, which excludes minorities. Nasir assimilates Bhatti’s murder to this larger contribution “kal hī mere bhai ne apna tāzah lahū diyā hai iss dhartī ke liye,” (only yesterday has my brother has given his fresh blood for this land).81 The irrigation becomes a transfusion for the land, made sacrifice because the amount of blood given results in the death of the donor.
Nasir’s (and the documentary makers’) density of citation is an attempt to restore a history erased by the project of turning the history of the region into one conceived only in religious nationalist terms, a religious nationalism whose security is achieved through the delineation and ongoing iteration of a theological principle. If the citation of Jinnah’s speech attempts to seize the charismatic if—given his oscillations on the question—ultimately unstable authority of Jinnah in order to authorize a secular conception of the state, to retain hold of a different concept of the nation in order to authorize dissent from prevalent forms of power, the allusions, woven together into a political poetics of blood, work to restore the bodily presence of the minority in the area, the land, over which different conceptions of the nation, and different nationalisms, seek to settle. Blood that does not stain reveals the moral stain of unprosecuted murder, blood that clots and strengthens (“jam jāta hai,” “becomes congealed”) has the power to cause some transformative upheaval for justice, and blood shed by minorities in the service of the national project (Christian nurses who died at Partition) and the state (a murdered minister) reveals a history in a condition of perpetual erasure because the contribution, the national labor (the work of irrigation) cannot be recognized. Put together, these metaphorical meanings, all suggested within the speech, reveal complex varieties of suffering, within the nationalist state, of which the disappearance of history is the absent and yet, as Nasir configures it, overwhelming sign.
In the context of a political environment pervaded with metaphors of martyrdom and sacrifice, Nasir’s declaration that Bhatti is a shahīd (martyr) is another demand for recognition within the very terms of the languages of the state and, more subtly, for some equivalence to be granted to the religions that feed those languages. Her mention of those who die in the service of Christ is also an insistence for the state’s recognition of martyrdom as a condition that can be achieved by its “non-Muslim” subjects. The poetry of blood she invokes is an oppositional poetry by poets for whom blood is a sign of injustice and a signal for dissent, both against the state and against varieties of Muslim identitarian nationalism, and, in the case of Faiz, also against Ayub Khan’s secular militarism. At the same time, the importance of Christ’s blood in Christian theology and piety gives these metaphors of blood an additional and religiously particular emotional resonance.
A note is in order about the confusion that speaking of nationalism induces in this context. This nationalism is complex because it issues from a demand for a state, but in its inceptionary moment its opposition to Indian nationalism, in the form we see it in Iqbal, is based on a transnational conception of the demands of faith, practice, and sociality upon Muslims. For Iqbal, these obligations of faith and practice are to be seen as constitutive of Muslim identity, and that identity is then presented as the principle underpinning the demand for the state. The available language of the nation-state is not fully adequate to this phenomenon, which acquires its nationalist purchase in the form of the achieved state but whose conceptual mutability issues from an Iqbalian pan-Islamist conception of Muslim identity and collectivity as transnational, a conception that requires the local policing of the boundaries of religion in the service of its “eternal solidarity” and geographically diffuse instantiations.
As is so often the case, the history of discrimination within the postcolonial state has an intricate relation with a pre-Independence context, upon which the discrimination draws in a completely counterintuitive manner. For the language of anti Christian discrimination issues from the idiom of caste bigotry—Christians are attacked as churas and achūt, as sweepers and of low caste. Immediately after she speaks of the invitation from Jinnah, Nasir refers to the Christian participation in the Boundary Commission discussion about the partition of Punjab. A small number of Punjabi Christians had sought to remain in eastern Punjab. A larger group sought to join the western part that would become part of Pakistan. The language used at the time to defend the choice is revealing, and, with the hindsight of the half century that has followed, heartbreakingly ironic:
Our people have been living with the Muslims for a long time and they have become Muslimised more or less in culture and outlook. They trust the Muslims more. They dress like them. No doubt there have been stabbings of Christians but this was probably due to a mistake as they were taken as Muslims. They are economically as poor as the Muslims. With Muslims they have a religious affinity. After all the Prophets of Islam and Christians are the same. If somebody talks discourteously about Christ, a Muslim will take up the cudgels and even take to violence more than a Christian himself. They believe in the sacred things we believe in. There is a great affinity between the two communities, especially in the villages.82
Underlying this sense of affinity is an idea that many Punjabi Christians are lower-caste converts and would still be subject to caste discrimination in a predominantly Hindu context. The presumption of affinity on historical (shared prophets) and theological (shared monotheistic and “people of the book”) grounds combined with an awareness of the absence of caste as an Islamic theological category apparently makes a Muslim-majority nation a more attractive option than a Hindu-majority one:
The question of Chhoot, Chhat, i.e. untouchability is a great sore in their hearts and these people have suffered a lot from the social prejudices of non-Muslims. I have been in the villages and I know. I am their representative and have to express their feelings. In non-Muslim villages we have no graveyards and are not allowed to draw water from wells.83
Nasir’s assertion that Christians came into Pakistan of their own choice is an insistence on a recognition of this history and, at the same time, calls the originary moment of Partition into question, acting as it does as a reminder of the inaugural problem of minority that underpins the Pakistani state. The current crisis is represented as a betrayal of the trust evinced by Christians in the moments preceding Partition, a trust relying both on this Punjabi Christian commitment to Pakistan and on the idea that the nation built for a particular minority might be more sensitive to the needs of the minorities it gathers into its borders, such as Christians, Parsis, and Sikhs, and the new minorities its borders create—the Hindus within. The crisis Nasir struggles to name issues from the paradoxical sense that the nation built for a segment of the Muslim minority in India might have been expected to be more responsive to the problem of other minorities but seems unable to escape a consciousness of that very formation in a condition of Muslim minority. A sympathetic awareness of Muslim minority lies in the conclusion of the Christian arguments at the boundary commission: “The bulk of our population should be allowed to go to the West Punjab where most of us live and want to live. The weight of our number and our percentage of population should go to the Muslims, to make their majority bigger or to make them from minority to majority in all their claims.”84 The solution at the time is a pooling of minority in order to achieve a majority—a nonsecular Christian dissolution into Muslimness to achieve a shared majority enabled through overlapping prophets and a shared monotheism. Most important, of course, is the material condition of living and having lived on the land that is about to be sliced in the service of nationalisms articulated in terms that render them invisible.85 Nasir’s speech, and the conditions that occasion it, shows that what remains inaccessible more than sixty years after Partition is the knowledge that Muslims are now the powerful majority.
Nasir’s reminder of the betrayal of Christian fealty at Partition comes as an accusatory cry:
Kaise log hain āp log? Kaise insān hain āp log? Jab hamāre ‘vote’ kī zarūrat thī, Pakistan banāne kī zarūrat thī tho hamen sāth le līya aur jab Pakistan ban gaya tho aqlīyat keh kar dīvar ke sāth lagā diyā. Phir hamen ‘discriminations’ ka sāmna karna parha, kabhī hamen ‘untouchable’ kabhī hamen achūt keh kar hamāre bartan alag kar diye ga’e kabhi hamāre. . . . kabhī hamāre masīḥā ko chīn līya gaya.
What kind of people are you? What kind of humans are you people? When you needed our vote, when you needed to make Pakistan then you gathered us with you and after Pakistan was created we were declared minorities and put against the wall. We had to face discriminations then. Sometimes we were called untouchable and sometimes achūt [also untouchable] and our plates were separated. . . . Sometimes our messiah was taken from us. 86
For Nasir, the abjection that attends the status of legal minority is fully entangled with the discrimination encoded in the language of untouchability (of the achūt). For both the status of minority and the figure of untouchability are markers of separation, indeed of segregation. The separation of the cutlery, the insistence on separation during the particular sociality of a meal, signals a fundamental rupture in the social and a complete failure of the originary promise in the intimacy she imagines in the invitation from Jinnah. The separation Nasir indicts is very visible in Noreen’s case. The incident is a variation on the archetypal fear of a member of a lower caste drinking at the well and thus contaminating the water. The dispute, which culminated in the accusation of blasphemy, is said to have begun with some Muslim women with her refusing to drink water that Noreen had brought them and in response to which refusal she is said to have become abusive. The history that haunts the inability of the Muslim women to take water from the hands of a Christian in a village in a nation created to protect Muslim difference poses yet another challenge to the narrative of that creation.
Nasir declares her awareness of the threat to her own life by equating herself with Noreen. The shared first name heightens the sense of the plight shared by the Christian population: “Iske bād Aasia Bibi ko takht-e dar (takht-e bakht?) par lita den ya Asiya Nasir ko golīyon se chalnī kar den āp aqlīyaton kī āvāz ko nahīn dabā saken ge” (After this [Shahbaz Bhatti’s murder] whether you lay Aasia Bibi down on [she seems to mean a bier] or riddle Asiya Nasir with bullets, you will not be able to suppress the voice of minorities).87 It is a plight that is exacerbated by an imperial encounter in which Christians are then inscribed as traitors by the religious actors, newly antagonistic to Empire, who are affiliated with organizations that have a history (that significantly predates the current conflict) of persecuting minorities. She feels yet the necessity of declaring that the loyalties of the Christians are not to America or the West but to Pakistan, for they have “sworn,” she says, “to protect this garden” (ham ne is gulshan ke taḥaffuz̤ kī qasam khā’ī hai).88
The need to declare one’s loyalty and to use that loyalty as a demand for protection might well be the problem of the minority in the nation. It is a dilemma heightened in conditions of war and imperial adventurism. In these conditions, the double bind of minoritarian identity is subject to a double erasure. For to speak of injustice is to court the possibility of being called a traitor or of being accused of producing “recruitable” narratives. Yet one might wonder what might be the condition of those who have fled in the face of threats. When confronted with racism as “Pakis” in Britain or subject to an Islamophobia that cannot tell brown people apart, what should the refugee or asylum seeker say? How, moreover, should postcolonial intellectuals respond to these dilemmas?
The globalization of “local” conditions and histories requires tensile responses. The convergence of concerns about the status of minorities in Europe and America with wars that have been waged since 1989 can obscure these histories in intellectual discourse. Yet thinking about minorities elsewhere cannot be disconnected from metropolitan contexts. For in these contexts immigrant populations are increasingly encouraged to articulate political claims in terms of identitarian alterity—in terms, that is, that call upon histories from elsewhere. These political claims have the potential to affect religious and “cultural” identities on a planetary scale, for as we know, and I have sought to demonstrate further, narratives travel across time and space, sometimes with devastating consequences. Modood’s claims about religious pain with which I began this chapter are built on arguments about the particularities of South Asian forms of devotion, which are said to be invisible to metropolitan “host” populations. To make his case he draws upon the persecution of Muslims in the West and in India but also obscures the costs of that pain for others in the very spaces whose historical and “cultural” authority he summons in support of his argument, all the while erasing the colonial genealogy of the juridical construction of that pain. The absence of Pakistan from his narrative is perhaps most significant. If a history and present of injustice toward people with whom one shares beliefs or practices or histories is one’s own, in what sense is injustice by people with whom one shares beliefs, practices, and histories not so? What, in other words, are the ethics of transnational belonging?
The conceptual problems that confront us have everything to do with the disparate but yet fully discursively entangled locations from which postcolonial intellectuals write. As I struggle with the question of what it is about the current configuration that makes Muslims as a majority inconceivable, it seems appropriate to pay renewed attention to what Mufti has termed the “crisis of minority in its global diffusion.”89
Figure 1. Pamphlet “World Congress for the Protection of the Finality of Prophethood”
Figure 2. Eid Milad-ul-Nabi Day, 2011, outside Delhi gate of the walled city of Lahore. The banner reads: “Disrespectful Pope Benedict and Salman Rushdie. Give proof of faith and earn God’s favor by throwing shoes at both disrespectful dogs.”
Figure 3. Eid Milad-ul-Nabi Day, 2011, outside Delhi gate of the walled city of Lahore.
Figure 4. Komail Aijazuddin First Majlis
Figure 5. Komail Aijazuddin, Pieta
Figure 6. Komail Aijazuddin, The Accusation
Figure 7. Komail Aijazuddin, The Flagellation
Figure 8. Abdur Rahman Chughtai, The Wasted Vigil. All rights reserved by Arif Rahman Chughtai, representing Chughtai Art Home Lahore, courtesy of Arif Rahman Chughtai.