Introduction
1. On the increasing equation of Islam with Sunni juridical forms, see Aamir Mufti, “Why I’m Not a Postsecularist,” boundary 2 40.1 (Spring 2013): 12.
2. For a study of the politics of Islamophobia, see Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
3. I take my terms here from Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2005).
4. The turning of matters is even more evident after the Arab revolutions. Even the media, especially the New York Times, the great bellwether of the intersection of liberal and state opinion, has adopted this vision of Islam. Societies in which Muslims are a majority are now divided into religious “masses” and “secular” dissidents. See, for instance, the New York Times article regarding the protests in Istanbul about the government grab of Taksim Square, which states, “Mr. Erdogan still has great support among Turkey’s religious masses, but secular critics cite his government’s sweeping prosecution and intimidation of journalists as evidence of its intolerance of dissent.” Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu, “Peaceful Protest over Istanbul Park Turns Violent as Police Crack Down,” New York Times, May 31, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/world/Europe/police-attack-protesters-in-istanbul-taksim-square.html?emc=eta1, accessed May 31, 2013. The presumption here is that no religious person could be environmentally conscious or appalled by mallification of his or her city and home, or object to authoritarian governance. It might indeed be that the protesters are secular or have secular (not primarily motivated by religion) motives for the protests, but surely what is at stake is the issue at hand and what is being protested. When, unnoticed by most, did the New York Times become populist? See two wonderful alternatives: Evran Savci, “On the ‘Turkish Model’: Neoliberal Democracy with Teargas,” Jadaliyya, June 4, 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12008/on-the-turkish-model_neoliberal-democracy-with-tea, accessed June 4, 2013; Emrah Yildiz, “Alignments of Dissent and Politics of Naming: Assembling Resistance in Turkey,” Jadaliyya, June 4, 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12001/alignments-of-dissent-and-politics-of-naming_assem, accessed June 4, 2013.
5. See chapter 4.
Chapter 1
1. See C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). The scene is from Spooks/MI-5, “Who Guards the Guards?,” 3:3, BBC ONE, October 25, 2004, writer Rupert Walters, dir. Cilla Ware, streaming video, http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70110301&trkid=3326878. Hereafter cited in the text as WGG.
2. On historical amnesia in the context of the special relationship, see Hazel Carby, “US/UK’s Special Relationship: The Culture of Torture in Abu Ghraib and Lynching Photographs,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary Art 20 (Fall 2006): 60–71.
3. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), 2.
4. Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 2.
5. Spooks/MI-5, “The Suffering of Strangers,” 3:10, BBC ONE, December 13, 2004, writer Ben Richards, dir. Alrick Riley, streaming video, http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70110308&trkid=13633959.
6. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Cheng (New York: Routledge, 1996), 449. For critiques of the limitations regarding feminism in the thought of some adherents of the idea of Black Britain and their production of a stable antiracist identity, see Ashley Dawson’s fine chapter on Rushdie, “Heritage Politics of the Soul: Immigration and Identity in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” in Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
7. My Beautiful Laundrette, dir. Stephen Frears, scene 4 (Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1985), DVD; hereafter cited in the text as MBL.
8. Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
9. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, xi, xiv, x, xvi.
10. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3, 2.
11. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 257.
12. For more on Modood, see chapter 4. Of course, Modood constructs the distinction between racism and antireligious feeling with an elaboration of a notion of religious injury, in which religious pain and identity will reveal themselves as inextricable, indeed as mutually constitutive. Tariq Modood, “Muslims, Race, and Equality in Britain: Some Post-Rushdie Affair Reflections,” Third Text 11 (Summer 1990): 127–34; reprinted as “Reflections on the Rushdie Affair: Muslims, Race, and Equality in Britain,” in Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–12.
13. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 446
14. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” 447.
15. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 299.
16. Talal Asad, “Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitations,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Jurgensmeyer, and Jonathan van Antwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6918 of 7924 to 6931 of 7924 (ebook location). Asad’s antipathy to aesthetic practice leads him to write rather astonishing passages such as the following, which seems to indicate so deep an animosity that the argument disappears into the vortex of hostility. Even by the standards of précis, the passage is reductive: “Paranoia is the condition that some literary historians have, interestingly, identified as integral to modernist aesthetics. It denotes a range of affective states, including horror, loathing and nausea, generated by uncontrolled migration, by movement not from Europe to non-Europe but from non-Europe to Europe. As such, aesthetics, no less than theology, is a dimension of all modern politics, national and international. Modernism—the aesthetics accompanying modernity—engages with powerful feelings of visceral disgust. And it is in mimesis that modernism finds one of the most potent sources of revulsion and of paranoia, revulsion because modernism values only independence of judgment and despises imitation, paranoia because modernism seeks to penetrate disguises that make things (people, action, words) appear normal and innocent and shows them to be really meaningful and hostile” (6931 of 7924, ebook location).
17. On a notion of adab that does not erase its history, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Some Thoughts on Naguib Mahfouz in the Spirit of Secular Criticism,” boundary 2 34.2 (2007): 32–33.
18. On the Urdu marsiya, see C. M. Naim, “The Art of the Urdu Marsiya,” in Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C. M. Naim (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). In this essay, Naim also suggests that marsiya is the closest thing in Urdu to an epic.
19. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 346.
20. Mahmood, “Secularism,” 346. See the special issue Critical Secularism, boundary 2 31.2 (2004).
21. Mahmood’s accusation against Gourgouris—that he draws on a “liberal romantic imaginary through which we are routinely asked to recognize our most profound commitments (to autonomy, creativity, imagination and freedom)”—is in the same vein. See “Is Critique Secular? A Symposium at UC Berkeley,” Public Culture 20.3 (2008): 447. See also Gourgouris’s trenchant response, “Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood,” Public Culture 20.3 (2008): 453–59.
22. For the author function, see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Josué V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101–20.
23. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 221.
24. “Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Naim in Conversation,” 2009, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Talal-Asad-and-Abdullahi-An-Naim-in-conversation.pdf, accessed January 19, 2011. Asad appears to be engaging a version of Syed Qutb’s account of theological slavery in Social Justice and repeating Qutb’s response to historical liberalism, letting, in other words, the theology be repositioned entirely within the grid of liberalism. Asad’s account is more explicitly based on a collapse between the worldly institution of slavery and the theological notion. On Qutb and liberalism, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al-waqi’I, or New Realist Science,” boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 113–48, esp. 121–22.
25. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 11.
26. For a response to the resuscitation of a variation on the idea of the happy slave, the happy slave family, in “The Marriage Vow,” a document endorsed by Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, see Tera Hunter, “Putting an Antebellum Myth to Rest,” New York Times, op-ed, August 1, 2011. Hunter’s conclusion is worth quoting in full: “Why does the ugly resuscitation of the myth of the happy slave family matter? Because it is part of a broad and deliberate amnesia, like the misleading assertion by Sarah Palin that the founders were antislavery and the skipping of the ‘three-fifths’ clause during a Republican reading of the Constitution on the House floor. The oft-repeated historical fictions about black families only prove how politically useful and resilient they continue to be in a so-called post-racial society. Refusing to be honest about how racial inequality has burdened our shared history and continues to shape our society will not get us to that post-racial vision.” http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/putting-an-antebellum-myth-about-slave-families-to-rest.html?_r=0, accessed February 16, 2013.
27. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 11.
28. Saba Mahmood, “Secular Imperative?,” Public Culture 20.3 (2008): 463.
29. Domenico Lusordo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (New York: Verso, 2011). See also Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
30. Of course not all philosophers are prone to such historical blindness; see, for instance, Bernard William’s rejection of philosophical reflections on slavery that hide its historical violence: “Seminar with Bernard Williams,” Ethical Perspectives 6 (1999): 255.
31. On the use of the happy slave, see Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 190–91.
32. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 219.
33. Sarah More, “A True Account of a Pious Negro,” in Cheap Repository Tracts: Sorrowful Sam; or, The History of the Two Blacksmiths (Philadelphia: B&J Johnson, 1800), 33. Early American Imprints, Series I: 1639–1800, http://infoweb.newsbank.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=D58A59XPMTM3ODY2NzY5My4zNDEzODY6MToxMjoxMjguNi4yMTguNzI&p_action=doc&p_queryname=1&p_docref=v2:0F2B1FCB879B099B@EAIX-0F30140A0F718978@37137-100C834C6F864668@33, accessed May 13, 2013. The story is here misattributed to Sarah More but is regarded to be by Hannah More.
34. Sarah More, “A True Account of a Pious Negro,” 34. http://infoweb.newsbank.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=D58A59XPMTM3ODY2NzY5My4zNDEzODY6MToxMjoxMjguNi4yMTguNzI&p_action=doc&p_queryname=1&p_docref=v2:0F2B1FCB879B099B@EAIX-0F30140A0F718978@37137-100C93639B4BC718@34, accessed May 13, 2013.
35. Maria Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” in Tales and Novels, vol. 5 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850), 159.
36. Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” 159–60.
37. Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” 160.
38. Alan Richardson, “Slavery and Romantic Writing,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 1999), 466.
39. Blackburn, American Crucible, 483.
40. Ronald A. T. Judy, “Reflections on Straussism, Antimodernity, and Transition in the Age of American Force,” boundary 2 33.1 (2006): 40.
41. Judy, “Reflections on Straussism,” 40.
42. Carby, “US/UK Special Relationship”; Colin Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2007); Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). For a striking history of the historical development of the American prison system, see Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
43. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Graeme Harper, ed., Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration (New York: Continuum, 2001).
44. For a wonderful corrective, see Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah al-Najjar, eds., We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
45. See David Denby, “Anxiety Test: The Hurt Locker and Food, Inc.,” New Yorker, June 29, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/06/29/090629crci_cinema_denby, accessed June 2, 2013; A. O. Scott, “Soldiers on a Live Wire between Peril and Protocol,” New York Times, June 25, 2009, http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/movies/26hurt.html?_r=0, accessed June 2, 2013. Scott mentions the “hyperbolic realism” of the film and (very much in passing) its political evasions but seems unable to link the politics to the deliberate emptiness, made to pass for stylish “realism.” The rave reviews of the film are puzzling. For another instance, see David Edelstein’s “Explosive Material,” June 21, 2009, http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/57462/, accessed June 2, 2013. For a refreshingly critical review, attentive to the “erasure” of politics in the film, see Seth Colter Walls, “All Pain, No Gain,” Newsweek, January 21, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/01/21/all-pain-no-gain.html, accessed June 2, 2013.
46. Kathryn Bigelow, “High Explosive: Kathryn Bigelow Talks to James Bell about Her Iraq Drama, ‘The Hurt Locker,’” Sight and Sound 19.9 (2009): 8.
47. Describing a different moment, Edelstein notices that James looks like a spaceman: “Explosive Material,” The Hurt Locker, dir. Kathryn Bigelow (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2013).
48. Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, scene 1 (Burbank, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2013), DVD; hereafter cited in the text as ZDT.
49. Jeremy Waldron’s introduction to Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 44 of 486 (ebook).
50. Nadeem F. Paracha, “Zero IQ Thirty,” Dawn, January 31, 2013, http://dawn.com/2013/01/31/zero-iq-thirty/, accessed May 28, 2013. See also Susan L. Carruthers, “Zero Dark Thirty,” Cineaste 38 (2013): 50. Carruthers, too, seems to agree that the film invites mockery; and Deepa Kumar’s detailed critique of the film’s varieties of bigotry, “Rebranding the War on Terror for the Age of Obama: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and the Promotion of Extra-Judicial Killing,” Mondoweiss, January 15, 2013, http://mondoweiss.net/2013/01/rebranding-promotion-judicial.html, accessed June 2, 2013.
51. Fayes T. Kantawala, “Very Dark, Very Zero,” Friday Times 25.1 (February 15–21, 2013), http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130215&page=13, accessed May 28, 2013. On the assassination, see “Cry, the Beloved Country,” Friday Times 25.3 (March 1–7, 2013), http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130301&page=13, accessed May 28, 2013.
52. The oscillations are very clear in the Rand Corporation report (2003), which seems unable to decide which Muslim and what secularist are most useful, if any.
53. Michael Crowley, “Airplane,” New Republic, May 20, 2009, https://www.newrepublic.com/article/airplane#, accessed March 10, 2013.
54. Tariq Ali, “Waiting for an Islamic Enlightenment,” Guardian, October 21, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/oct/22/highereducation.islam, accessed February 1, 2013.
55. Judith Butler, Precarious life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 142.
56. Butler, Precarious Life, 5–6.
57. On African Arabic slave narratives, see Ronald A. T. Judy, (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). According to Judy, one of the earliest narratives dates to 1731 (19). See also Terry Alford, Prince among Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), and A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alrryes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). On Muslims and black internationalism, see Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Chapter 2
1. “Individualism Can’t Beat a Good Crowd Riot,” Life of Brian, scene 20, dir. Terry Jones (Burbank, CA: Handmade Films; Warner Home Video, 1979), DVD.
2. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage International, 2005).
3. For a quick discussion of the role of Turkey in the discussion of the veil, see Leila Ahmed’s “The Discourse of the Veil,” in Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
4. See, for instance, Syed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and, on unintended consequences of the reaction to Turkey leading to a strange (very temporary) alliance between Muslim clerics in Iran and the founding of the Pahlavi dynasty, see Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2007), 123.
5. The project of understanding the veiled or believing Muslim woman is becoming ubiquitous in Anglophone fiction. You see this in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Minaret, Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil, and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf.
6. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–2; hereafter cited in the text as SP.
7. There is a remarkable list of formerly secular leftists doing penance for an earlier contempt for, or simply indifference to, religion. They frequently manifest a strange quality of surprise, as if theirs has been a startling discovery that the “natives” are, in fact, sentient. But if one were once one of those thought to be insensible, the compulsive declaration of surprised and new understanding itself seems strange . . . and patronizing.
8. Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 158, 164; hereafter cited in the text as POV.
9. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 3.
10. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), 233, 235, 237–42. For Daniel Pipes’s campaign against El Fadl, see “Stealth Islamist: Khaled Abou El Fadl,” Middle East Quarterly 11.2 (Spring 2004), www.danielpipes.org/1841/stealth- islamist- khaled-abou-el-fadl, accessed August 31, 2010; and “Khaled Abou El Fadl Reveals His Islamist Outlook,” Lion’s Den: Daniel Pipes Blog, February 4, 2005, updated December 5, 2005, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/02/khaled-abou-el-fadl-reveals-his-islamist, accessed August 31, 2010.
11. As quoted in El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name, 237.
12. Scott is happy to foreground her own American perspective and to use American understandings of the French case as theoretical counterpoint (POV, 93, 8–9).
13. Of course, the neoconservatives will not let up on this. Jamie Glazov, of Front Page Magazine (www.frontpagemag.com) has just published a book in which he discusses fitna at length.
14. See Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18.2 (Spring 2006): 323–47.
15. John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man (New York: Scribner, 2008), 322.
16. Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man, 68.
17. Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man, 13–14.
18. The sudden ubiquity of the tortured male body in mainstream popular culture has everything to do with this discussion. You can see the preoccupation with torture in films and television shows, ranging from the radically conservative imagination of 24—whose fundamental formal conceit, the real-time pretext of the show, is an attempt to find a formal correlative of the ticking-bomb scenario so dear to defenders of torture—to The Bourne Ultimatum’s liberal vision of the good spy who exposes torture and corruption. Children of Men, Rendition, Syriana, to name a few, provide other examples.
19. Hazel Carby, “A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture,” openDemocracy.net, October 10, 2004, www.opendemocracy.net/media- abu _ghraib/article_21, accessed March 29, 2010.
20. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 98; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TA.
21. Hiram Perez, “‘Going to Meet the Man’ in Abu Ghraib” (unpublished paper).
22. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104.3 (September 2002): 783–90. Abu-Lughod mentions Iran as a space where women have greater visibility, but she does not discuss the works she cites by people like Haideh Moghissi and Afsaneh Najmabadi. Moghissi, for instance, has been very critical of Iranian theocracy. Najmabadi’s article, “(Un)veiling Feminism,” is a fascinating attempt to rethink the history of veiling and unveiling in twentieth-century Iranian history. Najmabadi’s notion that the discussion of the veil occludes the complexities of women’s presence in the Iranian public sphere, post-1979, is worth serious discussion, but her discussion militates radically against any recuperation of the burqa under the Taliban, for whom women’s education itself is an abomination. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)veiling Feminism,” Social Text 64 (Autumn 2000): 29–45. See also Gayatri Spivak’s emphasis on the education of the girl child in “1996: Foucault and Najibullah,” chapter 4 of Other Asias (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 132–60.
23. The reception of this article has been fascinating. In order to argue with a political theorist celebrating the liberation of Afghan women by the American war machine, Judith Butler reports that she heard a talk about “the important cultural meanings of the burka.” She goes on to write, “The fear of the speaker was that the destruction of the burka, as if it were a sign of repression, backwardness, or indeed, a resistance to cultural modernity itself, would result in a significant decimation of Islamic culture, and the extension of US cultural assumptions about sexuality and agency ought to be organized and represented.” Butler does not name Abu-Lughod in the text, but she cites the article. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 146.
24. Valentine Moghadam, “Patriarchy, the Taliban, and Politics of Public Space in Afghanistan,” Women’s Studies International Forum 25.1 (2002): 19–31. See also Moghadam’s “Revolution, the State, Islam, and Women: Gender Politics in Iran and Afghanistan,” Social Text 22 (Spring 1989): 40–61. Currently, Malalai Joya’s position is a useful example. She is critical of the U.S. occupation, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban and has called for secularism—in the sense of a separation of mosque and state. See also Time magazine’s attempt to tone down her message: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Malalai Joya,” in “The 2010 Time 100,” Time, April 29, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1984685_1984949_1985238,00.html. For her resistance to being co-opted, see Judy Mandelbaum, “How Time Magazine Hijacked Afghan Activist Malalai Joya,” Open Salon (blog), May 4, 2010, http://open.salon.com/blog/judy_mandelbaum/2010/05/04/how_time_magazine_hoodwinked_afghan_activist_malalai_joya.
25. Maliha Safri, “The Political Economy of Afghan Migratory Movement” (unpublished paper).
26. For a range of positions on Islam and feminism, see Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), and The Fundamentalist Obsession with Women: A Current Articulation of Class Conflict in Modern Muslim Societies (Lahore, Pakistan: Simorgh/Women’s Resource and Publication Centre, 1987); and Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). For a more critical reading, see Ghada Karmi, “Women, Islam, and Patriarchalism,” in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 69–85. For more of an overview, see miriam cooke, “Women, Religion, and the Postcolonial Arab World,” Cultural Critique, no. 45 (Spring 2000): 150–84; and Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam.
27. On queer as optic, see Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xiii. On links between the turban and terrorist masculinity, see the entire chapter “‘The Turban Is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling.”
28. I mean by telos a desired endpoint that is also assumed to be a likely outcome if the prohibitions are observed.
29. This discussion, perhaps more conceptually familiar to early modernists and medievalists, replays new historicist analyses of gender and embodiment in medieval and early modern Europe.
30. In an article coauthored with Charles Hirschkind, Mahmood has already pointed out that Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey lined up behind George Bush to support the war in Afghanistan. The critique of Hollywood liberalism and its moralistic smugness is very welcome. Nonetheless, the piece is far from contrapuntal. For two, tensely balanced, contrapuntal readings, see Spivak’s “1996: Foucault and Najibullah” (cited earlier) and “Terror: A Speech after 9-11,” boundary 2 31.2 (Summer 2004): 81–111. Spivak does not elide the violence of the Islamist Right, or disappear the problem of gender injustice, in order to mount her critique of imperialism.
31. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8; hereafter in this chapter cited as PP. The essay by Abu-Lughod that Mahmood discusses here is “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17.1 (February 1990): 41–55.
32. The choice is not between La Perla and the veil. Modern capitalism and consumerism are strangely ecumenical, but neither Mahmood nor Abu-Lughod mentions the growing trend of “designer Islam”: special websites for “Muslim” clothes, high-fashion Islamist designer veils, celebrity Islamists like Pakistan’s Junaid Jamshed, the former pop star, who also owns and runs an overpriced high-end fabric and clothing store, where he sells a range of clothes in line with people’s “social and cultural values” (www.junaidjamshed.info/junaid-jamshed-fashion-outlets.html, accessed September 6, 2010). One can see the fascination with high-end consumption in the following websites: Islamic Design House, www.islamicdesignhouse.com/usa/, accessed September 6, 2010; Designer Hijab Company, www.designerhijabcompany.com//index.php?osCsid=654d4edab2c902b2c403a57ba2127d4, accessed September 6, 2010. One excited hijabi blogger is delighted that Lacroix is inspired by the hijab. Mariam Sobh, “Christian Lacroix Uses Hijab as Inspiration,” Examiner.com, www.examiner.com/muslim-women-s-style-in-national/christian-lacroix-uses-hijab-as-inspiration, accessed September 6, 2010. When I see some of the other images juxtaposed with Lacroix, all I can think of is Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem. There is, of course, also Hijab Barbie.
33. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34.
34. Marnia Lazreg has recently distanced herself from Mahmood’s positions and from positions like Mahmood’s. See especially the introduction and “Letter Four: Conviction and Piety,” in Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
35. One might contrast this with the wonderful collection edited by Afsaneh Najmabadi and Kathryn Babayan, Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
36. In an astonishing passage, Colin Jager extends this aesthetic tendency. He uses Mahmood’s comparison of the members of the dawa movement with virtuoso pianists to explain how a Wordsworth sonnet works: “In her discussion of women’s mosque movement, Saba Mahmood considers the multiple ways in which traditional forms of religious discipline interact with and help to shape Egyptian modernity. In the course of her investigation she offers an analogy that resonates powerfully with Wordsworth’s sonnet. A virtuoso pianist, she notes, can achieve excellence only by submitting herself to a rigorous program of drills, lessons, and exercises; the freedom of expertise, accordingly, is not the freedom of an autonomous will but rather the freedom of mastery—the mastery of a certain set of habits, skills, dispositions, or bodily postures. In like manner, the sonnet’s speaker imagines that both poet and reader will submit themselves on a regular basis to the rigours of the sonnet form. In this kind of expertise, a certain discipline becomes so ingrained that the self empties out into pure activity; the forms of life enumerated in the sonnet’s octave, accordingly, renounce being in favour of doing, striving to become verbs rather than nouns.” I am not sure if the analogy is ultimately between the Muslim woman and the sonnet’s speaker, or between the woman and the sonnet, but aestheticization turns out to be crucial to postsecularism. More disturbing is the thought that Muslim women might as well be sonnets, so little reality do they seem to have in this conversation. See Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 214.
37. Khaled Abou El Fadl, for instance, has also published something with the Rand Corporation. He has also written an introduction to a volume on the War on Terror that includes a piece by Noam Chomsky. Daniel Pipes detests him. I am not sure, then, where, on Mahmood’s terms, he stands on the spectrum of complicities with empire.
38. Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 343 n. 51, 338–39.
39. Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2006).
40. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Lila Abu-Lughod’s adoption of the notion of the burqa as portable seclusion does the same. The idea there is that women ought to carry their houses with them and, in so doing, provide the virtuous domesticity, which is their patrimony.
41. The term is Mahmood’s (PP, 197).
42. Some of these analyses need to be more global, but Mahmood insists that the local and the particular are conceptually necessary in order to buttress her claims while surreptitiously stretching arguments into a more global form. See Faisal Devji’s brilliant The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) for a powerful study of global and historical discourses and tendencies at play in militant Islam and the War on Terror.
43. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 284.
44. One might surmise that it is in order to secure this equation that she attempts to discredit both El Saadawi and, in a more recent piece on the Danish political cartoons, Tariq Ali.
45. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 254.
46. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (Summer 1992): 770–803, esp. 803.
47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Use and Abuse of Human Rights,” boundary 2 32.1 (Spring 2005): 136.
Chapter 3
1. For an account of the cultural and political trends that contributed to the death of the project of Black Britain and replaced it with an identitarian politics conceived in religious terms, see Chetan Bhatt, “The Fetish of the Margins: Religious Absolutism, Anti-Racism and Postcolonial Silence,” New Formations 59 (2006): 102–8.
2. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); hereafter cited in the text as GR.
3. For a sympathetically critical discussion of Asad, see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), xiv–xvi.
4. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 346.This version of antisecularism mutates into a kindly attempt to rescue Said from himself in Gil Anidjar’s “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 52–77.
5. Mahmood, “Secularism,” 346.
6. Aamir Mufti, “The Aura of Authenticity,” Social Text 18.3 (2000): 87, 88.
7. The word perfection is curiously important to Arnold: “Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists; for, on the contrary, what we aim at is their perfection. But culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us, as we in the following pages have shown, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffers, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation, the harder that way is to find.” Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Cultural and Political Criticism, ed. Ian Gregor (New York: Merrill, 1971), 7–8; hereafter cited in the text as CA. In the chapter on sweetness and light, he writes: “Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion” (34).
8. For some versions of this view, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), and Genealogies of Religion; Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), and “Secularism.” For an opposing view, see Aamir Mufti, “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” boundary 2 34.1 (2007): 17–23; and “The Aura of Authenticity,” 87–103.
9. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 285–91; and Formations of the Secular, 8–9.
10. For histories of the development of the novel, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
11. Leila Aboulela, The Translator (New York: Black Cat, 1999), 89; hereafter cited in the text as T.
12. Leila Aboulela, “Leila Aboulela: Author Statement,” British Council/ Literature, British Council, http://literature.britishcouncil.org/leila-aboulela, accessed October 23, 2011.
13. Leila Aboulela, “Moving Away from Accuracy,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 22 (2002): 198–207.
14. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 109–32.
15. The influence of Martin Luther on Jamaluddin al-Afghani, himself a model for Muhammad Abduh, is well known. See, for instance, Aziz Al-Azmeh’s Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 2009), 104, 109. The point of the book is not to elide the differences between a range of Muslim reformers but to track some general trends, which Al-Azmeh does brilliantly even as he resists the tendency to homogenize Islam.
16. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2–3.
17. The marshaling of women who defend polygamy with Islamist rhetoric can be found in a range of contexts. For an example in Pakistan, see Abbas, “Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan,” in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda Khan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 344–69. For an account of a defense of conservative positions on women in the Egyptian context, see also Leila Ahmed’s discussion of Zeinab al-Ghazali in chapter 10 of Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
18. Aboulela, “Moving Away from Accuracy,” 206.
19. “Surah An-Nisa 4, 34,” in Qur’an, trans. Marmaduke Pickthall (London: Ta’ha Books, 1930).
20. For a history of these developments, see Jay Spaulding, The Heroic Age in Sinna´r (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1985), 154, 223–24, 238–39, 252. For an account of the rewards for the Islamist middle class in the current Sudanese situation, see Salma Ahmed Nageeb, New Spaces and Old Frontiers: Women, Social Space, and Islamization in Sudan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 16–17.
21. Quoted in Susan Mansfield, “Bridging the Culture Gap,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, December 4, 1999, 13, LexisNexis, accessed August 16, 2011.
22. Leila Aboulela, Minaret (New York: Black Cat, 2005); hereafter cited in the text as M.
23. For a very useful discussion of postcoloniality and Muslim feminism, see Miriam Cooke, “Women, Religion, and the Postcolonial Arab World,” Cultural Critique 45 (2002): 150–84. For the offering up of female consent in answer to imperialism, see Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind, “Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75.2 (2002): 339–54; see also Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
24. See Marie-Aime’e Helie-Lucas, “Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle,” in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 104–14, for an exemplary treatment of this problem.
25. See, for instance, John O. Voll, ed., Sudan: State and Society in Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Alex De Waal, Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). For the effects of Islamization in present-day Sudan, see Nageeb, New Spaces and Old Frontiers.
26. Aboulela does this in The Translator as well (69). There are, of course, complexities surrounding this, given the discourse of Western intervention. See Alex De Waal, “Tragedy in Darfur: On Understanding and Ending the Horror,” Boston Review, October–November 2004, accessed August 20, 2011; and Mahmood Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency,” London Review of Books, March 8, 2007, 5–8.
27. Wai’l Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” Novel 41.2–3 (2008): 316–17.
28. For an argument that connects the two, see Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 305.
29. Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Picador, 1983), 23.
30. I am using an argument made by Rosemond Tuve, “Sacred ‘Parody’ of Love Poetry and Herbert,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 249–90.
31. Hassan has argued that this remark indicates that Coetzee does not expect restraint from a Muslim woman, but I think that to understand this remark one needs to revisit the tensions between Rushdie and Coetzee. Coetzee’s aversion to magical realism is well known. Rushdie’s novels are also, according to Coetzee, too baggy. Aboulela may well be, laudably, the polar opposite of Rushdie for him. Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” 309. See also J. M. Coetzee, “Palimpsest Regained” [Review of The Moor’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie], New York Review of Books, March 21, 1996, accessed April 25, 2007. For the description “halal fiction,” see Ferial Ghazoul, “Halal Fiction” [Review of Coloured Lights and The Translator by Leila Aboulela], Al-Ahram Weekly Online, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/542/bo4.htm, accessed April 25, 2007.
32. Ghazoul, “Halal Fiction.”
33. Mike Philips, “Faith Healing” [Review of of Minaret by Leila Aboulela], Guardian, June 11, 2005, accessed April 26, 2007.
34. Anita Sethi, “Keep the Faith,” Guardian, June 4, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/05/fiction.features2, accessed April 26, 2007.
35. For a quick and useful overview of this history, see Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner, 1992), 257–58, 348–49. For a thoughtful account of variants of revivalist reformism, see Ahmad Dallal, “The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750–1850,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113. 3 (1993): 341–59. It is often argued that the doctrinal differences between different, variously modern revivalist groups makes it difficult to speak of them together, but such reasoning would imply that the separate existence of Quakers, Methodists, and Anabaptists means that there is no such thing as Protestantism.
36. For a discussion of this development, see Mufti, “Fanatics in Europa,” boundary 2 34.1 (2007): 17–23.
37. Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (New York: Knopf, 2005).
38. Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers, 276.
39. See the first chapters of Asad’s Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular.
Chapter 4
1. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 79.
2. Tariq Modood, “Muslims, Race, and Equality in Britain: Some Post-Rushdie Affair Reflections,” Third Text 11 (Summer 1990): 127–34; reprinted as “Reflections on the Rushdie Affair: Muslims, Race, and Equality in Britain,” in Tariq Modood, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–12. Hereafter cited in the text as MP.
3. Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” in Talal Asad et al., Is Critique Secular?Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); hereafter cited in the text as RR. See also the entire volume Is Critique Secular?
4. This sense of what I am calling “the redundancy of secularism,” the tendency, that is, to add secularism to any set of failures, including Protestant Christian ones, that mark the disenchanted aridity of the contemporary world is also to be found in Judith Butler’s “Sexual Politics, Torture and, Secular Time,” British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 1–23; reprinted in Elzbieta H. Oleksy, ed., Intimate Citizenships: Gender, Sexualities, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2009), 17–39; and Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 101–35.
5. On sources for Asad’s views regarding religion and belief see Chapter 3, note 39. The same conflation is evident in the following line, “From the Cargo Cults of Melanesia to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, they merely attempt (hopelessly) ‘to resist the future’ or ‘to turn back the clock of history.’” Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 19.
6. On Mahmood’s use of Byzantium, see Dimitris Krallis, “The Critics Byzantine Ploy: Voltairean Confusion in Postsecularist Narratives,” boundary 2 40 (2013): 223–45.
7. I find the use of the noun icon odd, given that the adjectival “iconic” would do the work as well without doing so much violence to the language. How would one talk about a Muslim’s relation with Muhammad, on Mahmood’s terms? Would one say the Muslim is icon to Muhammad or icon with Muhammad. At the risk of being pedantic, I simply don’t see the gain in the adjectival sacrifice. Is it a verbal noun? How would it be used?
8. See, for instance, Amelie Blom, “The 2006 Anti-‘Danish Cartoons’ Riot in Lahore: Outrage and the Emotional Landscape of Pakistani Politics,” Samaj: South Asia Multi-Disciplinary Journal 2 (2008), http://samaj.revues.org/1652, accessed June 4, 2013.
9. On the terms of Mahmood’s argument regarding agency, abjection, and subjectivation it might be worth asking what ought to prevent someone from asking whether choosing to live with religious pain might not be a form of producing agency and a condition of subject formation.
10. Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2006), 97.
11. On varying and intersecting impulses on the question, see Barbara Metcalfe, “Travelers’ Tales in the Tablighi Jamaat,” Annals of the American Academy 588 (July 2003): 138.
12. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Belief, and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13.
13. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 13.
14. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 251.
15. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 251.
16. The Bhagvat-Geeta or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, in Eighteen Lectures with Notes, trans. Charles Wilkins (London: Printed for C. Nourse, 1785), 13.
17. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); and Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
18. The Bhagvat-Geeta or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, in Eighteen Lectures with Notes, 12.
19. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 60.
20. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English Rule in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Betsy Bolton, “Imperial Sensibilities, Colonial Ambivalence: Edmund Burke and Frances Burney,” English Literary History 72.4 (2005): 871–99.
21. The code was subsequently revised by Sir Barnes Peacock, the first chief justice of the Calcutta High Court.
22. All quotations from the Indian Penal Code are taken from J. O’Kinealy, B.C.S., “Chapter XV (Of Offences Relating to Religion),” The Indian Penal Code [Act XLV. Of 1860] And Other Laws of and Acts Of Parliament Relating to the Criminal Courts of India, With Notes, Containing the Rulings of the Nizamut Adawlut on Points of Procedure and Decisions of the High Court of Calcutta (Calcutta: Messsrs. Thackeray, Spink and Co., 1869), 138–39; hereafter cited in the text as IPC. The Pakistani amendments are quoted from “Chapter XV (Of Offences Relating to Religion)” of the Pakistan Penal Code [Act XLV of 1860], http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/legislation/1860/actXLVof1860.html, accessed August 20, 2011. The five Pakistani amendments are also quoted in their entirety in note 8, Osama Siddique and Zahra Hayat, “Unholy Speech and Holy Laws: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan—Controversial Origins, Design Defects, and Free Speech Implication,” Minnesota Journal of International Law 17.2 (2008): 303–86, 311.
23. For a short account of the history of the pamphlet, see Deepak Mehta, “Words That Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim-Pakistani Publics in Bombay,” in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda Khan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 326.
24. For some critical analyses of these tendencies, see Chetan Bhatt, “The Fetish of the Margins: Religious Absolutism, Anti-Racism and Postcolonial Silence,” New Formations 59 (2006): 98–115; Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath (New York: Melville House, 2010). For Dahl’s reaction see Rachel Donadio, “Salman Rushdie: Fighting Words on a Knighthood,” New York Times, July 4, 2007.
25. Osama Siddique and Zahra Hayat, “Unholy Speech and Holy Laws: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan—Controversial Origins, Design Defects, and Free Speech Implication.” In its entirety 295-B reads: Defiling, etc., of Holy Qur’an: “Whoever willfully defiles, damages, or desecrates a copy of the Holy Qur’an or of an extract therefrom or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life” (PPC).
26. The history of the addition of the death penalty is fascinating in its own right as it attests to the growing power of the conservative lobby. Aasia Bibi, whose case prompted political interventions that led to the assassinations of the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, and the Christian federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, was charged under 295-C. I shall return to her case in the next section.
27. The true precariousness of the status of minorities revealed itself when Bhutto’s government introduced the second amendment to the constitution, declaring Ahmadis non-Muslims, in 1974. Although the usual account, figuring the Bhutto government’s adoption of the amendment as a response to pressure from the Jamaat-i-Islami party, mirrors American narratives of hapless Democrats, hobbled by a powerful Right, it underplays (as in the American case) the temptations of triangulation. It is unclear why an authoritarian leader who refused to accept the outcome of a democratic election, thereby enabling a civil war, and who subsequently had no trouble turning against his own party members and squashing the demands of trade unions would feel the need to countenance these demands. Bhutto’s self-presentation as the true representative of the people is radically undermined by the authoritarian nature of his regime and, foundationally, by his complicity with the military and the religious Right in the suppression of the democratic aspirations of the East Pakistanis.
The acceptance of the demands of the anti-Ahmaddiya campaigners is both an index of the nation’s anxieties in those years and a part of the larger matrix of Bhutto’s consolidation of his own power. Thus the introduction of the amendment and the hosting of the OIC summit also appear to be an attempt to occlude the atrocities against fellow Muslims in the newly formed Bangladesh and Bhutto’s complicity in that loss. What was enacted was a recourse to a stabilized Islamic identity that could enable a forgetting of the atrocities committed against fellow Muslims in the former East Pakistan, atrocities, moreover, in which the Jamaat-i-Islami was known to have colluded with the army. In 1974 the Muslim World League also declared Ahmadis non-Muslims.
28. See, for instance, Khalid B. Sayeed, “The Jama’at-i-Islami Movement in Pakistan” Pacific Affairs 30.1 (March 1957): 59–68. Osama Siddique and Zahra Hayat remark the objection of the minorities to the Objectives resolution as well, see note 300, “Unholy Speech and Holy Laws: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan—Controversial Origins, Design Defects, and Free Speech Implication,” 368.
For a discussion of the implications of the debates at the Constituent Assembly for the consolidation of the nation-state, see Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011), especially chapter 2. For readings of the status of religion in the Pakistani Constitution, see Fazlur Rahman, “Islam and the Constitutional Problem of Pakistan,” Studia Islamica 32 (1975): 275–87; and “Islam and the New Constitution of Pakistan,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 8.3–4 (1973): 190–204.
29. Constitution of Pakistan (Second Amendment) Act 1974, art. 3, http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/constitution/amendments/2amendment.html, accessed August 20, 2011.
30. Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000); Antonio R. Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion: Ahmadi Muslims and Orthodoxy in Pakistan (Montreal: Guernica, 1989). See also Asad Ahmed, “The Paradoxes of Ahmadiyya Identity: Legal Appropriation of Muslim-ness and the Construction of Ahmadiyya Difference,” in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda Khan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 273–314; Spencer Lavan, The Ahmadiyyah Movement: A History and Perspective (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1974).
31. The Shia, who are numerically a minority, are not yet a legal minority in the country.
32. Significantly, they are happy to use this media representation on their own website. “Shahi Imam Decries Nawaz Sharif’s Statement on Ahamadiyas,” Ahrar News, http://archives.dawn.com/archives/36323, accessed August 29, 2011. See also “Sharif’s Statement on Ahmadis Angers Clerics,” June 7, 2010, archived on The Persecution.org., http://www.thepersecution.org/news/10/et0607.html, accessed August 29, 2011; “PML-N Defends Nawaz’s Remarks about Ahmadis,” June 10, 2010, http://archives.dawn.com/archives/36323, accessed August 29, 2011.
33. Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion, 102.
34. On “posing,” see also Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion, 30–34.
35. Qadianis is a derogatory term for Ahmadis. Sayyid Abu’l A’la Mawdudi, The Qadiani Problem (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1979).
36. Mawdudi, The Qadiani Problem, 18.
37. Muhammad Iqbal, “Qadianis and Orthodox Muslims,” and “Reply to the Questions Raised by Pandit J. L. Nehru,” in Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, comp. A. R. Tariq (Lahore: Ghulam Ali & Sons, 1973), 91–104, 109–39. See also in the same volume “Rejoinder to the ‘Light’” (99–104) and “Letter to the ‘Statesman’” (104–8). “Qadianism and Orthodox Muslims” hereafter cited in the text as QM; “Reply to the Questions Raised by Pandit J. L. Nehru”/”Islam and Ahmadism,” cited as RQ. For a subtle reading of the complexity of Iqal’s positions, see Naveeda Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
38. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty. See particularly the chapters “Contested Sovereignty in the Punjab: The Interplay of Formal and Informal Politics,” 262–319; and “Between Region and Nation: The Missing Centre,” 320–85.
39. My view grants more importance to Iqbal’s insistence on Muhammad as the seal of the prophets than does Khan. See Khan, Muslim Becoming, 92.
40. Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 136.
41. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 369.
42. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 356.
43. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 369.
44. On some of the ironies of the current situation of Ahmadis in relation to concepts of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, see Gualtieri, Conscience and Coercion, 102–7.
45. Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Solidarity of Islam,” in Jawaharlal Nehru on Communalism, ed. Nand Lal Gupta (Delhi: Hope India Publications, 2006), 84–87.
46. On the Jewish Question in relation to minority and secularism in South Asia, see Aamir Mufti, “Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique,” Social Text 45 (1995): 75–96.
47. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 132. The current struggles surrounding religion in Pakistan, sometimes refer to the “Arabization” of Pakistani culture, where the word is usually a code for the rise of right-wing religious actors and their attempts to reshape society by de-vernacularizing it. As a term of critique, “Arabization” must be understood within the history of Urdu and regional progressive thought, because it attempts to retain a social connection with customary social forms, conceived in terms of Indic culture.
48. That it has become a sort of informal national test is evident from Imran Khan’s statement that he will not contest the amendment regarding the Ahmadis in the days leading to the 2013 Pakistani elections. Khan’s statement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHw1_nL7Dew and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUe9rit9vxU. Faiza Rahman, “1973 Constitution: Imran Opposes Repeal of Ahmadi Laws,” Express Tribune, May 3, 2013, http://tribune.com.pk/story/543862/1973–constitution-imran-opposes-repeal-of-ahmadi-laws/. See also the press release, dated May 1, 2013, on the Tehreek-i-Insaf website “PTI Denies Seeking Ahmadis Support in Polls.” An excerpt from the release: “Khan said he had an absolute belief in the finality of Prophet Muhammad PBUH. Anyone claiming prophethood after him is a liar. This belief of mine is the same at the entire Muslim ummah. PTI totally subscribes to the article in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan on Qadianis.” http://www.insaf.pk/News/tabid/60/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/15820/PTI-denies-seeking-Ahmadis-support-in-polls.aspx., accessed June 6, 2013.
49. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 210.
50. Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Asad et al., Is Critique Secular?, 36. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
51. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 293.
52. It is worth asking whether in Shia theocratic Iran Shia thought and practice are both Islamic and state orthodoxy? If so, how would the example work within the broader antinomies of “Islamic orthodoxy”/religious criticism and Western intellectual thought/liberalism/state power?
53. For a useful history of the Jihadi groups, see Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
54. See also the website thepersecution.org. I’m grateful to Biju Matthew to pointing out the tones of Bollywood gangsterism in the pamphlet.
55. I am using “writer” in the singular here for economy and convenience, but its declared association with a larger group might equally easily indicate a more corporate hand.
56. As the groups desire to connect with, and draw on the authority of, groups like the Taliban and the Lashkar-Jhangvi makes clear, the extrajudicial persecution that is also now part of the Pakistani juridical order cannot be separated from the Cold War context in which the Zia regime was bankrolled by the United States, as Pakistan became an ally in the war in Afghanistan. As is well known, in the process of fighting various proxy wars (America’s) as well as Pakistan’s own against India, the regime also created a series of militias. Many of these groups have had their own religio-political agendas for almost a quarter of a century now. The power of these groups suggests that the crisis of the postcolonial state needs to be theorized in terms of both military usurpation of constitutional and judicial processes and of paramilitary state-complicit but increasingly state-hostile groups. The oscillation between complicity and hostility itself requires further documentation and analysis. The hostility appears to emanate from the proximity to segments of the military, itself increasingly fissured, and the fact that such proximity does not guarantee the militias recognition at the political table. These paramilitary groups are also paralegal and yet secure enough, and thus fully juridical, to be able to engage in the process of declaring minorities such as the Ahmadis and Shias non-Muslim. This history of collusion is unintelligible without a recognition of the role of the United States in enabling the institutions and actors in Pakistan most committed to the most reactionary brands of modern Islam in the war against the global Left and communism. The current normativity of this persecution must be seen as an effect of global and local convergences. Yet, as evinced by the resistance* of political agents ranging from human rights activists to the members of the government willing to challenge the laws and a cleric such as Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, combined with initiatives on the ground such as those launched after the murders of the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, and the only Christian in the federal cabinet, Shahbaz Bhatti, the normative is also a site of contest and resistance. (*The word resistance here seems important precisely because the more theoretically palatable, and less binary, negotiation seems not to capture the intensity of the polarization around the attempt to normalize these laws and also risks suggesting the necessity of some mode of acceptance of the way these laws frame minorities.)
57. Shahid Alam, “A Political Murder or War,” Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, January 15–16, 2011, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/01/14/a-political-murder-or-war, accessed September 15, 2011.
58. Alam, “A Political Murder or War.”
59. Alam, “A Political Murder or War.”
60. Alam, “A Political Murder or War.”
61. See Linda Walbridge’s very important account of the fate of Christians under the Blasphemy law(s), The Christians of Pakistan: The Passion of Bishop John Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2009), ix, 89-90.
62. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Josué V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, 101–20.
63. My terms here are drawn from Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
64. Asiya Nasir, “Speech in Parliament following Shahbaz Bhatti’s murder,” “Dedicated to Shaheed Shahbaz Bhatti,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT4oGIWXfQ4, accessed August 10, 2011.
65. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, “Ham jo tārīk rāhon men māre ga’e,” Nuskha hā-yi vafā (Lahore: Maktabah-i Kārvān, 1984), 262–64.
66. Nasir, “Speech.”
67. It is worth pointing out that this claim has ostensibly non-“extremist” proponents. The arch-Orientalist, Muhammad Asad, who made little distinction between the stillness of the Arab desert and the Arab mind in his conversion narrative, The Road to Mecca, claimed quite remarkably, in the immediate aftermath of Independence, that only a good Muslim could be a good Pakistani. Asad was, of course, prominent in the Pakistan government before he decamped to Spain—as if because monumentally disappointed by the present of which he had been a fervent proponent, he could only find comfort in the shade of Al-Andalus. He was invited back by Zia-ul-Haq. It is worth wondering why a man who could be disappointed by the Zionism of the Jews in Palestine, because of the indifference to the Arabs it encoded, could not see the consequences of such an assertion for the new minorities in the new state carved out for India’s Muslims. See my “Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan,” in Khan, Beyond Crisis, 344–69.
68. Nasir, “Speech.”
69. Nasir, “Speech.” “Shān men gustākhī” is very difficult to translate. “Shān” is grandeur and glory, and gustaaqi is insolence and rudeness but very much with the connotation of an insult to a social superior. Literally, it means “insolence in grandeur,” but more broadly it means insolence or insult against someone above one in a hierarchy. Its connotation is of offense against someone immeasurably superior, and the phrase partakes fully of worldly structures of discrimination and inequality.
70. Sahir Ludhianvi, “Khūn phir khūn hai,” in Ā’o ke ko’ī khvāb bunen (Bombay: Alavi Book Depot, 1971), 24–26. It might be interesting to note that this poem of Ludhianvi’s was written on the occasion of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and that it has for its epigraph Nehru’s famous declaration: “Ek maqtūl Lumumba ek zindah Lumumba se kahīn zīadah tāqatvar hotā hai” (A slain Lumumba is much more powerful than a living one).
71. Burning Alive, dir. Leonard D’Souza and Anjum James Paul, Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VGOakfH8 (part 1) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ0U0fhQeYQ (part 2), accessed Aug 10, 2011. The documentary is narrated in Urdu with a little text (the quotation from the Bible and the title) in English. I have been in touch with Anjum James Paul regarding its availability here. According to Paul (who is from the same village as Shahbaz Bhatti and was his classmate), two of the makers of the documentary, Leonard Dsouza and Nosheen Dsouza, have left the country after being attacked for making it (email correspondence, October 2011).
72. Burning Alive.
73. Burning Alive.
74. Burning Alive.
75. Nasir, “Speech.”
76. Faiz, “Ham jo tārīk rāhon men māre ga’e,” 262–64.
77. Ludhianvi, “Khūn phir khūn hai.”
78. Faiz, “Lahū ka surāgh,” Nuskha hā-e vafā, 395–96.
79. Butler, Precarious Life. On ongoing trauma, see Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 38–65.
80. Nasir, “Speech.”
81. Nasir, “Speech.”
82. “Arguments of the Christians (Joint Christian Board),” in The Partition of the Punjab 1947: A Compilation of Official Documents, vol. 2, ed. Mian Muhmamad Sadullah et al. (Lahore: National Documentation Centre, 1983), 225.
83. “Arguments of the Christians (Joint Christian Board),” 225.
84. “Arguments of the Christians (Joint Christian Board),” 235.
85. It is significant that the town of Gojra is not far from “Toba Tek Singh,” the name of which Saadat Hassan Manto used in his devastating, and oft-translated, story about Partition.
86. Nasir, “Speech.” I am tempted to translate “hamen sāth le līya,” which I have rendered as “you gathered us with you,” as “took us into the fold” but do not want to exaggerate the religious aspect of that phrase, which has such historical resonance in this context.
87. Nasir, “Speech.”
88. Nasir. “Speech.”
89. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 262.
Chapter 5
1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36.
2. Seyyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus, Dar al-Ilm). The edition is not dated.
3. For a subtle discussion of the question of sovereignty in Syed Qutb, see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al-waqi’I, or New Realist Science,” boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 113–48. See also William E. Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (New York: E. J. Brill, 1996).
4. For an example, see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7.
5. Tim Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order,” Social Text 20.4 (Winter 2002): 1–18.
6. Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (New York: Knopf, 2008); hereafter cited in the text as CM.
7. Rene Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 3.2 (December 1946): 77–109; Mario Praz, “The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the the Baroque,” in The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (New York: Doubleday, 1958); Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), and Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Late Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950).
8. Wölfllin, Renaissance and Baroque.
9. Wellek, “The Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship.”
10. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), xxv.
11. Zamora and Kaup’s Baroque New Worlds is a magnificent collection, and Zamora’s The Inordinate Eye is inspiring in its foregrounding of the importance of reading visual and verbal forms together. See Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also the PMLA issue 124.1 (2009) for a collection of essays on Baroque and neo-Baroque.
12. See Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order.”
13. John Guillory, “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter 2002): 470–508.
14. See, for instance, Chalmers Johnson, “The Largest Covert Operation in History,” History News Network, June 3, 2009, http://hnn.us/articles/1491.html, accessed June 14, 2013. For a history of the CIA presence in the region, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
15. Mohammed Hanif, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Noida: Random House, 2011); hereafter cited in the text as AB.
16. On Pakistani painting, see, for instance, Akbar Naqvi, Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan, 1947–1997 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Marcella Nesom Sirhandi, Contemporary Painting in Pakistan (Lahore: Ferozsons, 1992); Salima Hashmi, Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan (New York: Asia Society, 2009); Virgina Whiles, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Although Iftikhar Dadi does not call his book a study of Pakistani painting, the contemporary painters it focuses on are either located in Pakistan or members of the Pakistani diaspora: see Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
17. Conversation with painter, December 28, 2011.
18. A marsiya is a long martyrological poem with elaborate descriptions of the incidents at Karbala. It can more generally mean an elegy but becomes martyrological through its subject matter. See C. M. Naim, “The Art of the Urdu Marsiya,” in Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C. M. Naim (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 1–18.
19. Fayes T. Kantawala, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” Friday Times 25.3 (March 1–7, 2013), http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130301&page=13, accessed March 20, 2013; and “Mourning Assembly,” Friday Times 24.42 (November 30–December 6, 2012), http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20121130&page=13, accessed March 20, 2013.
20. Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).
21. See Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, The Hudood Ordinances: A Divine Sanction. A Research Study of the Hudood Ordinances and Their Effect on the Disadvantaged Sections of Pakistan (Lahore: Rhotas, 1990).
22. Georg Lukacs, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” in Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 142–43; the edition does not specify a translator, although it has an introduction by Alfred Kazin.
23. There is work to be done on the class politics of the starch and fabric in Pakistan. For, on the one hand, the turn to vernacular, local dress under Bhutto was turn away from colonialism, class is now marked by the condition of cotton shalwar kameezes worn by both elite men and women. The white cotton shalwar-kameez favored by upper-class men and politicians is itself a sign of privilege. Starch quickly becomes limp in the heat or crumples very quickly in just about any other circumstances. Its absence may indicate the lack of wherewithal required for exceptional amounts of maintenance and also for the greater number of clothes required to stay in such a condition of pristineness. Mixed fabrics can be more convenient for working-class and poor men and women but are also signs of a lower status.
24. Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, 227. See also Dadi’s discussion of the feminist artist Naiza Khan’s work in the chapter, “Emergence of the Public Self: Rasheed Araeen and Naiza Khan.”
25. Faiz, Nuskha hā-e vafā (Lahore: Maktabah-e Kārvān, 1984), 345–46.
26. On the importance of cultural production to politics in Pakistan, see Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
27. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007); also, for instance, on Pakistan as a praetorian state, “The Mirage of Middle-Class Revolution” (lecture), December 2011, http://ayeshasiddiqa.blogspot.com, accessed June 4, 2013. Zia Mian and Pervez Hoodhbhoy, “Pakistan, the Army and the Conflict Within,” MERIP: Middle East Research and Information Project, July 12, 2011, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero071211, accessed June 4, 2013; Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (New York: Knopf, 2008).
28. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–57; and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
29. Srinivas Aravamudan, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 22, ebook.
30. Laal, “Umeed-e-Sahar,” Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8gJcwh4k88, accessed June 2012.
31. Saadat Hassan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” in Kingdom’s End: Selected Stories, trans. Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007), 9–17.
32. Hanif has become an important commentator on affairs in Pakistan. On the 2013 elections: “Pakistan Elections: How Nawaz Sharif Beat Imran Khan and What Happens Next,” Guardian, May 13, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/mohammed-hanif, accessed June 7, 2013. On Salman Taseer’s murder: “Pakistan Viewpoint: Who Is to Blame for Taseer’s Death?,” BBC, January 6, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12129770, accessed June 7, 2013. On blasphemy in Pakistan: “How to Commit Blasphemy in Pakistan,” Guardian, September 5, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/05/pakistans-blasphemy-laws-colossal-absurdity, accessed June 7, 2013. On the floods of 2010: “Pakistan Victims ‘Have No Concept of Terrorism,’” BBC, August 21, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8931886.stm, accessed June 7, 2013.
33. Saadat Hasan Manto, Phundne (Lahore: Maktabah-e Jadīd, 1955), 8. Hanif says as much regarding the question of love in an NPR interview. See “Mohammed Hanif on Secres and Lies in Pakistan,” NPR, May 24, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153303834/mohammed-hanif-on-secrets-and-lies-in-pakistan, accessed June 4, 2013.
34. See “How Injury Travels,” particularly the third section of the chapter and the discussion of the boundary commission hearings.
35. Paul Amar, “Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13.3 (September 2011): 299–328.
36. Mulk Raj Anand, The Untouchable (London: Penguin Books, 1940), 64.
37. Anand, The Untouchable, 65.
38. Fazlur Rahman, “Islam and the Constitutional Problem of Pakistan,” Studia Islamica 32 (1970): 275–87.
39. Qutb, Milestones; Shepard, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism, xxv, xl–xli.
Chapter 6
1. The poem appears under the title “Wa-yabqā wajhu rabbika,” in Faiz, Nuskha hā-e vafā, 655–56, from which, in my copy, the lines referring to al-Hallaj’s declaration are missing. As what appears to be self-censorship (since the poem does not appear to have been formally banned) this is quite ineffectual because there are so many extant and accessible performances—both sung and recited, including by Faiz himself. (I am grateful to Aamir Mufti for talking to me about the instability of the text across various editions—email correspondence, September 30, 2013). I am grateful to Ali Mir for telling me the story of the performance as related to him by the composer and actor Arshad Mahmood, who was at the performance. For an account of the performance, see also Reginald Massey, “Iqbal Bano: Renowned Pakistani Singer Dies,” Guardian, May 10, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/may/11/iqbal-bano-obituary, accessed September 30, 2013; and M. Ilyas Khan, “Pakistani Singer Iqbal Bano Dies,” BBC News, April 22, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8011930.stm, accessed September 30, 2013. The complete poem without the Arabic title and with the more popular title can be found in O City of Lights: Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Selected Poetry and Biographical Notes, ed. Khalid Hasan, trans. Khalid Hasan and Daud Kamal (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231–33. I have adapted the translation of the title from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Qur’an. “Súra Ar-Rahmán,” in Qur’an, trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali (New York: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, 2012), 55, 27. For a complete recitation of the poem, sans title, see, for instance, Faiz: Poet in Troubled Times, dir. Faris Kermani (London: Penumbra Productions, 1986), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps4u_tqefRA, accessed September 25, 2013; Iqbal Bano, “A Tribute to Faiz” (EMI Records, 1988), cassette.
2. Farzana Sheikh, “Will Sufi Islam Save Pakistan,” in Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands, ed. Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crewe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)
3. On the travails of Sufism in Orientalist, Wahhabi, and media constructions, see Carl Ernst, “Ideological and Technological Transformations of Contemporary Sufism,” in Medium, Metaphor, and Method, ed. miriam cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See also Ernst’s “Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Problematizing the Teaching of Sufism,” in Teaching Islam, ed. Brannon Wheeler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 108–23; and Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
4. Cheryl Benard, Civil-Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (RAND, 2003), Rand Corporation Report, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR1716.sum.pdf, accessed March 20, 2013.
5. Aslam is himself perhaps an exemplary product of this history. His very presence in England is a result of his communist father’s flight to England during Zia’s persecution of the Left. Given his status as a member of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain, it is perhaps unsurprising that he is also preoccupied with crises of Muslim identity.
6. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 23.
7. Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 47. See also Qurratulain Hyder’s introduction to her own translation of Pat jhar kī āvāz (The Sound of Falling Leaves) in which she calls her practice “a throwback to the strong Sufi-secular undercurrent and tradition of Persian and Urdu literature.” Qurratulain Hyder, The Sound of Falling Leaves, trans. Qurratulain Hyder (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1997), v; Qurratulain Hyder, Pat jhar kī āvāz (New Delhi: Maktabah-e Jāma, 1970).
8. Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (New York: Knopf, 2005); hereafter cited in the text as ML. On the importance of pain and death in the classical Persian poetic Sufi tradition, see Schimmel, As Through a Veil, 70–72. On the complicated relationship with the body in Sufi hagiography, see Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
9. Qurratulain Hyder, Āg kā daryā (Lahore: Maktabah-e Jadīd, 1963).
10. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (New York: Knopf, 2008); hereafter cited in the text as WV.
11. Qurrutulain Hyder, River of Fire (new York: New Directions Books, 1998), 426.
12. Gayatri Spivak, “Terror: A Speech after 9–11,” boundary 2 31.2 (Summer 2004): 81–111.
13. On Faiz and the Sufis, see the wonderful chapter “Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Towards a Lyric History of India,” in Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
14. Nadeem Aslam, Season of the Rainbirds (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
15. The weather, as I suggested in chapter 3, is a recurrent symbol of immigrant displacement. Most responses tend to be close to the sentiment in The Satanic Verses that London needs tropicalization.
16. Schimmel, As Through a Veil, 105.
17. Tim Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order” Social Text 73, 20.4 (Winter 2002): 1–18.
18. I am tempted to call this mystical thought, but on the problems of calling such thought mystical, see Carl Ernst’s “Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Problematizing the Teaching of Sufism.” Although perhaps what needs to be conceptualized and developed is the ecstatic element across a variety of devotional practices and prayer.
19. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 217.
20. For an exemplary performance of the impasse, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Seductions of the ‘Honor Crime,’” differences 22.1 (2011): 17–63.
21. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” in Notes to Literature vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 40.
22. Pankaj Mishra, “From a Mansion Near Tora Bora,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 13.
23. Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky (New York: Vintage International, 2011), rpt. ed.
24. Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
25. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), rpt. ed.
26. Kamila Shamsie, “What Has Malala Yousafzai done to the Taliban?,” Guardian, October 10, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/malala-yousafzai-taliban-misogyny, accessed October 20, 2012.