In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
University of North Carolina Press (2019)
Centering Pakistan in a story of transnational Islam stretching from South Asia to the Middle East, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs offers the first in-depth ethnographic history of the intellectual production of Shi’is and their religious competitors in this “Land of the Pure.” The notion of Pakistan as the pinnacle of modern global Muslim aspiration forms a crucial component of this story. It has empowered Shi’is, who form about twenty percent of the country’s population, to advance alternative conceptions of their religious hierarchy while claiming the support of towering grand ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq.
Fuchs shows how popular Pakistani preachers and scholars have boldly tapped into the esoteric potential of Shi’ism, occupying a creative and at times disruptive role as brokers, translators, and self-confident pioneers of contemporary Islamic thought. They have indigenized the Iranian Revolution and formulated their own ideas for fulfilling the original promise of Pakistan. Challenging typical views of Pakistan as a mere Shi’i backwater, Fuchs argues that its complex religious landscape represents how a local, South Asian Islam may open up space for new intellectual contributions to global Islam. Yet religious ideology has also turned Pakistan into a deadly battlefield: sectarian groups since the 1980s have been bent on excluding Shi’is as harmful to their own vision of an exemplary Islamic state.
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs is a lecturer in Islamic and Middle East studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
Aafia Unheard
Dawood Ghazanavi
Jumhoori Publications (2020)
Aafia Unheard is a non-fiction book covering the life story of a brilliant minded young Pakistani woman, an MIT graduate, and a mother, who found herself being the focus of a case which continues to serve as an example for the war on terror in response to 9/11.
Dawood Ghazanavi is the author of Thinking Ahead: The Role of Pakistan Diaspora in the 21st Century.
Soul Rivals: State, Militant and Pop Sufism in Pakistan
Nadeem Farooq Paracha
Vanguard Books (2020)
Sufism has always been a contested space in Pakistan. Successive governments, political parties and religious organisations have attempted to coopt it or reject it to suit their own political agendas. Since the turn of the millennium, however, the Pakistani government has made a conscious effort to recast Pakistan as a ‘Sufi country’—a whitewashing endeavour.
In the past few decades, Pakistan’s image has taken a severe beating, ravaged as the country is by the rise of religious extremism. A focus on the syncretic culture of Sufism was seen as a way to reverse this damage without the need to explore more secular narratives and alternatives as almost every attempt at genuine reform has triggered extreme reactions from the politico-religious segments of the society that were empowered through various controversial constitutional amendments and laws between 1974 and the late 1980s.
Soul Rivals discusses the many strands of Sufism (State, Pop and Militant) that have emerged in the course of the country’s attempts to reimagine Sufism. In this close look at the religio-political space in Pakistan, Nadeem Farooq Paracha is as insightful as he is entertaining.
Nadeem Farooq Paracha is a well-known cultural critic, historian and columnist. He is associated with Pakistan’s largest English language daily, Dawn and also the author of four best-selling books on the social history of Pakistan: End of the Past, The Pakistan Anti-Hero, Muslim Modernism: A Case for Naya Pakistan and Points of Entry: Encounters at the Origin Sites of Pakistan.