"Grounding Sectarianism: Islamic Ideology and Muslim Everyday Life in Lahore, Pakistan circa 1920s /1990s" by Naveeda Ahmed Khan

Naveeda Ahmed Khan

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation takes distance from scholarship on Pakistan that considers sectarianism to be the exclusive preserve of religious politics. It fails to ask how and why sectarianism has found support among Pakistanis. I claim sectarianism has to be studied not only as politics but also as a historical condition. This condition is prefigured by the political constitution of Muslim subjects in colonial India and their enduring commitment to Islamic Ideology. I distinguish the sectarian condition from sectarian politics by showing this condition to be a response to such politics, containing its excesses to allow Pakistani Muslims to maintain a minimal commitment to Islamic ideology. However, this condition inadvertently engenders violence. This dissertation attempts to draw out this bind to show how sectarianism implicates, albeit complicatedly, all aspects of Pakistani state and society, and not simply militant mullas.

Drawing upon diagnostic terms in circulation in Pakistan, I posit cynicism as the leading disposition of this condition in everyday life allowing Pakistanis to live with ideological contradictions and sectarian politics and violence. Cynicism involves an investment in the face, with concerns over hypocrisy helping to be vigilant against sectarian politics in the guise of the hypocritical mulla. However, the bind of sectarianism is that cynicism stands to elaborate those very gestures of sectarian politics and violence of which it is critical, specifically, repudiation of others on grounds of duplicity/double-facedness/religious deception, which gives lie to the promise of fraternal brotherhood of Islamic ideology. I provide a history of the emergence of this condition, genealogies of those ideological attitudes and postures struck by the modern Muslim subject that help to draw out this condition, and, finally, the ethnography of three neighborhoods in Lahore, Pakistan at those moments within everyday life which shared with sectarian politics a sense of an increasingly unfamiliar, even deceitful world.