Who Is a Muslim?: Orientalism and Literary Populisms

By Maryam Wasif Khan

Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780823290147

Maryam Wasif Khan

Maryam Wasif Khan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS University, Lahore.

Book preview

Introduction

Who Is a Muslim?

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an Oriental as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

—EDWARD SAID, ORIENTALISM

Unlike many Muslims of today, the Muslims of the Balkan-to-Bengal complex did not feel the need to articulate or legitimate their Muslim-ness / their Islam by mimesis of a pristine time of the earliest generations of the community (the salaf). Rather they felt able to be Muslim in explorative, creative, and contrary trajectories …

—SHAHAB AHMED, WHAT IS ISLAM: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ISLAMIC

This book argues that a modern Muslim identity, one that has taken on dangerously orthodox, populist dimensions in contemporary Pakistani culture, has evolved from what was essentially a moment of orientalist literary invention in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is informed by a single question—who is a Muslim?—one that is and has historically remained at the core of early modern and modern Western literariness, but that in the past century or so has taken on precarious significance in postcolonial Muslim societies and nation states as well. It shows how modern Urdu prose fiction, from the moment of its inception at Fort William College in colonial North India, becomes inextricably bound with the task of defining who is a Muslim. Over the course of some three centuries, this question and its answers, originally posed within a series of British orientalist fictions and treatises, become recurrent staples of prose texts that range from the literary or canonical to the popular, first in the colonial North India and subsequently in the postcolonial state of Pakistan.

The epigraphs that frame this introductory section are central to the methodological and ethical directions that this book takes, asking us to consider two aspects of postcolonial Muslim identity. The first, a digression of sorts by Edward Said, offers Orientalism, that sweeping history of the socio-cultural politics and intellectual disciplines that undergirded the Western imperial project of the post-Industrial era, as a personal endeavor of sorts, an attempt to read oneself, the individual subject, as indelibly marked by the centuries-long cultural transformation of colonized societies. The second, borrowed from Shahab Ahmed’s magisterial study, What is Islam? directs us further into orientalized spaces and territories and asks us to confront the problem of how and when modern Muslim subjects in societies ranging from Egypt to Indonesia came to measure themselves, albeit to different degrees, against the classical period of Islam, one that is distinguished by the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions and the generation that followed. By imagining this moment as original and therefore authentic, exemplifying a model Islamic disciplinary arrangement, modern Muslims cast off subsequent developments as pale reflections or decadent versions of an incontrovertible truth, thus disassociating themselves from half a millennium or so of their own continuous formation.¹

Despite the ostensible distance of the intellectual motives, disciplinary underpinnings and historical archives that inform each work, they bear witness to a singular concern. How do we understand, in our various presents, the widescale transformations of peoples, practices, and traditions forced by European imperialisms of the modern era? In this book, I attempt to grapple with this question by focusing on the extended legacies of eighteenth-century British orientalism in the Indian subcontinent—in particular, the orientalist construction of the category of literature in the language we have come to know today as Urdu. More specifically, I examine the orientalist reinvention of the Mahometan—a longstanding and variously purposed figure in European literature—and the historical processes by which he traverses the realm of the literary to reappear in the colony as Muslim, a religio-political subject of the modern colony.

In the past five or so years that I have spent teaching and writing in Lahore, Pakistan, a city I imagine as home, I have had to reconsider what it means to be an intellectual in our times. I had imagined, for much of my scholarly career, that the study of Western literature, world literature, or even the history of orientalism had little to do with the oppressive religio-nationalist discourse that appears to dominate every aspect of life in contemporary Pakistan. The simultaneous acts of studying eighteenth-century English fantasies of the Muslim world and teaching Pakistani undergraduates the enduring relevance of Western culture to the postcolonial humanistic project forced me to inventory the many traces of orientalism, to use Said’s words, upon myself as a historical subject.² I have had to understand that the traces of orientalism are legion, as much a part of my journey as a secular humanist educated at elite North American institutions, as they are of the powerful, orthodox narratives of religious supremacy and nationalism whose intertwined interests have forced ordinary Pakistani citizens—poets, intellectuals, leftist workers, anti-nationalists, feminists, and both ethnic and religious minorities—into positions of physical and attitudinal exile.

Thus, I attempt to understand a postcolonial present that is rife with religio-nationalist populisms, and to historicize the increasingly dangerous inseparability of the supposedly distinct realms of the literary, the political, and religious. I hope to elaborate the processes and mechanisms through which British orientalism—from its popular incarnations in eighteenth-century oriental tales to its more conclusive scholarly endeavors—sets into motion a powerful and irreversible religio-cultural transformation in the North Indian colony. This book, then, is as much a literary history of the ideas and institutions that made up that formidable structure of cultural domination as it is an exercise in confronting the cultural ideals that make up modern identity for a postcolonial citizen.³

Orientalism and Secular Critique

Since the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978) some forty odd years ago, both the work and the eponymous structure that it refers to have become contested categories. While it is difficult to reiterate all of the resulting scholarly engagements with Said’s arguments and archive, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalism and World Literatures (2016), Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (2012), Urs App’s The Birth of Orientalism (2011), Suzanne Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (2009), and Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer’s Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (1993) can be counted among some of the more compelling volumes on this question. Almost all of these works explore the contours and possibilities opened up by Orientalism for disciplines such as comparative literature, English, religious studies, and history.

In a partial departure from the broad concerns that inform the above-mentioned works, I argue that eighteenth-century Anglo-French orientalist fictions, heralded by works such as Antoine Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits (~1703), and the scholarly orientalism pioneered by figures such as William Jones quite literally invent, and subsequently import, the idea of a modern, religio-political Muslim identity to the North Indian colony. Less an explication of Said’s argument and more an elaboration of his method and ostensibly contentious claims, I show how what can only be termed a crisis of religio-populism in a postcolonial site such as Pakistan has its antecedents in a seemingly obscure moment in the history of British orientalism.

In my use of the term British orientalism, I gesture toward the massive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual project, engineered by scholars, travelers, writers, artists, and bureaucrats, whose specific task was to amass knowledge and expand the imaginative possibilities around the territory that was then loosely known as the Orient. British orientalism, to be clear, was one part of a much larger European complex, whose major players, France and Britain, were joined in the nineteenth century by a number of German orientalists. While German orientalism has been defended in part by Marchand as a scholarly practice that was not primordially or perpetually defined by imperialist relationships, it remained crucial, as Mufti argues, to the broader imperial effort that defined Europe’s relations with South Asia and North Africa in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁴ Described by the latter in Forget English!, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalisms were simultaneously singular and pan-European hydra-like systems of knowledge about the orient.⁵ In my use of the term British orientalism, I invoke both the discipline as it was broadly developed and expanded in modern Europe, but also the specific fashion in which it emerged given British imperial interests and expansion in South Asia, Egypt, and adjoining Arab territories.

That is to say, after Said’s searing exposition, orientalism, long considered an academic discipline of philological bearings in Europe, could no longer be treated as an apolitical or hermetic intellectual exercise. Neither could Western humanists defend its practices—literary, visual, and scholarly—as benign representations, for as Said argued, orientalism did not merely represent; it, quite literally, invented the orients and oriental identities it imagined.⁶ While the latter claim has been hotly critiqued by self-described Marxist scholars in particular, their accounts emerge from narrow disciplinary grounds that fail to consider the powerful role the idea and construction of literature has played in shaping colonial and later postcolonial cultures. To phrase the matter more succinctly, we can turn to Mufti’s unequivocal definition of orientalism as "the cultural logic of colonial rule in the post-Industrial revolution era, or what he calls the cultural logic of the bourgeois order in its outward or nondomestic orientation.⁷ Orientalism, thus considered, is the literal export of structures of knowledge and knowing from the metropolis to the colony, imposed upon peoples and practices designated as oriental. Literature, a category that is conceived and constructed first in eighteenth-century England and then in colonial India within orientalist institutions such as the Royal Asiatic Society and Fort William College, is instrumental for both the colonial, and subsequently, the national project of the postcolonial state. The newly invented literature" of an equally newly invented language, in this case, modern Urdu, I argue, is not merely the literal realization of a moment in eighteenth-century British orientalism but becomes foundational for the formation of a modern Muslim identity in North India, one that persists and evolves in accordance with its orientalist ideals well into the present moment.

There remain some misconceptions regarding orientalism, which are worthy of mention given the scope of this project. One of the more elementary of these is the trend in eighteenth-century English literary studies, where a number of scholars, including the late Srinivas Aravamudan and Felicity Nussbaum, have argued for the rehabilitation of forms of Enlightenment orientalism, which Aravamudan, in particular, described as self-critical, intended to encourage mutual understanding across cultures of East and West.⁸ Aravamudan, Nussbaum, and Ros Ballaster, among others, invoke the eighteenth-century English oriental tale as an example of Enlightenment orientalism, reading the genre’s critique of a rising English identity as a kind of productive or positivist orientalism. This position, as I show over the course of this book, is only tenable if our understanding of orientalism remains restricted to the metropolis. While Aravamudan’s or Ballaster’s insightful readings into the political and social positions taken up by the oriental tale remain invaluable to eighteenth-century studies, they fail to consider that the oriental tale continued its career beyond the metropolis. Traveling from the European Republic of Letters to a colonial city such as Calcutta, the oriental tale became a prototype of sorts for the invention of new and useful literature for Indian natives, transforming aesthetic traditions and extant textual practices for perpetuity.⁹

On a slightly divergent note, it is also worth briefly clarifying Said’s idea of the secular, a critical element of his method that has serious relevance to the arguments and ethical positions that move this book. Emerging out of the premise visible in Orientalism as well—that all texts, literary and other, are essentially worldly, historical events—Said’s essay argues for a new critical practice in the academy and beyond, one that he describes as secular.¹⁰ Described with startling clarity, secular criticism is a practice premised on a suspicion of totalizing concepts, reified objects, guilds, and other religio-nationalist orthodoxies that seem all too familiar in our present moment.¹¹ At the heart of this concept, however, are not religion or ethnic politics, but nationalism and the nation-state, for it is within the latter that the falsely organic ideals of belonging and kinship are reinvigorated to create socio-political and religious structures of majority and exclusion. This does not mean, however, that we limit the possibilities Said’s conception of the secular offers. His powerful reimagining is one that is oppositional to any form of hegemony that seeks to exclude, be it ethno-nationalism, religious orthodoxy, or other. The task of a secular critic, as Said saw it, was to function as life-enhancing, and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.¹² In other words, the secular critic resists any form of coercive authority, religiously deployed or other. As Bruce Robbins reminds us, Said’s method—exemplified in Orientalism as an elaboration of what a secular scholarship could look like—offered a new humanism, one that existed in a critical, paradoxical continuity with its predecessor. This last point marks also what I can only describe as an ethics of generosity that Said brought to the field of postcolonial studies, one that is increasingly marked by scholars whose rigid positions against modernity and strident calls to recover an idyllic precolonial past only obfuscate the potential of a meaningful postcolonial engagement.

It is with this concept of critique at the forefront, then, that this book traces the powerful influence British orientalism and its attendant institutions exercised on the invention and subsequent canonization of a modern Urdu prose literature in North India. It offers, therefore, a historical elaboration of how a series of writers, scholars, and entrepreneurs, as well as research institutions and educational networks, were able to produce a literary corpus that accorded with orientalist conceptions of the forms that a Mahometan literature could take. But the process by which the Mahometan of the eighteenth-century Anglo-French oriental tale becomes the Muslim of North Indian colony—the latter, at once a religio-political and aesthetic category—is by no means a dormant legacy of empire and orientalism, nor can it be divided along the overt lines of secular (here: a- or non-religious) and religious. In our present, the powerful traces of the British orientalist project in North India exhibit themselves in the affiliation of Urdu—today Pakistan’s declared national language—with Sunni Islam. This is a symbiotic partnership that over the course of a century and by way of a wide range of aesthetic forms—novels, stories, and television serials—has subsumed the national into the religious, the vernacular into the sacred, the state into a living Mecca, in short, the Pakistani into a Salafi Muslim (a term reserved for the first followers of Muhammad and his call to Islam in 610 A.D.). This impulse, which in our times is nothing short of religio-populist in its bearings, is gradually suffocating regional vernaculars such as Pashto and Sindhi, a diversity of folk practices, lived Islams, and above all, the claims of women and religious and ethnic minorities to dignified citizenship.

This is not a study of theology or law. Nor does it intend to essay a suitable, alternative response to the question that it argues has been coded into the canon of modern Urdu. This is a study of how a systematic series of answers to the question "Who is a Muslim" is disseminated predominantly through the imperially invented domain of literature, first in eighteenth-century England, subsequently in colonial India, and in its most alarming iteration, in present-day Pakistan. In answering this central question, I am not, either by training or by interest, attempting to solicit a pure Islam or a better way of being Muslim, or reclaiming an idyllic Muslim past in precolonial India. My concern arrives out of the danger and political isolation that populist responses to this question pose to so many individuals and communities in a postcolonial Muslim state such as Pakistan. My task, as a secular critic, is to understand how, and through what historical institutions and ideas, has the present moment been brought to its crisis. The various literary members of a modern, colonial vernacular, such as Urdu, I argue, have been and continue to be instrumental in the creation and perpetuation of a narrative that overwhelmingly defines the exclusionary and evangelical realms of culture and politics in contemporary Pakistan.

Confronting the Literary Canon

In recruiting literary texts, particularly those intended for broad, almost mass consumption as historical sources on the way Muslims are defined by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalists, colonial administrators, and North Indian, later Pakistani readers and writers, I am arguing that we ethically scrutinize the domain of literature for its complicity in the violence and exclusions enacted by religio-nationalist politics. The idea of literature, as it is understood first in colonial North India and in the postcolonial state, develops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the aegis of British orientalists and supporting institutions at home and in the colony. I show how a number of fictions—including the canonical Bāġh-o Bahār (1803) of Fort William College—that are initially developed as a literature for Urdu under colonial patronage form the ideological basis for a modern Muslim imaginary. While this impulse manifests itself in the form of numerous novels and short stories that critics and scholars dismiss or discount as prototypes (Nazir Ahmad’s Mirāt al-‘Arūs [1862]) or bestsellers (Hijazi’s Muhammad bin Qāsim [1945] or Umera Ahmad’s Pīr-e Kāmil [2004]) the imbrication of the popular or the low-brow with the scholarly and the empirical is, in fact, essential to the totalizing discourse of orientalism and to its legacies in the colony. This book, then, asks for a radical reconsideration of what constitutes the canon of Urdu prose fiction by suggesting that this entire body of works evolves in accordance with, rather than in contradiction to, its orientalist origins.

The troubled coming-of-age of the English term literature has been explored from various ends by Marxist critics and postcolonial scholars, including Terry Eagleton and Gauri Viswanathan, both of whom have variously argued that the idea of English literature as a discipline and body of canonical works emerged in nineteenth-century England as a means of containing a burgeoning middle-class.¹³ Offering a nuanced examination of the term, its transformations in Enlightenment Europe and then the colonies, Vinay Dharwadker reminds us that literature evolved from suggesting letteredness and knowledge to a broader ideal of an aesthetically refined textual body suggestive of a certain national character or spirit during the latter half of the eighteenth century.¹⁴ Dharwadker, of course, draws on the detailed account offered by René Wellek in his essay Literature and its Cognates, as well in his opus, The Theory of Literature, from which it becomes clear that while in early eighteenth-century usage literature implied a grounding in the knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin languages and works, by the second half of the century it had come to connote a body of writing. In Voltaire’s 1751 use, literature refers to the genres of Italy, while L’Abbe Sabatier de Castes titled his 1772 book Les Siècles de littérature francaise, or The ages of French literature, both inadvertently imbuing the notion of a collective body of works with a tentative sense of having to do with or belonging to a nation or a people.¹⁵

For an orientalist such as William Jones, then, the self-proclaimed discoverer of Sanskrit, the entire body of writing in that ancient language naturally came to constitute the basis of Indian literature. Somewhat differently, his successor, John Gilchrist, who took it upon himself to invent a new Indian vernacular, did so through the synchronized production of a body of largely fictional works, believing that the latter could revive Indian culture to the lost eminence of classical Europe itself. In other words, both Jones and Gilchrist, orientalists whose legacies I discuss at length in this project, rewrite entire traditions and aesthetic practices in both premodern and colonial North India as literature, whether Indian, Urdu, Hindi, or vernacular. Because Jones, as M. H. Abrams reminds us, in the spirit of Longinus, the ancient rhetorician, had already defined and thus sequestered lyric poetry as the unique expression of a nation’s character, the quest of invention focused largely on prose forms, which then bore the onus of functioning as both entertaining and useful.¹⁶

The English ideal of the term literature, Michael Allen has argued, is at its heart a disciplined reading practice, or more broadly, a cultivated sensibility linked to civil norms of what it means to be educated, which by the eighteenth century becomes attached with markers of nation—whether these be origin, language, character, or domesticity.¹⁷ When we turn to colonies such as Egypt or India, this distinctly English and orientalist ideal of literature comes to be erroneously conflated with the idea of adab, the untranslatable Arab, Turko-Indo-Persian concept of being mannered: cultivated in knowledge, the arts, and etiquette, a premodern practice distinctly removed from conceptions of modern nation-thinking.¹⁸ That is to say, as colonial administrators undertook the task of producing the fictional works that would become the earliest examples of a literature of modern vernaculars such as Urdu and Hindi, the terms adab and sahitya are relieved of their broader implications and slowly designated as Urdu or Hindi equivalents of literature.¹⁹

Thus, a term such as adab, with all of its diverse implications (in North India adab privileged oral recitation, performance, etiquette, attention to linguistic register, above all else) is reduced to the realm of the textual by the late nineteenth century and begins to imitate European modes of self-historicization and progression. Urdu literature, in the then-orientalist (and now universally accepted) sense of the term, therefore, begins at Fort William College, Calcutta, a language school for young English officers founded by John Gilchrist in 1800. Mostly in the form of simple, moral stories, this orientalist inauguration of Urdu literature obscures several centuries of Indo-Persian oral fiction and lyric practices, including the widespread presence of the dāstān, that grand, morally disinclined fictional telling of alternative magical worlds navigated by great heroes and their companion tricksters. Though the College initially published the ghazals of then-revered court poets such as Mir Taqi Mir, by the mid–nineteenth century even that seemingly abstract, Arab-Persianate form of poetry was dismissed by colonial administrators as inappropriate and immoral. What I am briefly describing here, and what the first part of this book explores in some detail, is how an entirely modern European ideal of literature is imposed in the North Indian colony through orientalist institutions and individuals.

I argue, therefore, that the body of textual works we refer to as literature in Urdu is invented and organized for the particular purpose of moral, and subsequently, religious reform over the course of the nineteenth century. That is to say, prose literature in Urdu, from the moment of its inception in colonial Calcutta, is invested with the authority to designate and endorse certain ideals of Muslim practice, while excluding, even condemning, others, a practice entirely at odds with premodern Indo-Persian aesthetic practices. While in its early stages the Muslim of Urdu prose fictions is modeled on the Mahometan of the eighteenth-century English oriental tale, by the second half of the nineteenth century this same Muslim has to be refashioned to accord with colonial culture. The Mahometan, a staple protagonist of the oriental tale, is a refinement upon earlier European emblems of Islam, including the Shakespearean Turk or Moor, and or the medieval, all-purpose pagan. His figure precedes the more scientific religio-racial theorization of Arabs and Jews as Semites that orientalists such as Ernest Renan popularized in the nineteenth century. In the latter half of this book, I show how a rising Muslim nationalism in North India fashions itself on and against these early conceptions of the literary Mahometan, giving way in the present to an increasingly insular religio-nationalist definition of the Muslim self.

Literary histories for the most part tend to end on triumphant notes, their undertones often nationalist in nature. In the case of English, world anglophone and postcolonial literatures represent reparations for three centuries of imperialism. In the case of Egypt, the nahdāh is celebrated as a moment of literary and cultural awakening for a colonized people, a literary historicization that Allen has argued against in In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Likewise, Hindi literature or a modern Hindi canon is directed by standards proposed by early Western critics and the succeeding generation of Indian critics writing on canon formation.²⁰ American literature in the twentieth century, Juliana Spahr shows in her recent book, Du Bois’ Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, is curated as a set of liberal, state-friendly literary texts that celebrate the national mantra of diversity and assimilation, while anti-colonial voices remain suppressed by political and state actors. In the case of Urdu, the Euro-American academy and affiliate liberal scholars celebrate the Progressive Writer’s Movement as marking Urdu’s embrace of secularity.²¹ Valuable contributions, including Jennifer Dubrow’s Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia and the late Kavita Datla’s nuanced study on the Osmania University at Hyderabad, The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India, have attempted to open up the world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Urdu literary production as cosmopolitan and secular, that is non-religiously, or at the very least, syncretic.

What literary histories and, more recently, world literature histories, tend to obfuscate in their rush to celebrate a literature or even a particular literary text as worldly or diverse are the broader contexts of its production.²² The literary histories of modern Urdu prose, both in Urdu and in Euro-American academy, trace a progression that roughly mimics that of literature in English, and subsequently dismisses several hundreds of influential novels and stories as merely pulp or popular fiction. The broad set of works we traditionally know as constitutive of Urdu literature roughly accords with Western norms of canonicity and genre: romance, novel, modernism, postmodernism, and so on. In other words, the nineteenth century is traditionally seen as the moment when Urdu prose fiction matures from its propensity for the romance and other fantastic forms toward the realist novel, while the twentieth century is a moment marked by the modernist works of the All-India Progressive Writers, as well as a number of other experimental, subversive fictions.

While this narrative is a satisfactory one, allowing us the comfort of enjoying literature and literary writing as generally isolated from or occupying a higher moral ground than that of quotidian history, parochial religiosity, politics, and culture in general, it offers only a cosmetic view of a literary canon, or even an individual text. For modern Urdu (though there are several approximate examples), the canon of prose works is the love-child of an uncomfortable union between low-brow English orientalist fictions and the colonial effort to inculcate a subservient, mostly religiously derived morality in native subjects through simple, textbook-like stories produced for the purposes of widespread vernacularization in North India. Only in the past decade or so have we begun to question the so-called origins of what many histories have celebrated as a modern literature, but we have yet to question the various, often futile omissions that are so essential to the making of literary canons.

In an oppositional gesture to the fashion in which literary histories are written—celebratory from a national perspective, philanthropic or positivist from a transnational or world literature lens—this project confronts both the canon of Urdu literature and the limits within which this literature continues to be studied and circulated in critical histories, the Euro-American academy, and more recently, literary festivals and related media of a globalized age.²³ In asking that we, particularly humanists from postcolonial states, reconsider or interrogate national canons or accepted literary ideals, I am not undermining the haunting, politically resistant voices of writers such as Sa‘adat Hasan Manto and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the defiant feminisms of Fahmida Riaz and Ismat Chugtai, or even the older, incorrigible notes on exile by nineteenth-century aesthetes Mirza Hadi Rusva and Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. I also acknowledge that the trajectory of literary writing in Urdu in post-1947 India, where the language is now associated largely with the sizeable Muslim minority, has taken diverse directions, evidenced in the evocative magnificence of Shamsur Rehman Faruqi’s fictions and the subversive bent of S. M. Ashraf’s writings. I am, however, arguing that these authors, whether Indian or Pakistani, and the aesthetic and ethical positions they espouse are peripheral, minor, at times even exilic, when held up against what is a continuous, cohesive, and fecund body of works, constructed on the orientalist premise of Urdu as an essentially Muslim language. Dominant, enduring, and omnipresent in the contemporary Pakistani imagination are writers who have conformed around the task of defining the Muslim. Their contributions, works whose concerns range from the political to the domestic, present the recent religio-populist impulse in contemporary Urdu as continuous with its past, rather than as an anomaly that needs to be explained away.

An honest acknowledgment of the fact that it is this latter set of works that commands the national imagination lays bare the historical processes through which modern literatures in colonized territories first took shape. It directs us to think critically about the fast-shrinking space that progressive or humanist writings occupy in the national narrative of a postcolonial state such as Pakistan. The question I was forced to ask and answer as this project unfolded was simply: What works, ideas, and arguments about Pakistan and Pakistani identity dominate across the literary and broader socio-political and cultural landscapes of the country? In a moment marked by the self-righteous rise of a religious populism whose single-point agenda—one that extends beyond the realm of politics—is to protect the sanctity of Islam and Muhammad as its last prophet, secularity, reflections on exile, doubt, other faiths, and alternative expressions of sexuality present nothing less than a dire threat to Pakistan’s raison d’etre.

What literature, canon, or textual tradition, then, is complicit in propagating these insularly populist ideals, and what are its historic antecedents? Alternatively, who are the writers we dismiss as nationalist, popular, or one-dimensional, but who, nevertheless, are ubiquitous, their stories, characters, and moral universes affirming the rigid bounds of nation and state? Do they force us to reexamine the generally exclusive, even lofty fashion in which we have so far employed the term literature? Or should we perhaps rethink our currently perforated use of the term, which often differentiates high-brow from low-brow, women’s literature from that designated for men, world literature from all others? The terms of this continuously self-affirming body of fictional works in Urdu range from colonial language primers inspired by the English oriental tale to longer, complex contemplations on the idea of the Muslims of North India as constituting a distinct nation, in the modern sense of the word, to bestselling novels that sacralize Muslim pasts in medieval Islamic empires and tout an idyllic future where Muslims, saved from the evil seductions of the West, practice the pure Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The production of a consistent and systematically developing canon in modern Urdu is undertaken by a varied cast of authors who begin with Mir Amman, a scribe in the colonial language school, Fort William College, and extend from nationally revered figures such as Syed Ahmad Khan, the leader of the Aligarh Movement; his followers, Nazir Ahmad, an education inspector, Altaf Hussain Hali, deemed one of the greatest Urdu poets in Urdu; to journalists-turned-novelists in the twentieth century, Nasim Hijazi prominent among them; and finally to bestselling women novelists such as Umera Ahmad and Farhat Ishtiaq.

The Postsecularist Politics of Populism

The central argument of this book—an interrogation of the process by which the domain of the literary assumes the authority to determine religious belonging—subverts the claims of postsecularist members of the North American academy who have, in the years following 9/11, argued against what they see as a monolithic Western liberal secularism. More urgently, the present crises of rising religio-nationalisms in the postcolonial world ask us to approach postsecularist arguments that cast piety movements, the strengthening of religio-political parties, and the public reclamations of pristine religious pasts as exemplary of social agency in Islamic states, with skepticism and apprehension.

I gesture here toward the work of the late Saba Mahmood, but also toward other postsecularists, including Joan Scott and Humera Iqtedar. Mahmood’s contributions with regards to the Muslim world and Western liberalism have been particularly valuable for the Euro-American academy, but also resonate with scholars in the Global South. Mahmood is best known for her multifaceted study, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which argued that feminine acts of religious submission can and should, in fact, be considered as acts of agency and self-determination. The study, based on extensive fieldwork with the female followers of an Islamic revivalist movement in Egypt, challenged the Western feminist ideal of agency as a possibility that demanded resistance and freedom. Reading the latter condition as an assumption of contemporary scholars, even nonprofit organizations, liberal governments, and rights activists, Mahmood posits that the natural status accorded to the desire for freedom in analyses of gender runs the risk of Orientalizing Arab and Muslim women all over again.²⁴ Muslim women who participate and are motivated by these new piety movements, Mahmood argues alternatively, should be treated as agent subjects whose cultivated forms of desire and capacities of ethical action stem from discursive and practical conditions that may be outside the pale of Western liberal secularism.²⁵

As an anthropological study, Politics of Piety has critical and continuously relevant