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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822395256 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Naveeda Khan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan.
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MUSLIM BECOMING
ASPIRATION AND SKEPTICISM IN PAKISTANBy Naveeda Khan
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2012 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5231-0
Chapter One
SCENES OF MUSLIM ASPIRATIONNEIGHBORHOOD MOSQUES AND THEIR QABZA
Pakistan as a Mosque
"Why study mosques? They are only shells for prayer." Statements such as these greeted me on a daily basis as I made my way around neighborhoods of Lahore with my Urdu teacher and research guide Farooq sahib to do a preliminary reconnoiter of mosques before settling into the long-term study of a few. There was truth to this observation since mosques of the present were not like mosques of old, part of famous complexes devoted to learning, dispensing justice, channeling charity and serving as sarais (hostels for travelers) (Frishman and Khan 1994). They were also not like mosques that were once part of darbars, complexes housing the shrines of saints to which pilgrims flocked (Troll 2004). They now stood singly, as monumental structures built by the state, convenient sites of prayer close to office buildings or places for Friday prayer in residential neighborhoods. Oleg Graber (2002) claims that the historical diminution of the mosque's functions translated into a stronger focus on prayer and a heightened sense of the mosque as sacralized space. Nowhere is this transformation from a place of prayer to sacralized space more apparent than in the case of the mosque in Ayodhya, India, which was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992 and which produced region-wide Hindu-Muslim conflicts.
I was drawn to the study of mosques because of the oft-repeated statement that Pakistan was a mosque (Pakistan masjid hai), to see what purchase this formulation gave us in understanding what it meant to be Muslim in Pakistan. Given the historical transformations of the mosque as institution, this statement could be taken to mean that Pakistan was a place of assembly for Muslims or that it was a sacred place and should be treated as such. Certainly, those who exclaimed that Pakistan was a mojiza (miracle) viewed the nation as sacralized (Rozehnal 2010). But there was something more to this statement. As I had learned from my conversations with Lahoris about everyday sites and practices of religiosity, I needed to begin with books on mosques. This was an early instance of how texts facilitated my entry and navigation of this milieu. In the bookstores of the crowded Urdu Bazaar I found no fewer than twenty books and booklets that promised to provide the definitive history of mosques. With titles such as Masjid Allah ka Ghar (The Mosque Is Allah's Abode, by Badrul Qadri, 1999), Islami Mu'ashare men Masjid ka Maqam (The Position of Mosques in Islamic Society, by Ajmal Khan, 1993), The Role of Mosque in Islam (M. S. Qureshi, 1989), Masjid ka Maqam (The Position of the Mosque, by Quasar Niazi, 1976), these books were primarily concerned with correct comportment within mosques. Starting as a rudimentary structure abutting the Prophet's house in Medina, the mosque had not only undergone transformation, even monumentalization, as a built form, but an etiquette had also evolved on how to behave in them. Over time, spitting, gossiping, and hawking wares had been firmly proscribed and new admonitions added: removing one's shoes before entering the mosque, greeting everyone, reciting a formula to oneself, and sitting quietly in place until the congregational prayers began. These books invariably traced the trajectory of mosques from the imposing ones in Mecca and Medina to the humblest in Pakistan. This was undoubtedly to provide a respectable lineage for contemporary mosques (considered daughters of the Great Mosque in Mecca, in one formulation) but they also provided the sense that one had to learn to inhabit a mosque and that such learning was continual. There was clear evidence of this effort to teach proper behavior in the mosques I visited, with signs requesting that people not spit or urinate on the walls outside the mosque, others issuing warnings to those who stole the shoes of assembled worshipers, and cupboards with doors ajar holding prayer caps and copies of the Qu'ran draped in sumptuous fabric inviting those sitting around.
The most enduring example of learning to inhabit a mosque appears in the many efforts taken to apportion the space and prayer times of a mosque so that competing groups could be accommodated. The books listed above tell how the Prophet himself, learned, over time, how best to allow non-Muslim traveling contingents egress to the Medina mosque for their worship. The books mentioned this as a concern also for Muslim rulers who had to accommodate different interpretations of the Prophet's commandments with respect to prayer times and modalities. Colonial archives show that British authorities too had to adjudicate among competing Muslim groups, newly ascendant in the colonial era, over claims of ownership of mosques (Fyzee 1999). Since land was usually given in endowment in perpetuity (waqf) for mosques or became an endowment through an uninterrupted period of prayer, the question of the ownership of mosques posed a problem for British authorities deciding these cases under the rubric of Muslim personal law (Kozlowski 1985). As I came to learn through my own study of mosques in residential neighborhoods in Lahore, the competition over mosques and the Pakistani state's refusal to adjudicate on questions of their ownership meant that learning to inhabit a mosque with other groups was a continuing concern.
Transposing these perspectives on mosques onto Pakistan, one might take the statement that Pakistan was a mosque as a way of saying that one had to learn to inhabit this place, to acquire the right etiquette in sharing it with others with differing perspectives on how to be Muslim. This formulation captures the ongoing aspect of the striving to be Muslim that oriented Pakistan's origins, which I described in my introduction. But there is a qualifying clause to this statement. Most of my informants who said that Pakistan was a mosque were equally quick to complain that it had undergone violent seizure or qabza: "Pakistan masjid hai jis par qabza kiya gaya hai" (Pakistan is a mosque that has undergone forcible possession). Depending on whom I spoke with, Pakistan as a mosque was under seizure by the state, venal religious figures, unscrupulous lay Muslims, or sectarian groups. Moreover, the description of Pakistan as a mosque under qabza seemed to draw upon actual events of qabza, because almost all the mosques that I studied in Lahore had either undergone seizure or their administration feared that they might.
The colonial archives show evidence of conflicts over mosques (Freitag 1989). In fact the very same groups, the Shi'is, Barelwis, Deobandis, Ahl-e Hadis, and Ahmadis, of whom I spoke in my introduction, who engaged in theological disputation and religious arguments with one another, also fell into disputes over one another's mosques in their neighborhoods. One could say that religious disputation and arguments had their spatial counterpart in the building and struggles over mosques (Bowen 1993). And these conflicts carried over into the Pakistani context, where they acquired sectarian inflections insofar as religious differences were institutionalized by state administration and national politics and empowered by modern weapons (Malik 1990, Zaman 1998, Nasr 2001).
What is notably different in the postcolonial context, however, is the affect with which these experiences of forceful possession were recounted. The stories of mosque construction and their subsequent qabza were told with deep disappointment, even shock, that Muslims could behave this way with one another. It is my claim that such narratives of loss speak to an additional investment in mosques in Pakistan beyond their being a place of prayer or a sacralized space that demanded proper comportment. These narratives speak of investments in self-betterment and bettering one's community, tying moral and spiritual development to the progress of the nationstate. Moreover, the qabza of mosques could not thwart all such efforts at striving for everybody. In fact, in some instances, it extended striving by accentuating disputation, thereby producing the conditions of possibility for the unexpected becomings I outlined in my introduction when speaking of the argument in the Provincial Assembly Library in Lahore. Consequently, rather than detracting from the idea of Pakistan as a mosque, the qabza of mosques turns out to be important in illuminating the aspect of striving that informs Pakistan.
The emergence of independent mosques within residential neighborhoods point to the simultaneous emergence of new property arrangements, administrative bodies, and sources of funding, which have been studied to understand the growth of civil institutions within modern Muslim societies (Salvatore and Eickelman 2006, Clark 2004) and diasporic Muslims (Bartells and de Jong 2007). The persistence of qabza with respect to such mosques in Pakistan made it such that it was not so much the civility of these institutions that struck one as contributing to our knowledge of Muslimness in Pakistan but their incivility or the violence attendant upon them. Here I am drawing upon Matthew Hull's formulation that the city bureaucracy of Islamabad has produced what he calls "uncivil politics" rather than a civil society, but which he affirms as politics nonetheless (2010). His affirmation of uncivil politics as politics is in contrast to Robert Hefner's claim (2000) that civil society and state requires a politics of civility without which politics can get unrestrainedly violent, putting the political into question.
In this chapter I first locate mosques and their qabza within the changing urban landscape of Lahore. I explore the semantic range of the term qabza, which incorporates both physical seizure and the more intangible condition of being bound. This wider meaning supports my claim that the qabza of a mosque can shed light on the experiential state of striving and its closures within Pakistan, most specifically within everyday life. Next I present the stories of three mosques in three distinct neighborhoods in Lahore and their equally distinct experiences of qabza. These stories illuminate how qabza makes explicit the wide scope of striving to be Muslim within the milieu of neighborhoods infused by religious differences of the kind I describe in the introduction, which often acquired violent sectarian inflections. Within these neighborhoods, qabza is the obstacle thrown up in the path of striving, but which may paradoxically serve as the opportunity to expand the scope of one's initial efforts at striving. In my concluding section I draw out the threads of aspiration within these stories while considering other tendencies that emerge as well, such as those of skepticism and the commitment to neighborliness.
Mosques in the Lahori Landscape
Lahore is a metropolis of over six million people (Qadeer 2006). Instead of dissolving the past in the hypermodern, Lahore's urban fabric retains the feeling of a palimpsest of different eras of history, political leadership, social composition, aesthetic styles, and modalities of social engineering (Glover 2008). Perhaps this is because it has grown out of the Walled City, the historical center, by accretion rather than by the strict application of modern town planning principles. As William Glover has noted in Making Lahore Modern (2008), British colonial authorities, although not averse to large-scale demolition to produce more sanitary and secure Indian cities, did not attempt to recast Lahore in such a thoroughgoing manner. They reoutfitted many existing buildings for administrative purposes, and when they built their civil lines they did so with some sensitivity to existing settlements. Subsequently new housing and suburbs sprang up amid the more historical parts of the city at the same time as they extended out to the surrounding countryside. At the time of Partition, Lahore experienced a large influx of refugees (Talbot 2007). In absorbing them, the city acquired another layer of change upon its existing built form as its social composition changed from merchant-class Hindus and Sikhs to Muslim agriculturalists. And the sense of a palimpsest continues into the present.
My interest in studying mosque construction in Lahore was informed by David Gilmartin's insight that the city provided the best instantiation of religious institutions and politics in the province of Punjab, the hegemon within Pakistan (Gilmartin 1988). While Gilmartin was speaking of the late colonial and early postcolonial eras, Lahore remains the best site for research in the postcolonial period if not more so, given the upsurge of organized sectarian politics in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s (Ali 2002, Zahab 2002). Given my interest in studying mosques built in urban neighborhoods in different eras of Pakistan's history, I decided to focus on a neighborhood close to the historical part of the city, constructed shortly before Partition but emptied of its original inhabitants and filled by refugees in 1947. I refer to this neighborhood as a muhalla to indicate its pre-Partition origins. My second site was a new neighborhood built within the city in the 1970s, which I call a suburb to indicate its Western-style planning. And my third site was an outlying neighborhood still very much under formation at the time I was there in the late 1990s, which I call a colony to indicate its preponderance of apartment-style housing earmarked for specific sections of the city population, such as government employees.
Although it was not difficult to decide on the neighborhoods to work on, deciding on mosques proved to be more of a challenge, given the large numbers of them in each neighborhood. My final choice of mosques was shaped by the opportunities that came my way to access mosques in the neighborhoods I had selected: a fortuitous break in a trip by my research assistant, my residence in a particular neighborhood, or my chance encounter with a bureaucrat whose husband was deeply engaged in local mosque-related politics. These were only a few of the plethora of mosques in the city, many of which I visited or learned about through other sources. By the end of my stay I had become familiar with the reputations of most of the larger mosques in the city, having examined twenty in different sites and undertaken detailed studies of three. Before I speak of these three mosques it is necessary to embed them further within the landscape of Lahore.
With demographic change, population growth, and the strengthening of sectarian polities, mosques were the most commonly constructed buildings in Lahore, as elsewhere in Pakistan. The state has had a troubled history with this growth industry. After Partition, the state enacted urban planning, which rendered previously built mosques "illegal." While some had been "regularized," that is, their presence had been accepted within the planning maps or, in some cases, their physical form had been altered to match their surroundings, others continued as "illegal." Moreover, people continued to build mosques flouting urban planning principles and zoning regulations. This was particularly true in squatter settlements on government land, for instance, along railways or highways, where the presence of a mosque helped secure tenuous claims on land.
On the other hand, town planning had also encouraged a new kind of illegality. Once maps of new settlements were published, they were distributed to real estate agencies to sell circumscribed plots of land to customers. These maps indicated the area put aside for "civic amenities," such as mosques, parks, schools, and so on. Once these maps were in circulation, people laid claim to empty plots earmarked for mosques or parks by building mosques there with the confidence that the government would not be able to remove them, as such buildings were considered mosques for perpetuity. In a sense these mosques were "legally illegal," that is, they were illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose.
The arrival of mosque committees, neighborhood-based mosque maintenance groups, date to at least the early nineteenth century in South Asia, inaugurating the presence of the bureaucrat within mosques (Freitag 1989). These bureaucrats, usually employed at various levels of government, were active in legalizing those mosques with which they were affiliated through the production of official documents. Most mosques, whether legal or illegal, were now able to present fat files of documents asserting their legality as, theoretically, the state only recognized mosques whose land documents and design plans had been registered with the proper authorities by mosque committees, which had to be registered as well. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004) have shown the importance of such documents in securing the authority of the state in those areas outside of its direct concern, which they consider the margins of the state. At the same time, as we shall see in the case of the mosque in Gulshan, such documents were deployed by their holders to make claims upon a state largely indifferent to their situation. These documents also mimicked the state's mode of administration and government as if re-creating an ideal state by means of the mosque.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Scenes of Muslim Aspiration: Neighborhood Mosques and Their Qabza 21
2. A Possible Genealogy of Aspiration: Muhammad Iqbal in His Time 55
3. Inheriting Iqbal: The Law and the Ahmadi Question 91
4. The Singularity of Aspiration: A Father, a Child, and a Jinn 121
5. Skepticism in Public Culture: From the Jahil Maulwi to Mullaism 145
6. Skepticism and Spiritual Diagnostics: Iqbal, the Ulama, and the Literati 171
Epilogue: Becoming Present 201
Notes 209
Bibliography 225
Index 251