This dissertation draws on more than twelve months of participant-observation at Darul Ulum Muhammadiyya Ghausia at Bhera, Pakistan, a prominent Islamic seminary or madrasa, affiliated with the Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamaat sect (commonly known as the 'Barelwi maslak in South Asia). Based on this ethnography, the dissertation conducts a series of inquiries into the production of Islam at the personal, political, and discursive levels. At the personal level, it looks at the cultural reproduction of seminary students' beliefs, mapping the role of prayer-practices in the process of belief-formation. At the political level, it analyzes students' desire to Islamize Pakistan. It argues that students' Islamist desires are produced when a particular pious subjectivity (a subjectivity that demands acknowledging Islam as the supreme ethical foundation for life) articulates with a particular social imaginary (an imaginary in which personal piety is experienced as intimately linked with the nation's piety). At the discursive level, the dissertation looks at the academic study of Pakistani seminaries, showing how this literature is aligned with the political project of secularization. It further argues that this literature exhibits the operation of emergent logics of secularization, predicated not just on the privatization, decline, or functional differentiation of 'religion,' but also on the localization of non-secular forms of Islam. Overall, this dissertation contributes to Anthropology, Islamic Studies, and Political Science by underscoring the importance of complementing discursive, text-based, and descriptive accounts of Muslim societies with explanatory accounts that are attentive to Muslim subjectivities.
The dissertation pursues this line of analysis, closely attending to the experiential dimensions of quotidian practices like five-daily prayers (namaz, salat), supplicatory prayers (dua), Sufi shrine-visitations (hazeri), social etiquettes ( adab), and other disciplines of pious self-formation. In so doing, it demonstrates how closely mapping our interlocutors' subjectivity – the conditions of its production, the texture of its experience, and the complexity of its impact– can yield novel insights into enduring questions about Muslim piety and politics.
