RT Article
T1 Contested sovereignty: Islamic piety, blasphemy politics, and the paradox of islamization in Pakistan
JF Asian affairs
VO 53
IS 2
SP 430
OP 449
A1 Khan, Arsalan
LA English
PB Royal Society for Asian Affairs
YR 2022
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1815519754
AB Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy. (Asian Aff/GIGA)
NO Teil einer Special Issue: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India
K1 Islam
K1 Islamisierung
K1 Politischer Islam
K1 Religionsgemeinschaft
K1 Staat
K1 Religiöse Gemeinschaft
K1 Personenvereinigung
K1 Religionsausübung
K1 Pakistan
DO 10.1080/03068374.2022.2076485