Dr Faisal Devji: List of publications

Torn between a futurist vision of Pakistan, on one hand, and the desire for a conventionally historical narrative about its founding on the other, Muslim nationalism has always faced its past in the form of impossibility. As Devji discusses in this afterword, the essays in the special section “The Past for Pakistan” explore Pakistan's tormented relationship with history each in its own way, and whether this past is given the name of India or Islam. If Salma Siddique writes about the undecidability of origins in cinematic culture, Shruti Kapila demonstrates how Pakistan was imagined outside its own ideology and categories. Where Nayanika Mookherjee explores the different forms of historical amnesia and memory that define nationality in both wings of what was once Pakistan, Chris Moffat writes about the commemoration of transient and non-national pasts in the country's present.

This chapter consists, first, of an extended theoretical analysis of the concept of belonging in three dimensions: belonging as “identity,” belonging as “solidarity,” and belonging as “the unalienated life.” And second, there is an extended empirical survey of different regions of the world where belonging in one or other of its analytical dimensions has surfaced in certain socially, politically, and economically situated contexts. Belonging as identity, it is argued, can be both subjective and objective, and it is the former that is most obviously present in identity politics since people tend to politically mobilize themselves on the basis of identities when they subjectively identify with some important aspect of their social lives-their class, their caste, their race, their gender, their nationality, etc. A detailed effort is made to consider the relation between the subjective and objective sides of identity, to define each of these, to locate the historical conditions in which each is prompted, and to address the question whether some of these identities (class identity, for instance) are more fundamental than others. Belonging as solidarity, it is argued, may occur both in mobilizations toward some immediate and shared political goal but also in the broader social and cultural context when different groups with vastly different cultural and social and moral values may nevertheless seek to engage with one another via an empathetic form of reasoning. In the latter case they exhibit a form of solidarity in a more conceptual sense than in mere political activism. Finally, belonging in the form of an unalienated life is considered as a very specific form of social relation that overcomes the individualistic atomization that is so prevalent in modernity, in particular a form of social relation that repudiates the pervasive individualist mentality that constantly threatens the possibilities of social cooperation toward the common good (whether it be the common good of a just political economy or sustainable environment). Each of these three dimensions of identity raise very complex theoretical and practical issues and the chapter makes some detailed effort to address the most important of these. On the question of social progress, both the theoretical analysis and the empirical survey of different regions of the world yield an overarching normative conclusion about the relations between these three dimensions of identity: There is social progress when belonging as identity-through deliberate social and political efforts at wider solidarities and socially grounded overcoming of individual-centered alienation-becomes more rather than less inclusive (the “becomes” here suggesting an essentially dynamic nature of the constitution of belonging). How such progress is made may emerge from a variety of conditions and may be variably pursued, but our regional surveys suggest that central to these various possibilities is the need to stress and to integrate two different agencies in any large-scale effort toward these ends: on the one hand the role of the state and the policies and reforms it can enact, and on the other the element of democratic mobilization. The latter has two functions. Movements first of all put pressure on the state to enact policies that promote the conditions of cohesion that generate solidarities, civic rather than divided participation, and eventually unalienated social relations. But movements are also locations of public education through democratic collective deliberation, which, if sustained over time, helps to create solidarities that transcend particular sites of language, ethnicity, religion, etc. to a common register of common concepts and ideals. What forms these movements might take and what policies exactly they seek from the state will, of course, differ in different regional contexts. Our different regional surveys throw up a range of further, more specific, conclusions. We very briefly and abbreviatedly list below two or three of these, just to give a vastly summarizing sense of the detail that may be found in these surveys. The reports from Canada and Sri Lanka propose startlingly different policies, the former weighing in favor of recognition of communitarian identities that should be dialogically brought together, while the Sri Lankan report stresses a more top-down state intervention that discourages such communitarian differences in favour of a more civic form of popular participation. One report on Europe traverses the vexed forms of exclusion that owe to language, in particular how deliberative democracy may be blocked by language constraints-first by lack of knowledge of the language of debate and then further by lack of access to the conceptual register of debate. The report on Islamic nations is a historical account of how identities formed and ideologies developed into an ethical register, despite seemingly politically articulated goals. Throughout the chapter, there is a sustained and sturdy conviction in a methodological stance that the ideal of belonging (in these aspects of the unalienated life and solidarity and inclusive identity) is what most deeply underlies the other great ideals of modern political thought, those of liberty and equality, and that if we lost sight of this more fundamental underlying ideal, then the pursuit of liberty and equality would be in danger of being reduced to an exercise in social engineering.

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http://www.indianexpress.com/news/middle-of--the-road--mahatma/1195529/

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In 1981 the Noel Buxton Trust, which, since its inception in 1919, has had as one of its principal concerns the study of the causes of war and the promotion of international peace, invited the University of Leicester to hold a series of lectures on a theme of the University's choosing in the field of international relations. The University acknowledges the generosity of the Trust in supporting these lectures, which were given by Peter Calvocoressi, Geoffrey Goodwin, Alan James, Maurice KeensSoper and Susan Strange in the spring term 1982 under the title of 'The United Nations and Diplomacy'. It was from this series that the idea for the present book emerged. A special debt is owed for the assistance of Margaret Beard, Secretary of the Noel Buxton Trust.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/fighting-terrorism-with-the-big-boys/article7930220.ece

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/his-story-of-india

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http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/analysis/bjp-and-congress-different-mandates-similar-challenges/article1-1225028.aspx

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/changing-contours-of-censorship/article5719569.ece

In the prologue to his account of Gandhi’s early career in England and South Africa, Ramachandra Guha declares, ‘There are some striking resemblances between the central character of this story and his counterpart in the great Indian epic, the Ramayana.’ These resemblances are said to comprise the themes of travel, exile, struggle and even marital mistreatment, all of which the Mahatma is meant to have shared with Rama...

At the height of the imperial age, European powers ruled over most parts of the Islamic world. The British, French, Russian, and Dutch empires each governed more Muslims than any independent Muslim state. European officials believed Islam to be of great political significance, and were quite cautious when it came to matters of the religious life of their Muslim subjects. In the colonies, they regularly employed Islamic religious leaders and institutions to bolster imperial rule. At the same time, the European presence in Muslim lands was confronted by religious resistance movements and Islamic insurgency. Across the globe, from the West African savanna to the shores of Southeast Asia, Muslim rebels called for holy war against non-Muslim intruders. Islam and the European Empires presents the first comparative account of the engagement of all major European empires with Islam. Bringing together fifteen of the world's leading scholars in the field, the volume explores a wide array of themes, ranging from the accommodation of Islam under imperial rule to Islamic anti-colonial resistance. A truly global history of empire, the volume makes a major contribution not only to our knowledge of the intersection of Islam and imperialism, but also more generally to our understanding of religion and power in the modern world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/militant-ideals-captured-in-poetry.html

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/poke/me/Poke-me-Homegrown-terrorism-is-class-war-not-war-against-Indian-state-Do-you-agree/articleshow/18853608.cms

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Before 9/11, films addressing torture outside of the horror/slasher genre depicted the practice in a variety of forms. In most cases, torture was cast as the act of a desperate and depraved individual, and the viewer was more likely to identify with the victim rather than the torturer. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, scenes of brutality and torture in mainstream comedies, dramatic narratives, and action films appear for little other reason than to titillate and delight. In these films, torture is devoid of any redeeming qualities, represented as an exercise in brutal senselessness carried out by authoritarian regimes and institutions. This volume follows the shift in the representation of torture over the past decade, specifically in documentary, action, and political films. It traces and compares the development of this trend in films from the United States, Europe, China, Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East. Featuring essays by sociologists, psychologists, historians, journalists, and specialists in film and cultural studies, the collection approaches the representation of torture in film and television from multiple angles and disciplines, connecting its aesthetics and practices to the dynamic of state terror and political domination.

The Impossible Indian offers a rare, fresh view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went far beyond a nationalist agenda. Revising the conventional view of the Mahatma as an isolated Indian moralist detached from the mainstream of twentieth-century politics, Faisal Devji offers a provocative new genealogy of Gandhian thought, one that is not rooted in a clichéd alternative history of spiritual India but arises from a tradition of conquest and violence in the battlefields of 1857.

The existing vast scholarship on collective identities in India, whether it deals with caste, creed or nationalism, is dominated by a concern with their modern ‘construction’, a process generally seen as having occurred during the colonial period. So in the last two decades historians have carefully described the way in which communities of all kinds are invented or reinvented through a set of debates, practices and, most important of all, ‘reforms’...

Overlooked by many as mere propaganda, poetry offers an unfettered insight into the wider worldview of the Afghan Taliban. This collection of over two hundred poems draws upon Afghan tradition and the recent past as much as upon a long history of Persian, Urdu and Pashto verse. The contrast between the severity of their ideology and the Taliban’s long-standing poetic tradition is nothing short of remarkable. Unrequited love, vengeance, the thrill of battle, religion and nationalism — even a yearning for non-violence — are expressed through images of wine, powerful women and pastoral beauty, providing a fascinating insight into the hearts and minds of these redoubtable adversaries.

The upheavals of the "Arab Spring" have led many to argue that it marks the decline of globalized forms of militancy in the Muslim world and the return to "real" politics there. By contrast this essay traces a continuity between the forms of mobilization pioneered by Al-Qaeda on the one hand, and the Arab "revolutions" on the other. In both cases sacrificial forms of mobilization emerge outside the inherited institutions and categories of statist politics and seek to remake them. Whether they are violent or nonviolent, then, such movements illustrate the remaking of political practice in the global arena.

This essay is about the way in which Muslim thinkers in 19th and 20th century South Asia started thinking about Islam as a universal religion. It argues that these men abandoned previous notions of Muslim universality to focus on the way in which Islam could be said to represent the human race as a new kind of enumerable entity. In the process, the multiple worlds and angelic or demonic beings who had populated them were dismissed from view in a secularization of the Islamic tradition. Beginning as a denial of the hierarchies of race and civilization that had become familiar themes in colonial sociology, this emphasis on Islam's purely human universality was theorized in terms of its fidelity to nature and natural law. By the 20th century, however, nature was replaced by history as the true sign of Islam's universality, with the Prophet coming to be seen as the first truly human recipient of divine revelation, one who laid no claim to the supernatural. It was precisely the secular nature of Muslim history, then, that guaranteed its universality. The essay then goes on to explore the intellectual implications and contradictions of such a position.

"Not the common virtues and vices of men, therefore, but the claim to martyrdom is what demonstrates Islam’s universality [...]. As the supposed abnegation of all particularity and interest, sacrifice constitutes a kind of negative embodiment of the race."

Laid out as a series of three inter-related conversations, this volume investigates the diverse discourses of identity politics that relate the nationalist movement to current concerns and debates. Focusing upon the peripheries of modern India-states of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir-the first section explores local and regional nationalisms at play at marginalized spaces. It highlights their relationship with the homogenizing nationalism of the centre. The next examines literary production to delineate the plurality of narrative and consciousness. The final part explores the works of Mohammed Iqbal and Mohandas Gandhi while the conclusion provides a post-history of communalism. Overall, the volume deals with the multiplicity of historical experiences both within and without the discourse of nationalism.

A global society has come into being, but as yet it possesses no political institutions proper to its name. I will make the case that new forms of militancy, like that of al-Qaeda, achieve meaning in this institutional vacuum while representing, in their own way, the search for a global politics. From environmentalism to pacifism, such a worldwide politics can only be one that takes humanity itself as its object. This article aims to show that militant practices are informed by the same search that animates humanitarianism, which has become the global aim and signature of all politics today. © Berghahn Journals.

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was by far the most serious anticolonial insurrection of the nineteenth century and is generally held to constitute the last great act of traditional resistance to British rule. This essay is concerned with delineating another vision of the mutiny’s modernity than the one retailed by colonial and nationalist writers. It was neither the unity of India in any political sense, nor its division in any religious one, that the revolt brought to light, but rather an empire of distinctions where the native was not set against the alien but existed alongside it within a moral compact. And if much of this moral compact was drawn from tradition, its hesitant achievement during the rebellion of 1857 had unexpected consequences for India’s modernity. These became evident in the next period of anti-British mobilization across northern India, Gandhi’s movement of noncooperation that began with his defense of the caliphate in 1919. The extraordinary similarity of themes and arguments between these two events must give us pause for thought, even if we do not link them in any causal fashion. Whether it is the sacrifices made by one religious group for another or the practice of noncooperation itself, such elements appear to have been reincarnated from one historical moment to the next. For it was in the mutiny that these factors were transformed out of traditional recognition and made into the stuff of Indian modernity, destabilizing nationalist verities even as they made the nation itself possible in Gandhi’s spiritualization of politics.

This volume collects eleven essays and their commentaries by some of the world's leading scholars who hail from multicultural and multiethnic societies. The essays discuss the trends in secularism in social, politics, legal, and administrative organs including literature and academic institutions and the media. They further examine the perceived threat to secularism asking if it is a passing phenomenon or a deep seated one and whether the threat extends beyond secularism to economic liberalism and globalization. The contributors also discuss viable options for national and international institutions (governmental and non-governmental) to diffuse the threat.

From Tangier to Jakarta, and from Western capitals to those of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has confirmed its status as a kingdom without borders. Its political influence, religious expansion and media empires are now applauded, debated or contested and both local recipients of Saudi largesse and governments enmeshed in Saudi agendas debate a phenomenon that so far has attracted more sensational reporting than serious scholarly analysis. Kingdom Without Borders is the first volume to shed light on this growing regional and international power and its ambitions to project its influence beyond its frontiers in three interrelated spheres of activity. This volume brings together established scholars from Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia to map the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of Saudi expansionism.Combining both top-down and grass roots analysis, contributors interrogate the reality and impact of Saudi transnational connections on local politics, religious affiliation and media genres.

A global community of Hindus with origins in what is today Pakistan, the Sindhis are a remarkable people by any accounting. Unlike trading diasporas from other parts of the subcontinent, they are not heir to a long tradition of commerce overseas, having taken up the practice only after their forcible displacement from Sindh during the partition of British India...

This volume addresses some of the key issues marking the process of decolonization in India and Pakistan. It looks at decolonization as a long-term process and highlights some of the historical complications involved in nations born under the aegis of the colonial rule evolving into postcolonial polities. The contributors include a range of distinguished scholars from North America, the United Kingdom, South Asia, and Australia. They approach the issue of decolonization in different but mutually reinforcing ways, through constitutionalism, sports, housing, genders, minority issues, regionalism... Chicago, 15-16 April 2005. 9. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of&nbsp;...

The ‘Muslim community’ in India emerged during colonial rule as a new kind of sociological category. This emergence was linked to the designs and exigencies of British rule, including the deployment from the early years of the nineteenth century of new forms of classification like the census, which for the first time defined India’s Muslims as a minority. More interesting, however, was the way in which the colonial state provided Muslims the opportunity to redefine themselves as a group. In this chapter, I will argue that rather than being territorialized by British rule as a demographic or religious minority, Muslims adopted forms of selfdefinition that ended up deterritorializing both India and Islam. They did so by abandoning the idea of territorial nationality, which defined them as second-class subjects in a state where they were unfree instead of free, a minority instead of a majority. What resulted from this abandonment of territoriality was a Muslim community that occupied an imagined space situated at an angle to the sovereignty of the state. Like a shadow, this community was spread by the territorial notion of nationality, while at the same time being quite distinct from it.

This essay argues that the emergence of al-Qaeda as a new kind of enemy has resulted in the paradoxical de-militarization of the war waged against it. The much-publicized incidents of abuse at the U.S. detention centre of Abu Ghraib provide an example of the way in which the Global War on Terror has increasingly become a criminal rather than military operation. By reclassifying Iraqi prisoners into “criminal-like” enemies they became mere human beings rather than prisoner of war properly defined, which meant that their captors, too, were ironically defined merely as human beings and not as soldiers subject to a set of positive regulations.

This article looks at the way in which the Prophet Muhammad has been reconstituted into a model of citizenship for much of modern Islam. In particular it investigates how such a citizenship emerges as a global model during the Rushdie Affair, especially in the version of Ayatollah Khomeini, which allowed Muslims to address the event of globalization itself through the figure of the Prophet.