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The Army and Democracy
Military Politics in Pakistan
Aqil Shah
Harvard University Press, 2014

Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, only once has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government. In sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation has been ruled by its military for over three decades. Even when they were not directly in control of the government, the armed forces maintained a firm grip on national politics. How the military became Pakistan’s foremost power elite and what its unchecked authority means for the future of this nuclear-armed nation are among the crucial questions Aqil Shah takes up in The Army and Democracy.

Pakistan’s and India’s armies inherited their organization, training, and doctrines from their British predecessor, along with an ethic that regarded politics as outside the military domain. But Pakistan’s weak national solidarity, exacerbated by a mentality that saw war with India looming around every corner, empowered the military to take national security and ultimately government into its own hands. As the military’s habit of disrupting the natural course of politics gained strength over time, it arrested the development of democratic institutions.

Based on archival materials, internal military documents, and over 100 interviews with politicians, civil servants, and Pakistani officers, including four service chiefs and three heads of the clandestine Inter-Services Intelligence, The Army and Democracy provides insight into the military’s contentious relationship with Pakistan’s civilian government. Shah identifies steps for reforming Pakistan’s armed forces and reducing its interference in politics, and sees lessons for fragile democracies striving to bring the military under civilian control.

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Boys Will Be Boys
A Daughter's Elegy
Sara Suleri Goodyear
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Sara Suleri Goodyear's Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, Meatless Days intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with Suleri Goodyear's most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his "patriotic and preposterous" disposition).

Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear's upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also "preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space," a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father's inalienable right to oppress his children.

Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: "On Judgment Day," he told his daughter, "I will say to God, 'Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'"
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Chequered Past, Uncertain Future
The History of Pakistan
Tahir Kamran
Reaktion Books, 2024
Spanning thousands of years, a wide-ranging history of Pakistan from the Bronze Age to partition and beyond.
 
This book takes us on a sweeping journey through the ebbs and flows of Pakistan’s history, from the ancient Indus Valley Civilization to contemporary times. Chequered Past, Uncertain Future uncovers influences from Turkey, Persia, Arabia, and Britain that have shaped Pakistan, as well as showcases the region’s diverse and rich tapestry of peoples, and its pluralistic, multicultural society. The book also describes the post-1947 shift—following the partition of India and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan—as the country became more religiously conservative and autocratic, intensifying sectarian and ethnic divisions. For most of their history, the people of Pakistan have found themselves under the control of military dictators who suppress civil liberties and freedom of speech and action—a trend that persists today.
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Complex Rivalry
The Dynamics of India-Pakistan Conflict
Surinder Mohan
University of Michigan Press, 2022

While a substantial body of research explains how the conflict between India and Pakistan originated and developed over time, a systematic and multivariate inquiry cutting across different IR paradigms to understand this rivalry is rare or limited. Surinder Mohan contributes to the understanding of India and Pakistan’s rivalry by presenting a new type of framework, also known as complex rivalry model. This comprehensive model, by not limiting its theoretical tool-kit to any single paradigm, is unique in its approach and better positioned to debate and answer baffling questions that the single-paradigm-based studies address rather inadequately and in isolation.

This book, through an examination of fifty-seven militarized disputes between 1947 and 2021, explains the life cycle of India-Pakistan rivalry in four phases: initiation; development; maintenance; and a possible transformation/termination. Mohan delineates five specific conditions that evolved the subcontinental conflict into a complex rivalry: first, its survival in spite of the Bangladesh War and the end of the Cold War; second, its linkage with other rivalries; third, the inclusion of nuclear factor; fourth, the dyadic stability in the militarized disputes and hostility level despite changes in the regime type; and fifth, the dyad’s involvement in a multilayered conflict pattern. To break this deadlock and mitigate their longstanding differences, Mohan proposes that India and Pakistan must reframe their national priorities and political goals so that the new situation or combinations of conditions would assist their peace strategists to downgrade the dyadic hostility and implement risky policies to make headway to a promising transformation.

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Development Policy
Edited by Walter P. Falcon and Gustav F. Papanek
Harvard University Press, 1971
The contributors draw on their extensive experience as advisers to the Pakistan Planning Commission. Walter Falcon and Joseph J. Stern provide a general summary of Pakistan's development. The well-documented volume then focuses on specific economic issues. Stern analyzes inter-regional income differences and the trade-off between growth and regional equity. G. C. Hufbauer discusses West Pakistan's rapidly increasing exports, as well as effective subsidies and taxation, costs, and discrimination among exports. Henry D. Jacoby examines the application of a model to the planning of a whole power system. Robert Repetto is concerned with costs involved in designing an irrigation system. Falcon and Carl H. Gotsch study Punjab agriculture, the rationality of Punjabi farmers and their responses to prices and technological change. John W. Thomas provides important empirical evidence on a program to provide employment: the rural public works of East Pakistan. Gustav Papanek, former Director of the Development Advisory Service, discusses the occupational background and financing of Pakistan's industrial entrepreneurs and the relationship between their education and their success.
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Dispatches from Pakistan
Madiha R. Tahir
University of Minnesota Press, 2014


Since 9/11, Pakistan has loomed large in the geopolitical imagination of the West. A key ally in the global war on terror, it is also the country in which Osama bin Laden was finally found and killed—and the one that has borne the brunt of much of the ongoing conflict’s collateral damage. Despite its prominence on the front lines and on the front pages, Pakistan has been depicted by Western observers simplistically in terms of its corruption, its fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, and its propensity for violence. Dispatches from Pakistan, in contrast, reveals the complexities, the challenges, and the joys of daily life in the country, from the poetry of Gilgit to the graffiti of Gwadar, from an army barrack in Punjab to the urban politics of Karachi.

This timely book brings together journalists, activists, academics, and artists to provide a rich, in-depth, and intriguing portrait of contemporary Pakistani society. Straddling a variety of boundaries—geographic, linguistic, and narrative—Dispatches from Pakistan is a vital attempt to speak for the multitude of Pakistanis who, in the face of seemingly unimaginable hardships, from drone strikes to crushing poverty, remain defiantly optimistic about their future. While engaging in conversations on issues that make the headlines in the West, the contributors also introduce less familiar dimensions of Pakistani life, highlighting the voices of urban poets, rural laborers, industrial workers, and religious-feminist activists—and recovering Pakistani society’s inquilabi (revolutionary) undercurrents and its hopeful overtones.

Contributors: Mahvish Ahmad; Nosheen Ali, U of California, Berkeley; Shafqat Hussain, Trinity College; Humeira Iqtidar, King’s College London; Amina Jamal, Ryerson U; Hafeez Jamali, U of Texas at Austin; Iqbak Khattak; Zahra Malkani; Raza Mir; Hammad Nasar; Junaid Rana, U of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Maliha Safri, Drew U; Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Lahore U of Management Sciences; Ayesha Siddiqa; Sultan-i-Rome, Government Jahanzeb Postgraduate College, Swat, Pakistan; Saadia Toor, Staten Island College.

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Drivers of Long-Term Insecurity and Instability in Pakistan
Urbanization
Jonah Blank
RAND Corporation, 2014
Pakistan is already one of the most urbanized nations in South Asia, and a majority of its population is projected to be living in cities within three decades. This demographic shift is likely to have a significant impact on Pakistan’s politics and stability. This report briefly examines urbanization as a potential driver of long-term insecurity and instability, with particular attention to the cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Quetta.
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The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual
Devotional Practices of Pakistan and India
By Shemeem Burney Abbas
University of Texas Press, 2002

The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in the West.

This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.

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Hidden Caliphate
Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus
Waleed Ziad
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award

Sufis created the most extensive Muslim revivalist network in Asia before the twentieth century, generating a vibrant Persianate literary, intellectual, and spiritual culture while tying together a politically fractured world.

In a pathbreaking work combining social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Waleed Ziad examines the development across Asia of Muslim revivalist networks from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the center of the story are the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. In a time of political upheaval, the Mujaddidis fused Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indic literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam. The Mujaddidi “Hidden Caliphate,” as it was known, brought cohesion to diverse Muslim communities from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia. And the legacy of Mujaddidi Sufis continues to shape the Muslim world, as their institutional structures, pedagogies, and critiques have worked their way into leading social movements from Turkey to Indonesia, and among the Muslims of China.

By shifting attention away from court politics, colonial actors, and the standard narrative of the “Great Game,” Ziad offers a new vision of Islamic sovereignty. At the same time, he demonstrates the pivotal place of the Afghan Empire in sustaining this vast inter-Asian web of scholastic and economic exchange. Based on extensive fieldwork across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan at madrasas, Sufi monasteries, private libraries, and archives, Hidden Caliphate reveals the long-term influence of Mujaddidi reform and revival in the eastern Muslim world, bringing together seemingly disparate social, political, and intellectual currents from the Indian Ocean to Siberia.

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India and Nuclear Asia
Forces, Doctrine, and Dangers
Yogesh Joshi and Frank O'Donnell
Georgetown University Press, 2019

India's nuclear profile, doctrine, and practices have evolved rapidly since the country’s nuclear breakout in 1998. However, the outside world's understanding of India's doctrinal debates, forward-looking strategy, and technical developments are still two decades behind the present. India and Nuclear Asia will fill that gap in our knowledge by focusing on the post-1998 evolution of Indian nuclear thought, its arsenal, the triangular rivalry with Pakistan and China, and New Delhi's nonproliferation policy approaches. Yogesh Joshi and Frank O'Donnell show how India's nuclear trajectory has evolved in response to domestic, regional, and global drivers.

The authors argue that emerging trends in all three states are elevating risks of regional inadvertent and accidental escalation. These include the forthcoming launch of naval nuclear forces within an environment of contested maritime boundaries; the growing employment of dual-use delivery vehicles; and the emerging preferences of all three states to employ missiles early in a conflict. These dangers are amplified by the near-absence of substantive nuclear dialogue between these states, and the growing ambiguity of regional strategic intentions.  

Based on primary-source research and interviews, this book will be important reading for scholars and students of nuclear deterrence and India's international relations, as well as for military, defense contractor, and policy audiences both within and outside South Asia.

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Intimate Connections
Love and Marriage in Pakistan’s High Mountains
Anna-Maria Walter
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Intimate Connections dissects ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. It offers insightful perspectives from the emotional lives of Shia women and their active engagement with their husbands. These gender relations are shaped by countless factors, including embodied values of modesty and honor, vernacular fairy tales and Bollywood movies, Islamic revivalism and development initiatives. In particular, the advent of media and communication technologies has left a mark on (pre)marital relations in both South Asia and the wider Muslim world. Juxtaposing different understandings of ‘love’ reveals rich and manifold worlds of courtship, elopements, family dynamics, and more or less affectionate matches that are nowadays often initiated through SMS. Deep ethnographic accounts trace the relationships between young couples to show how Muslim women in a globalized world dynamically frame and negotiate circumstances in their lives.
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Islam's Political Culture
Religion and Politics in Predivided Pakistan
By Nasim Ahmad Jawed
University of Texas Press, 1999

This book examines the political dimension of Islam in predivided Pakistan (1947-1971), one of the first new Muslim nations to commit itself to an Islamic political order and one in which the national debate on Islamic, political, and ideological issues has been the most persistent, focused, and rich of any dialogues in the contemporary Muslim world.

Nasim Jawed draws on the findings of a survey he conducted among two influential social groups—the ulama (traditional religious leaders) and the modern professionals—as well as on the writings of Muslim intellectuals. He probes the major Islamic positions on critical issues concerning national identity, the purpose of the state, the form of government, and free, socialist, and mixed economies.

This study contributes to an enhanced understanding of Islam's political culture worldwide, since the issues, positions, and arguments are often similar across the Muslim world. The empirical findings of the study not only outline the ideological backdrop of contemporary Islamic reassertion, but also reveal diversity as well as tensions within it.

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Kashmir
Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
Sumantra Bose
Harvard University Press, 2005

In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace.

Though the roots of conflict lie in the end of empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the contemporary problem owes more to subsequent developments, particularly the severe authoritarianism of Indian rule. Deadly dimensions have been added since 1990 with the rise of a Kashmiri independence movement and guerrilla war waged by Islamist groups. Bose explains the intricate mix of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities that populate Kashmir, and emphasizes that a viable framework for peace must take into account the sovereignty concerns of India and Pakistan and popular aspirations to self-rule as well as conflicting loyalties within Kashmir. He calls for the establishment of inclusive, representative political structures in Indian Kashmir, and cross-border links between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Bose also invokes compelling comparisons to other cases, particularly the peace-building framework in Northern Ireland, which offers important lessons for a settlement in Kashmir.

The Western world has not fully appreciated the desperate tragedy of Kashmir: between 1989 and 2003 violence claimed up to 80,000 lives. Informative, balanced, and accessible, Kashmir is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand one of the world's most dangerous conflicts.

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Meatless Days
Sara Suleri Goodyear
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West.

"Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pakistani history, and deeply
into the history of her family and friends. . . . The Suleri women at home in Pakistan make this book sing."—Daniel Wolfe, New York Times Book Review

"A jewel of insight and beauty. . . . Suleri's voice has the same authority when she speaks about Pakistani politics as it does in her literary interludes."—Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The author has a gift for rendering her family with a few, deft strokes, turning them out as whole and complete as eggs."—Anita Desai, Washington Post Book World

"Meatless Days takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author's similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader . . . hungering for more."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

"Dazzling. . . . Suleri is a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."—Henry Louise Gates, Jr., Voice Literary Supplement
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Military, Inc.
Inside Pakistan's Military Economy
Ayesha Siddiqa
Pluto Press, 2016
Pakistan occupies a paradoxical, even contradictory place in American foreign policy. Nominally a strategic ally in the war on terror, it is the third-largest recipient of US aid in the world. At the same time, it is run by its military and intelligence service—whose goals certainly do not always overlap with US priorities.

This book offers a close look at what the rise of the military has meant for Pakistani society. Ayesha Siddiqa shows how entrenched the military has become, not just in day-to-day governance, but in the Pakistani corporate sector as well. What are the consequences of this unprecedented merging of the military and corporate sectors? What does it mean for Pakistan’s economic development—let alone for hopes of an eventual return to democracy and de-militarization? This new edition brings Siddiqa’s account fully up to date with a new preface and conclusion that emphasize the changing role of the media.
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Mughal Gardens
James L. Wescoat Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1996

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Mullahs on the Mainframe
Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras
Jonah Blank
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In Jonah Blank's important, myth-shattering book, the West gets its first look at the Daudi Bohras, a unique Muslim denomination who have found the core of their religious beliefs largely compatible with modern ideology. Combining orthodox Muslim prayer, dress, and practice with secular education, relative gender equality, and Internet use, this community serves as a surprising reminder that the central values of "modernity" are hardly limited to the West.
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Muslim Becoming
Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan
Naveeda Khan
Duke University Press, 2012
In Muslim Becoming, Naveeda Khan challenges the claim that Pakistan's relation to Islam is fragmented and problematic. Offering a radically different interpretation, Khan contends that Pakistan inherited an aspirational, always-becoming Islam, one with an open future and a tendency toward experimentation. For the individual, this aspirational tendency manifests in a continual striving to be a better Muslim. It is grounded in the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the poet, philosopher, and politician considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan. Khan finds that Iqbal provided the philosophical basis for recasting Islam as an open religion with possible futures as yet unrealized, which he did in part through his engagement with the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Drawing on ethnographic research in the neighborhoods and mosques of Lahore and on readings of theological polemics, legal history, and Urdu literature, Khan points to striving throughout Pakistani society: in prayers and theological debates and in the building of mosques, readings of the Qur'an, and the undertaking of religious pilgrimages. At the same time, she emphasizes the streak of skepticism toward the practices of others that accompanies aspiration. She asks us to consider what is involved in affirming aspiration while acknowledging its capacity for violence.
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Muslim Zion
Pakistan as a Political Idea
Faisal Devji
Harvard University Press, 2013

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India’s Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India’s rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.

A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world’s sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.

Revealing how Pakistan’s troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

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The New Pakistani Middle Class
Ammara Maqsood
Harvard University Press, 2017

Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. In The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in contemporary Lahore, where she unravels these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition and the quest for identity among middle-class groups.

Lahore’s traditional middle class has asserted its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. Recently, however, a more visibly religious, upwardly mobile social group has struggled to distinguish itself against this backdrop of conventional middle-class modernity, by embracing Islamic culture and values. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi.

Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkhaThe New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. Maqsood probes how the politics of modernity meets the practices of piety in the struggle among different middle-class groups for social recognition and legitimacy.

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No Five Fingers Are Alike
Cognitive Amplifiers in Social Context
Joseph C. Berland
Harvard University Press, 1982

Snake charmers, bards, acrobats, magicians, trainers of performing animals, and other nomadic artisans and entertainers have been a colorful and enduring element in societies throughout the world. Their flexible social system, based on highly specialized individual skills and spatial mobility, contrasts sharply with the more rigid social system of sedentary peasants and traditional urban dwellers. Joseph Berland brings into focus the ethnographic and psychological differences between nomadic and sedentary groups by examining how the experiences of South Asian gypsies and their urban counterparts contribute to basic perceptual habits and skills.

No Five Fingers Are Alike, based on three years of participant research among rural Pakistani groups, provides the first detailed description in print of Asian gypsies. By applying methods of anthropological observation as well as psychological experimentation, Berland develops a theory about the relationship between social experience and mental growth. He suggests that there are certain social conditions under which mental growth can be accelerated. His work promises to stand as an important contribution to the cross-cultural literature on cognitive development.

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Pakistan Desires
Queer Futures Elsewhere
Omar Kasmani, editor
Duke University Press, 2023
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contributors to Pakistan Desires invite reflection on what meanings adhere to queerness in Pakistan. They illustrate how amid conditions of straightness, desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making. Among other topics, the contributors analyze gender transgressive performances in Pakistani film, piety in the transgender rights movement, the use of Grindr among men, the exploration of homoerotic subject matter in contemporary Pakistani artist Anwar Saeed's work, and the story of a sixteenth-century Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy. From Kashmir to the 1947 Partition to the resonances of South Asian gay subjectivity in the diaspora, the contributors attend to narrative and epistemological possibilities for queer lives and loves. By embracing forms of desire elsewhere, ones that cannot correlate to or often fall outside dominant Western theorizations of queerness, this volume gathers other ways of being queer in the world.

Contributors. Ahmed Afzal, Asad Alvi, Anjali Arondekar, Vanja Hamzić, Omar Kasmani, Pasha M. Khan, Gwendolyn S. Kirk, Syeda Momina Masood, Nida Mehboob, Claire Pamment, Geeta Patel, Nael Quraishi, Abdullah Qureshi, Shayan Rajani, Jeffrey A. Redding, Gayatri Reddy, Syma Tariq
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Pakistan
Terrorism Ground Zero
Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal
Reaktion Books, 2011

As made abundantly clear in the classified documents recently made public by WikiLeaks, Pakistan is the keystone in the international fight against terrorism today. After the US-led coalition targeted terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, these groups, including al Qaeda and the Taliban, relocated to the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan. From its base in this remote, inhospitable region of Pakistan, al Qaeda and its associated cells have planned, prepared, and executed numerous terrorist attacks around the world, in addition to supporting and waging insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

 

This book is the first detailed analysis of the myriad insurgent groups working in Pakistan. Written by well-known expert on global terrorism Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal, a leading scholar in Pakistan, the book examines and reviews the nature, structure, and agendas of the groups, their links to activists in other countries, such as India and Iran, and the difficulties of defeating terrorism in this part of the world. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews with government officials and former terrorists, the authors argue that Pakistan faces grave and continuing pressures from within, and that without steadfast international goodwill and support, the threats of extremism, terrorism, and insurgency will continue to grow.

This timely and necessary book argues that if the international community is to win the battle against ideological extremism and operational terrorism around the world, then Pakistan should be in the vanguard of the fight.

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Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws
From Islamic Empires to the Taliban
By Shemeem Burney Abbas
University of Texas Press, 2013

Under the guise of Islamic law, the prophet Muhammad’s Islam, and the Qur’an, states such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh are using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of speech. Yet the Prophet never tried or executed anyone for blasphemy, nor does the Qur’an authorize the practice. Asserting that blasphemy laws are neither Islamic nor Qur‘anic, Shemeem Burney Abbas traces the evolution of these laws from the Islamic empires that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present-day Taliban. Her pathfinding study on the shari’a and gender demonstrates that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are the inventions of a military state that manipulates discourse in the name of Islam to exclude minorities, women, free thinkers, and even children from the rights of citizenship.

Abbas herself was persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, so she writes from both personal experience and years of scholarly study. Her analysis exposes the questionable motives behind Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were resurrected during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime of 1977–1988—motives that encompassed gaining geopolitical control of the region, including Afghanistan, in order to weaken the Soviet Union. Abbas argues that these laws created a state-sponsored “infidel” ideology that now affects global security as militant groups such as the Taliban justify violence against all “infidels” who do not subscribe to their interpretation of Islam. She builds a strong case for the suspension of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and for a return to the Prophet’s peaceful vision of social justice.

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Pakistan's Counterterrorism Challenge
Moeed Yusuf, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2014

Pakistan, which since 9/11 has come to be seen as one of the world’s most dangerous places and has been referred to as “the epicenter of international terrorism,” faces an acute counterterrorism (CT) challenge. The book focuses on violence being perpetrated against the Pakistani state by Islamist groups and how Pakistan can address these challenges, concentrating not only on military aspects but on the often-ignored political, legal, law enforcement, financial, and technological facets of the challenge.

Edited by Moeed Yusuf of the US Institute of Peace, and featuring the contributions and insights of Pakistani policy practitioners and scholars as well as international specialists with deep expertise in the region, the volume explores the current debate surrounding Pakistan’s ability—and incentives—to crack down on Islamist terrorism and provides an in-depth examination of the multiple facets of this existential threat confronting the Pakistani state and people.

The book pays special attention to the non-traditional functions of force that are central to Pakistan’s ability to subdue militancy but which have not received the deserved attention from the Pakistani state nor from western experts. In particular, this path-breaking volume, the first to explore these various facets holistically, focuses on the weakness of political institutions, the role of policing, criminal justice systems, choking financing for militancy, and regulating the use of media and technology by militants. Military force alone, also examined in this volume, will not solve Pakistan’s Islamist challenge. With original insights and attention to detail, the authors provide a roadmap for Western and Pakistani policymakers alike to address the weaknesses in Pakistan’s CT strategy.

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Planning for Education in Pakistan
A Personal Case Study
Adam Curle
Harvard University Press

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Portrait of a Giving Community
Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora
Adil Najam
Harvard University Press, 2006

Portrait of a Giving Community is based on a nationwide survey of the giving habits of Pakistani-Americans. This study, the first of its kind, not only examines the history, demography, and institutional geography of Pakistani-Americans but also looks at how this immigrant community manages its multiple identities through charitable giving and volunteering. It provides a snapshot in time of a generous and giving community whose philanthropy has become increasingly “American” without being less “Pakistani.”

Who are the Pakistani-Americans? What is the extent of their diaspora giving to Pakistan? What can be done to increase and channel their philanthropy for more equitable development in Pakistan? How much do they give within the U.S. and to causes unrelated to Pakistan? How does this community manage the hyphen in “Pakistani-American”? These are some of the questions that motivate this book.

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Queer Companions
Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan
Omar Kasmani
Duke University Press, 2022
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
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Quest for Kim
In Search of Kipling's Great Game
Peter Hopkirk
University of Michigan Press, 1999
This book is for all those who love Kim, the masterpiece of Indian life in which Kipling immortalized the Great Game, the centuries-old power struggle between Russia and Great Britain in the depths of Central Asia. Fascinated since childhood by this strange tale of an orphan boy's recruitment into the Indian secret service, Peter Hopkirk here explores the many mysteries surrounding Kipling's great novel.
"This is a fascinating, brilliantly written book, as interesting in its description of the author's journeys as it is in its investigation of the reality that lies behind 'the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme,'" as Kim has been described by Nirad Chaudhuri." --T. J. Binyon, Times Literary Supplement
"In an original combination of autobiography, travel writing, and literary detective work, Hopkirk manages accessibly to tell the story of Kim and his own obsession with it. Hopkirk illustrates how creatively and thoroughly the reading of a work of fiction can shape a whole life's experience." -- John R. Bradley, Independent on Sunday
". . . a reminder of just how absorbing was the world Kipling knew, and how fabulous was his transformation of it into literature." --Richard Bernstein, New York Times
Peter Hopkirk has traveled widely over many years in the regions where his books are set--Central Asia, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. His nearly twenty years with The Times included work as an Asian affairs specialist. His previous books include The Great Game, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Setting the East Ablaze, and Our Secret Service East of Constantinople. His works have been translated into twelve languages.
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Secularizing Islamists?
Jama'at-e-Islami and Jama'at-ud-Da'wa in Urban Pakistan
Humeira Iqtidar
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism.

This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

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The Social Lives of Figurines
Recontextualizing the Third-Millennium-BC Terracotta Figurines from Harappa
Sharri R. Clark
Harvard University Press, 2016
The largest category of representational art recovered from many ancient Indus sites is terracotta figurines. In this lavishly illustrated book, Sharri R. Clark examines and recontextualizes a rich and diverse corpus of hundreds of figurines from the urban site of Harappa to reveal new information about Indus ideology and society.
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The State of Islam
Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan
Saadia Toor
Pluto Press, 2011

The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.

Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.

Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.

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The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan
Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons
Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar
Pluto Press, 2022
'A major analysis of our world's political crisis' - Joel Wainwright

The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone.

Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialization and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolized the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class.

Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification and atomization, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject.
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The Struggle for Pakistan
A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ayesha Jalal
Harvard University Press, 2014

Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider’s assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region.

“[An] important book…Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]…The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date…She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.”
—Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books

“[Jalal] shows that Pakistan never went off the rails; it was, moreover, never a democracy in any meaningful sense. For its entire history, a military caste and its supporters in the ruling class have formed an ‘establishment’ that defined their narrow interests as the nation’s.”
—Isaac Chotiner, Wall Street Journal

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Under the Drones
Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands
Shahzad Bashir
Harvard University Press, 2012

In the West, media coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan is framed by military and political concerns, resulting in a simplistic picture of ageless barbarity, terrorist safe havens, and peoples in need of either punishment or salvation. Under the Drones looks beyond this limiting view to investigate real people on the ground, and to analyze the political, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. Understanding the complexity of life along the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can help America and its European allies realign their priorities in the region to address genuine problems, rather than fabricated ones.

This volume explodes Western misunderstandings by revealing a land that abounds with human agency, perpetual innovation, and vibrant complexity. Through the work of historians and social scientists, the thirteen essays here explore the real and imagined presence of the Taliban; the animated sociopolitical identities expressed through traditions like Pakistani truck decoration; Sufism’s ambivalent position as an alternative to militancy; the long and contradictory history of Afghan media; and the simultaneous brutality and potential that heroin brings to women in the area.

Moving past shifting conceptions of security, the authors expose the West’s prevailing perspective on the region as strategic, targeted, and alarmingly dehumanizing. Under the Drones is an essential antidote to contemporary media coverage and military concerns.

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The United States and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
Third Edition
W. Norman Brown
Harvard University Press, 1972

The first edition of this work appeared in 1953. The Foreign Service Journal greeted it as a "basic work" and the New York Times Book Review hailed it as "unquestionably the best and most balanced account of India and Pakistan."

The second edition appeared in 1963 and received an equally warm welcome. The Times of India said, "It provides the historical perspective, and discusses the present-day social, economic, and political problems with knowledge, sympathy, and acumen."

Between 1963 and 1972 the two nations of India and Pakistan made a number of important governmental, political, economic, and cultural changes. They had to meet crises caused by forces of nature as well as crises originating in their own institutions. Democratic processes advanced in India; they were repudiated in Pakistan and the repudiation led to the civil war in East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. W. Norman Brown covers all of this and more in his fresh look at the subcontinent.

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Untying the Afghan Knot
Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal
Riaz M. Khan
Duke University Press, 1991
Diplomatic efforts to resolve the Afghanistan crisis began almost immediately after the Soviet Union’s military intervention in that country in December 1979. Untying the Afghan Knot offers the first detailed account of the diplomatic process set in motion by that intervention and culminating in the April 1988 Geneva Accords—a milestone in multilateralism and United Nations (UN) peacemaking.
Riaz M. Khan, a senior Pakistani diplomat, participated actively in all meetings on Afghanistan in the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in all of the Geneva negotiating rounds (1882–1988). Drawing upon his personal experience, official documents, scholarly literature, and press accounts, he provides a unique insider’s view of these precedent-setting negotiations, which were often shrouded in secrecy and misperceptions.
Khan examines the interests, positions, and behind-the-scenes maneuverings of the major players—Afghan governments and resistance groups, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, the United States, and UN mediators—and assesses the impact of military and political developments inside Afghanistan and elsewhere, including the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. Khan’s authoritative account of these critical diplomatic initiatives sheds important light on the internal dynamics of the multilateral Afghanistan negotiations.
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Urban Traditions and Historic Environments in Sindh
A Fading Legacy of Shikarpoor, Historic City
Anila Naeem
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Shikarpoor Historic City, in Sindh, Pakistan, has a rich historical heritage: as a central point on caravan trade routes, it served as the gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia. In recognition of that history, in 1998 the government of Sindh named it a protected heritage site-but that status hasn't prevented the ongoing destruction of the city's historic fabric. This book tells the story of Shikarpoor and presents as complete a picture of its threatened historical fabric as possible, through copious maps and images past and present.
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Vying for Allah’s Vote
Understanding Islamic Parties, Political Violence, and Extremism in Pakistan
Haroon K. Ullah
Georgetown University Press

What is driving political extremism in Pakistan? In early 2011, the prominent Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by a member of his own security team for insulting Islam by expressing views in support of the rights of women and religious minorities. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, was killed by gunfire and explosive devices as she left a campaign event in December 2007; strong evidence links members of extremist organizations to her slaying.

These murders underscore the fact that religion, politics, and policy are inextricably linked in Pakistan. In this book, Haroon K. Ullah analyzes the origins, ideologies, bases of support, and electoral successes of the largest and most influential Islamic parties in Pakistan. Based on his extensive field work in Pakistan, he develops a new typology for understanding and comparing the discourses put forth by these parties in order to assess what drives them and what separates the moderate from the extreme. A better understanding of the range of parties is critical for knowing how the US and other Western nations can engage states where Islamic political parties hold both political and moral authority.

Pakistan’s current democratic transition will hinge on how well Islamic parties contribute to civilian rule, shun violence, and mobilize support for political reform. Ullah’s political-party typology may also shed light on the politics of other majority-Muslim democracies, such as Egypt and Tunisia, where Islamist political parties have recently won elections.

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The Wild East
Criminal Political Economies in South Asia
Edited by Barbara Harriss-White and Lucia Michelutti
University College London, 2019
Through eleven case studies conducted across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, The Wild East examines a variety of economic sectors and business enterprises that regularly flout the law, such as coal, oil, real estate, and industrial labor. Bridging anthropology and political economy, the case studies explore how state regulative law is ignored or selectively manipulated and reveal the workings of regulated criminal economic systems in which politicians, police, judges, and bureaucrats are closely intertwined. Disrupting the existing literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East also suggests avenues for future research that will be of critical value to students and scholars of economics, anthropology, sociology, criminology, comparative politics, political science, and international relations.

 
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Women's Seclusion and Men's Honor
Sex Roles in North India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan
David G. Mandelbaum
University of Arizona Press, 1988
Hindus and Muslims of northern South Asia share the belief that women should seclude themselves from men and that men must supervise the conduct of women so that their behavior will not sully men's honor. While these practices are well known, until now no book has attempted to explain why they are so crucially important to so many people.
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