Cultural anthropologist // ex-architect // Berliner-by-love. I am a guest lecturer at Freie Universität, Berlin. My work pursues ideas of post-migrant be/longing, queer futurities and public intimacy – a research practice that is best read across the study of religion, queer and affect theory. My earlier work has focused on Pakistan, however, current research on Berlin involves an interest in aesthetics of migration and affective cultures, involving especially queer, religious and migrant forms of be/longing. I am the author of "Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan" (Duke UP 2022 and winner of the 2023 Ruth Benedict Prize). I'm the editor of "Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere" (Duke UP 2023). I have also co-edited the book "Muslim Matter" (Revolver Publishing, 2016) and "Nothing Personal!? Essays on Affect, Gender and Queerness" (b_books, 2022). I teach on affect, religion and queer theory with expertise in Sufi life-worlds and contemporary South Asia. For more, please visit my homepage: omarkasmani.com Address: Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Is religious sound rightfully queer? Are gay verses of a diasporic poet properly Pakistani? What ... more Is religious sound rightfully queer? Are gay verses of a diasporic poet properly Pakistani? What does it mean to mourn for futures amid a fracturing relation to the historical? How is it to desire in unfinished tongues? With poetic charge and lyrical affect, I read verses of a gay Urdu poet alongside devotional texts at religious shrines to speculate and articulate across distinct universes, the tenuous narrative possibilities of unstraight lives and loves in Pakistan. I do so neither with comparative means nor to reparative ends, rather to work out an enabling fiction: I explore how desiring in verse is to desire in the way of history; or how might we poetically refuse the occlusion of queers in the country’s national and public histories, or lyrically insist against the tyranny of Pakistan’s further and only straight narration.
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contri... more 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.
Queer Companions: Religion, Public intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, 2022
In Queer Companions, I theorize saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations a... more In Queer Companions, I theorize saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage in Sehwan. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, I outline 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, I show 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, I contend that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
Critical Thin: Haunting Sufis and the Also-Here of Migration in Berlin, 2021
This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly ... more This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inheritances are made contemporaneous while sup- pressed civic-political matters find a spectral, more-than-visual presence in Berlin. Sufi haunting thus achieves, amid enduring conditions of migration, a provisional posi- tioning of the not-here and the not-now as an also-here. Such remembrance affords migrants a greater awareness of being distinctly historical as well as the critical means to look past conditions of the present.
Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with a reader. It is a flirt... more Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with a reader. It is a flirtation even, on part of the author, thinly carried over to a scene of reading. (…) I propose that writing through affect is not mere writing up of ethnographic data but cruising in queer zones of inter-subjective knowing that open up during fieldwork or become available in its wake through wispy registers of memory and intimacy. Permeable, partial, personal—thin, cruisy, queer modes of writing, as I elaborate, help trouble anthropological habits of form, content and knowledge epistemes.(….) Writing through affect is writing that takes us beyond capture or holding, to what lies in excess or exists beside, in-between and alongside, or to that what impinges on life obliquely or is given in the interface of inward and external modes, subjectively and piecemeal. This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to “Thin Attachments” (Kasmani 2019, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry) and has appeared in "Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing" edited by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 pp. 163-188
Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, 2021
Based on my impressions of the Sufi ritual of zikr in Berlin, my conversations with Sufi follower... more Based on my impressions of the Sufi ritual of zikr in Berlin, my conversations with Sufi followers, and my limited participation in the ritual itself, I write on the notion of intimate religion, which distinct from material religion or religion as matter is in my view a matter of worlding, religiously sutured. On the interface of material and immaterial religion in Berlin, I am interested in how the felt and the intimate of a doubly interiorized performance like zikr—which takes place in mosque interiors and targets mystical interiorities—permeates the urban, more importantly, how a world coheres through affective threads of (religious) feeling. So long as intimacy concerns the affective relation that thrives in the critical distance between close but distinct objects, I argue that saintly companies in the ritual help believers suture the outward world with its inward dimension without necessarily transcending it. The chapter is composed as a diptych. The first section Feeling in Circles features long, direct excerpts from interviews with Sufi followers. Intimate Religion, the subsequent piece turns to researcher’s voice with a mix of ethnographic observations and philosophical deliberations on migrant religion in the urban.
In Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Julia Martinez-Ariño and Marian Burchardt (eds.) Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, pp. 189-202. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newe... more Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variability are being pushed out and projected anew but where its historical, trans-local, cross-scalar, and open-ended working out is mappable. To outline its futural shapes, this text closely traces a set of affective, representational, and practical strategies as part of an unfinished, contested, and dynamic process of encounters across a variety of allies and actors: individuals, institutions, collectives, spaces, and networks. It illustrates , on the one hand, how trans* in Pakistan kicks off a capacious contact zone, triggers cross-sectional encounters, and generates momentum with implications, which impact but also exceed local conditions. On the other hand, it observes how its horizons might be curtailed by conditions and concerns that privilege some ways of gender nonconforming over certain others.
No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, 2019
Place is a concern in Abidi’s time-based practice, yet her work is not about a place. The urban i... more Place is a concern in Abidi’s time-based practice, yet her work is not about a place. The urban is both fact and fiction, whether it is given to us as a set of borders within borders, as vignettes of intimacy or as a city suspended in an act of waiting. Abidi stages the city at every opportunity. "They Died Laughing" is not a show about a place per se, yet it demands of the viewer an appreciation of complexity that structures the local in a particular field of power relations. Pakistan or not, whether Shia or otherwise, Abidi simply offers us a world she knows best. And the ones who know her, know that her ability to poke fun is as sharp as her sense for tragedy. Must loss replace laughter in our reading of her work or is laughter already loss of some kind, standing in for an unbearable reality, driving those who laugh defiantly to die, laughing.
To cite this article: Omar Kasmani (2019) No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, Anthropology Now, 11:1-2, 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/19428200.2019.1648127
Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves, 2019
KEYWORDS: queer affect, intimacy, belonging, Sufi, migration
Thin Attachments brings personal m... more KEYWORDS: queer affect, intimacy, belonging, Sufi, migration
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city's queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traffic, it performs the task of engaging politics of time, sex, and religion in the city not in antagonistic terms but as critically coincident. Similarly, attachment in this work is that figure of affect, which brings us tad closer to the knowledge of how we might long and belong in shared unfamiliarity; of how ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, sex and saints in Berlin constitute continuums otherwise implausible; of how delicacies of religious ritual echo precarities of queer love. The result is a body of non-linear fragments that discover the sparse and surprising ways in which longings of places and people intersect and in so doing summon the city as though it were a crafty djinn, shapeshifting between its material, virtual, and imaginal forms.
That journeys to holy sites are divinely sanctioned, saints are found through dreams or that beli... more That journeys to holy sites are divinely sanctioned, saints are found through dreams or that believers are called to saints’ shrines in waking visions is hardly news when it comes to pilgrims’ accounts of places of pilgrimage. But not always do dreams and visions simply occur. They are evoked by the tactical exercise of sleeping on hallowed grounds like shrines and cemeteries (Mittermaier 2008, 60), they are invited, also anticipated, through intimate exchanges with Sufi bodies and persons (Ewing 1994, 1990), and in some cases as this work illustrates, dreams are enabled via processes and interventions of the state.
This text is based on the life history of gender non-binary fakir (ascetic) who relocates to the pilgrimage town of Sehwan on the basis of his_her childhood dreams. A life story is made to converse with the modern story of Sehwan's shrine since its public takeover in 1960. The chapter discusses how the relationship between saints and their devotees comes to be mediated through offices of the state. This is particularly relevant given that shrines are administered under the bureaucratic structures of the state within the framework of the Ministry of Religious affairs and the Department of Awqaf. I make the argument that the state's interest in governing saints' places exceeds its material and financial stakes and takes affective forms influencing the ways in which its subjects interact or become intimate with saints of the state, in this case, also in dreams.
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Pilgrimages of the Dream: On Wings of State in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan.” In Babak Rahimi and Peyman Eshagi (eds.) Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflections on the Work of Qasim Riza Shaheen, 2018
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. "From your internal to my external." The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflect... more Kasmani, Omar. 2019. "From your internal to my external." The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflections on the Work of Qasim Riza Shaheen, edited by Mary Ann Hushlak and Monica B. Pearl. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, pp. 75-78.
"The Last Known Pose is a collection of written and visual responses to the works of British artist, Qasim Riza Shaheen. Essays, reflections and conversations, by eminent scholars, curators, artists and collaborators, consider the multiple aspects and the experience of his works.Through depictions of his own body and a vocabulary of simulation set within the photographic frame, Shaheen’s inter-disciplinary and socially-engaged practice explores notions of gender, a-typically through the poetics of Sufism and the performance of cultural texts."
The sources I discuss here are sonic-lyrical offerings (listen on the blog) performed by pilgrims... more The sources I discuss here are sonic-lyrical offerings (listen on the blog) performed by pilgrims facing saints’ tombs at two affiliated shrines. I make the argument that despite contrary measures of the Pakistani state, Shia faith and devotion in places like Sehwan perseveres spectrally by way of a sonic stickiness. The broader discussion this text pursues is that beyond the moment in which these are performed and recorded, lyrical-sonic performances in Sehwan effect a double emotional haunting, mourning that which (in actuality) no longer is to desiring that which (in actuality) has not yet happened. Because in publicly sounding allegiance to Shia figures, events and temporalities, pilgrims long for other histories, they insist on other futures. They voice a historical-emotional consciousness that critiques, interrupts, and refuses a for-granted continuity of the present.
This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and... more This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and historical structures of authority and charisma. Being active and acted upon in complexly emplaced ways, fakir lives target the transcendent and so doing complicate the modernist separation of the inner self with the outer world, reveal affective continuities across realms of zahir and batin, and make room for spatial and intercorporeal labour in religious careers. The discussion on fakir becoming points to the broader notions of charismatic spatiality that dialogically tie sites of the living and the dead, interweave realms of dreams with those of waking life, and helps redirect analytical attention away from religiously-bounded individuals to religiously-dynamic life-worlds.
Grounds of becoming: fakirs among the dead in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, Culture and Religion, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2017.1326959.
Opinion / Special feature for The Friday Times
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's... more Opinion / Special feature for The Friday Times
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's shrine (16 February 2017), I have been struck by how poorly understood and routinely exoticised a place like Sehwan is both in popular discourse and media reportage. In this short opinion-essay, I argue why "the easy idea that one kind of Islam is under threat from another kind of Islam is not only flawed, it is plain shoddy" or why "to portray an Islam of the shrines as simply tolerant, peace-loving and compassionate captures only the dynamism of what is easily observable at such places: shrine music, ritual dance, multi-faith pilgrims. All true. But historically deep-seated constellations of power, structures of orthodoxies, and contestations of authorities are much harder to observe." I further argue that it is in ambiguity and not exceptionalism that we may come to understand a place like Sehwan. In fact, the recent attack shows that Sehwan is not an isolated retreat of the hermits but a place actively engaged with a Pakistan in transformation bearing the brunt of its broader political and social unrests.
– published in The Friday Times on 24 February 2017.
Kasmani, Omar. 2016. "Matter that Matters: An Orientation / Bedeutsame Dinge: Eine Orientierung" ... more Kasmani, Omar. 2016. "Matter that Matters: An Orientation / Bedeutsame Dinge: Eine Orientierung" in Omar Kasmani & Stefan Maneval (eds.) Muslim Matter. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, pp. 47-60.
One possible reading of the more specific case of female masculinity that Jack Halberstam is inve... more One possible reading of the more specific case of female masculinity that Jack Halberstam is invested in illustrating is that instances, practices, and performances of undoing femininity must and can only give way to the subject’s masculinization. And this, despite a welcome proliferation of masculinities, does little to break away from a necessary dimorphic regime of sex and gender.(....) Picking from women’s stories and narrativization of spiritual careers in Sehwan Sharif, I shall highlight how frames of knowledge that tend to situate an emancipatory ideal in the subject’s masculinization miss the point and risk ascribing projects of gender to such women, projects not always reflective of their own aspirations.
Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia: Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) , 2016
The chapter situates the practices and self-representations of two female fakirs in the context o... more The chapter situates the practices and self-representations of two female fakirs in the context of a continuing vitality of intercessory practice and spiritual instruction in Sehwan sharīf, Pakistan. It argues that an inventive articulation of gender lies at the heart of the female fakīrī project. The cases demonstrate how, contrary to their male counterparts’ positions on gender and spiritual authority, female fakirs emphasize their femininity in order to validate their roles as intercessors and spiritual healers while creatively dissociating themselves from an idea of the feminine prescribed within a shared cultural template.
Is religious sound rightfully queer? Are gay verses of a diasporic poet properly Pakistani? What ... more Is religious sound rightfully queer? Are gay verses of a diasporic poet properly Pakistani? What does it mean to mourn for futures amid a fracturing relation to the historical? How is it to desire in unfinished tongues? With poetic charge and lyrical affect, I read verses of a gay Urdu poet alongside devotional texts at religious shrines to speculate and articulate across distinct universes, the tenuous narrative possibilities of unstraight lives and loves in Pakistan. I do so neither with comparative means nor to reparative ends, rather to work out an enabling fiction: I explore how desiring in verse is to desire in the way of history; or how might we poetically refuse the occlusion of queers in the country’s national and public histories, or lyrically insist against the tyranny of Pakistan’s further and only straight narration.
Drawing on history, anthropology, literature, law, art, film, and performance studies, the contri... more 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.
Queer Companions: Religion, Public intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, 2022
In Queer Companions, I theorize saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations a... more In Queer Companions, I theorize saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage in Sehwan. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, I outline 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, I show 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, I contend that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
Critical Thin: Haunting Sufis and the Also-Here of Migration in Berlin, 2021
This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly ... more This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inheritances are made contemporaneous while sup- pressed civic-political matters find a spectral, more-than-visual presence in Berlin. Sufi haunting thus achieves, amid enduring conditions of migration, a provisional posi- tioning of the not-here and the not-now as an also-here. Such remembrance affords migrants a greater awareness of being distinctly historical as well as the critical means to look past conditions of the present.
Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with a reader. It is a flirt... more Writing is an overture. Cruisy at best, it is a move seeking to land with a reader. It is a flirtation even, on part of the author, thinly carried over to a scene of reading. (…) I propose that writing through affect is not mere writing up of ethnographic data but cruising in queer zones of inter-subjective knowing that open up during fieldwork or become available in its wake through wispy registers of memory and intimacy. Permeable, partial, personal—thin, cruisy, queer modes of writing, as I elaborate, help trouble anthropological habits of form, content and knowledge epistemes.(….) Writing through affect is writing that takes us beyond capture or holding, to what lies in excess or exists beside, in-between and alongside, or to that what impinges on life obliquely or is given in the interface of inward and external modes, subjectively and piecemeal. This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to “Thin Attachments” (Kasmani 2019, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry) and has appeared in "Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing" edited by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 pp. 163-188
Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, 2021
Based on my impressions of the Sufi ritual of zikr in Berlin, my conversations with Sufi follower... more Based on my impressions of the Sufi ritual of zikr in Berlin, my conversations with Sufi followers, and my limited participation in the ritual itself, I write on the notion of intimate religion, which distinct from material religion or religion as matter is in my view a matter of worlding, religiously sutured. On the interface of material and immaterial religion in Berlin, I am interested in how the felt and the intimate of a doubly interiorized performance like zikr—which takes place in mosque interiors and targets mystical interiorities—permeates the urban, more importantly, how a world coheres through affective threads of (religious) feeling. So long as intimacy concerns the affective relation that thrives in the critical distance between close but distinct objects, I argue that saintly companies in the ritual help believers suture the outward world with its inward dimension without necessarily transcending it. The chapter is composed as a diptych. The first section Feeling in Circles features long, direct excerpts from interviews with Sufi followers. Intimate Religion, the subsequent piece turns to researcher’s voice with a mix of ethnographic observations and philosophical deliberations on migrant religion in the urban.
In Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Julia Martinez-Ariño and Marian Burchardt (eds.) Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, pp. 189-202. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newe... more Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variability are being pushed out and projected anew but where its historical, trans-local, cross-scalar, and open-ended working out is mappable. To outline its futural shapes, this text closely traces a set of affective, representational, and practical strategies as part of an unfinished, contested, and dynamic process of encounters across a variety of allies and actors: individuals, institutions, collectives, spaces, and networks. It illustrates , on the one hand, how trans* in Pakistan kicks off a capacious contact zone, triggers cross-sectional encounters, and generates momentum with implications, which impact but also exceed local conditions. On the other hand, it observes how its horizons might be curtailed by conditions and concerns that privilege some ways of gender nonconforming over certain others.
No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, 2019
Place is a concern in Abidi’s time-based practice, yet her work is not about a place. The urban i... more Place is a concern in Abidi’s time-based practice, yet her work is not about a place. The urban is both fact and fiction, whether it is given to us as a set of borders within borders, as vignettes of intimacy or as a city suspended in an act of waiting. Abidi stages the city at every opportunity. "They Died Laughing" is not a show about a place per se, yet it demands of the viewer an appreciation of complexity that structures the local in a particular field of power relations. Pakistan or not, whether Shia or otherwise, Abidi simply offers us a world she knows best. And the ones who know her, know that her ability to poke fun is as sharp as her sense for tragedy. Must loss replace laughter in our reading of her work or is laughter already loss of some kind, standing in for an unbearable reality, driving those who laugh defiantly to die, laughing.
To cite this article: Omar Kasmani (2019) No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, Anthropology Now, 11:1-2, 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/19428200.2019.1648127
Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves, 2019
KEYWORDS: queer affect, intimacy, belonging, Sufi, migration
Thin Attachments brings personal m... more KEYWORDS: queer affect, intimacy, belonging, Sufi, migration
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city's queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traffic, it performs the task of engaging politics of time, sex, and religion in the city not in antagonistic terms but as critically coincident. Similarly, attachment in this work is that figure of affect, which brings us tad closer to the knowledge of how we might long and belong in shared unfamiliarity; of how ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, sex and saints in Berlin constitute continuums otherwise implausible; of how delicacies of religious ritual echo precarities of queer love. The result is a body of non-linear fragments that discover the sparse and surprising ways in which longings of places and people intersect and in so doing summon the city as though it were a crafty djinn, shapeshifting between its material, virtual, and imaginal forms.
That journeys to holy sites are divinely sanctioned, saints are found through dreams or that beli... more That journeys to holy sites are divinely sanctioned, saints are found through dreams or that believers are called to saints’ shrines in waking visions is hardly news when it comes to pilgrims’ accounts of places of pilgrimage. But not always do dreams and visions simply occur. They are evoked by the tactical exercise of sleeping on hallowed grounds like shrines and cemeteries (Mittermaier 2008, 60), they are invited, also anticipated, through intimate exchanges with Sufi bodies and persons (Ewing 1994, 1990), and in some cases as this work illustrates, dreams are enabled via processes and interventions of the state.
This text is based on the life history of gender non-binary fakir (ascetic) who relocates to the pilgrimage town of Sehwan on the basis of his_her childhood dreams. A life story is made to converse with the modern story of Sehwan's shrine since its public takeover in 1960. The chapter discusses how the relationship between saints and their devotees comes to be mediated through offices of the state. This is particularly relevant given that shrines are administered under the bureaucratic structures of the state within the framework of the Ministry of Religious affairs and the Department of Awqaf. I make the argument that the state's interest in governing saints' places exceeds its material and financial stakes and takes affective forms influencing the ways in which its subjects interact or become intimate with saints of the state, in this case, also in dreams.
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Pilgrimages of the Dream: On Wings of State in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan.” In Babak Rahimi and Peyman Eshagi (eds.) Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflections on the Work of Qasim Riza Shaheen, 2018
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. "From your internal to my external." The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflect... more Kasmani, Omar. 2019. "From your internal to my external." The Last Known Pose: Essays and Reflections on the Work of Qasim Riza Shaheen, edited by Mary Ann Hushlak and Monica B. Pearl. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, pp. 75-78.
"The Last Known Pose is a collection of written and visual responses to the works of British artist, Qasim Riza Shaheen. Essays, reflections and conversations, by eminent scholars, curators, artists and collaborators, consider the multiple aspects and the experience of his works.Through depictions of his own body and a vocabulary of simulation set within the photographic frame, Shaheen’s inter-disciplinary and socially-engaged practice explores notions of gender, a-typically through the poetics of Sufism and the performance of cultural texts."
The sources I discuss here are sonic-lyrical offerings (listen on the blog) performed by pilgrims... more The sources I discuss here are sonic-lyrical offerings (listen on the blog) performed by pilgrims facing saints’ tombs at two affiliated shrines. I make the argument that despite contrary measures of the Pakistani state, Shia faith and devotion in places like Sehwan perseveres spectrally by way of a sonic stickiness. The broader discussion this text pursues is that beyond the moment in which these are performed and recorded, lyrical-sonic performances in Sehwan effect a double emotional haunting, mourning that which (in actuality) no longer is to desiring that which (in actuality) has not yet happened. Because in publicly sounding allegiance to Shia figures, events and temporalities, pilgrims long for other histories, they insist on other futures. They voice a historical-emotional consciousness that critiques, interrupts, and refuses a for-granted continuity of the present.
This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and... more This ethnographic portrait of a graveyard in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, illustrates the spatial and intercorporeal ways in which fakir becoming resists autonomous conceptions of the self. It explores how fakir perception of and participation in richly structured environments involves a masterful engagement with manifold beings, places and temporalities; is characterised by gendered struggles over corporeality and place; and intervenes in local and historical structures of authority and charisma. Being active and acted upon in complexly emplaced ways, fakir lives target the transcendent and so doing complicate the modernist separation of the inner self with the outer world, reveal affective continuities across realms of zahir and batin, and make room for spatial and intercorporeal labour in religious careers. The discussion on fakir becoming points to the broader notions of charismatic spatiality that dialogically tie sites of the living and the dead, interweave realms of dreams with those of waking life, and helps redirect analytical attention away from religiously-bounded individuals to religiously-dynamic life-worlds.
Grounds of becoming: fakirs among the dead in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, Culture and Religion, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2017.1326959.
Opinion / Special feature for The Friday Times
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's... more Opinion / Special feature for The Friday Times
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's shrine (16 February 2017), I have been struck by how poorly understood and routinely exoticised a place like Sehwan is both in popular discourse and media reportage. In this short opinion-essay, I argue why "the easy idea that one kind of Islam is under threat from another kind of Islam is not only flawed, it is plain shoddy" or why "to portray an Islam of the shrines as simply tolerant, peace-loving and compassionate captures only the dynamism of what is easily observable at such places: shrine music, ritual dance, multi-faith pilgrims. All true. But historically deep-seated constellations of power, structures of orthodoxies, and contestations of authorities are much harder to observe." I further argue that it is in ambiguity and not exceptionalism that we may come to understand a place like Sehwan. In fact, the recent attack shows that Sehwan is not an isolated retreat of the hermits but a place actively engaged with a Pakistan in transformation bearing the brunt of its broader political and social unrests.
– published in The Friday Times on 24 February 2017.
Kasmani, Omar. 2016. "Matter that Matters: An Orientation / Bedeutsame Dinge: Eine Orientierung" ... more Kasmani, Omar. 2016. "Matter that Matters: An Orientation / Bedeutsame Dinge: Eine Orientierung" in Omar Kasmani & Stefan Maneval (eds.) Muslim Matter. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, pp. 47-60.
One possible reading of the more specific case of female masculinity that Jack Halberstam is inve... more One possible reading of the more specific case of female masculinity that Jack Halberstam is invested in illustrating is that instances, practices, and performances of undoing femininity must and can only give way to the subject’s masculinization. And this, despite a welcome proliferation of masculinities, does little to break away from a necessary dimorphic regime of sex and gender.(....) Picking from women’s stories and narrativization of spiritual careers in Sehwan Sharif, I shall highlight how frames of knowledge that tend to situate an emancipatory ideal in the subject’s masculinization miss the point and risk ascribing projects of gender to such women, projects not always reflective of their own aspirations.
Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia: Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) , 2016
The chapter situates the practices and self-representations of two female fakirs in the context o... more The chapter situates the practices and self-representations of two female fakirs in the context of a continuing vitality of intercessory practice and spiritual instruction in Sehwan sharīf, Pakistan. It argues that an inventive articulation of gender lies at the heart of the female fakīrī project. The cases demonstrate how, contrary to their male counterparts’ positions on gender and spiritual authority, female fakirs emphasize their femininity in order to validate their roles as intercessors and spiritual healers while creatively dissociating themselves from an idea of the feminine prescribed within a shared cultural template.
Muslim Matter: Photographs, Objects, Essays. Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2016
This book brings together photographs, objects, and essays as a way to present the overlooked and... more This book brings together photographs, objects, and essays as a way to present the overlooked and sometimes under-represented aspects of everyday life across various Muslim communities and societies. In doing so, it recognises and reflects upon the importance of material and visual cultures.
Our selection is comprised of material gathered at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies: photographs that researchers have recorded during fieldwork, objects and artefacts that they have brought back from the field and accompanying essays that feature multi-disciplinary perspectives on the subject.
Muslim Matter underscores the complexity and heterogeneity of Muslim lifeworlds in countries in Asia, Africa and Europe: places where prayer goes hand in hand with ideas of amusement and simple pleasures offset the harshness of conflict-ridden environments; also communities which are in conversation with non-Muslim majorities; and occasions where the human-ness of the subject takes precedence over its Muslim-ness.
Muslim Matter ist eine Publikation der Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (Freie Universität Berlin). Die Fotos, Gegenstände und Essays in diesem aufwändig gestalteten Bildband führen ein in den Alltag von Muslimen in einer Vielzahl von gesellschaftlichen Kontexten. Muslim Matter beleuchtet die häufig unterrepräsentierten Aspekte und die Vielfalt muslimischer Lebensweisen in Asien, Afrika und Europa. Zugleich lädt das Buch ein zu einer kritischen Reflexion über die Darstellung und Wahrnehmung von Muslimen in unserer eigenen Gesellschaft.
Whether you are an undergraduate/Master/PhD student, an early career academic, a tenured faculty ... more Whether you are an undergraduate/Master/PhD student, an early career academic, a tenured faculty person, or someone outside of the academy all-together, the Society for the Study of Affect Summer Seminars provides an AMAZING opportunity to learn, interact, and create alongside two dozen of the most engaging folks (established and up-and-coming scholars) working in/around affect studies from all around the world! COME BE A PARTICIPANT!!
Elsewhere Affects and the Politics of Engagement across Religious Life-Worlds, 2020
This special section proposes that Elsewhere be discussed neither merely as a synonym for the not... more This special section proposes that Elsewhere be discussed neither merely as a synonym for the not-here nor only as an analytical frame to gesture at the here-after in religious lifeworlds. Instead, as a polyvalent figure, Elsewhere in this collection of essays lays out and examines the critical, medial, and agentive ways in which interlocutors in the field affect—and are affected by—attendant notions of the unknown, the uncanny, the imaginal, the other-worldly, the more-than-living, the ghostly, and the invisible. At the heart of such engaged worlding for us—especially when it comes to the study of religion and its multiplicitous affairs with notions of the divine—is the question of affect. This is an introduction to the volume; contributions include: "Learning the Elsewhere of ‘Inner Space’" by Nasima Selim; "An Ethics of Response" by Ingie Hovland; "From the Throes of Anguished Mourning" by Fouad G. Marei; "Dream-Realities" by Sana Chavoshian; "Politicizing Elsewhere(s)" by Dominik Mattes; plus a wonderfully co-crafted afterword, "The Elsewhere beyond Religious Concerns" by Annalisa Butticci and Amira Mittermaier.
This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal C... more This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while seeking to establish shared affective relations and terrains that would otherwise be implausible. With two separately observed accounts of prayer gatherings in a shared urban context, we describe locally specific workings of affect and sensation. We argue that sense-aesthetic forms and patterns in our field sites are supra-local affective forms that help constitute an analytic relationality between the two religious settings.
This chapter highlights the importance of using the researcher's own bodily perceptions or her/hi... more This chapter highlights the importance of using the researcher's own bodily perceptions or her/his ways of dis/sensing the field as a crucial means for understanding and representing religious gatherings' affective atmospheres. It draws on comparative research in a neo-Pentecostal church and a Sufi prayer circle in Berlin and explores the more-than-visual forms and methods of accessing the field. The discussion is centered around the researchers' decision to close their eyes as part of believers' practices. We argue that the potential of accessing affect is effectively enhanced through researchers' bodies even though they might not have the same experience as other participants in these religious settings. This is tied to the position that sense-embodied ways of knowing arising out of such methods offer the possibility to transcend distinctions between cognition and emotion, eventually covering some measure of distance between researchers and the researched.
Proceeding from discussions within a multidisciplinary working group, this text outlines key dime... more Proceeding from discussions within a multidisciplinary working group, this text outlines key dimensions and identifies affective registers with regard to the notion of belonging. Further, it presents case studies from two research projects: an ethnographic account of a Vietnamese migrant community in Berlin and a literary-studies analysis of writings of the contemporary German-language author Herta Müller. The cases highlight the simultaneously cohesive and disruptive forces at play in relational processes of belonging; they bring into view the heterogeneously constituted settings, where such processes unfold; and finally, they effectively disturb the causal logic that belonging necessarily stems from conditions of mobility.
This issue investigates the ways in which the Sufi repertoire of heuristic categories
of intelle... more This issue investigates the ways in which the Sufi repertoire of heuristic categories
of intellectual and spiritual maturation (e.g. batin, spiritual growth, intuitional
knowledge and inner awareness) may converge, intersect, and also diverge from
modern epistemologies of the inner self. In doing so, the contributions touch upon
two questions in particular. On the one hand, they discuss the relation between
selfhood and the transcendent, describing not only how the self is built but also
how it is somehow unbuilt in the relationship with the divine: rather than defined
through its ‘inner’ boundaries, the self is seen as emerging continuously on the
background of a wider horizon of existence, that is, the transcendent dimension
of life. On the other hand, the authors highlight the overlaps between notions
belonging to the Islamic tradition and modern discourses on interiority, tracing
out the specific social and micro-political issues that lie behind this entanglement
through key experiential notions such as dhawq, love, imagination, dreams and
visions. In such a way, the papers tell about the strive of translating transcendence
into new forms of sociality which may subvert, substitute or be alternative to
institutionalised, established mundane and also religious forms of interaction and
inter-subjectivity.
This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal C... more This article, a reflection on collaborative fieldwork involving a Sufi Muslim and a Pentecostal Christian setting in Berlin, examines whether distinct and diverse religious groups can be brought into a meaningful relation with one another. It considers the methodological possibilities that might become possible or foreclose when two researchers, working in different prayer settings in the same city, use affect as a common frame of reference while seeking to establish shared affective relations and terrains that would otherwise be implausible. With two separately observed accounts of prayer gatherings in a shared urban context, we describe locally specific workings of affect and sensation. We argue that sense-aesthetic forms and patterns in our field sites are supra-local affective forms that help constitute an analytic relationality between the two religious settings. How can diverse religious groups, otherwise distinct, be brought into a meaningful relation with each another? What methodological possibilities emerge or foreclose when two researchers work with affect as a common framework in different prayer settings in the same city? Or how, for that matter, through such joint labors, might we establish shared affective terrains and relations that would otherwise be implausible? With such questions at hand, we reflect on carrying out collaborative fieldwork and studying religion in a shared urban context. This discussion is based on our joint research project, which focuses on two transnational religious congregations in Berlin that, despite having no direct contact with each other, deal with common urban conditions. One is a
... In its barest sense, Elsewhere is the not-here. ‘In, at, or to some other place’, it refers t... more ... In its barest sense, Elsewhere is the not-here. ‘In, at, or to some other place’, it refers to the else of here, to what lies beyond the immediate, exists otherwise, and a where in excess to what is present in any given time and place, even instead of it, although never completely removed from it. It follows that the else of here cannot always be described as a there—at least not in the sense that it might indicate or point to a conceptually distinct here, a removed position that has no bearing on that which constitutes a here. Thinking such, as we learn from Amira Mittermaier’s (2011, 2012) work on Sufi communities in Egypt and Annalisa Butticci’s (2016) work on African Pentecostals in Italy, imbricates a greater landscape of imagination and aesthetics (of presence). Paying further attention to the affective ties—in saintly dreams, inspired religious visions, spiritual callings, and bodily sensations, as well as their material afterlives —produces and evidences a dialogue between a here and an imaginal Elsewhere, knotting in its wake reciprocal relations across disparate objects, figures, and realms, whether these are spatially or temporally configured. ...
It was a great pleasure to be part of Omar Kasmani’s book launch event at Savvy Contemporary in B... more It was a great pleasure to be part of Omar Kasmani’s book launch event at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. Together with Nasima Selim, we talked about Omar’s recently published book “Queer Companions” (Duke University Press 2022) and Omar shared some readings. July 1st, 2022. Link to the event: https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2022/queer-companions/
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Publications by omar kasmani
This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to “Thin Attachments” (Kasmani 2019, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry) and has appeared in "Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing" edited by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 pp. 163-188
In Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Julia Martinez-Ariño and Marian Burchardt (eds.) Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, pp. 189-202. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
in an act of waiting. Abidi stages the city at every opportunity. "They Died Laughing" is not a show about a place per se, yet it demands of the viewer an appreciation of complexity that structures the local in a particular field of power relations. Pakistan or not, whether Shia or otherwise, Abidi simply offers us a world she knows best. And the ones who know her, know that
her ability to poke fun is as sharp as her sense for tragedy. Must loss replace laughter in our reading of her work or is laughter already loss of some kind, standing in for an unbearable reality, driving those who laugh defiantly to die, laughing.
To cite this article: Omar Kasmani (2019) No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, Anthropology Now, 11:1-2, 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/19428200.2019.1648127
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city's queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traffic, it performs the task of engaging politics of time, sex, and religion in the city not in antagonistic terms but as critically coincident. Similarly, attachment in this work is that figure of affect, which brings us tad closer to the knowledge of how we might long and belong in shared unfamiliarity; of how ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, sex and saints in Berlin constitute continuums otherwise implausible; of how delicacies of religious ritual echo precarities of queer love. The result is a body of non-linear fragments that discover the sparse and surprising ways in which longings of places and people intersect and in so doing summon the city as though it were a crafty djinn, shapeshifting between its material, virtual, and imaginal forms.
This text is based on the life history of gender non-binary fakir (ascetic) who relocates to the pilgrimage town of Sehwan on the basis of his_her childhood dreams. A life story is made to converse with the modern story of Sehwan's shrine since its public takeover in 1960. The chapter discusses how the relationship between saints and their devotees comes to be mediated through offices of the state. This is particularly relevant given that shrines are administered under the bureaucratic structures of the state within the framework of the Ministry of Religious affairs and the Department of Awqaf. I make the argument that the state's interest in governing saints' places exceeds its material and financial stakes and takes affective forms influencing the ways in which its subjects interact or become intimate with saints of the state, in this case, also in dreams.
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Pilgrimages of the Dream: On Wings of State in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan.” In Babak Rahimi and Peyman Eshagi (eds.) Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
"The Last Known Pose is a collection of written and visual responses to the works of British artist, Qasim Riza Shaheen. Essays, reflections and conversations, by eminent scholars, curators, artists and collaborators, consider the multiple aspects and the experience of his works.Through depictions of his own body and a vocabulary of simulation set within the photographic frame, Shaheen’s inter-disciplinary and socially-engaged practice explores notions of gender, a-typically through the poetics of Sufism and the performance of cultural texts."
To listen to the audio tracks: https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/en/texte/audible-spectres-the-sticky-shia-sonics-of-sehwan
Grounds of becoming: fakirs among the dead in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, Culture and Religion, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2017.1326959.
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's shrine (16 February 2017), I have been struck by how poorly understood and routinely exoticised a place like Sehwan is both in popular discourse and media reportage. In this short opinion-essay, I argue why "the easy idea that one kind of Islam is under threat from another kind of Islam is not only flawed, it is plain shoddy" or why "to portray an Islam of the shrines as simply tolerant, peace-loving and compassionate captures only the dynamism of what is easily observable at such places: shrine music, ritual dance, multi-faith pilgrims. All true. But historically deep-seated constellations of power, structures of orthodoxies, and contestations of authorities are much harder to observe." I further argue that it is in ambiguity and not exceptionalism that we may come to understand a place like Sehwan. In fact, the recent attack shows that Sehwan is not an isolated retreat of the hermits but a place actively engaged with a Pakistan in transformation bearing the brunt of its broader political and social unrests.
– published in The Friday Times on 24 February 2017.
This rumination on ethnographic writing re/turns to “Thin Attachments” (Kasmani 2019, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry) and has appeared in "Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing" edited by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 pp. 163-188
In Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Julia Martinez-Ariño and Marian Burchardt (eds.) Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, pp. 189-202. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
in an act of waiting. Abidi stages the city at every opportunity. "They Died Laughing" is not a show about a place per se, yet it demands of the viewer an appreciation of complexity that structures the local in a particular field of power relations. Pakistan or not, whether Shia or otherwise, Abidi simply offers us a world she knows best. And the ones who know her, know that
her ability to poke fun is as sharp as her sense for tragedy. Must loss replace laughter in our reading of her work or is laughter already loss of some kind, standing in for an unbearable reality, driving those who laugh defiantly to die, laughing.
To cite this article: Omar Kasmani (2019) No Laughing Matter: Bani Abidi at Berlin's Gropius Bau, Anthropology Now, 11:1-2, 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/19428200.2019.1648127
Thin Attachments brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin. In scenes of daily loves, the city's queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are returning figures that coagulate in private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. Insofar as thin stands for spectral depth and emotional traffic, it performs the task of engaging politics of time, sex, and religion in the city not in antagonistic terms but as critically coincident. Similarly, attachment in this work is that figure of affect, which brings us tad closer to the knowledge of how we might long and belong in shared unfamiliarity; of how ostensibly straight pasts and queer futures, sex and saints in Berlin constitute continuums otherwise implausible; of how delicacies of religious ritual echo precarities of queer love. The result is a body of non-linear fragments that discover the sparse and surprising ways in which longings of places and people intersect and in so doing summon the city as though it were a crafty djinn, shapeshifting between its material, virtual, and imaginal forms.
This text is based on the life history of gender non-binary fakir (ascetic) who relocates to the pilgrimage town of Sehwan on the basis of his_her childhood dreams. A life story is made to converse with the modern story of Sehwan's shrine since its public takeover in 1960. The chapter discusses how the relationship between saints and their devotees comes to be mediated through offices of the state. This is particularly relevant given that shrines are administered under the bureaucratic structures of the state within the framework of the Ministry of Religious affairs and the Department of Awqaf. I make the argument that the state's interest in governing saints' places exceeds its material and financial stakes and takes affective forms influencing the ways in which its subjects interact or become intimate with saints of the state, in this case, also in dreams.
Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Pilgrimages of the Dream: On Wings of State in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan.” In Babak Rahimi and Peyman Eshagi (eds.) Muslim Pilgrimage in the Modern World, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
"The Last Known Pose is a collection of written and visual responses to the works of British artist, Qasim Riza Shaheen. Essays, reflections and conversations, by eminent scholars, curators, artists and collaborators, consider the multiple aspects and the experience of his works.Through depictions of his own body and a vocabulary of simulation set within the photographic frame, Shaheen’s inter-disciplinary and socially-engaged practice explores notions of gender, a-typically through the poetics of Sufism and the performance of cultural texts."
To listen to the audio tracks: https://www.history-of-emotions.mpg.de/en/texte/audible-spectres-the-sticky-shia-sonics-of-sehwan
Grounds of becoming: fakirs among the dead in Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, Culture and Religion, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2017.1326959.
In the days since the suicide-attack at Sehwan's shrine (16 February 2017), I have been struck by how poorly understood and routinely exoticised a place like Sehwan is both in popular discourse and media reportage. In this short opinion-essay, I argue why "the easy idea that one kind of Islam is under threat from another kind of Islam is not only flawed, it is plain shoddy" or why "to portray an Islam of the shrines as simply tolerant, peace-loving and compassionate captures only the dynamism of what is easily observable at such places: shrine music, ritual dance, multi-faith pilgrims. All true. But historically deep-seated constellations of power, structures of orthodoxies, and contestations of authorities are much harder to observe." I further argue that it is in ambiguity and not exceptionalism that we may come to understand a place like Sehwan. In fact, the recent attack shows that Sehwan is not an isolated retreat of the hermits but a place actively engaged with a Pakistan in transformation bearing the brunt of its broader political and social unrests.
– published in The Friday Times on 24 February 2017.
Our selection is comprised of material gathered at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies: photographs that researchers have recorded during fieldwork, objects and artefacts that they have brought back from the field and accompanying essays that feature multi-disciplinary perspectives on the subject.
Muslim Matter underscores the complexity and heterogeneity of Muslim lifeworlds in countries in Asia, Africa and Europe: places where prayer goes hand in hand with ideas of amusement and simple pleasures offset the harshness of conflict-ridden environments; also communities which are in conversation with non-Muslim majorities; and occasions where the human-ness of the subject takes precedence over its Muslim-ness.
Muslim Matter ist eine Publikation der Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (Freie Universität Berlin). Die Fotos, Gegenstände und Essays in diesem aufwändig gestalteten Bildband führen ein in den Alltag von Muslimen in einer Vielzahl von gesellschaftlichen Kontexten. Muslim Matter beleuchtet die häufig unterrepräsentierten Aspekte und die Vielfalt muslimischer Lebensweisen in Asien, Afrika und Europa. Zugleich lädt das Buch ein zu einer kritischen Reflexion über die Darstellung und Wahrnehmung von Muslimen in unserer eigenen Gesellschaft.
of intellectual and spiritual maturation (e.g. batin, spiritual growth, intuitional
knowledge and inner awareness) may converge, intersect, and also diverge from
modern epistemologies of the inner self. In doing so, the contributions touch upon
two questions in particular. On the one hand, they discuss the relation between
selfhood and the transcendent, describing not only how the self is built but also
how it is somehow unbuilt in the relationship with the divine: rather than defined
through its ‘inner’ boundaries, the self is seen as emerging continuously on the
background of a wider horizon of existence, that is, the transcendent dimension
of life. On the other hand, the authors highlight the overlaps between notions
belonging to the Islamic tradition and modern discourses on interiority, tracing
out the specific social and micro-political issues that lie behind this entanglement
through key experiential notions such as dhawq, love, imagination, dreams and
visions. In such a way, the papers tell about the strive of translating transcendence
into new forms of sociality which may subvert, substitute or be alternative to
institutionalised, established mundane and also religious forms of interaction and
inter-subjectivity.
(2011, 2012) work on Sufi communities in Egypt and Annalisa Butticci’s (2016) work on African Pentecostals in Italy, imbricates a greater landscape of imagination and aesthetics (of presence). Paying further attention to the affective ties—in saintly dreams, inspired religious visions, spiritual callings, and bodily sensations, as well as their material afterlives —produces and evidences a dialogue between a here and an imaginal Elsewhere, knotting in its wake reciprocal relations across disparate objects, figures, and realms, whether these are spatially or temporally configured. ...