SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Informality, Islam, and Public Opinion on the Inter-Peripheries of South Asia

Abstract

The late 2012 death of Maulana Bijligar—high-voltage orator, Peshawar-based imam, stalwart of the Deobandi political party Jamiat-i Ulama-i Pakistan since the 1970s—went nearly uncommented in Pakistan’s national media, despite being more important in refashioning the contemporary Pashto public domain in Pakistan than almost any other single individual. This media inattention corresponds to one in scholarship too.

Much research of the past decade has studied the rise of Islamist political parties in Pakistan; definable activist social movements that seek to inject a disciplined form of religion into the national-level public sphere; and militant networks. But there appears to have been little scholarly imagination to conceptualize the sort of anti-formal public spaces occupied by a classically-trained cleric and a conservative insult comic, whose activist politics was successful precisely because it was mediated largely through orality and tactically-improvised small media.

As I argue in this seminar, Maulana Bijligar’s practice might appear to be a regionally isolated and exceptional example. Yet, the spaces of activist sociability in which Bijligar intervened can be historically traced, despite the diffuseness which has been a key to their resilience. Moreover, they have analogs in non-dominant publics ranging from the hinterland in Afghanistan to rural East Bengal. And finally, these non-dominant public domains themselves were not simply similar; they coalesced simultaneously in cross-regional space and even formed interlinked zones of improvised political practice—the permanently tactical, horizontal counterpoint to emergent vertical hegemonic public domains in colonial India, Afghanistan, and East and West Pakistan.

Speaker Biography

James Caron joined SOAS in 2012 from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on non-elite histories through popular literature and informal small media, and the spaces of sociability that these have articulated in South Asia and the Persianate world. He is currently finishing his first monograph: a transregional social history of Pashto literature, it is also a cross-temporal dialog with Pashto poetic debates on history, empire, and the individual, from 1600 to the present.