The Promise Of Piety: Islam and the Politics Of Moral Order In Pakistan

Author: Arslan Khan

Pages: 240

This excellent book investigates the relationship between personal piety, civic responsibilities, and Islamist movements and widens our understanding of how Muslim subjectivities and Muslim masculinities are formed in the social and historical moment that we share.”Kamran Asdar Ali, University of Texas, Austin, author of Communism in Pakistan. In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic plety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Tablighis say that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. Khan explores both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan. “The Promise of Piety shows how the pietistic emphasis is not that of individual piety and cultivation of selves but a collective piety issuing out of the careful management and regulation of relations. This highly original insight is put forward to help us understand the Tablighis’ supposed quietism in the face of fractious politics in Pakistan, and to encourage us to re-think the Importance of hierarchy within anthropology and social theory more generally.” Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University, author of Muslim Becoming. “The Promise of Piety is a superb intervention into the study of Islam, and religion more broadly. In this pathbreaking book, Arsalan Khan astutely demonstrates how an ethics of hierarchy as a particular form of semiotic mediation is central to the aspirations of Pakistani Tablighis, convincingly laying out a fruitful new direction for the anthropology of Islam.” Patrick Eisenlohr, University of Göttingen, author of Sounding Islam.