The 'Ulama in Contemporary Pakistan
Contesting and Cultivating an Islamic Republic

This book studies how contemporary clerics engage with the historically first and currently most populated Islamic nation-state: Pakistan.

Mashal Saif (Author)

9781108839730, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 October 2020

350 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'Saif has produced a stimulating and fascinating work, which gives vast and enriching access of the ulema's political thinking, without which any understanding of Pakistan remains deficient … Everyone interested in studying Pakistan must engage with this treatise.' Muneeb Yousuf, South Asia Research

In this book, Mashal Saif explores how contemporary 'ulama, the guardians of religious knowledge and law, engage with the world's most populated Islamic nation-state: Pakistan. In mapping these engagements, she weds rigorous textual analysis with fieldwork and offers insight into some of the most significant and politically charged issues in recent Pakistani history. These include debates over the rights of women; the country's notorious blasphemy laws; the legitimacy of religiously mandated insurrection against the state; sectarian violence; and the place of Shi'as within the Sunni majority nation. These diverse case studies are knit together by the project's most significant contribution: a theoretical framework that understands the 'ulama's complex engagements with their state as a process of both contestation and cultivation of the Islamic Republic by citizen-subjects. This framework provides a new way of assessing state - 'ulama relations not only in contemporary Pakistan but also across the Muslim world.

1. The clerics and the council: contesting religious authority
2. Sovereignty between God and the state: debating Muhammad's honor and blasphemy
3. Questioning state identity and legitimacy: a case for religiously mandated insurrection
4. Seeking security: Shi'a 'Ulama and state formation
5. Minority aspirations and teh state: Shi'a political theology.

Subject Areas: Islamic law [LAFS], Islamic life & practice [HRHP], Islamic worship, rites & ceremonies [HRHC], Islam [HRH], Asian history [HBJF]