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INTRODUCTION

The Social Production of Jihād

IN THIS BOOK, I PRESENT an anthropological analysis of the social production of jihād among refugees who occupy a transnational space in the borderlands between Pakistan and India. For the first four decades after the Partition of colonial India, displaced Muslims from Jammu and Kashmir placed tremendous value on the Islamic practice of a kind of migration known as hijarat (protective migration). They defined themselves as muhājirs (refugees) and accorded spiritual value to the practice of reestablishing the Muslim family in exile. In the 1990s, a shift was discernible; more and more, Kashmiri refugees talked about the importance of becoming mujāhids (warriors) and participating in a jihād (armed struggle) as a way to defend their families and to make it possible to return to their homes. Through their incorporation in militant groups, Kashmiri Muslim refugees living in Pakistan and in the Pakistan-administered territory known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) played a significant role in shaping the militant movement known as the “Kashmir Jihad.” I use the tension between hijarat and jihād to tell the story of why “refuge-seeking” became a socially and politically devalued practice in the Kashmir region and how this devaluation made large numbers of refugee men available for militant mobilization. The tension between hijarat and jihād grounds this analysis in a set of debates in which Muslim Kashmiri refugees are deeply invested and which are both explicit in political discourses and implicit in social practices.

A long history of violent political conflict has shaped the lives of people who live in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. During each period of interstate and intrastate armed conflict, people were forcibly dislocated across the military Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan and AJK, Muslim refugees from the Indian side of the LoC were given temporary property allotments and resettled in refugee resettlement villages and urban satellite colonies. Their resettlement was, and remains, legally temporary; international agreements provided for refugees to return to their home places and reclaim their properties when the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan will be resolved. In the interim, their documented legal status as “Kashmiri refugees” became the basis of the extension of political rights in Pakistan. That legal category includes both people who were themselves displaced and their descendants, and there are now over five million officially recognized Kashmiri refugees in AJK and Pakistan. These documented Kashmiri refugees now comprise a large percentage of the citizens of the provincial state of AJK.¹ Of these, none are recognized as conventional refugees by the United Nations or by international refugee organizations. While they successfully garner recognition as “Kashmiri” within Pakistan, they are increasingly categorized as “Pakistanis” in other contexts.

After the beginning of the civil armed conflict in the Indian valley of Kashmir in 1989, additional refugees entered AJK territory. They were settled in camps rather than offered resettlement provisions, and many of the men from these camps became active in militant organizations that fight in Indian Jammu and Kashmir State. The refugee camps became spaces both for providing relief and for organizing militant violence, and youths from resettlement villages and urban Kashmiri refugee communities began joining active militant organizations fighting on the Indian side of the LoC. They called this struggle the Kashmir Jihad (jihād-e-kashmīr). Young militants often endured the disapproval and discouragement of their elders, but they eventually garnered widespread public support. By the late 1990s, their participation had prompted the emergence of new jihadist groups that had little connection to established Kashmiri political parties and only loose ties to organized religious schools. The Kashmiri refugees who joined and supported these militant organizations had refashioned an insurgency as an Islamic jihād, but they also reframed popular understanding of what jihād is and how it should be practiced.

This book is organized in three parts, each of which integrates ethnographic with historical accounts to explore the relationship between these two social forms produced by displaced peoples’ experiences with political violence: that of the muhājir (refugee) and that of the mujāhid (warrior). Part One, “Between Hijarat and Jihād in Azad Kashmir,” examines the political and cultural paradigms through which Kashmiri Muslim refugees interpret and explain their personal and collective histories and express their aspirations for the future. Over their lives, displaced people sometimes claimed to be muhājirs and sometimes mujāhids. They did not always achieve the social recognition they sought, but their claims referenced symbolic meanings that connected refugees to other historical migrations and to periods of violent political struggle in other parts of the Muslim world. The designation “Kashmiri” also indicates people’s awareness of their involvement in political contexts and historical processes that exceed the immediate context of daily life. Many people were displaced by historical accidents—by the unanticipated formation of new borders or by the border’s propensity for wandering across terrain. But the production of Kashmiri refugees as political subjects was not an accident of history. Kashmiri refugees insisted on recognition as Jammu and Kashmir “hereditary state subjects” and on the institutionalization of their status as refugees, because they derive their rights claims in the postcolonial state from a polity that existed in the past (and that some still strive to re-form for the future): the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. In this sense, national and transnational processes shaped Kashmiri refugees’ experiences of incorporation into the postcolonial nation-state. “Being Kashmiri” and “being a refugee” now simultaneously secure rights claims and obscure intense social conflicts about how cultural affinities correspond to political identities.

The second part of the book, “The Historical Emergence of Kashmiri Refugees as Political Subjects,” analyzes the formation and transformation of the Jammu and Kashmir state subject refugee (muhajir-e-riyasat-e-jammu-o-kashmir)—or simply Kashmiri refugee (muhajir-e-kashmir)—as a social and governmental category. In South Asia, a regional refugee regime developed to deal specifically with the displacements associated with the dismantling of the British Empire during the Partition. Kashmiri refugees had a distinctive place in that classificatory system. Refugee administrators, international observers, and the Pakistani public distinguished Jammu and Kashmir state subject refugees from Partition-era refugee-migrants. Jammu and Kashmir refugees and politicians also used the distinct category to make claims on legitimate governance over the former polity and to limit Pakistan’s administrative penetration into AJK. The concept of being a refugee was thus imbued with political value, both by people’s use of religious symbolism and by this specific historical formation. What it meant to be a Kashmiri refugee came into conflict with global cultural expectations, legal norms, and administrative practices that constitute the international refugee regime after 1989, when new groups of displaced people crossed into AJK. For Kashmiri refugees, the concept of hijarat no longer adequately explained the social or political experiences of violence-related forced displacement. Addressing the international community as a kind of humanitarian victim-refugee, required the de-politicization of the Kashmiri refugee subject. The terms refūjī (camp refugee), panāh gazīn (refuge-seekers), and mutāsirīn (affectees) became a focus of political and social debate and placed conflict-related forced displacement in a global political imaginary. At the same time, the terms mujāhid and jihādī (jihadist) became important as fighters emerged from refugee communities.

The final section, “Body of Victim, Body of Warrior,” describes the contemporary social practice of jihād within Kashmiri refugee communities in AJK and Pakistan. The young refugee men who joined militant organizations fighting in Kashmir were not recruited through traditional Islamist political party networks or through fundamentalist ideological indoctrination in traditional religious institutions. Instead, they sought out militant organizations directly. Their primary sources of information about the conflict in Kashmir were networks of personal relationships (including residents of refugee camps and relatives living in Indian Kashmir) and public media (such as newspapers, satellite television, and the Internet). They describe the Kashmir Jihad as a defense of Kashmiri people from human rights abuses by the state rather than as a defense of Muslim territorial sovereignty (the fundamentalist paradigm) or a means of establishing Islamic legal rule within the modern state (the Islamist paradigm). Jihadist organizations accommodated this image of the mujāhid as the defender of victimized Kashmiri women, and this formulation of the Kashmir Jihad shifted the terrain of struggle from sovereign territory or the sovereign state to the sovereign body.

This story, thus, reveals a surprising convergence: Kashmiri Muslim refugees adopted the language of human rights and humanitarianism to rethink their position in relationship to wider regional, transnational, and global communities. In doing so, they forged a notion of “rights”, as a hybrid of Islamic and global political ideas and practices, and reformulated the Kashmir Jihad as a project legitimized by the need to protect the bodies of Muslim people against torture and sexual violence. Kashmiri refugees emphasized their personal conscience and their understanding of the broader political context over doctrinal regulation. In this, they drew on modern experiences of the self to express ideas about how a Muslim person should respond to experiences of violent transgression of the physical and social body. While this formulation offered many different ways for people to participate in jihād and produced a significant amount of public support, it also loosened the institutional connections between political parties and militant organizations. Indeed, Kashmiri mujāhids and jihādīs cannot produce themselves through the ideological guidance and bodily disciplining of religious institutions, because this notion of rights was created as a relational concept within and by refugee families. Instead, for Kashmiri Muslim refugees who become Islamic militants, the family rather than the mosque or the religious school mediates entrance into jihadist organizations.

This ethnographic reality challenges many current understandings of what jihād is and how it is produced.

ON CONTEMPORARY JIHADS AND THE SPECTACLE OF JIHADIST VIOLENCE

Jihād is no longer a concept that is completely contained by the Islamic religious traditions. It has become an object of public culture on a global scale² and a concept that mobilizes political and military interventions in the name of multiple (and divergent) ethical goals.³ At the end of the Cold War and through the first years of the so-called War on Terror, media and policy discourses produced a widespread understanding that it refers to Islamic religious warfare, or “holy war.” Scholars of the Islamic traditions objected to this translation; they argued that the term rightly refers to a spiritual struggle for moral perfection rather than to practices of warring.⁴ Despite these objections, the term jihād came into broad use not only as an indicator of religious warfare, but more specifically to denote terrorism legitimated by theocratic discourses. This created a demand for experts on “Islamic terrorism,” many of whom were not trained in the history, culture, or languages of any particular Muslim society and approached jihād as a universal fundamentalist form of religiously mandated violence against nonbelievers.

In response, scholars with expertise in historical and contemporary Muslim societies turned their focus to jihād’s relationship to the universalizing claims of “Islam” as a religious tradition, and three broad positions emerged. One emphasized trends of continuity within Muslim societies and historical attempts to maintain or regain religious purity, and linked contemporary violence to the origins of the Islamic religious traditions.⁵ It has been critiqued for making violence central to the study of Islam and for presenting the culture of Muslim societies as unchanged by debates; as if, instead of being a “people without history,” Muslims are a people with nothing but history for whom the work of culture-making is inherently already complete.⁶ Another position emphasized the political and economic conditions, particularly those of inequality and domination, that shaped jihād practices in the modern era and made them analytically comparable with other (violent) anticolonial, anti-imperial, or liberatory resistance movements.⁷ A third position has described the Islamic tradition as “hijacked”—the true spiritual meaning of jihād has been captured and corrupted by a very small number of Muslim people who do not represent the true religious tradition.⁸ This perspective posits, on the one hand, a universal Islam (but one disassociated from violent politics) and, on the other, a historical misappropriation of that “real” universal Islam (by untrained, uneducated, or misguided Muslims who do not understand their own tradition). Critiques of these positions accuse adherents of being apologists for Islamic terrorism.

These studies have illuminated the actual diversity of jihāds, and they offer important challenges to counterterrorism policy analysts. Unfortunately, however, the dominant paradigm has been to analyze “jihād” as its own object. It is therefore not surprising that institutions (like religious schools or militant training camps), religious doctrines (such as Deobandi, Salafi, etc.), and political ideologies (like fundamentalism or Islamism) have been removed from their social contexts and posited as new sites of subject formation and regulation.⁹ In addition, the methodologies employed to study jihād have had profound theoretical consequences.¹⁰ Religious studies focus on the foundational texts and lineages of interpretive exegesis.¹¹ Historians, for their part, have taken up regional traditions and approach jihād as a paradigm that that Muslims have drawn upon in different ways at different times.¹² And social science studies of contemporary jihāds are predominantly based on statistical survey methods, structured interviewing, and analysis of testimony or statements of jihadists in detention.¹³ Unfortunately, a focus on texts privileges doctrinal positions and the cultural productions of religious elites, and basing social analysis on preidentified jihadists presupposes understanding how someone becomes a fighter in a jihād. To actually ask people what jihād means to them, and to further observe how communities and individuals support or subvert processes by which people become mujāhids, requires a sustained ethnographic access that is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain.¹⁴ But it is precisely such an approach that one must adopt in order to address the serious analytic challenges posed by the current approaches to the study of contemporary jihāds.

One such challenge is that emphasizing the essential spiritual meaning of the “greater jihād” does not explain how jihād as warfare or armed struggle (the “lesser jihād”) can have a valued place in modern social life and why it cannot simply be de-fetishized by those Muslim scholars and intellectuals who argue the foundationally spiritual meanings of the concept. Another is that, as regards so-called Islamic violence, the role of culture in the process of sociopolitical transformation is contested and contingent; the eventual emergence of new social forms is neither epiphenomenal to cultural production nor culturally overdetermined. Islam in its many political forms provides several alternative models for how Muslims might act when confronted with oppression and violence—hijarat and jihād, for example, are both discussed in Islamic religious texts, both have the status of sunnat (models of behavior), and both address the issue of how to live with political violence. Therefore, why one model becomes more or less powerful at any given moment cannot be explained by a textual or historical hermeneutics that is internal to its object. Furthermore, there is no ritual process of subject formation that embodies Islamic ideology outside of specific historical and social contexts, and religious concepts, symbols, and interpretations are always connected with and inflected through worldly symbols and historical processes of meaning-making.¹⁵ Thus, neither the social production of mujāhids nor muhājirs can be explained analyzing either textual explanations of Islam or historical precedent exclusively.

There is also the challenge of confronting the violence in/of jihād. Images of violence associated with jihād circulate on a global scale, yet the spectacle of that violence and the human experiences of suffering associated with it have no single, stable political meaning. Whether the suffering that first comes to mind was caused by the 9/11 attacks or by unmanned drones bombing a village suggests whether a person thinks of jihād as a practice that is offensive, even terroristic, or a legitimate use of violence to defend Muslim people from external aggression. Other spectacles of violence are even less stable; for instance, the marks of torture inscribed on the bodies of prisoners interrogated for their political activities or beliefs are read very differently across diverse publics. Even images of violence that are intended to reveal a simple truth about violent events instead reveal that the corporeal wound does not speak for itself. The most eloquent expression of this that I have encountered is from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. She wrote that photographers think about their material “as unmasking the conflict, but those same antiwar photographs may be read as showing pathos, or admirable heroism, in an unavoidable struggle that can be concluded only by victory or defeat.”¹⁶ Divergent interpretive publics come to very different conclusions about what the corporeal wound is evidence of, and they come to very different conclusions about how they should respond to what they see and what they “know”. In this sense, the interpretive processes by which Muslim publics evaluate violence carried out in the name of Islam are quite similar to the social practices of evaluation and rationalization that are a part of the process of legitimating modern political violence in general.

The Kashmir Jihad and the Pakistani State

Here, I would like to clarify what my argument is not. It is well documented that the Pakistani state funds various militant groups as part of a long-term proxy-war strategy vis-à-vis India and that international Islamic organizations have links with some of the militant groups active in the Kashmir region.¹⁷ I do not deny that they exert influence. The people who participate in the Kashmir Jihad, however, are very well aware of the different uses that various states will make of them, and they have their own uses for state and non-state sponsors as well. The common analytic perspectives that explain changes in the social mobilization of violence on the ground by analyzing the intentions and stratagems of Pakistan or any other government are insufficient. I am also not focused on political elites or their explanations of the political goals of their movements; many of the young men involved in militant organizations, both those allied with political parties and those purely organized to conduct jihād, are members of multiple political associations, some of which have contradictory ideological underpinnings or political goals. Overt statements about political affiliations might or might not represent aspirations or commitments for Kashmiri refugees in the current context; and in many cases, people have many different political affiliations that they deploy as needed in different local, regional, national, and transnational contexts. This reality presents a problem to anyone seeking to correlate party or organizational membership, or even participation, with a specific political or religious position. Furthermore, they often join associations explicitly for the infrastructural support that they offer, rather than as an endorsement of a position. Rather than being the end point of separating young men from the family, the life histories of Kashmiri refugees who have become jihādīs suggest that the family, as a model and moral structure and as an aspiration, penetrates even into the militant training camp. conflict analysis in the Kashmir region has remained firmly on states and political elites,¹⁸ but in order to understand how decades of armed conflict have changed the regional political culture, it is necessary to take serious measure of the new social formations that have emerged from people’s long struggles with and against violence.

It is also not my argument that Muslim refugees in AJK are the only victims of political violence in the Kashmir region, or that they haven’t perpetrated great violence upon others.¹⁹ It is a terrible truth that there are many victims in this long conflict and that basing political claims on the defense of victims has heretofore contributed to greater victimization rather than to the emergence of sustainable systems of accountability or to a durable peace. Understanding the emergence of jihād on the ground requires engaging an important social reality: violence is actually a very small, if highly visible, part of the practices of jihād—most of which are not violent most of the time. These practices raise ethical debates, produce new cultural aesthetics, and shape the desires and aspirations of the social imagination.

Regarding the Modernity of Politicized Islam and Personhood in Muslim Societies

My argument that contemporary jihāds, like other modern violent political movements, unfold over time through discussion, debate, and conflict over legitimate practices and limitations, brings into question the role of Islam as a religious tradition in the process of sociopolitical transformation. It also engages two theoretical debates in the interdisciplinary study of political movements—including violent ones—that employ an Islamic moral language. One of these debates is about whether Islam as a religious tradition is inherently already political or whether it requires some kind of social work to make it politically accessible. The other, a corollary in some ways, is about how to explain the paradox of overtly politicized uses of Islam—that both fundamentalist ideology (which argues that individuals should model their behavior on the past as a site of authentication and authority) and Islamist ideology (which argues that the state apparatus should enforce traditional Islamic legal systems to reform Muslim society) depend, in their appeal and practice, on modern political forms and subjects. I contend that it is important to make analytic distinctions between “Islamic fundamentalism,” “Islamism,” and “political Islam.”

Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism are distinctly modern movements, even though they rhetorically claim a return to an uncorrupted and universal past.²⁰ As modern ideological forms, however, fundamentalist and Islamist trajectories have important distinctions.²¹ For this reason, while there are legitimate objections to the use of the word fundamentalism in application to Islam, it is a valuable marker of the debate among Muslim intellectuals in which Islamist ideologies diverged from their reformist and revivalist influences. Fundamentalist thinkers (whose arguments first cohered and became prominent in the 1920s and 1930s) argued that individuals should model their behavior on the past as a site of authentication and authority. They were interested in establishing a proper Islamic sociopolitical order, and they argued that it would be achieved through organized movements to reform individual Muslims and society more broadly. In this, the intellectual task was the excavation and reaffirmation of foundational principles and the organized effort to reshape society by those principles.²²

Islamist thinkers (whose arguments diverged from the fundamentalist position in the 1940s and became prominent in the 1960s), on the contrary, were explicitly interested in articulating a political ideology based on this foundational Islam. Islamist ideologues argued that Islam constituted a total system for the governance of public and political life as well as for individual piety and social organization. Indeed, the term Islamist emerged from these thinkers’ explicit effort to distinguish themselves from other Muslims in general, and from fundamentalist thinkers specifically; an Islamist is someone committed to what Abu A'la Maududi, ideologue of the South Asian Islamist party the Jamaat-e-Islami, termed in Urdu the “nizām-e-islāmī” (the total system/order of Islam).²³ Eventually, Islamist thinkers argued for the total institution of Islamic governance and the institutionalization of Islamic law. Yet, “because Islamic symbols are filled with different patterns of meaning . . . there exists no clear consensus on how to determine the substance of the posited concept of order,”²⁴ and Islamist positions vary on what form Islamic governance should take and on the specific character of the law. Significantly, Islamists’ arguments were not based on classical notions of caliphate and territorial sovereignty but were instead interested in the modern bureaucratic state and the use of political parties to organize formal institutional politics.²⁵ Islamist political parties are typically made up of closely affiliated associations; the political party itself, which may be concerned with administration or diplomatic efforts; a wing concerned primarily with charitable activities and the provision of social welfare; and a militant wing, which may or may not be active.²⁶

One of many vexing questions in the study of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism is how to measure their success. The posited “total system” of Islam rejects a foundational distinction between social order and political order and, on one hand, Islamism failed as a global political ideology if its focus was to capture and transform the modern state. Islamist parties have rarely been successful electorally. When they have had electoral success, they have been suppressed by authoritarian regimes often supported by external powers. Where they have had electoral or revolutionary success, the paradox of Muslims, including Islamist leaders, having different conceptions of the Islam on which the order of society and state should be based becomes an object of immediate dispute. But the social work and political organizing actually carried out on the ground by fundamentalist and Islamist social activists extended the cultivation of disciplined, self-reflective Muslim personhood and demonstrated that people could be the agents of their own political possibilities.²⁸ As Islamist activists and parties reinterpreted Islamic precepts for application in state legal practices and institutions, they had to make arguments that were convincing and compelling to people in the emergent political public sphere. In this process, overtly nonpolitical reform and revivalist movements contributed to the formation of modern political subjects, through their focus on the self-reflective moral reform of individual Muslims and the inculcation of conscious bodily practices of piety.²⁷ Religiously inflected moral terminologies were integrated into discursive arguments about the rationality and value of political practices, but in ways that confounded doctrinal regulation and actually produced hybrid political forms.²⁹

The concept of “political Islam” should be understood and applied as an analytic concept distinct from but related to both Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism. Political Islam properly marks epistemological and ontological orientations—rather than ideological ones—that have become legible though the central role that cultural processes and cultural conflicts play in modern political forms of rule. Questions of authoritative interpretation remain contested issues in Muslim societies, but in practice, neither traditionally trained scholars nor political ideologues, control the actual social debates and cultural process of evaluation by which people evaluate the “good” use of power or the legitimacy of political practices, including the use of violence to achieve political ends. Instead, the forms of knowing and being in the world that correspond to the politicization of Islamic cultural forms in late modern societies are connected to Muslim political subjects’ awareness of and engagement in local, national, and global social, political, and economic processes.

ON CATEGORICAL COMMENSURABILITY, TAXONOMIC ANXIETIES, AND KASHMIRI REFUGEES

One of the theoretical strengths of anthropology has long been its ability to explain how systems of cultural categorization operate to frame the conditions of politics. This book explains the coherence and contradictions within and between systems of categorization that shape who qualifies as a Kashmiri refugee. What appear to be merely taxonomic struggles actually reveal social and political struggles over, and anxieties about, who is Kashmiri, Pakistani, or Indian; who qualifies as a refugee as distinct from a citizen; and whose violent pasts are worthy of solidarity and care (such as refugees or victims of human rights abuses) as opposed to those whose pasts are not (such as militants and terrorists).

Some have argued that the young men who joined militant groups in the 1990s came to think of themselves as Kashmiri refugees as a result of an effort by Pakistan to recruit them to a proxy war in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.³⁰ This perspective is underwritten by two misleading assumptions about political violence in Jammu and Kashmir. The first is a tautological but pervasive culturalist argument that has held that Kashmiri society is fundamentally nonviolent and religiously syncretic and that it therefore follows that a political struggle based on violence or legitimated in a religious discourse must by definition be “unKashmiri” and carried out by people who are not Kashmiri and come from outside of Kashmir.³¹ However, the category “Kashmiri” also emerged as a distinct rights-bearing political subject through the cultural, social, and political work of Jammu and Kashmir politicians and political activists who struggled to maintain the Princely State’s categories of legal identification. Through their efforts, the Hereditary State Subject provisions remain wrapped into the political and social fabric of the divided regions of the former state; they undergird struggles for political belonging in ways often obscured by the claims of the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan for legitimacy and domination in the region.

The second misleading assumption is that there is a single real (universal and unchanging) refugee subject against which disjunctures or contradictions can be held up as a sign of inauthenticity. In fact, categorical incommensurability is a familiar problem in accounting for displaced people in many parts of the world.³² One of its causes is a failure to recognize the different symbolic systems that order the management of refugees. Another is a failure to examine how and why these systems change over time. The refugee regime concept illuminates the different processes through which people displaced by political violence in Jammu and Kashmir became refugees at different historical moments and the varying social, institutional, and cultural meaning accorded to it. It renders visible the changes in meaning that derive from refugees’ place in the regional, transnational, and international cultural and political order. The category “Kashmiri refugee” has a historical continuity, and its relational meanings to other political forms have changed over time. Indeed, that refugee camps could become spaces for organizing militant violence as well as for offering relief to refugees, while disturbing to many observers, was a comparatively well-known phenomenon by the 1990s. In fact, the issue of the humanitarian dilemma (that long-term support for displaced peoples perpetuates conflicts by supporting women and children and freeing men for militant labor) was by then a topic of debate among humanitarian practitioners.³³ Taking serious inventory of the relationship between the category of the Kashmiri refugee and the classificatory system of the South Asian refugee regime, thus also renders visible the process of problem of regime change.

Refugee Regimes and Refugees in South Asia

Examining violence-related forced mass displacement in postcolonial South Asia within the rubric of refugee studies has long been a problem for the field. This is due in no small part to the emergence of a new “conventional” definition of a modern refugee during the Partition of colonial India. The final version of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defined a refugee as an individual who has crossed a national boundary and has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country of origin for reason of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.³⁴ Although it took several years to set this definition, in part because states’ representatives had serious disagreements about the principles of recognition that should be applied, the standards of categorization and management that developed became normative on a global scale, and this system is now commonly referred to as “the international refugee regime.”

The idea that refugees are people deprived of their nationality had the effect of excluding displaced people who could be argued to have multiple claims on nationality—particularly people displaced by decolonization processes. It became a generally accepted argument that Partition-era displacement was a mass migration in which Partition’s displaced did not lose the protection of their states and that therefore Partition “migrants” were not subject to United Nations (UN) refugee agreements.³⁵ But as the historian Mark Mazower has argued about that formative period in the creation of the UN, “the origins of legal regimes lie in a set of cultural, political, and ideological struggles.”³⁶ These legal regimes did not merely reflect an obvious distinction or institutionalize a preexisting agreement—it shaped them. In the words of B.S. Chimni, a legal scholar and former advisor to the United National High Commissioner for Refugees, “the problem of defining a refugee is a debate about the epistemological principles which inform its elaboration.”³⁷ This epistemological ordering of displacement—the process of identifying a person as a refugee, or defining a group as a refugee population—is an inherently political project that orders international relations by categorizing migration and assigning different values to dislocation experiences.³⁸

In the social sciences, political scientist Aristide Zolberg and anthropologist Liisa Malkki refocused the study of the international refugee regime; they approached it as a set of transnational expectations, provisions, and representations that constitute a symbolic system for ordering the material practices of refugee administration, including legal adjudication, security provision, and relief distribution.³⁹ This regime analysis approach shifted the scholarly study of refugees away from purely legalistic consideration of juridical status to a focus on the symbolic as well as material practices that organize power relations through the care and administration of dislocated people. It also made it possible to examine other systems that developed to deal with modern mass dislocation and to coordinate refugee practices across nation-states.

One such system was the South Asian refugee regime, which developed to deal with the ten million to twelve million people who crossed the newly international borders of India and Pakistan between 1946 and 1951 as part of the Partition of the colonial provinces of Punjab and Bengal into East Punjab (India) and West Punjab (Pakistan) and East Bengal (Pakistan) and West Bengal (India).⁴⁰ Partition is still too often approached as a historical event that produced an immediate and clear rupture between Pakistan and India. It is better understood as a long process of creating a new categorical and classificatory system that established political and cultural (rather than simply territorial) separations between the new nation-states.⁴¹ The identification, management, and rehabilitation of displaced people were a central part of this process, and India and Pakistan developed bilateral laws and practices that produced the “refugee” as a governmental and social category in postcolonial South Asia. The South Asian refugee regime was based on a political notion of what it means to be a person displaced in the world and has generated political power for the state. The identity category “Kashmiri refugee” developed within this regional refugee regime.

Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Depoliticization

The international refugee regime has changed over time, and it adopted and adapted symbolic and material practices from several world contexts.⁴² In the post–Cold War era, the refugee became a subject whose main reference is not the nation-state but the human rights of the individual.⁴³ In the 1990s, Kashmiri refugees engaged in documenting their status as a certain kind of humanitarian subject—the human rights victim—for the international community, effectively claiming inclusion in what Jonathan Benthall has called the humanitarian narrative.⁴⁴ The international refugee regime’s use of human rights and humanitarian discourses and practices emphasized the “victim” status of refugees in ways that challenged the historical construction of refugee subjectivity in the Kashmir region. Those claims were first made in the iconic “humanitarian” space of the refugee camp, but they became a part of wider rethinking of the relationship between being Kashmiri and having rights that depoliticized Kashmiri refugee identity. One effect was a new gendered distinction between female and male refugees that led to the depoliticization of refugee women and the militarization of refugee men in the 1990s.

The depoliticization of Kashmiri refugee women may have been facilitated by globally reinforced images of victimization, in which violence “is strongly sexualized, and the distinction between perpetrators and victims of violence is often represented as a gendered diff erence.”⁴⁵ Still, it was striking given that practices of sexual violation of women in other armed conflicts in the same decade were explicitly theorized as a form of political violence characteristic of modern politico-territorial disputes.⁴⁶ Feminist scholars have objected to the uncritical acceptance of the trope of women as victims as “a positioning [that treats] women as ‘objects’ [and that] denies their agency and voices.”⁴⁷ Unfortunately, critical responses have often taken the form of efforts to recuperate women’s agency by finding counterexamples of women’s militant activism or subversions of hegemonic domination.⁴⁸ Instead, I offer a perspective on the constitution of Kashmiri refugee women as victims that reveals the social value produced by people who can be recognized as victims by global political communities.

The shift away from the South Asian refugee regime toward the international refugee regime required a tremendous amount of social work, and it illustrates that depoliticization is an active process that produces its own political effects. The depoliticization of women in modern Muslim contexts cannot be explained by reference to globalization or renewed enforcement of a posited universal Islamic gender symbolism.⁴⁹ And gendered depoliticization in postcolonial South Asia is not a product of the ideological reformulation of the domestic sphere by nationalist elites, making women a repository for a privileged sphere of “culture” or “tradition” that serves as a site for political claims based on cultural identity.⁵⁰ Instead, we must look to the difficult social work required to produce certain kinds of experiences as “political” and other kinds of experiences as “cultural” or to fix the unruly boundaries between “the public” and “the domestic.”⁵¹

The transformation of Kashmiri refugee subjectivity thus brings to the forefront the question of what it means to live a “politically qualified life”—by which I mean not only the kinds of values that shape formal recognition of political belonging (like nationality or citizenship) but also the ways in which some experiences of the world are coded as “political.” Social processes and cultural categorization shape how people struggle to occupy, in Hannah Arendt’s still-cogent words, “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.”⁵²

ON THE AZAD STATE OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR

Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is a part of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. In Pakistan, it is commonly referred to as Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), although in India it is known as POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). It has a semiautonomous regional government and has been administered internationally by Pakistan since 1949, but it is not constitutionally a part of Pakistan and its people are not represented in the Pakistan National Assembly. Under the 1949 UN agreements on Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan was recognized as temporarily in charge of AJK’s international status. Successive governments of AJK have struggled to maintain their control as “local authorities,” in the UN treaty terminology, over AJK’s internal administrative structures and governance practices. Formally, AJK operates as a limited parliamentary democracy, as established in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act, adopted in 1974. The territory of AJK comprises about five thousand square miles of the former State of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the largest Indian Princely States during British colonial rule in South Asia (see map 1). The borders with Pakistan’s Provinces of Punjab and Khyber Phaktunwa (formerly known as the NWFP, North West Frontier Provinces) determine its territorial boundaries to the west and south. The military Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan demarcates the eastern border. At the time I was doing field research, AJK was comprised of six administrative districts, all of which bordered the LoC (see map 2).⁵³ To the north, another part of the former princely state known as the Northern Areas, until it was renamed Gilgit-Baltistan in 2010, has a separate governmental and administrative structure.⁵⁴ It is governed directly through the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan in Islamabad.⁵⁵

MAP 1. The Former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (2012).

AJK’s political status within Pakistan is complex and widely misunderstood, because its internal governance is marked by a long history of tension between the formal structural limits on Pakistan’s power and the informal influence and coercion wielded by Pakistani bureaucrats and military personnel. Study of AJK politics has been dominated by a kind of proxy government theory, which explains political developments in AJK by analyzing the interests and influence of Pakistan.⁵⁶ This perspective keeps the focus firmly on the international politics of the Kashmir Dispute and denies the political agency of Kashmiri peoples in producing the conditions of their own political lives. It also overemphasizes formal institutional politics and underestimates the role that Kashmiri politicians, administrators, and political society played in shaping political practices and institutions as they developed in the postcolonial period. As a result, a consensus opinion in the scholarly literature is that the institutionalization of refugee representation in the AJK government was a deliberate strategy through which Pakistan guaranteed itself representation in AJK internal politics.⁵⁷

MAP 2. The Azad State of Jammu and Kashmir (2001).

On the contrary, displaced Jammu and Kashmir hereditary state subjects (the “refugees” who are guaranteed representation) have a long history of actively demanding recognition from and a role in the AJK government. In fact, the “Kashmiri refugee” as a political identity emerged in part through efforts by AJK political elites to define an exclusive domain of state power. By restricting all forms of state patronage—including government employment, property ownership, and registration in government schools—to recognized Jammu and Kashmir state subjects (including refugees), they were able to limit Pakistan’s control over the administrative machinery of the AJK government. That government provides most of the public services available in AJK, and it employs only legally recognized Jammu and Kashmir state-subjects and bases civil service appointments on its own exam system.⁵⁸ Since the 1980s, small industry and private businesses, like construction firms, hydroelectric development projects, and private English-medium schools⁵⁹ have been a growing sector of the regional economy. Private employment opportunities also grew exponentially after the earthquake of 2005 with internationally funded rehabilitation and reconstruction. Historical restrictions on property ownership and employment created opportunities for AJK residents and documented state refugees to provide contract labor for international agencies and establish new local businesses, because Pakistani-owned firms did not have a foothold in the state. The political party or coalition in charge in the capital of Muzaffarabad supervises a vast structure of service provision, administration, and governance and therefore controls an important regional patronage system.

Under the Interim Constitution, the executive branch of the AJK government is comprised of a Prime Minister, elected by a Legislative Assembly, and a Council of Ministers. The Assembly and the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs jointly elect a President, and the AJK Supreme Court and the High Court of Azad Kashmir exercise judicial oversight. The current Legislative Assembly is made up of forty-nine seats. Of these, forty-one seats are directly elected: twelve are elected by refugees living in Pakistan, and twenty-nine are elected by AJK residents. The elected members of the Assembly make appointments to eight reserved seats, of which one is for “overseas Jammu and Kashmir State Subjects.”⁶⁰ The AJK government is responsible for all internal law and order and internal security. It maintains its own police, whose elite investigative unit is the AJK Special Branch. AJK does not have its own professional army; the Pakistan Army provides border defense. A special regiment of the Pakistan Army called the “Mujahid Regiment” was established in the late 1980s. It recruits only Jammu and Kashmir state-subjects and is deployed only on the front line of the LoC. The AJK government has also developed an active civil defense program, which trains village-level militia to defend against external (Indian) invasion.

Pakistan has always been sensitive about its international reputation on matters pertaining the UN resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir. For that reason, outright annexation was not a political option. Instead, Pakistan’s administrative penetration into the AJK state government was accomplished by making political alliances with AJK political leaders.⁶¹ The government of Pakistan legally exerts authority in AJK internal politics through the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council, through supervision of the state administrative services, and through control over the state budget.⁶² In addition, candidates for elected office are required to support Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, and all government employees are required to sign an oath to that effect. For this reason, the nationalist, pro-independence political parties cannot forward candidates for election in AJK, and anyone in government service cannot be a registered member of a pro-independence party. This constraint has effectively kept independence parties (both pan-Kashmir and AJK-based) out of political office, although they have a presence in nongovernmental political contexts. It has also led to a widespread practice of multiple party affiliation, some that are documented for the purpose of employment and others that people espouse clandestinely.

The Pakistan Army exercises coercive power but has to limit its interventions to those that can be hidden from international public scrutiny or that it can legitimate in the name of defending against external aggression. Pakistan treats the entirety of AJK as an area of security risk, because the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir has been at the center of regional instability since 1947, and because it is claimed by India. Pakistan exerts the most direct administrative influence within the official Military Security Zone, which covers a 16-km band along the LoC and encompasses areas within range of Indian Army artillery. Within the zone, the Military Intelligence (MI) of the Pakistan Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which recruits both from the Pakistan Army and the Pakistan Civil Services, along with the Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) oversee the activities of the local population, and the military carries out identity checks at regular check posts. These practices remind the people who live there that AJK is an insecure state under constant impending threat of external armed aggression, and it allows Pakistan to suppress dissent in the name of security.

Politicians, administrators, and civilians in AJK express deep suspicions about the indirect influence that representatives of the government of Pakistan play in their political lives. The rise of international access to AJK after the earthquake of 2005 facilitated vocal public critique.⁶³ Despite Pakistan’s influence, however, the reality is that the state of Azad Jammu and Kashmir plays a key role in organizing the experiences of daily life and in shaping the national historical consciousness of people who derive aspects of their political identity from its regulatory regime. For residents of AJK and for Kashmiri refugees resident in Pakistan alike, living a political life means negotiating AJK’s semiautonomous institutional structure, political parties, and civil associations, as well as the Pakistani state’s surveillance and oversight.

ON THE RESEARCH, SITES, AND METHODS

I conducted the fieldwork upon which this book is based between 1998 and 2008. That fieldwork included twenty-two months of ethnographic research with Kashmiri refugees in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and in Pakistan and four months of archival research at the National Archives of Pakistan. I maintain connections with overseas Kashmiris based in the United States and in England, and over the years I have met with Kashmiri political party leaders on extended political or personal visits in New York, London, and Geneva. My primary methods were participant observation, life-history interviews, and archival research. I also conducted numerous structured interviews on topical issues with government officials and administrators, politicians, and religious leaders. Published scholarship on AJK is limited, and a number of relevant sources are available only in Urdu. I use the available materials—including histories, pamphlets, and memoirs—to contextualize my analysis of the historical development of Kashmiri refugees as a political category, and I draw on government documents from the National Archives of Pakistan, which holds the original records related to Kashmir refugee relief in Pakistan from 1947 to 1965. I also examined jihadist publications, including magazines and taped lectures and songs (tarānas). The conclusions that I present in this book emerged from a sustained analysis of various kinds of information considered in light of others.

I designed my research around the different categories of refugees rather than the places where I could encounter them. I thus met with men and women, displaced during each of the wars and from various parts of the Jammu and Kashmir region living in both AJK and Pakistan. This design accommodated the theoretical issues involved with working with Kashmiri refugees as well as the pragmatic concern that my access to any particular place could change unexpectedly. I was always aware that any number of factors could affect my ability to work with a particular community in a particular place, including the escalation of tensions between Pakistan and India or a decision by the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs that local conditions were dangerous for foreigners. On many occasions I adjusted the timing of meetings with people or visits to certain places in order to allow people to evaluate my project and reputation among other communities. In the first year of my research, I avoided developing close ties with political parties and formal associations to keep my research separate from their political projects, although I did visit a number of nongovernmental organization (NGO) projects on request. Once I felt that my research was well established and that I was not seen as affiliated with any particular group or party, I began meeting with political representatives. Over the years, my fieldwork within AJK has been made feasible by some of these connections.

When I was resident in AJK, I was based in Muzaffarabad city. I made day trips to refugee camps and spent extended periods of time in refugee resettlement villages in the district. When I was resident in Pakistan, I was based in Rawalpindi or Islamabad, and I met with settled refugees living in urban allotments, unsettled refugees living in three different labor camps, and camp refugees who were living and working in Pakistan illegally. I also met with people displaced from villages near the LoC who had come to Pakistan seeking temporary wage labor. I made many short trips to Muzaffarabad and Mirpur for important social and political events, and I moved around a great deal, often following networks of kinship alliances. People from refugee communities in AJK added me to their broader networks of visiting, which were connected to wage-labor migration and kinship obligations between AJK and Pakistan. I, in turn, also traveled these networks to meet with Kashmiri refugee families in cities in the northern Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunwa (NWFP), such as Murree, Abbottabad, and Mansera. One spring, I accompanied a family group of migratory goat headers (bakerwals) on the seasonal migration from a village near Rawalpindi to the high grazing grounds of Skardu, meeting other Kashmiri bakerwals along the route. I turned back as they embarked on the last leg of the journey, a dangerous stretch that passed within firing range of the LoC.

As a female researcher, it was more appropriate and easier to travel in public spaces and to work with unrelated men when a male companion accompanied me. I therefore worked with a research assistant who came with me on most of my field visits from June 1999 through December 2000. For reasons of protocol, he almost never accompanied me on official meetings with government officials or politicians. For reasons of his security, I never had him accompany me on visits to places like refugee camps or to meet people that I knew were likely to be under high surveillance. My assistant had extended kin relations in several refugee resettlement villages in Muzaffarabad District, and he identified two families who had been displaced from resettlement villages on the LoC who were living in labor camps in Rawalpindi and Islamabad; those families gave me my first entrance into communities of unsettled Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan. I have not worked with a research assistant since 2001. I have sometimes been the guest of government officials in AJK and, at other times, members of local families who have assumed collective responsibility for me have escorted me to and from meetings.

I was almost always allowed to record life-history interviews. Many of my interlocutors insisted that they wanted their life histories to be preserved in their own words, and one of my research assistant’s primary jobs was to transcribe Urdu- and Pahari-language interviews. I also took cameras into refugee resettlement villages and made short films of rituals and ritualized events. I never took photographs in refugee camps, which are already profusely, if selectively, photographed. In retrospect, I rather wish I had photographed those things that underscore the “getting-on-with-life-ness” of living ten years in a refugee camp. At the time, however, I found that not having a camera in the camps facilitated my research: foreigners often came to the camps to take pictures as documents of human rights abuses or to “expose” the presence of militants in the camps, so without a camera it was easier to abandon that official script and access the daily life of the camps.

Over time, I found that some of my interlocutors took up the life-history part of my project in ways I had not expected. Several people who were present during my interviews with other people made their own recordings of their experiences of displacement or resettlement and gave me the tapes. On two occasions, I received recordings from young men who I have no record or recollection of having met, but who sent their stories to me. Others took pictures or made videos of events or people who live in places where I was not allowed to go (such as the Security Zone) and asked me to view them. The viewings were always social occasions, with others who for various reasons could not go to these places also watching, explaining, commenting, and asking questions. Like viewings of videos received from across the LoC, these were often heterogeneous social events, with men and women from several generations participating. On one occasion, I received the taped life-history interview of a member of a jihadist organization who did not feel comfortable meeting me. Someone who had been present during my conversations with several other young refugee men conducted the interview, entirely on his own initiative. He said later that he knew the man’s story well and felt that I needed to know “the whole dirty truth” about the Kashmir Jihad.

Indeed, many people gave me materials that they thought I should consider in my research. For example, people sometimes brought me jihād manuals or other publications such as recordings of lectures and militant songs, things they had bought at fairs or from militant organizations. Once, I received a pamphlet in the mail from a town near Peshawar. The pamphlet explained the “necessity of organizing jihād to combat injustice and protect the innocent” from the abuses of unchecked power; the accompanying anonymous letter, painstakingly penned in English, explained that the sender hoped I would give serious attention to the continuity between spiritual and political jihād and attempt to understand why “ jihād is not a terrorist practice.” Not infrequently, the same thing was given to me from radically different stated motives; one person brought me a collection of jihadist magazines so that I could better understand why jihād is a legitimate form of “resistance against a terrorist state [India],” and another brought me one of the same magazines so that I could see how it “exploits the uneducated [and has become] a terrorist business [which is] ruining Pakistani society.” Many people risked social or state disapproval to show me the truth as they understood it.

The ethnographic quotations in this book come from my transcripts of recorded interviews and from my own original field notes. To maintain the confidentiality of my interlocutors, I have identified people by a combination of fictive name and a general time frame for the interview. I don’t use specific identifying information except when the significance of the information cannot be conveyed without knowing that information. In the process of analyzing the life histories and narratives that refugees constructed for me, I tracked the different markers in the narratives that would make the speakers recognizable. I did this originally in order to obscure such markers, but in the process of doing so, I came to a much clearer perception of how Kashmiri refugees as historical subjects are implicated in multiple sites of power, both informal and institutional. Twice, I have attributed a quotation or a piece of a life story to a new speaker when in fact the narrator had already appeared in the text under another name. I did this because the information conveyed was so specific that to use the same name twice would have effectively revealed the actual identity of the person. However, none of the stories represent compilations of multiple accounts. I have selected narratives and accounts that are good examples of the personal experiences, sentiments, and concerns expressed by many people over the years. The selection of stories represents my own final understanding of the development and transformation of refugee political life in AJK and Pakistan.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 discusses the history and historicity of Kashmiri political subject formation in order to explain the apparent paradox of the Kashmiri refugee collective identification—that the very existence of the Kashmiri refugee as a politicolegal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the structural foundations of the postcolonial nation-state in South Asia. In the colonial-era Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, the first political movements produced a highly territorialized definition of political belonging in the greater Kashmir region. The historical patterns of dislocation in the region between 1947 and 2001 then created a dispersed population of people who became categorized as “refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir” living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The identity category Kashmiri refugee emerged as a subject position, within a domain of rights claims, as the sovereign ground of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. For this reason, the state's territorial borders provide neither the empirical nor analytical language needed to express the relationship between being Kashmiri and political activism.

Chapter 2 delves into competing ideas about what it means to be a refugee in the Kashmir region, aided by life-history narratives of men and women, young and elderly, who have been forcibly displaced because of interstate wars or intrastate insurgency. In their lifetimes, displaced people can move between being muhājirs (refugees) and mujāhids (Islamic warriors). The chapter examines the Islamicate concepts of protective migration (hijarat) and struggle (jihād) to show how Muslim societies have used them to integrate suffering, social responsibility, and political activism in both historical and religio-moral terms. Community discussions of what it means to do hijarat or to participate in jihād show that both practices are continually debated and evaluated; even within communities and families, individuals often come to very different conclusions about the value of each practice.

Chapter 3 examines the national contexts in which Kashmiri refugees emerged as rights-bearing political subjects in the postcolonial period. After 1947, the dominant modes of interpreting what it means to “be a refugee” established Kashmiri refugees as active political subjects with rights claims over political institutions in Pakistan and in India, as well as in the province of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Within the South Asian refugee regime, Kashmiri refugees in AJK used their status of “difference” from Partition refugees and the “temporary” nature of their resettlement to enforce limits on the coercive power of the Pakistani state. The practices established in this period firmly ensconced a high cultural, social, and political value for hijarat as a model for political engagement.

Chapter 4 discusses the transformation of Kashmiri refugee political subjectivity as displaced Kashmiris renegotiated their multiple relationships with social and political sites of power to include the international community. This precipitated a fracturing of the previous sociopolitical consensus about the relationship between refugees and broader AJK society. For Kashmiri refugees in the 1990s, addressing the international community as “refugees” required the depoliticization of the Kashmiri refugee subject. This process of depoliticization was contested and remains incomplete, but it produced a new gendered distinction between female and male refugees. As it became progressively more difficult for men to claim the political and religious recognition of hijarat as a valued political practice, jihād acquired an enhanced social value as a model for political engagement.

Chapter 5 examines how “human rights” became a part of jihād discourses and practices in transnational Kashmiri communities. The Kashmir Jihad that emerged in Pakistan during the 1990s employed an Islamicate vocabulary but was not primarily defined by Islamic doctrine or Islamist ideology, and the process of drawing young men into militant organizations was not regulated by ideological education or bodily disciplining. Instead, as human rights discourses and practices localized in AJK, refugees drew on concepts of justice, rights and obligations to formulate a concept of jihād as a project legitimized by the need to protect the bodies of Muslim people against human rights violations. This articulation challenged both liberal humanist understandings of human rights and Islamist ideologues’ regulation of jihād. The personal narratives of young Kashmiri refugee men who were active members of militant organizations reveal that jihadist organizations (as opposed to political-party-based militant groups) proliferated in the mid-1990s because they accommodated Kashmiri refugees’ ideas how a Muslim person should respond to the experiences of violent transgression of the physical and social body.

Chapter 6 argues that for Kashmiri Muslim refugees, the family rather than the mosque or the religious school mediates entrance into Islamic militant organizations. Kashmiri mujāhids depend on the family for the social recognition of “discernment” (which one gains through sacrificing for others) and for the evaluation of “good intention” (which one gains through moral training in familiar and public domains); together, discernment and good intention established the armed struggle as an extension of an internal moral transformation linked to an awareness of mujāhids’ obligations to society. Yet, their close association with those who inspire strong personal attachments of love and physical desire, especially children and wives, produced a tension around issues of sexuality and sexual purity. The mujāhid in life and the “martyr” in death alike are enmeshed in social relationships and are subject to ongoing social evaluation about the meaning and value of their actions, including their use of violence.

The Conclusion describes the significance of the emergence of a social distinction between a mujāhid and a jihādī. The book ends with a brief Postscript. It describes the continuing negotiations over the meaning and significance of jihād in Azad Jammu and Kashmir’s political culture by discussing how the earthquake of 2005 led to the emergence of a practice that Kashmiri jihādīs call “humanitarian jihād,” which in turn is transforming how people there think about security, welfare, and their struggles for sovereignty.