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The central argument of this book—an interrogation of the process by which the domain of the literary assumes the authority to determine religious belonging—subverts the claims of postsecularist members of the North American academy who have, in the years following 9/11, argued against what they see as a monolithic Western liberal secularism. More urgently, the present crises of rising religio-nationalisms in the postcolonial world ask us to approach postsecularist arguments that cast piety movements, the strengthening of religio-political parties, and the public reclamations of pristine religious pasts as exemplary of social agency in Islamic states, with skepticism and apprehension.

I gesture here toward the work of the late Saba Mahmood, but also toward other postsecularists, including Joan Scott and Humera Iqtedar. Mahmood’s contributions with regards to the Muslim world and Western liberalism have been particularly valuable for the Euro-American academy, but also resonate with scholars in the Global South. Mahmood is best known for her multifaceted study, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which argued that feminine acts of religious submission can and should, in fact, be considered as acts of agency and self-determination. The study, based on extensive fieldwork with the female followers of an Islamic revivalist movement in Egypt, challenged the Western feminist ideal of agency as a possibility that demanded resistance and freedom. Reading the latter condition as an assumption of contemporary scholars, even nonprofit organizations, liberal governments, and rights activists, Mahmood posits that the “natural status accorded to the desire for freedom in analyses of gender runs the risk of Orientalizing Arab and Muslim women all over again.”²⁴ Muslim women who participate and are motivated by these new piety movements, Mahmood argues alternatively, should be treated as agent subjects whose cultivated “forms of desire and capacities of ethical action” stem from “discursive and practical conditions” that may be outside the pale of Western liberal secularism.²⁵

As an anthropological study, Politics of Piety has critical and continuously relevant ramifications for ethical practices in the field. But if read in conjunction with Mahmood’s earlier works, Politics of Piety misreads secularity as a principle of a hegemonic and misplaced Western liberalism. Secular culture, as Mahmood sees it, far from liberating often takes on violent means in order to render minor religious subjects “compliant with liberal political rule.”²⁶ Her critique addresses itself both to liberal Muslim citizens in countries such as the United States, but also, ironically, to Sunni majoritarian states such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. While Mahmood’s work and her political positions have been celebrated by a number of her intellectual interlocuters, Iqtedar and Scott included, it is a worthwhile exercise to consider the possible implications of her arguments not just for members of the Euro-America academy, but also for scholars and subject citizens in the postcolonial Muslim world.²⁷ It is worth considering also that resistance against some of her compelling claims has not necessarily come from fellow anthropologists, but from critical humanists as well as scholars of religion and political science.

Mahmood reads the revivalist Da’wah movement in Egypt (a lens with which we can examine parallel movements in other Islamic societies that maintain mostly colonial era constitutions) as a means through which Muslim women, through practices such as veiling, segregated gatherings for re-education and proselytization, and deliberate subordination to men on matters such as male polygamy, become agent subjects within what Talal Asad has called the Islamic “discursive tradition.”²⁸ Mahmood, with close reference to Asad, describes the latter not as a fixed idea unable to come to terms with modernity, but as a practice in which the “past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and self-understanding of the tradition’s adherents are constituted.”²⁹ In other words, the idea of Islam as a discursive tradition, central to Mahmood’s defense of revivalist and associated piety movements, is premised on the assumption of a fixed past, which in this case is defined by the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah, or the known practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

While this past and the significance of its chastity may or may not be open to interpretation, other scholars, including Shahab Ahmed, have argued against its centrality to premodern Muslim societies in particular. My own engagement with Mahmood is urgently informed by how the present moment—one of violent and rising religio-populism in Pakistan and India—is anchored in the longer history of the orientalist invention of religious and national pasts in North India. I formulate the concept “religious populism” by drawing on Jan Werner-Muller’s recent book What is Populism? in which he suggests that the populist wave afflicting liberal democracies of the Euro-American world is marked not just by its anti-elitist turn, but by its anti-pluralist inclinations. I show how this moment of religio-populism in Pakistan, narrativized in bestselling Urdu novels, short stories, and television serials (in addition to talk shows and political rhetoric), bases itself firmly within this notion of a sacred foundational moment in Islam. In upholding the idea of a certain past as central to Islamic practice, Mahmood and Asad forego a confrontation with colonial recoding of the originary pasts—religious or other—in essentially national terms. The anchor of origin, or the “past” to use Asad’s term, allows novelists such as Umera Ahmad and Nimra Ahmad to reject those Muslims they may see as Western or liberal; decry minority sects such as the Ahmadiyya as blasphemers, while extolling women who take up practices such as the veil; and abjure associations with that which may be Western or non-Islamic.

While Mahmood admits that the assumption of a pure religious reclamation is “easy to dismiss,” she asks her readers to refrain from casting doubt in a “context where the distinction between the subject’s own desires and socially prescribed performances cannot be easily presumed and where submission to certain forms of (external) authority is a condition for achieving the subject’s potentiality.”³⁰ Mahmood’s defense of piety movements and attendant teachings, thus, is premised on the condition that the observer refrain from questioning the paradigms and social formations within which the subject exercises desire. By sequestering off the terms with which piety movements establish authority, Mahmood absolves herself of the task of both critique and historicization, but also seems to suggest that others also refrain from such intellectual exercises. Mufti has called this tendency “ethnographic philanthropy,” or the condition by which the “postcolonial liberal Western subject … closes off in advance any possibility of engagement and critical involvement in the postcolonial societies and communities in question.”³¹ Mahmood’s gesture, the closing off of critique, though clearly an example of this kind of philanthropic orientation, eludes the task of delving into the historical processes that have created these socio-ethical conditions.

My use of the term “religio-populist” to describe these evangelical novels, the socio-political influence they exercise, and the associated revivalist ideologies that they prescribe should not be read as a testimony of the secular humanist’s “commitment to the poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” but rather as a means of comprehending the ultimate and most present iteration of the long orientalist literary project in North India.³² From different vantage points, Mufti and Abbas separately remind us that modern Islam, above all its Sunni rendition, with its legalistic-theological leanings, its totalizing tendencies, its claims of pure origin, and its condemnation of all other claimant forms of practice, Shi’ism included, is symptomatic not of “a return of religion, but of its historical transformations under the conditions of late, postcolonial capitalism.”³³

In this book, I hope to undo Mahmood’s gesture through a confrontation with both the present and the narrative pasts that have led to it. Admittedly, the scope of my argument is not limited to piety movements, and this study approaches the specter of religious populism through literary texts. I ask audiences from the Euro-American world and the Global South alike to acknowledge the contemporary state of Islam and Muslim societies as an ongoing condition, the most recent manifestation of the protracted legacies of orientalism in the colony. My project, to borrow Mahmood’s own words, is another kind of attempt at “turning the critical gaze” upon oneself.³⁴

This critique of a language, culture, and religious practice—all of which remain part of my identity as a Pakistani citizen and a Muslim—is informed by what I see as the deep, colonial roots of piety and revivalist movements, as well as by the broader role they play in the spread of ideologies that distance themselves from terrorism and organizations such as Al-Qaeda or ISIS, but that nevertheless sanction other forms of extra-state violence, including death to apostates and blasphemers, marital rape (by denying women the right to refuse sex to their husbands), and the excommunications of non-Sunni sects from the folds of Islam. These events and ideas do not make for international news, but rather take shape and solidify over some two and half centuries of Urdu prose narratives that are consumed in Pakistan for the purposes of both religious edification and chaste entertainment.

In turning the critical gaze, then, I see myself as the product of various, often conflicting discursive traditions. I am a citizen member of a state where the often-violent expression of religious populism has become a quotidian event. I am, both as a historical subject and as an individual, implicated in the questions that this book raises. To trace the literary past of modern Urdu is a simultaneous exercise in tracing the increasingly rigid ideals of who in Pakistan can lay claim to the title of Muslim. In tracing the troubled past and present of a language and literature I am meant to consider as my “national” language and literature, I am forced to acknowledge the mechanisms of their creation, but also to confront the homelessness that accompanies this acknowledgment. My confrontation with the now indelibly linked national language, literature, and religion in Pakistan is an inadvertent confrontation with narratives of identity that I cannot disassociate or tear from my person at will—Pakistan, Islam, Urdu—but that designate those who dissent or doubt as apostates and traitors.