Contested Sovereignty

Pakistan has witnessed the rise of a range of Islamic forces that claim to be defending Islam from what they imagine to be a deluge of incidents of blasphemy, a veritable moral panic organized around a set of blasphemy laws pertaining to the regulation and protection of Islam. The violence of blasphemy politics, which is disproportionately directed at sectarian and religious minorities, is predicated on the claim that is the duty and mandate of the state to enforce the blasphemy laws, and where the state fails, the onus falls on ordinary Muslims to fulfill the demands of Islam. In this article, I focus on the response to this blasphemy politics by Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. Like other Islamic groups in Pakistan, Tablighis consider blasphemy to be a grave sin and a deep threat to the Islamic community, but Tablighis believe that the solution to the growing incidence of blasphemy is to spread virtue through their distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat). I show that these different ethical responses to blasphemy reflect different approaches to the relationship between Islam and state sovereignty. Specifically, I argue that blasphemy politics presupposes the sacralization of the state but Islamic piety among Pakistani Tablighis provides an alternative ethical framework for addressing the moral injury of blasphemy

Blasphemy · Duty · Islam · Islamization · Piety · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Theology · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Religious studies · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Religious Studies

• Muslim Ummah and its Disintegration in the Past

  Open Access•Kausar Ali, Huang Min-Xing et al.•Journal of Islamic Thought and…•2024

  Add to list