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ass that makes it a suitable representation of illnesses of various types.

Following the writings of Deleuze and Derrida, there has been a heightened
interest in using figures of animality to model different kinds of sociality
and relationship. This edited volume is a novel addition to that body of
literature and will appeal to a wide range of scholarly disciplines.
Department of Sociology
University of Delhi

ROMA CHATTERJI

Naveeda Khan. 2012. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism

in Pakistan. Durham: Duke University Press. xii + 261 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $64 (paperback).
DOI: 10.1177/0069966715574762
Naveeda Khans book offers a radical reading of the relationship between
Islam and Pakistan as experimentations in identity within a postcolonial
milieu inherited by the Pakistani state since its inception in 1947.
Combining political theology and philosophy with ethnography from
the late 1990s and the middle of 2000s, Khan takes fraught moments of
contestations over Islam in independent Pakistan, sketching and recasting
these moments from the lens of plentitude as modalities of self-making
and moral self-perfection whereby the individual is linked socially within
a national register.
The book, in particular, presents a range of ethnographic and philosophic
insights internal to Pakistans self-expression, which is accessed through
popular culture, legal debates, theological exchanges, literature, affective
gestures of argumentation, debate, rhetoric and everyday contestations
around mosques. Taking her cue from W.C. Smiths early insights on
the aspirational tendencies in Pakistan, Khan argues that the aspiration
to strive as Muslims is part of striving toward a determinate end while
maintaining the notion of further ends and an open future (p. 55), despite
questions of who is a Muslim or what kind of Islamic state one seeks to
strive for remaining obscure. With this insight, she urges her readers to
suspend judgement while taking on board questions of tolerance, sectarian
violence and the question of difference in the relationship of selves to
othersquestions that hitherto have heuristically been viewed in terms
of lack, particularly in the common use of metaphors of Pakistan as a
failed Islamic state.

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Instead, the book via the political philosophy of poet Muhammad

Iqbalconsidered as Pakistans spiritual foundersees contestations
around Islam through the language of experimentation put on course by
an Iqbal-inspired striving to be Muslim with the possibility of recasting
Islam as an open religion with possible futures. The genealogy of
aspiration undertaken in the book, by means of Iqbals poetry and political
philosophy, grounds Iqbals ideas in connection with Muhammad Asad
and Maulana Syed Abulala Maududi, two of his contemporaries who
moved to Pakistan after Independence and exerted considerable influence
upon its political formation, to show that Iqbals picture of Muslim
aspiration was among several on offer for Pakistan. The brilliance of the
engagement with Iqbal throughout the book is the inflection of his ideas
through a translocal engagement with Henri Bergsons thesis on time as
becomingin which life is seen to act towards perfection characterised
by continual strivingas well as Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence
that is seen to accord Iqbals quest an understanding of how one might
relate to Prophets time, project it forward, yet not introduce the death
grip of finality upon future (p. 180).
Khan insightfully brings to bear these philosophical exchanges to the
important question of co-existence explored in the book. In fact, it begins
with everyday disputations and expressions of religiosity over the nature
of the Prophets body after his death, setting the stage for ferociously held
views on affective relations such as ecstatic love, reverence and emulation
forged with the Prophet, that in many ways defines differences not just
between the Sunni and Shia forms, but within the different Sunni paths
(maslaq), between the Deobandi, Barelwi, Ahl-e Hadis, alerting the reader
to the varied topography of Islam in South Asia.
The diverse milieus of doctrinal contestations over maslaq differences
are explored in their spatial manifestations in lower and middle-class
neighbourhoods in Lahore around fights over mosques in the first chapter
titled Scenes of Muslim Aspirations: Neighbourhood Mosques and Their
Qabza. Using instances of qabza or violent seizure/violent usurpation of
voice of three neighbourhood mosques in Lahore, set apart in time and
space, the chapter lays out the complex interlay of shifting local, personal,
social and doctrinal relationships. The long-term ethnography tracks the
changing nature of these relationships, charting aspiration and striving in
claims made around the space of mosques in desires to stake a claim on a
new nation-state or produce an exemplary Islamic state within Pakistan.
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The significant question of co-presence is explored through the Ahmedi

question in an impressive chapter titled Inheriting Iqbal: The Law and the
Ahmedi Question. Being a movement that emerged in the 19th century
in colonial India under Mirza Ghulam Ahmedclaimed as the new
Prophet of Islamthe Ahmedis were deemed as a non-Muslim minority
and apostates by the state of Pakistan, denying the community access to
Muslim insignia and institutions. The chapter traces changing contours of
the states position on the Ahmedi question, eventually striving to fulfill a
desire Iqbal had expressed in 1935of moving Ahmedis from the status
of Muslims to that of minority in order to protect Islam. The chapter
looks at legal debates and constitutional arguments noting the creative and
affective Muslim relation to law. This is brought out in discussions of the
Munir report of 1954 that confronts the Ahmedi belief in a Prophet after
Prophet Muhammad, in which the state deflected the question of what the
proper relationship to the Prophet ought to be, focusing instead on who is
a Muslim. Further, the amendment of the Penal Code in 1984 harnesses
the language of copyright and trademark to the Ahmedi question, seeking
to establish a propriety right on the correct mode of relating to the Prophet,
rendering it a crime if Ahmedis continue to refer to themselves as Muslims.
Registering the violence inflicted on the Ahmedis, Khan approaches the
accusation of intolerance of the Pakistani state by asking what tolerance is
after the event of exclusion and engages an Iqbalian notion of toleranceof
appreciating a different form of faith, while jealously guarding the frontiers
of ones own faith. She reads Iqbalian inspired notions of striving in
these state-led debates as ways in which the state secures its authority
on behalf of Islam by possibly engaging in a form of striving of its own
and inflecting Muslim aspiration in everyday life, of returning to past
actions, submitting them to scrutiny that could perpetuate striving by
re-accommodating Ahmedis in everyday life (p. 119).
In a fascinating parallel with coterminous existence, the chapter titled
The Singularity of Aspiration: A Father, a Child and a Jinn explores the
indeterminate relationship to faith by narrating the story of a pious familys
encounter and dependence on a creature of smokeless fire or a jinn, despite
the familys avowed commitment to Deobandi pathway within Sunni
Islam that emphasises reason and face-to-face learning from the religious
authorities. The chapter emphasises the necessity of approaching the
relationship between Islam, the self and nation from the perspective of
different versions of self, internal to ones being, as expressed in the story

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Book Reviews/263

of a father abdicating his position of authority within his family to attend to

his daughters words of guidance, taking cues from a faceless and voiceless
jinn with the child as an interlocutor, and later returning to his position of
authority when he decides not to attempt to bring back the jinn.
In thus emphasising the postcolonial Pakistani states aspiration of
striving towards perfection, the book places its analysis squarely within
a Deleuzian frame of becoming and stays true to it, notwithstanding
differences in the material it presents. In chapter five Skepticism in Public
Culture: From Jahil Maulvi to Mullahism, Khan offers Iqbals concept
of Mullahism to refer broadly to the transmission of ossified religious
knowledge and looks at its reception in the figure of a mullah loathed,
feared, parodied in popular jokes and comic strips. In the chapter, Khan
turns jokes around in themselves to explore instances in which people
assumed the posture of a mullah, claiming privileged knowledge. Here
she tackles the question of orthodoxy, that has been defined in the works
of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and others, as being central to a discursive
Islamic tradition, presenting three moments in which the striver attemptsa
bid for orthodoxy, indicating that striving to be a better Muslim bears
a relationship to orthodoxy (p. 155). These instances appeared to me as
moments and enclaves of orthodoxies, neatly explained by placing them
casually in relation to the notion of the mullah within. This is despite the
engagement with figures of authorityMaulana Yusuf Ludhianvi, Mufti
Abdul Wahid and Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi as producers of evaluative
statements and vibrant diagnostics on the state of spiritual health of lay
Muslims in everyday life that serve striving, which is explored in the
sixth chapter Skepticism and Spiritual Diagnostics: Iqbal, the Ulama,
and the Literati. At the end, however, I was left with a sense of a reticent
approach to the question of orthodoxy within the register of striving and
open futures, despite presenting many instances of orthodoxies, which in
their striving towards perfection were shown in continual and multiple
states of becoming. This was even whilst the book offered an extremely
complex picture of Pakistans relationship with Islam, with a potential to
bring orthodoxy in conversation with multiplicity, rather than seeing the
two apart or in opposition.
Indian Institute of Technology
Madras

SHIREEN MIRZA

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