Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan
By Naveeda Khan
Duke University Press
In Muslim Becoming, Naveeda Khan challenges the claim that Pakistan’s relation to Islam is fragmented and problematic. Offering a radically different interpretation, Khan contends that Pakistan inherited an aspirational, always-becoming Islam, one with an open future and a tendency toward experimentation.
“Tracing the ways that aspiration and skepticism are braided together in lives lived in dialogue with texts in contemporary Pakistan, Naveeda Khan gently shifts our angle of vision on the making and unmaking of Pakistan in everyday life. She thinks of aspiration as a striving for perfectibility, not perfection. This small shift of emphasis makes familiar phenomena, such as sectarian conflict, appear in a new light. Philosophically rich, written in a style that invites conversation, and ethnographically grounded in literary texts, as well as in the ordinary flows of neighborhood relations, Muslim Becoming surely deserves the designation of a modern classic.”—Veena Das, author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary
For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid= 18364
