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- All Subjects: South Asian studies
- Creators: Talebi, Shahla
Description
This project assembles incidences of namāz (daily Muslim ritual prayer) offered in jamāt (congregation) by those worshippers who have found themselves marginalized, disciplined, and disoriented from mainstream Muslim ritual life due to their gender or sexual orientation. It follows assays in, and commitments to, a livable Muslim life as it unfolds from the stories of disoriented Muslim worshippers at prayer together. It looks first at the religious life stories of a network of queer Pakistanis contending with the heteropatriarchal and cisgender norms of mainstream Muslim life, in struggle to continue their orientation towards Allāh alongside their own existential reality. It then narrates the last rites of two Pakistani women by describing the circumstances in which their namāz-e-janāza, i.e. their funeral prayers were performed. These funerals are moments and spaces that alter the received understanding of jamāt so that disoriented worshippers who have been made unwelcome in the larger collectivity can reorient towards compassionate convening with each other and with Allāh. The portraits of Muslims convened for prayer that are drawn together here bring into conversation multiple ways of being Muslim and describe an emergent queer Muslim praxis that expands the parameters of what is thinkable in Islam. This narrative ethnography sheds light on how it is that mainstream Pakistani religious life disorients women as well as transgender and queer folks by narrowing the space available to these bodies within the jamāt. Deploying multiple methodological approaches in a number of research sites, this dissertation draws on events and lived experiences of ritual and religious convenings to propose and advance an understanding of the jamāt as both a congregation of worship and a congregation of care. This dissertation is an exploration of the conditions of possibility for livable life for those who are disoriented in the space of Muslim communal gathering—a life that is queer, Muslim, safe from harm, and joyful—arguing that for queer and disoriented Muslims, solidarity and a livable life go hand in hand.
ContributorsPasha, Kyla Pria (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Haines, Chad (Committee member) / Quan, H. L. T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Since 1998 and as recently as November 2018, 165 Tibetans have burned themselves alive in public protest, both inside Tibet and in exile. This study foregrounds Tibetan refugees’ interpretations of the self-immolation protests and examines how the exile community has socially, politically, and emotionally interrogated and assimilated this resistance movement. Based upon eleven months of ethnographic field research and 150 hours of formal interviews with different groups of Tibetan refugees in northern India, including: freedom activists, former political prisoners, members of the exile parliament, teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, families of self-immolators, and survivors of self-immolation, this project asks: What does activism look like in a time of martyrdom? What are the practices of solidarity with the dead? How does a refugee community that has been in exile for over three generations make sense of a wave of death occurring in a homeland most cannot access? Does the tactic of self-immolation challenge Tibetan held conceptions of resistance and the conceived relationship between politics, religion and nation? These questions are examined with attention to the sociopolitical expectations and vulnerabilities that the refugee community face. This study thus analyzes what it means to mourn those one never knew, and examines the fractious connections between resistance, solidarity, trauma, representation, political exigency, and community cohesion. By examining the uncomfortable affect around self-immolation, its memorialization and representation, the author argues that self-immolation is a relational act that creates and ushers forth witnesses. As such, one must analyze the obligations of witnessing, the barriers to witnessing, and the expectations of solidarity. This project offers the theory of exigent solidarity, whereby solidarity is understood as a contested space, borne of expectation, pressure, and responsibility, with its expression complex and its execution seemingly impossible. It calls for attention to the affective labor of solidarity in a time of ongoing martyrdom, and demonstrates that in the need to maintain solidarity and social cohesion, a sense of mutual-becoming occurs whereby the community is reconciled uneasily into a shared fate.
ContributorsVehaba, Alana Sara (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Lauderdale, Pat (Committee member) / Lee, Charles (Committee member) / Carrico, Kevin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019