Sectarianism in Pakistan, specifically the Shi'i–Sunni conflict, already analytically challenging, has taken on further complexity of late. Within this landscape of ambiguity, I argue that everyday life is a necessary frame for understanding the reach and scope of sectarianism in Pakistan. This article shows how the dynamic of Shi'i–Sunni conflict becomes reprised within divides among Sunnis as a standing archive of stereotypes and slights. At the same time, we capture something of the trancelike quality of everyday life in the tensions embedded within familial relations that animate religious differences in unanticipated ways. Finally, through a focus on the efforts of a single pious self to speak the normative within this landscape, I show how these differences come to be internal to being.

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The protagonist of Intizar Hussain's novelTazkira(1987) is a haplessmuhajir, or refugee, in Lahore, Pakistan in the period shortly after the 1947 Partition of India, which witnessed the pell-mell transfer of Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan. He writes that while others were busy seizing abandoned sites in which to live, he was unable to feel at home anywhere. To compound his sense of dislocation,bu amma, his elderly companion, complains bitterly that she misses the sound of theazan, the call to prayer, in the first house they rent in an outlying area of Lahore, as yet forested and relatively un-peopled.Bu ammarecollects how the call used to punctuate her days in herhaveli, or mansion, in a busy neighborhood back in India. Without it, her days stretch out ahead of her, running uneventfully one into the other. How is it possible, she wonders, that one could be in this place created for Muslims and not hear theazan? In their next house,bu ammaquickly realizes what it means to live in the shadow of a mosque. It was once abarkat(blessing), she grumbles, that has been turned into a curse by that satanic instrument (shaitani ala), the loudspeaker. The protagonist describesbu amma's efforts to shut out the sounds from the mosque that now invade her thoughts, shred her concentration, and make her efforts to say her prayers a daily battle. They eventually have to leave this house as well.

Climate change is knowledge produced by running empirical data on weather through global simulation models. In contradistinction to the approach that studies how people come to be schooled to perceive climate change or produce their own accounts of change in an indigenous idiom, I show how knowledge of it is met by disbelief by Muslim farmers (chauras) living on eroding and accreting silt and sand islands (chars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh. Such disbelief is not unlike the denial that ordinarily greets news of climate change elsewhere. If one were to turn away from asking how people are taking up (or not) the issue of climate change, it is in smaller gestures of incorporating repugnant others, in this case dogs, that one sees reflections on divine creation qua creatureliness. And following such reflections on Creation through fables, narratives, and the everyday of the chauras, we see how Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnectedness. They also provide an anticipatory register of climate change within chaura life through the intensification of suffering in the present, while allowing for disbelief in climate change as poisoned knowledge from the West.

We begin with the words of rural and riverine women from Bangladesh recalling the events of their children's deaths by drowning. These events are cast as the work of supernatural beings, specifically Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir, who compel the mothers into forgetfulness and entice the children to the water. Is this a disavowal of loss and responsibility? This article considers that the women, specifically those from northern Bangladesh, assert not only their understanding of the losses that they have suffered but also their changing relationship to the river and its changing nature through their evocations of mythological figures. Alongside the many experiences of the river, the article takes note of its experience as paradoxical, with paradoxicality serving as the occasion for the coming together of the mythological, the material, and the social. The article draws upon Alfred North Whitehead to interrelate the strata of myths and their permutations, with the women's experiences of the river, and the river as a physical entity, allowing us to explore how the women's expressions portend the changing climate.