Muslim Cosmopolitans? Transnational Life in Northern Pakistan

Abstract

This article explores the importance of transnational forms of Muslim cultural identity in northern Pakistan. By documenting the dynamism of a transnational form of Muslim identity that encompasses people belonging to a wide range of ethnic communities and Islamic doctrinal traditions, as well as extending across countries whose Muslim peoples have experienced the differential effects of their incorporation into both the Soviet Union and British India, the author seeks to challenge the work of Islam specialists who emphasize the centrality of “globalizing modernity” to the making of contemporary forms of Muslim identity. In contrast, this article builds on historical accounts of premodern forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism, notably Engseng Ho's study of Hadrami Muslim scholars who saw themselves as active creators of a universal world structured around the transregional ideals of their faith in the expansive Indian Ocean trading world. Building on this and other work on cosmopolitanism, the author documents the ways in which older experiences of mobility in this politically sensitive region of the world influence villagers' present-day engagements with globalizing processes. The ethnographic focus is on the ways in which Sunni and Shi'a Ismai'li Chitrali Muslims interacted with refugees into their region from Afghanistan and Tajikistan between 1979 and 2002, a time when both countries were experiencing violent civil and international conflict.

Creating transregional collective nostalgia: the organising role of Catholic parishes among Louisiana migrants in Great Migration-era Los Angeles

“…This and similar studies contribute to answering the calls by various scholars (FitzGerald 2009;Hoerder 2012;King and Skeldon 2010;Levitt 2003;Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004;Marsden 2008;Whitling 2010) for more comparisons of processes involved in internal and international migrations. Transregional collective nostalgia calls into question the nation-state's position as a common level of analysis for migration studies, in the U.S. context and beyond.…”

“…The focus is usually on dynamics associated with transnational migration (migration across national borders), but the same dynamics operate within internal migrant communities as well. The transregional can span and predate national boundaries, as in the case of Islamic religious practices across Central and South Asia (Marsden 2008). Alternatively, the transregional can exist at a level internal to a nation-state (Hoerder 2012;Whitling 2010), as in the present study.…”

“…In this work, I extend research on transnational migration, religion, and collective memory to develop and illustrate the concept of transregional collective nostalgia. The term acknowledges that processes often tied to the global and transnational are relevant at other levels, specifically regions within nation-states (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004;Marsden 2008;Tweed 1997;Whitling 2010). Thus, going beyond the broader literature's current focus on transnational migrations, I argue that similar dynamics operate within internal migrant communities.…”

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“…To my acquaintances, the involvement of foreigners had been simultaneously promising because of their external position (which would potentially disrupt the usual patterns of exclusion) and worrying because of their naïveté (which made them easy targets for manipulation by those in powerful positions). I present this example because it provides a glimpse of the volatile dynamics of hope in a destitute environment and the "attitude of open-endedness" (Marsden 2008) that had emerged. There are many reasons why this development mission never instilled the kinds of conviction that some political and religious missions managed to produce (even if only temporarily).…”

Repertoires of Family Life and the Anchoring of Afghan Trading Networks in Ukraine

“…Baldasar and Merla 2014;Freeman 2011;Parren`as 2001), and to the importance of past community histories of migration and mobility to explaining such variation (e.g. Marsden 2008;Oxfeld 2005). A particularly notable work is Coe's (2014) study of Ghanaian families that have become increasingly dispersed due to the participation of women in the USA's care industry.…”