Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan

by Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Sovereign Attachments rethinks sovereignty by moving it out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality and into cultural, religious, and gender studies. Through a close reading of a stunning array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Shenila Khoja-Moolji theorizes sovereignty as an ongoing attachment that is negotiated in public culture. Both the state and the Taliban recruit publics into relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by summoning models of Islamic masculinity, mobilizing kinship metaphors, and marshalling affect. In particular, masculinity and Muslimness emerge as salient performances through which sovereign attachments are harnessed. The book shifts the discussion of sovereignty away from questions about absolute dominance to ones about shared repertoires, entanglements, and co-constitution.
 

Genres: Nonfiction

287 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2021

Reviews

[Kavya]

Interesting take on contemporary Pakistan, the antagonism between the state and non-state organizations (the Taliban), and its complicated relationship with ethnic minorities such as the Pashtuns. Kinship and gender are employed as a key category of analysis in regards to metaphorical "sisters" in faith, mother-son iconography, beard instructions, and magazine contents. In one poem "Lahoo" published in Hilal in 1965, which the author translated, it showed how Islamic propaganda worked: "The connective tissue of blood erases temporal and spatial borders and binds soldiers of today with Muslim warriors of the past. This lineage elevates the political meaning of their lives and deaths, producing soldiers as aspirational figures." The Hilal magazines "circulate within army circles and many of the authors are either army officers or their relatives."
The other cited magazines are published by the Taliban. The author spares us from the more gruesome photos used by Taliban magazines to make their point among the masses. These emotional and mundane details are often overlooked by Af-Pak security specialists in approaching the region. It would have been interesting to compare the shaid/martyr usages before and after the Iranian revolution, which may have influenced the rhetorics of both magazines.
The book also delves into the ideological implications within Pakistan in reaction to the incarceration of scientist Aafia Siddiqui's alleged link to Al-Qaeda, which her family denied.
There are some regrettable linguistic errors: p67 the author says the word "ghazi" is the Arabic word for warrior. It is a Farsi/Persian word for warrior. In Arabic, غازي means gaseous. On p156, a male scholar, writing in Urdu in the 21st century, also uses the word "zina" for describing "rape." The author translates it also as such-- without due qualification in regards to the actual Arabic origin of "zina" (which is not always used to describe rape and can also refer to cases of consensual sex.)

[Anaum Virani · Rating 5 out of 5]

exploring affect and sexual difference using Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji, “Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan”, sovereignty is reframed out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and jurisprudence into cultural, religious, and gender studies. The narrative while initially framed on sovereignty and the multidisciplinary approaches to understanding the definition of the word when it comes to political theory and feminist theory is expanded on by Khoja in her attempts to define sovereignty by the nature of attachment experienced by subjects themselves. And for that approach, she chooses to rely on the comparative with subjects that occupy the shared space of Pakistan but are ideologically at odds: the Pakistani State and the Taliban. The two parties and their interpretations and limitations on gender and “Muslim-ness” segues into the very core meaning of how sovereignty is performatively manifested in Pakistan.