On Our Reading Lists: Saadia Toor, "The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in #Pakistan" "I felt compelled to write this book because of the increasingly disturbing discourse on Pakistan in the West, both within the media and within academia. There is a mixture of incomprehension and hawkishness in this discourse when it comes to Pakistan, which is extremely dangerous given the increasing extension of the US/NATO war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. I believe that the ease with which even anti-war liberals (and sometimes Leftists) support, explicitly or implicitly, the covert war in Pakistan has to do with the fact that Pakistan has been constructed within media and academic circles in the West as a place overrun by extremists, as a place without culture (unless we are talking about raves or fashion shows being organized by the youth belonging to the elite classes) and, crucially, as a place without a history of popular struggle. The fact that it becomes very easy to bomb such a place is being borne out by the intensification of drone attacks under the Obama administration and the tacit or open support for them among liberal hawks both in the West and in Pakistan. I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied. ... The book analyzes key moments in the history of Pakistan through the cultural politics that defined them. The idea was to show the intimate connection between matters cultural and matters political, and specifically to point out how they have both been inflected by the Cold War and its aftermath. For example, in one chapter I analyze the exchange of polemics between members of the Leftist Progressive Writers Association and their liberal anti-communist detractors in the immediate aftermath of Independence. In another, I examine the contentious national debate that raged over the issue of the national language during roughly the same period, drawing upon newspaper accounts, Constituent Assembly debates, and reports of Government agencies. In a later chapter, I show how feminist poetry articulated a challenge to the regime of General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s."
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 04:11:16 +0000
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