“The Influence of Haram Never Goes Away”: Genealogy, Virtue, and Dignity for Anti-Blasphemy Activists in Pakistan

Date
Fri February 17th 2023, 10:00am
Event Sponsor
Center for South Asia

View the event recording here.

Why do blasphemy accusations in Pakistan often begin as allegations of mixing Haram with Halal, states of ritual impurity or purity respectively? Muslims must avoid Haram, or the forbidden, to remain within the limits of Halal. However, Halal is the bare minimum a Muslim must do before setting themselves upon the path of moral virtue. In South Asia, the Muslim elite have historically claimed social status through distinguished virtues and genealogies. However, scholars have paid less attention to how ordinary Muslims often refer to Halal eating, earning, and reproducing to attest their worth. This talk will focus on how members of the TLP, an anti-blasphemy movement of largely young working-class men, valorize the ethical and genealogical concept of Halal-ness to assert dignity based on minimal virtue and legitimate birth. TLP targets vulnerable groups for not being Halal, but also questions and insults the esteemed pedigrees and distinctions of upper classes and "big men" by demanding them to prove loyalty to Prophet Muhammad.

Saad Lakhani, Ph.D. candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University, will be in conversation with Paras Arora and Shubhangni Gupta, South Asia Working Group at Stanford Fellows.

Organized by South Asia Working Group at Stanford and co-organized with Center for South Asia.

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Saad Lakhani is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. He is interested in the anthropology of sovereignty, dignity, masculinity, social class, populism, and religion. His research examines the relationship between social class, gender, and religion through the lens of the everyday politics and public culture of religious offense taking and giving in Pakistan. In his recently completed ethnographic fieldwork, he focused on how several Islamic groups articulated and contested how Muslims should respond to what they saw as a general crisis of blasphemy in the contemporary world. Before joining Stanford, he received an M.A. (with distinction) in Social and Political Thought from the University of Warwick in the UK and a B.S. in Social Sciences from Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology in Pakistan.