The Metacolonial State: Pakistan, the Deoband 'Ulama and the Biopolitics of Islam.

Abstract

"The Metacolonial State" is a genealogical project that is concerned with understanding the nature of political space in contemporary Pakistan. My contention is that political Islam, and specifically the Deoband and Taliban ‘ulama, have taken on an increasingly biopolitical character. As “a history of the present” I show how the crisis in Pakistan today is itself a manifestation of the biopoliticization of Islam. While the Deoband ‘ulama remain the primary thematic subject and focus of the work, they are largely signposts towards a broader attempt to disclose a cartography of power. Within the multiplicity of Islamist practices in Pakistan, the Deoband movement has emerged as one of the most highly organized and yet remarkably polycentric institutions that claim orthodox religious authority. Until September 11 2001, scholarship on political Islam in Pakistan had been focused on ‘modernist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ movements; traditional ‘ulama were considered to be politically and culturally insignificant. The dramatic rise of the Taliban and its fateful alliance with Al-Qaeda have however resulted in a proliferation of new discourses about the ‘ulama, their traditions and educational institutions. Precisely because of the imperial gaze directed towards the control, reform and regulation of Islam, this study places our understanding of Islamist politics within a broader, complex, and overlapping set of governmentalities and competing sovereign powers. The work aims to be a material, embodied history and politics of the ‘ulama as a form of power. I argue that while ‘ulama practices have undergone a series of dramatic transformations since 1947, these cannot be understood in isolation from the broader militarization of political space; hence the need for opening this investigation with an analysis of the mullah-military complex that emerged in the 1980’s. The ‘metacolonial’ is itself a neologism that articulates two influential critical paradigms: Foucault’s concern with biopolitics and governmentality and Agamben’s illuminating thesis on sovereign power, bare life and the state of exception. Pakistan is shown to be an exemplary space of biopolitical sovereignty where the state of exception takes on a near permanent localization and where distinctions between dictatorship and democracy, between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ forces becomes indistinct