Textures of Belonging: Feeling Muslim Publics Past and Present

Abstract

Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments is a landmark monograph in the study of Islam in South Asia. This review approaches the book by way of three intersecting themes: the management of religious affect in the Indian subcontinent, past and present; the relationship between Muslim publics and what Khoja-Moolji calls ‘figurations’, or tropes (e.g. the ‘mourning mother’, the ‘brave soldier’, and so on) that are variously embodied and contested in contemporary Pakistani discourse; and the ways that Islamic normativities are constructed and mobilized by both the Taliban and the Pakistani state.