Constructing Religious Authority: Creating Exclusion along the Matrix of Knowledge and Power in Pakistan

Abstract

This article argues that in Pakistan, intra-Islamic differences and the contested field of Islamic identity politics affected and moulded the country’s integrated and overlapping religious identities into distinct and disparate categories at the micro level. The article discusses the process of formation of the jamaat of the Sufi-inspired silsila, the Naqshbandia Awaisia, by Major Ghulam Muhammad among the military and an urban middle-class constituency. It shows how the jamaat conceptualised and imbued Sufism with an exclusivist approach, positioning Sufism and Sharia within an Islamic discourse that categorically rejected the religion’s ritual and devotional aspects. This embroiled these mutually constitutive and intersecting dimensions, Sharia, esoteric Sufi doctrine and the devotional and ritual aspects in an ambivalent relationship. The exclusion of the devotional and ritual aspects became a boundary-setting label of difference between the ‘proper’ Muslim and the ‘other’ along a matrix of knowledge and power.