Description
Book SynopsisIn
Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through var
Trade Review“A lyrical and moving meditation on Islamic saints, Sufi intimacies, and affective histories of contemporary Pakistan. Through encounters with fakir life stories, Omar Kasmani offers us an exquisitely written ethnography on the queerness of religion, region, and belonging.
Queer Companions pulls us in, moving us toward more radical modes of the social life of the intimate.” -- Anjali Arondekar, author of * For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India *
“
Queer Companions presents the reader with perceptive observations that illustrate how desire not only works, but
worlds. How striving for saintly companionship puts certain futures within your reach, while this orientation alienates you from other normative ways of life.” -- Max Schnepf * Hypotheses *
“By engaging with the ways in which fakirs in Sehwan encounter and experience affective bonds with the more-than-human and more-than-living, Kasmani ingeniously illustrates a form of queer world-making in unexpected places. For those who ruminate on questions pertaining to queerness, Islam, affective encounters with more-than-human entities, and/or religion-state relations,
Queer Companions is an essential book and it will truly bloom as a companion in the time to come.” -- Febi R. Ramadhan * Reading Religion *
Table of ContentsNote on Orthography ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. On Coming Close 1
1. Infrastructures of the Imaginal 36
2. Her Stories in His Durbar 60
3. In Other Guises, Other Futures 84
4. Love in a Time of Celibacy 107
5. Worlding Fakirs, Fairies and the Dead 130
Coda. Queer Forward Slash Religion 152
Notes 165
Glossary 181
References 185
Index 201
