Ghulam Hussain: Secular Sufism and the Politics of Difference, Gebunden

Klappentext

This book offers a radical rethinking of caste, religion, and nationalism in contemporary Pakistan.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research, archival investigation, literary analysis, and engagement with Dalit and Pasmanda perspectives, Ghulam Hussain challenges the widespread assumption that Sindh's celebrated traditions of Sufism, pluralism, and coexistence exist outside the logic of caste.

The book develops the concept of "transreligious caste" to demonstrate how caste operates across Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and secular domains alike. Through an examination of secular-Sufi nationalism, political theology, literary canon formation, historical memory, and the symbolic afterlives of figures such as Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Raja Dahir, Hussain shows how caste is repeatedly displaced into the languages of humanity, culture, spirituality, and civilizational belonging. Rather than disappearing, hierarchy is rearticulated through the very moral vocabularies that claim to transcend it.

Bringing together critical caste studies, political anthropology, historiography, and religious studies, this book reveals how narratives of tolerance and pluralism can simultaneously challenge some forms of domination while obscuring others. In doing so, it offers a major new interpretation of Sindh, secularism, Sufism, and the enduring power of caste in South Asia.