Becoming Pious by Becoming an Anti-Blasphemy Vigilante: How Religious Ethics Shape Political Organizing in Pakistan

• In Event: 50461 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Culture, Belief, and Politics

Abstract

The paper examines how religious ethics constitute populist politics in the case of the Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (the Movement for Submission to the Will of the Prophet, or the TLP), a new Islamist party in Pakistan. The TLP glorifies vigilantism, encouraging pious Muslims to protect the Prophet’s honor by killing blasphemers without relying on the state that it believes has been captured by liberals who want to secularize the society. Scholars of Islamic reformism draw on Michel Foucault’s notion of ethics as ordinary practices of moral personhood to study how ordinary Muslims learn to become pious in accordance with their religious teachings. Populism literature that builds upon Antonio Gramsci’s relational and dialectical theory of personhood examines how populist political discourse and organizational practices shape ordinary social relations. Combining these two sets of literature, this paper examines how TLP’s organizational practices draw upon popular notions of masculine honor and self-reliance to theorize the process of becoming pious as becoming anti-blasphemy vigilantes. By tying the religious ethics of piety to a populist politics of honorable and self-reliant masculinity, the TLP has enabled disenfranchised men across urban ghettos to shun patronage-based politics of elite-led clientelist parties, which is seen as a mark of dishonorable and dependent masculinity. While TLP glorifies anti-blasphemy vigilantism as honorable acts of self-reliant masculinity, it also requires party members to submit themselves to a hierarchical leadership structure. Based on a 13-month ethnography with TLP’s rank-and-file members in a ghetto in Lahore, Pakistan, the paper examines how the combination of submission to a hierarchical authority and self-reliant political activities shapes TLP’s organizational practices.

Author

• Umair Rasheed, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign