In this episode of the Radio ReOrient podcast, Dr. Shehla Khan, Dr. Sher Ali Tareen, and Salman Sayyid discuss how the shadow of Gaza is felt even in the ongoing crisis in Pakistan. The general elections of February 2024, which represent an electoral heist of historically unprecedented proportions, are simultaneously an attempt to normalize the results. This conversation ties the current political climate to broader global issues, including the tragic events in Gaza. The discussion navigates through a complex of concepts central to the development of Critical Muslim Studies. 

Secularism, usually understood as the separation of church and state, religion and politics, or rationality from dogma, is revealed to be an overly simplistic understanding of the concept. It dates back to historically long-running power struggles and wars that accompanied the rise of European nation-states and colonial empires, fundamentally changing the exercise of political power. Rather than merely marking the disentanglement of political from sacral authority, secularism refers to the process whereby princes and monarchs (rather than priests) gradually extended their authority over state and society in an uneven, contested, and variable fashion. The process culminated in the establishment of a form of state that based sovereign authority on a set of interrelated functions. Firstly, it assumed the power to legislate the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Secondly, it constructed ‘religion’ as a category denoting a distinct area of human experience, primarily identified with Christianity. Thirdly, it relegated this area of experience to the private sphere, and in doing so, also proclaimed its neutrality and non-interference in this domain as a means of promoting societal harmony and tolerance. Taken together, these endeavors enabled the rise of secular power and informed its deep anomalies. Far from retreating from the newly instituted realm of ‘religion’, the newly empowered secular state sought to domesticate its content and purpose, regulate its expression, differentiate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ variants, and ultimately co-opt and align with some sects and denominations while suppressing or persecuting others. 

Ethnonationalism emerges as another key concept in this conversation, identifying a particular ethnicity and its associated racial logics and features, notably a shared language or narrowly defined understandings of culture, as the key determinants of sovereignty in contrast to a more open, inclusive, and pluralist approach. Ummatic consciousness refers to the cross-cultural, non-racial, transnational assertion of common historical trajectories, spiritual connections, networks of political solidarity, and shared future horizons among Muslims. 

The term ‘Zombie politics’ and its cognates are used to describe a dystopian exercise of power in a system that is incapable of renewal or generating forms of rule based on justice, ethics, ideology, or shared visions of the common good, dominated by the living dead who come to life only when prompted by visions of kleptocratic plunder. 

The terms ‘Coloniality’ and ‘Decoloniality’ have circulated widely in public and academic debate. In this conversation, they are used to précis the sum of structural changes wrought by European colonial-racial projects across the spectrum of politics, culture, society, economics, and knowledge production that have outlasted the end of formal colonial rule/decolonization—a counter-movement or manifesto to identify, unmask, and dismantle the incidence of coloniality in all its forms. 

Lastly, the conversation critiques in passing ‘methodological nationalism’—an approach to understanding the world that considers the nation-state and its territorial limits as the naturalized, sole points of reference for explaining and analyzing complex political, social, and economic phenomena, sidelining the merits of a relational, transnational approach. 

These concepts are used in this conversation to illuminate the current crisis in Pakistan as an example of how Muslim political sovereignty, whether in Palestine, Egypt, Eastern Turkestan, or for the Rohingya, continues to be systematically undermined.