Visit the current affairs section of any popular bookstore and one is bound to encounter titles on Pakistan brimming with alarming and sensationalist representations of the country as “difficult,” “on the brink of disaster,” or as a site of “unraveling.” Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of shallow journalistic accounts viewing the country predominantly through a security paradigm as either a looming threat or an abject failure. The discourse of “failure” dominates much of the popular and indeed even some academic discussions on Pakistan. What unites the two books discussed here, Naveeda Khan's Muslim Becoming and Humeira Iqtidar's Secularizing Islamists, is their refusal to approach Pakistan through a narrative of failure.

Khan and Iqtidar focus instead on the harder task of describing and detailing the aspirations, anxieties, and ambiguities that mark the religious topography of the country. These books provide readers with a view of Islam and Muslims in Pakistan animated by a riveting mixture of aspiration, contradiction, and tragedy. This review essay engages some of the central arguments, conceptual interventions, and problems found in these two works to highlight their contribution to the study of Pakistan, South Asia, and, more broadly, Islam.

Khan's Muslim Becoming approaches Islam in Pakistan as a site of becoming that is marked by the oppositional yet complementary qualities of aspiration and skepticism. She sees the relationship to Islam of Pakistani Muslims and the state as founded on the desire for moral perfectibility (not perfection). This quest for moral perfectibility is saturated with hope and disappointment, aspiration and skepticism. She sets her project in sharp contrast to the lack of consensus or clarity on the question of the place and role of Islam in Pakistan as a symptom of failure. Khan argues that it is precisely this lack of resolution, this open-ended indecision on the question of what Islam signifies, that drives the aspiration to strive to be Muslim in Pakistan. It is this aspiration, for which Pakistan was inaugurated in the middle of the twentieth century, that continues to shape everyday life in the country. That is the central argument of Khan's book.

Students of South Asian Islam will benefit from the light Khan sheds on the postcolonial afterlives of intra-Muslim divisions and debates that emerged in the late colonial period, especially as manifested in the polemics that enveloped the competing Sunni normative orientations (masalik) of Deobandi, Barelvi, and the Ahl-i Hadith. Khan points out that central to the dispute between these normative orientations were opposing imaginaries of Prophet Muhammad and his place in the religious lives of Muslims, as either a living light animating all aspects of piety or primarily a historical and long dead messenger of God. The strength of Khan's analysis lies in the way she documents the varied and unpredictable ways in which maslak-based differences and normative commitments play out in the daily lives of people, with often unexpected outcomes, as witnessed in her fascinating analysis of a Deobandi prayer leader's relationship with a Jinn.

Another strength of this book is the way it incorporates the role and power of the state in its analysis of striving and Muslim becoming. Khan argues that the Pakistani state acted as “a claimant upon Muslim aspiration, not only through its efforts at attending to theological questions but also through its enunciation of a new Muslim legal subject informed by continual experimentation” (pp. 93–94). Khan views the state's exclusion of Ahmadis from Islam not simply as an instance of capitulation to “reactionary forces in Pakistani society” or as a ploy to “secure its authority to speak on behalf of Islam” (p. 92), but as an expression of striving through religious argumentation conducted by means of law.

Combining individual and state narratives allows Khan to offer a multilayered analysis of striving, but the power differential between these two modes of striving is largely left unaddressed and absorbed into a rather generalized notion of striving. Noteworthy also is Khan's seamless juxtaposition of and movement between ethnographic and philosophical analysis, especially in the way she engages the thought of Muhammad Iqbal with the aspirations and anxieties of her ethnographic actors and narratives. The suggestion that Iqbal's understanding of the interaction of time and Muslim aspiration might provide productive future possibilities of political and moral experimentation is also brilliantly argued.

There is one major problem with this book, which has to do with the question of who does and does not get to strive. Although presented as a book on Pakistan, it primarily engages the strivings of Deobandi actors in Lahore, coupled with discussions on the thought of Muhammad Iqbal. While some Barelvi and Ahl-i Hadith actors do enter the picture, their narratives of striving hardly receive any sustained attention. But more problematic is the lack of attention to the texts, discourses, or aspirations of the Ahmadis in Pakistan or in colonial India. While the chapter on the Pakistani state's exclusion of Ahmadis from Islam is excellent, one would have expected at least some acknowledgment or discussion of how Ahmadis make a case for their inclusion in Islam. For instance, in his fascinating book Prophecy Continuous, Yohanan Friedmann (misspelled as Yohanness in Khan's bibliography) shows ways in which Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's claim to prophetic authority drew on a long-running distinction in the Muslim tradition between prophecy (the possession of prophetic qualities or attaining the spiritual rank of prophecy) and legislative prophethood (the prophet as the giver of a new law).Footnote ¹ Friedmann showed that the idea of the “seal of prophets” (khatam al-nabiyyin) was keenly contested in the classical tradition with sufficient ambiguity surrounding the import of the term.Footnote ² But we get no sense from Khan's analysis of how the Ahmadis compete in the Pakistani marketplace of Muslim striving through their own religious and theological arguments. Obviously one cannot expect a single monograph to attend to all religious communities in a vast country like Pakistan. That is not my point. Rather, the point is that the picture of striving presented in Muslim Becoming remains rather problematically tethered to a majoritarian scheme of who does and does not get to strive, and whose striving is deemed worthy of consideration.

But this objection does not take away from the brilliance of Khan's analysis, the novelty of her conceptual interventions, and the astonishing lucidity of her writing. As a reader, what I most appreciated about this book is that it is intellectually daring, it takes theoretical risks, and it is not solely invested in “establishing” a point by overwhelming the reader with empirical or archival evidence (though the book is solidly argued). Muslim Becoming reads almost like an evocative literary artifact on the agonistic nature of Islam in Pakistan today. And the somewhat disparate structure of the book only amplifies its quest to highlight the inconclusiveness and unpredictability of Muslim striving in the country. The form of the book and its argument coalesce with remarkable symmetry.

Iqtidar's Secularizing Islamists sets its sights on a yet different theater of Muslim striving in Pakistan, also in Lahore, that of Pakistani Islamists. She challenges the commonplace assumption that while Islamists—Muslims who seek moral reform through explicitly political means by attempting to curate an “Islamic state”—are anti-secular, conservative, and forces of static regress, secularists champion secularism, liberalism, and progress. Much of this book is aimed at dismantling this simplistic “teleological grid of progress and regress.” Contrary to such a stereotypical view of Islamists, Iqtidar argues that Islamists in Pakistan, most notably the two major Islamist groups, the Jama'at-i Islami and the Jama'at al-Da'wa, have contributed to the secularization of Pakistani society, even as they staunchly oppose secularism.

At the heart of Iqtidar's argument is the conceptual plea to distinguish secularism from secularization. While the first refers to the state doctrine of separating the state and religion, the second involves the rationalization of religion as a conscious object of reform, debate, contestation, and critical engagement rather than as a set of inherited beliefs and practices unavailable for such objectification. Through their activities and discourses, Iqtidar argues, Pakistani Islamists have contributed to the objectification of religion as a distinct object of debate and analysis and have hence taken part in the secularization of Pakistan, even while fiercely attacking the ideology of secularism. The outcome of the mode of secularization put in motion by Pakistani Islamists does not entail the production of a liberal secular subject who considers religion an impediment to progress and who views divine transcendence with intense skepticism. Further, it is precisely the conditions of secularism in colonial India that made the emergence of Islamism in South Asia thinkable in the first place. Secularizing Islamists is in large measure a protest against the conceptual conflation of secularism and secularization.

Iqtidar goes beyond the familiar argument that Islamists are thoroughly the products of modernity. She provides readers with an intimate tour of key historical conjunctures, individual narratives, and everyday conversations and debates that have shaped the normative horizons of Islamists in Pakistan today. She does so by neither glorifying nor vilifying Islamists, a particularly welcome achievement in regard to the Jama'at al-Da'wa, discussions about which rarely deviate from Indian and Pakistani nationalist polemical representations, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai bombings for which it was widely blamed.

As Iqtidar makes clear on multiple occasions, her goal is not to valorize or justify Islamism. Nor is it to present secularization as a necessary normative ideal to which Muslims are only now catching up. It is precisely such a misreading of the book that was on display in the reactions to it in certain self-professed liberal secular “academic” quarters in Pakistan. For instance, in a column in Pakistan's popular English daily The Express Tribune, the scholar and activist Ayesha Siddiqa postulated that “Iqtidar may contribute to further radicalization by presenting the militant narrative as a rationalized discourse.”Footnote ³ She went on to bizarrely claim that “anthropologists risk getting enwrapped by their subjects, which has happened to Iqtidar as well.”Footnote ⁴ These comments reflect more the crises and anxieties of a certain kind of Pakistani liberal elite than any aspect of Iqtidar's analysis or argument. Siddiqa did not get the point of this book.

Arguably the biggest substantive and conceptual contribution of Secularizing Islamists is that it shows the internal competition and variety within Islamism. Islamist groups are neither monolithic nor predictable. The manner in which Iqtidar makes this point is perhaps as important as the point itself, namely by highlighting and describing the competition over religious authority and the competing understandings of politics that mark the relationship between Islamist outfits like the Jama'at-i Islami and the Jama'at al-Da'wa. So, for instance, Iqtidar astutely shows that while the Jama'at-i Islami continues to participate in electoral democracy in its bid to wield state power, the Jama'at al-Da'wa, after some less than successful experiences, has entirely rejected electoral democracy as a means of societal transformation. Moreover, we also learn that concerns over the protection of the female body through dress and social norms of interaction are much more pronounced and meticulously choreographed in the Jama'at al-Da'wa than in the Jama'at-i Islami. Most instructively, we learn about ways in which the two groups vie to attract people from a common urban upper- and middle-class demographic, often regretting the loss of membership to each other. These details may seem trivial to the outside observer, but they are crucial in painting a complex portrait of Islamism in Pakistan, a task at which Iqtidar excels.

For all its merits, I did find myself searching for a clearer elaboration of the book's central argument that Islamists are secularizing Pakistan. An argument for the rationalization (and by extension secularization) of Islam by Pakistani Islamists would have been much more convincing if the precise ways in which such rationalization differs from other moments of rationalizing discourse in non-Islamist Muslim thought (such as on the part of traditionalist “ulama” like Deobandis) were clearly specified or at least hinted at. Also, while I got the point that the competition over religious authority between the Jama'at-i Islami and the Jama'at al-Da'wa is generating a more keenly competitive and objectified notion of religion, how precisely this is happening in Islamist discourse was left rather obscure. One reason could be that while Iqtidar spends much time in detailing the two groups’ techniques of political mobilization, she pays less attention to the way they engage the normative sources of the tradition (e.g., the Qur'an and normative prophetic practice) while debating questions of practice, politics, and theology. In the absence of a sustained discussion of the hermeneutical strategies through which Pakistani Islamists debate and contest questions of normative importance, the argument that they have objectified religion in a peculiarly modern secularizing fashion remains rather underwhelming.

All possible critiques and objections aside, Secularizing Islamists and Muslim Becoming are both landmark publications in the study of Islam in Pakistan that have set new standards for serious scholarship on a country that is far too often the subject of sensationalist journalism or pitying eulogies. There would be no exaggeration in saying that these are path-breaking works in the study of both modern Islam and South Asia.