The chapter focuses on religious and ethnic affiliation as social factors that influence the structure of variation in several Arabic-speaking communities. We go beyond the simplistic correlations between religious/ethnic groupings and language, and seek to uncover the histories and social meanings of variation based on such groupings. We include examples, both old and new, to illustrate variation according to these factors.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth exploration of the more open state opposition structure of the Hosni Mubarak regime – which groups were co-opted, which were included and allowed to participate, and which were excluded from formal political participation – and traces the impact of these different types of opportunity structures on the political and outreach activities that different groups undertook. We see that opposition groups that were excluded from the formal political system, such as Islamist groups and pro-reform umbrella groups, adjusted their strategies in response to exclusion and were alternately tolerated and repressed by the regime. During periods of toleration, these groups – especially Islamist groups – were able to establish an extensive grassroots presence through charities, community self-help organizations, private mosques, and individual religious outreach activities. These activities at the grassroots level, while not always directly confronting the state, constituted the construction of a “parallel society” that quietly contested the regime’s legitimacy. During periods of repression, members of these groups retreated underground and into informal networks until they found new venues through which to engage with their communities.

Faiz’s literary pursuits are difficult to disentangle from the wider political trajectory out of which he emerged and impacted. I argue that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ethical self-fashioning as a political subject was deeply rooted within Perso-Arabic, Indo-Persian, and Urdu literary traditions even as he became increasingly invested in internationalist solidarity. I show that Faiz’s poetry, deeply rooted in Urdu literary and ethical traditions and composed during incarceration and exile, demonstrated his revulsion for the narrow confines of territorial nationalism and the authoritarianism of the postcolonial state.

This chapter contends that Manto’s trials signify a paradoxical sociopolitical context when it came to questions of women and sexuality: middle-class women became more visible in public and more highly educated in the formal sense, but there was also a shift in expressions of sexuality. This chapter argues that a complex and critical reassessment of Manto’s ethical self-fashioning through an examination of official documents, literary materials, and debates within progressive literary circles over representations of sexuality, enhances an understanding of the larger cultural and political developments of a turbulent period when it comes to the politics of sexuality. Finally, moral discourses, particularly around sexuality, were also prevalent within progressive, communist, and socialist intellectual circles as well, giving rise to hegemonic definitions and distinctions about who constituted the ideal literary progressive.

“Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship,” is devoted to historically contextualizing the work of feminist Urdu poets of the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan. It argues that the burgeoning of feminist Urdu literature in this period represents a revitalization of the progressive literary movement, which is often schematized as having come to an end by 1950s or 1960s. The chapter begins by tracing the genealogies and the long history of South Asian Muslim women’s writing in Urdu, the gender politics and patriarchal modes of Urduphone progressive intellectual spaces, and Pakistani nationalism. Then it turns to the life, work, and context of the Urduphone intellectual and feminist poet and writer Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018) who was at the vanguard of feminist politico-literary transformations in Pakistan.

A historiography of South Asian Muslim nationalism and the place of Urdu progressive literature within a broader political context of independence struggles against colonial rule in India and Pakistan.

This chapter examines the practice of internal self-determination in the context of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It examines the Tamil minority struggle for self-determination, and how the demands for both federalism and separatism have been made through the broader language of self-determination. The chapter shows how different minority groups make demands which amount to internal self-determination, how the government responds to such demands, and also how the language of internal self-determination has been viewed skeptically by the Tamil minority. The chapter shows the potential and problems internal self-determination as a concept holds in the context of a protracted ethnic conflict.

Shows how narrative approaches and storytelling within communities can be an important way of tracing how community and individual identity are tied to interaction around sacred texts and rituals, even in informal settings.

Though violence is endemic to the founding of the US nation-state, this chapter focuses on the violence inflicted on certain types of individuals following the attacks of September 11, 2001 that set in motion the USA’s “global war on terror.” Through engaging poems, novels, and plays by South Asian, Arab, and Muslim American writers, this chapter seeks to answer three basic questions. (1) In the period after September 11, 2001, which subsets of the US population have been deemed most problematic, and why? (2) Is there political and popular will to imagine these populations as welcome members of the US body politic? (3) How can these populations be envisioned as important and productive additions to the nation, and what is the advantage of so doing? The chapter argues that a perpetual state of suspicion and hostility against certain groups of people weakens a nation and slowly erodes those bonds of “imagined community” that give a country its strength and resolve. To be in a state of high alert, to be always primed for conflict, depletes a nation’s resources and distracts it from focusing on the future. The literary texts reveal that negative emotions attenuate a nation’s capacity to imagine a future that is generative and enriching, and, instead, trap the nation in a never-ending cycle of fear, watchfulness, and mistrust of residents.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the different reactions toward criticism of ḥadīth found in the Ṣaḥīḥayn. Is there a consensus on the authenticity of the Ṣaḥīḥayn or have they always been open to re-examination? Next, I analyze Albānī’s ḥadīth methodology and the criticism he attracted. One would imagine that Albānī was a very strict and cautious ḥadīth scholar, but much of the criticism he received was due to leniency in his methodology. In particular, he was often criticized for using abridged versions of ḥadīth manuals to make decisions. Finally, the chapter ends by looking at the impact Albānī had on modern ḥadīth studies. In the 1960s it was not common practice for scholars to cite the ḥadīth they quoted or even note their level of authenticity. However, after Albānī we find that many authors, even his critics, started grading each ḥadīth. The most important result was that a generation of university students tried to evaluate any ḥadīth they would use in their dissertations.