Ali Usman Qasmi – författare

While most studies of Shi'i Islam have focused upon Iran or the Middle East, South Asia is another global region which is home to a large and influential Shi'i population. This edited volume establishes the importance of the Indian subcontinent, which has been profoundly shaped by Shi'i cultures, regimes and populations throughout its history, for the study of Shi'i Islam in the modern world. The essays within this volume, all written by leading scholars of the field, explore various Shi'i communities (both Isna 'Ashari and Isma'ili) in parts of the subcontinent as diverse as Karachi, Lucknow, Bombay and Hyderabad, as well as South Asian Shi'i diasporas in East Africa. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history, religious studies, anthropology and political science, they examine a range of themes relating to Shi'i belief, practice, piety and belonging, as well as relations between Shi'i and non-Shi'i communities.

The popularity of the Muslim League and its idea of Pakistan has been measured in terms of its success in achieving the goal of a sovereign state in the Muslim majority regions of North West and North East India. It led to an oversight of Muslim leaders and organizations which were opposed to this demand, predicating their opposition to the League on its understanding of the history and ideological content of the Muslim nation. This volume takes stock of multiple narratives about Muslim identity formation in the context of debates about partition, historicizes those narratives, and reads them in the light of the larger political milieu of the period. Focusing on the critiques of the Muslim League, its concept of the Muslim nation, and the political settlement demanded on its behalf, it studies how the movement for Pakistan inspired a contentious, influential conversation on the definition of the Muslim nation.

After the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence.Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.

After the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence.Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.

In this path-breaking new work, Ali Usman Qasmi traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. This volume is the first scholarly study of the declassified material of the court of inquiry that produced the Munir–Kiyani report of 1954, and the proceedings of the national assembly that declared the Ahmadis non-Muslims through the second constitutional amendment in 1974. The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan chronicles anti-Ahmadi violence and the legal and administrative measures adopted against them, and also addresses wider issues of the politics of Islam in postcolonial Muslim nation-states and their disputative engagements with ideas of modernity and citizenship. Winner of the Karachi Literary Festival Peace Prize 2015.