In this webinar, Ali Qasmi will be in conversation with Amna Qayyum about his recent book Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan.

About the Book

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. Learn more. 

About the Author
Ali Usman Qasmi, Associate Professor (History) at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, joined LUMS in January 2012. He received his PhD from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University in March 2009. Before joining LUMS, he was a Newton Fellow for post doctoral research at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has published extensively in reputed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Islamic Studies. He is the author of Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur’an Movements in the Punjab (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011). His second monograph, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London: Anthem Press, 2014), was the recipient of Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) Peace Prize in 2015. Dr. Qasmi has co-edited several edited volumes as well, which include Revisioning Iqbal as a Poet and Muslim Political Thinker (Heidelberg: Draupadi, 2010), The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia: Religion, History and Politics (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Muslims against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Ideas of Pakistan (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

About the Discussant
Amna Qayyum is a historian of international affairs, specializing in the role of gender and science in global governance. Her research spans the fields of gender and sexuality, critical development, and science and technology studies, bringing these into conversation with questions of political economy and geopolitics. As a fellow at the Brookings Institution, she co-leads the Center for Universal Education’s research portfolio on gender and education equality and oversees the Echidna Global Scholars Fellowship.

Qayyum’s current research agenda explores the gendered nature of global developmental governance. Her book project, “Governing Reproduction: A Global History of Population and Development in Muslim South Asia,” investigates the governance of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Focusing on both the history of policymaking and development practice, it reveals how authoritarian governance, the geopolitics of knowledge, and U.S. foreign relations have shaped reproductive norms in the Global South. Learn more.