Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 55

These two anecdotes indicate that far from one-dimensional ways to which the MQM positioned itself within the field of ethnic religions stereotypical categories. As I have argued in this chapter, these ethnic categories were partly the result of a state promoted nationalism, which endorsed Islamic modernist, high-caste (ashraf), Urdu-mediated values as more Islamic and more patriotic than regional folk customs, languages, and religious practices. The ethnic categorization was also partly promoted by ethnic movements such as the Sindhi nationalist movement that protested state nationalism by adopting its categorization while reversing its moral evaluation, turning "low" and "backward" into "authentic," and "modern" and "educated" into "uprooted" and "detached." This reversed, ethnic form of nationalism was to some extent taken up and incorporated into state nationalism by the government led by the Pakistan People's Party in the 1970s. The "culture of ethnicity" included Islam, separating so-called folk and traditional Islamic practices from high culture, modernist Islam, and dividing these categories along ethnic lines. As indicated by the two examples, the MQM's response to this was an ambiguous one, sometimes disrespectfully mixing up categories, sometimes embracing them.