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.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 47

The link between migration to Pakistan and the hijra was made soon after independence. As early as September 1947, the term muhajir (one who takes part in the hijra) was used when Pir Ilahi Bakhsh, education minister of Sindh, was reported to have "revived the good old Arab memory of brotherhood between the muhajireen and the ansar ... when he took a family of Muslim refugees from Amritsar from the railway station to his house as guests." Initially the use of muhajir was used to overcome differences among social, linguistic, regional, or sectarian groups. The term had several positive connotations. It ascribed a degree of agency to the migrants that other possible terms like panahgir (refugee) lacked.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 45

The main character of the novel is a young professor of history, born in a town called Rupnagar in Uttar Pardesh. The novel "Basti" describes his doubts and memories during the last months of 1971, just before the parting of Bangladesh:

When Pakistan was still all new, when the sky of Pakistan was fresh like the sky of Rupnagar, and the earth was not yet soiled. In those days how the carvans arrived from their long, long journeys! Every day caravans entered the city and dispersed among the streets and neighborhoods ... The refugees told whole long epics about how much suffering they had endured on the journey, and how many difficulties they had overcome in order to reach the city. They told about those whom they left behind. Then the refuge-givers and the refugees together remembered those who had clung to the earth, refusing to leave their homes and their ancestor's graves.

Militants and Mgirants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 44

To some extent, the distinction between the educate and the uneducated revives an older divide between the high caste of pure Muslim descent (ashraf) and the low caste of indigenous converts (ajlaf). The ashraf -- plural of sharif, meaning cultured, noble, soft-spoken -- were the groups occupying high positions in the Moghul Empire. They included subcastes or zat like the Syed, Siddiqi, Qureshi, or Sheikh, who claim a foreign and fully Muslim genalogy. In contrast, the ajlaf -- plural of jilf, meaning vulgar, or rude, low -- belong to occupational groups such as cobblers (mochi) or buthchers (qasai).

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 43

Things, however, become more complicated with the introduction of the opposites hot and cool. These are moods and qualities, poles on a scale on which potentially all phenomena can be ranked. All food, for instance, can be characterized by its hot or cool properties. Almonds are hot, like most meat, mangoes, alcohol, clarified butter, ice cream, etc. By eating them you become inflicted by their hotness. Again, hotness is associated with life, virility, physicality, creating, and destruction. But it does not completely overlap with nafs, because the spiritual world can also be hot. God Himself has a hot (jalal) as well as a cool (rahman) quality. There are hot, intoxicated forms of love and passion (mast) as well as cool and serene forms ('ishq). Colors can also be classified as hot or cool. Red and black are the hot colors of anger and martyrdom, while white and green are the cool colors of death and mercy.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 8

The imaginary of the MQM martyr/terrorist, for instance, is a mixture of East Asian martial art traditions, Middle Eastern styles of Muslim militancy, Hollywood cinema, and Bollywood pop music.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 18

The man who was in charge of this little garden, which also featured the seven graves of the May 1990 victims, was Pir Sahibzada Syed Mazhar Hussain Moini. I was reading Anna Karenina then and did not understand what the author meant by men with moustaches -- in plural -- until I met this Mazhar Sahib. He was a seventy-year-old widower with several white moustaches and had been an influential man in the neighborhood till the younger generation had deprived him of his power base. He was very proud of his titles and genealogy (shajra), which he had, after many requests, recently received in writing from relatives in Ajmer, India. During one of our first meetings he took me to his house to show me the document. Under his name was written in pencil "gone to Pakistan," which to me appeared not unlike the "expired" written under the names of those who had died without heirs. But it did not bother Mazhar Sahib. What mattered to him was the written proof that he had a respectable background.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - pg. 4

More important, the MQM constituted for its supporters both a spectacle and a sacrifice. It was an adventure and an excellent pastime to belong to the movement and take part in its public gatherings, which were often described to me as joyful and liberating. The MQM seemed to have offered the joy of provocation and transgression. The powerful were ridiculed, social conventions were temporarily set aside, and ethnic and religious stereoptypes were uprooted through role inversion and grotesque exaggeration. This ludic character of the MQM often went hand in hand with the vandalism carried out by the young male peer groups, that is, locally organized groups of friends, which played a major role in the recruitment and mobilization of new party members. All this was expressed in the term fun(shughal?), an emic term, adopted by the young Muhajirs like many other English words. Fun was a boundary marker, which set the MQM apart from the established political parties, condemned for their grave, solemn, hollow, ideological language. Fun was even, to some extent, considered a feature of Muhajirness, part of the metropolitan, cosmopolitan Muhajir culture and a far cry from the supposedly rural dullness of other ethnic groups.

Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan - Opening

Introduction

ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2001 -- fifteen days after the suicidal attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon -- a large public gathering was held in Karachi, Pakistan to demonstrate the city's solidarity with the thousands of victims in the United States and to offer sympathy and support for the United States-led campaign against terrorism that would soon lead to the bombing of Taliban and Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.

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