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.