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Performing Islam - Current Issue

Volume 12, Issue 1

Volume 12, Issue 1, 2023

  • Articles

      • Voicing a path to the afterlife: Rituals for the dead, transnational mobility and the changing soundspace of Islam among Mongolian Kazakhs

        https://doi.org/10.1386/pi_00023_1

        This article explores the role of sound and space in the negotiation of Muslim identity within rituals for the dead among the Kazakhs of Mongolia, a Turkic-speaking community that forms the majority population in the west of the country. Mobile pastoralists practising a syncretic form of Islam that integrates ancestor-spirit worship, Mongolian Kazakhs traditionally commemorated the dead at funeral and memorial feasts conducted in the portable nomadic yurt, and involving men’s recitation of the Qur’an and women’s performance of laments. The political and social transformations of the post-Soviet period, however, have wrought changes in the architectonics of the rituals. Increased transnational mobility in the wake of Kazakhstan’s independence has led to memorial feasts being held in venues ranging from mud-brick houses in western Mongolia to urban apartments, restaurants or mosques in Kazakhstan. The emergence of revivalist trends in Islam has prompted debates around the legitimacy and correct performance of female lamentation. Based on ethnography in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, the article examines how changes in the spatial and sonic configuration of the rituals reflect and shape evolving concepts of religiosity and gendered relations among the transnational community of Mongolian Kazakhs. The author introduces the concept of ‘soundspace’ to underscore the significance of spatiality, embodiment and emplacement in the production of sonic religious expression and experience.

    • Of broken promises and failed nations: Tipu Sultan at the Lahore Fort

      https://doi.org/10.1386/pi_00024_1

      In 2015, I wrote a play, , on Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750–99). The play has had three runs since. This article situates a distinct audience response (in what was a site-specific performance) within the larger backdrop of postcolonial nationalism in Pakistan. The study is guided by two questions: one, what was it about the performance that resulted in a varied reader/audience response? Two, in what ways did the site inscribe itself on the performance, and how did the performance write itself on the site? What I argue is that while the site itself was/is rich in evoking nostalgia for a supposedly glorious past, its expressive potential was intensified by the play in the context of Pakistan’s (dismal) performance as a nation state since 1947. While existing scholarship has analysed the nation state as an existential fantasy, Pakistan is more precarious owing to the state’s lack of connection to the territory it came to inhabit, and the aloofness of its ethnic minorities towards the idea of Pakistan. This compels the Pakistani state to define itself in oppositional terms to India, in an effort to deflect attention from its own failures. But the deflection is never complete and the people (who do partake of the Pakistan idea) are drawn in tandem to the broken promise of the country, as witnessed in the site-specific performance.

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