Table Of ContentCritical Readings: Devotional Reflections in the Pursuit of
Quranic Understanding in Contemporary Pakistan
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2012
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ABSTRACT
Critical Readings: Devotional Reflections in the Pursuit of Quranic Understanding in
Contemporary Pakistan
Nadia loan
This dissertation is a study of contemporary forms of Quranic learning among women in urban
Pakistan. Over the last two decades, Quran study programs which promise an in-depth and
personal knowledge of the text, have become immensely popular among literate women from all
backgrounds in urban centers of Pakistan. Placing an emphasis on developing skills for reading
and understanding the Quran, such programs of study have adopted an approach to textual
engagement that departs significantly from previously dominant modes of recitation and
memorization of the Quran in everyday practices of ritual devotion. Drawing upon ethnographic
fieldwork conducted among women participants of Quranic study, this dissertation investigates
these sites of learning to highlight the competencies, logics and modes of argumentation that are
encouraged and cultivated among women readers of the Quran. It locates the shift from Quranic
recitation to reading within a genealogy of the modernist exegetical tradition popularized by
Syed Abul Ala Maududi in the mid-twentieth century in South Asia which made the ‘ordinary’
reader its main focus rather than the scholarly world of the Ulama. It foregrounds this as the
condition under which a popular hermeneutics of the Quran emerges in contemporary Pakistan
and demonstrates how privileging a modality which illuminates the Quran’s ‘true’ meaning
steers conceptions about the text and its role in defining ethical action for women readers. This
study analyzes how contemporary practices of Quranic hermeneutics by ‘ordinary’ women rely
on the ethical cultivation of interpretive agency which is generated simultaneously by notions of
the autonomous self and a normative understanding of Quranic injunctions. Through an analysis
of women’s experiences of reading, it shows that Quranic study in these sites occurs at the nexus
of competing modalities of textual engagement in which women combine religious and secular
capacities, skills and sensibilities for reflection on the Quran’s meaning. It highlights the ways in
which seemingly contradictory modes of reflection—one which is critical and another which is
governed by devotional affect—are productively reconfigured together for discerning the ethical
import of Quranic injunctions and their insertion into the idioms governing everyday life. This
dissertation argues that such a mode of appreciation produces a unique register for reflecting on
the Quran’s pedagogical potential, thus imbuing the desire for ‘reading as understanding’ with
the promise of personal and collective social transformation. It also unravels assumptions about
the discreteness of the spheres governed by religiosity and secularity in a post-colonial context
and enables for a consideration of the ways in which the intersection between the two have been
productive of new modalities of womanhood, sociality, and politics.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
The Supplicating Subject: The Exemplary Life of Khairunnissa 57
Chapter 2
Maududi’s Hermeneutics and Popular Reading of the Quran 88
Chapter 3
Subjects of Knowledge: Tafsir and/as the Labor of Understanding 121
Chapter 4
Recitational Readings 175
Chapter 5
‘Hand’-writing the Quran: The Material Technologies of 217
Quranic Comprehension
Conclusion 254
Bibliography 263
i
Acknowledgments
I am truly grateful for the support that I have received from many people during
the research and writing of this dissertation at Columbia University where my intellectual
journey began; in Karachi, my home and the ‘field’; and Williamstown, where I finally
finished writing.
I want to start by thanking my dissertation committee, Brinkley Messick, Lila
Abu-Lughod and David Scott whose intellectual rigor, patience and guidance have
steered this dissertation through its inception to its completion. Brink’s endless supply of
gentle guidance, patience and support has allowed for this project to reach coherence
despite the sometimes circuitous path I have taken to get there. Lila provided a unique
combination of intellectual direction, engagement and support that is essential to the
completion of any project. Her thorough and incisive comments on my work have kept
me vigilant to my own blind spots and I can’t thank her enough for that. David’s
insightful and penetrating questions through the years have forced me to rethink my
assumptions at all stages of my intellectual journey—the importance of his insistence that
we turn our analytical gaze on to the questions we ask cannot be sufficiently
acknowledged for its contribution to my thinking and training. I am also grateful to my
external readers, Kamran Asdar Ali and Matthew Hull for their generous and thorough
engagement with my work. In particular, I want to thank Matt who went beyond his role
of external reader to give me invaluable feedback on my work long after the defense of
this study was over.
ii
Financial support from Columbia University, American Institute of Pakistan
Studies (AIPS) and the A.M. Foundation at various stages of this project have made it
possible to undertake and complete it.
I want to thank Partha Chatterjee and Mahmood Mamdani for their guidance,
interest and support of my work during my time at Columbia. Many friends at Columbia
provided the community in which this project and writing took shape. In particular I want
to thank Antina von Schnitzler, Mireille Abelin, Poornima Paidipaty, Uma Maheshwari
Bhrugubanda, Suren Pillay, Nadia Guessous, Yogesh Chandrani, Krista Hepburg,
Thushara Hewage, Shahla Talebi, Tahirih Cook and Ozge Serin,
Needless to say, this dissertation would not have been possible without the
generosity that was extended to me by the women who are the subjects of this study.
They were not only willing to share their experiences with me but also opened up their
homes for me. Given the suspicion with which many who engage in religious learning are
viewed in contemporary Pakistan, I cannot stress how essential this condition of
generosity has been to making it possible for me to undertake this project. During my
fieldwork in Karachi, my family and friends provided the support and distractions from
the, at times, frustrating task of fieldwork. My siblings Shomaila, Saima, Erum, and
Khurram have over the years been a fount of support in many ways.
In Williamstown many friendships and intellectual exchanges sustained and
carried me through the writing of this dissertation. In particular I want to thank Anand
Swamy, Jyotika Virdhi, Kenda Mutongi, Alan deGooyer, Denise Buell, William Darrow,
Magnus Bernhardsson, Margaret McComish, Anne Reinhardt, Katarzyna (Kashia)
iii
Pieprzak, Shinko Kagaya, Thomas O’connor, Richard Fox, Judith Fox, Nicole Mellow
and Paige Bartels.
I will forever be indebted to my mother and late father who encouraged and
guided all their children to follow their own paths. My daughter Safa, born at the time I
started writing, has been the source of my greatest joy and comfort. With her infectious
laughter and good humor, she provides the necessary respite from the isolation of writing.
Finally I want to thank Arafaat Valiani who has been a constant companion and
interlocutor. He has not only read and commented on each and everything I have ever
given him, his unfailing enthusiasm and energy has sustained me through the trials and
tribulations of writing. I cannot thank him enough.
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Page from a printed Quran used for recitational purposes
Figure 2: Outside cover of the Quranic ‘workbook’
Figure 3: Quran workbook, version I
Figure 4: Individual section (para) of the Quran workbook
Figure 5: Individual section (para) of the Quran with English translation
Figure 6: A writer’s notes filling out the workbook
v
