Queer Companions

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In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints. Omar Kasmani theorizes the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important Sufi site by examining the affective and intimate relationship between the site’s pilgrims and its patron saint. Omar Kasmani is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the CRC 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin and coeditor of Muslim Matter: Photographs, Objects, Essays. Note on Orthography  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. On Coming Close  1
1. Infrastructures of the Imaginal  36
2. Her Stories in His Durbar  60
3. In Other Guises, Other Futures  84
4. Love in a Time of Celibacy  107
5. Worlding Fakirs, Fairies and the Dead  130
Coda. Queer Forward Slash Religion  152
Notes  165
Glossary  181
References  185
Index  201

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