With the hope of throwing new light on the transformations of Pakistani society, this one-day conference intends to move the focus away from two dominant discourses on Pakistan : that is, on the one hand, the security discourse of political and media circles that reduces Pakistan to a state on the fringe of failure, trying to cope with radical Islam and terrorism; and, on the other hand, Pakistan’s official nationalism, which rests on a unitary conception of the nation that disregards the cultural and religious diversity of the country, stressing instead Islam and Urdu as national unifiers while relegating regional cultures to folklore. This conference hopes to partly fill this gap by inviting participants to illustrate the complex, lived experience of Islam in Pakistan, the identity component of religious practices that do not fit in the dominant norm, and their inscription in local political and ethnic relations. Papers would ideally use first-hand observation and/or analyses of cultural productions to examine circumscribed case studies.

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