Suchergebnisse

Argues that various forms of militancy, such as the actions of al-Qaeda, are informed by the same desire for agency and equality that animates other humanitarian interventions, such as environmentalism and pacifism.

Histories of the present are premised upon the loss of their subject, which is paradoxically deprived of its integrity by being tied back to the past. Attending to the present has been the prerogative of anticolonial and Cold War writing, for which the disconnection of present from past was crucial. If Gandhi, a critic of historical consciousness as a modality of imperialism, represented the former, Arendt did the latter kind of thinking. Histories of the present disregard these forms of thought, which stress rupture over continuity. This makes them Eurocentric almost by definition, as well as anti-global in their conceptualization. The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 offers us an example of how an event, understood provincially within a Euro-American history of the present, can be globalised to quite different effect.

Abstract
This article argues that the global emergence of children at the forefront of causes from climate change to education reveals a contradiction at the heart of politics. If politics is defined by the making of a future, the children who are meant to be its heirs are crucial to it. Yet they represent the last category of persons formally to be disallowed political agency, suggesting it is their very unfreedom that allows children to exercise power. Does their mobilization in contemporary politics signal the limits of its realm?

Torn between a futurist vision of Pakistan, on one hand, and the desire for a conventionally historical narrative about its founding on the other, Muslim nationalism has always faced its past in the form of impossibility. As Devji discusses in this afterword, the essays in the special section "The Past for Pakistan" explore Pakistan's tormented relationship with history each in its own way, and whether this past is given the name of India or Islam. If Salma Siddique writes about the undecidability of origins in cinematic culture, Shruti Kapila demonstrates how Pakistan was imagined outside its own ideology and categories. Where Nayanika Mookherjee explores the different forms of historical amnesia and memory that define nationality in both wings of what was once Pakistan, Chris Moffat writes about the commemoration of transient and non-national pasts in the country's present.

En este artículo estudio cómo el fundador de Paquistán, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, consiguió ser el líder de los musulmanes a pesar de su comportamiento herético, educación británica y arrogancia que, lejos de alejarlo de las masas, apuntalaron su popularidad. Jinnah venía a representar una política basada en la iniciativa más que en la búsqueda de lo tradicionalmente auténtico. La política musulmana en India rechazaba el nacionalismo por pertenencia a un espacio físico, que habría reducido a los seguidores del Profeta a una minoría, no a una nación. ; In this essay I will look at the way in which Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, managed to lead Muslims without claiming to resemble them in any way. His heretical background, anglicized character and sheer arrogance instead served to augment rather than detract from Jinnah's popularity, because he represented a politics based on novelty rather than heredity, artifice rather than authenticity. Muslim politics in colonial India was founded upon the rejection of blood-and-soil forms of nationality, which could only define the Prophet's followers there as a minority and not a nation. Pakistan therefore had to be fought for in the purely ideal terms of a political logic, whose iconic representation was to be found in the biography of the man hailed as its creator.

In his unprecedented study of history as consciousness and discipline in modern India, The Calling of History, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that this history has never been properly institutionalized. He explores the tense relations between academic and popular histories in the career of Jadunath Sarkar and shows how Mughal history in his wake has had to abjure ideas and subjectivity as a result of this constitutive tension. Devji's comments follow up this point by looking at the way in which Sarkar's apparently biased and old-fashioned focus on character, and so religion and ideas in general, allowed him a kind of intimacy with his sources and society that his successors lack. How, in other words, might the Indian historian's concern with secular writing end up in a parochial dead end?

Iqbal Singh Sevea, The Political Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 234.

Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.