Sovereignty in Ruins: Rethinking Inter-religious Intimacies in India and Sudan

Noah Salomon

Part of Perilous Intimacies: A Forum

I have worked for the last two decades on a national context, Sudan, that shares much in common with the Indian subcontinent, though this is rarely recognized. Both countries were the objects of British colonial occupation. Indeed, Sudan’s legal reforms instituted after the overthrow of the Mahdi in 1899 were based on ones that took place in India decades earlier. Both contain a dizzying diversity of religious, linguistic, ethnic and political communities, leading to a particular challenge to modernity, which demands a nation-state in a much more homogenous hue than any kind of demographic work in these places could ever allow. The question of religious difference, in each case, then became the question of the long 20th century, the frame in which conflict was understood and importantly, in both cases, the occasion for a redrawing of the map: both countries went through partition on religious grounds, in India in 1947 and in Sudan in 2011, when a line was drawn to try to ensure a Muslim majority north and a Christian (or really simply non-Muslim, given the many traditional African religions present) South. (Christopher Tounsel has also recognized in a recent review essay he wrote in Political Theology further parallels between the two cases.)

In both cases, partitions led to disastrous results: not merely minoritization, but, while in the case of India I do not need to remind this forum, in the case of Sudan, perhaps the bloodiest and most utterly destructive 12 years in its entire history, partition arguable presaging a situation we are in now wherein the failure to integrate Sudan’s diversity into the nation state, the short-cut solution of simply drawing a line on the map to corral difference, has led to a terrifying outburst of violence fueled by a persistent and rarely mentioned sense of dispossession and grievance at a state (and its real and perceived beneficiaries) whose own mechanisms of minoritization left out too many and for too long. Tareen’s work points both to these horrors and to other ways forward, paths not taken and a politics outside the state as the Muslim community “wrestled with a political context marked by the gradual yet decisive loss of political sovereignty…[wherein] Muslims…increasingly marked as a colonized minority, generat[ed] urgent and intensified debates over the boundaries of Islam as a religious tradition.”

Reading Tareen’s truly pathbreaking and beautifully written volume, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire, as an expert neither on the geography his study traverses, nor the period in which the traversing takes place, as someone who works on the 21st century rather than the late 18th to early 20th centuries, the parallels with the contemporary case are nonetheless striking. But Tareen’s examples are not in fact exactly parallels to the present but rather unrecognized genealogies to the world in which we live (and the conflicts that plague it). His Epilogue, in particular, so lucidly shows this, when he analyses debates around the building of a Hindu temple by the Pakistani state and the speeches of the jailed Muslim activist in India, Sharjeel Imam.   

For the Muslim groups with which I worked in the new South Sudan, on the morning of independence in 2011, equally (like in the post 1857 context Tareen discusses, with the end of imperial sovereignty) this question of loss of sovereignty became the question, marking a key debate around the topic of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims (with those very same sections of the Qur’an that Tareen cites as the object of debate in Chapter Three on the category of friendship, al-Mumtahana and al-Ma’ida, also being central in the context I studied). As one of my interlocutors said at that time, justifying his vote in the independence referendum for separation/partition/the end of Muslim sovereignty over the South (or perhaps, we might say, the siding with friendship with non-Muslims in the new national community and a certain sort of distance from Muslims, as part of a now distinct national community, that of Sudan):

Even though I am Muslim, I have always been a separatist. I always felt there was something lacking. And I felt the same way [as other southerners, even] as a Muslim. I asked myself: why are we in the South always praying in dilapidated mosques, with no air-conditioning? A mosque like this, look at it! At the same time, we as Southern Muslims are of the lowest class in our own society . . . our brothers the Christians see us as the followers of [ the Islamist regime in the North]. They thought that the Southern Muslims were benefiting [from the government in the North], but we were not benefiting. The people who were most oppressed [under the Islamic state] were the [marginalized] Muslims. So, we really see good tidings [in separation, i.e. in the loss of sovereignty, in minoritization]..We as Southern Muslims, and with our faith (ʿaqida), we no longer need to ask the northerners to act on our behalf….Islam is the religion of God. And once we sever this relationship [with the Islamic state], Islam might be able to spread in a beautiful way . . . Because of this, I supported separation warmly so that I can be free in making decisions, free to deal with other southerners (ahli) with wisdom.

I won’t dwell on this example, other than to suggest that there are opinions among even conservative Muslim activists, like those with whom I spoke in South Sudan during that independence summer, that see state-based sovereignty, such as they had under the Islamic state, as a surrender of Islam to powerful external forces, and Islam’s freeing to occur in the process of minoritization. Minoritization is here indicated by the word separation, i.e. the South becoming instead of a non-Muslim province under Islamic rule, an independent secular/or even Christian state with a Muslim minority. For these South Sudanese Muslim activists, to put this in Tareen’s terms, “power and politics in this scheme are not invested in the machineries and machinations of the state, but in the embodied and everyday discipline of daily life,” or in those of my interlocutor above, “And once we sever this relationship [with the Islamic state], Islam might be able to spread in a beautiful way . . . Because of this, I supported separation warmly so that I can be free in making decisions, free to deal with other southerners (ahli) with wisdom.” And this is where the interesting work begins, both for my interlocutors and, I’d argue, for Tareen’s.  For the Muslim minority as much as the majority, Tareen’s contention rings true: this “encounter between the legacy of precolonial discursive traditions and norms and conditions and institutions of colonial modernity” is the site of deep and fraught intra-Muslim debate, in fact far more acute than the anxiety produced through Muslim/non-Muslim relations. Indeed, what the state asks us to do in these multicultural contexts, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s work and others have so clearly shown, is to do the theological work of defining the boundaries of any given religious tradition for the law—and so the stakes of where the tradition begins and end are all the higher, intra-Muslim debates becoming, as Tareen so clearly shows, the arena of contestation.

So this is where I see some productive parallels between the things I’ve been thinking about recently in terms of sovereignty and the state and the possibilities of politics beyond sovereignty and in non-stately modes, and the rich material that Tareen brings to bear. But I want to get deeper into some of the constitutive terms here, focusing in particular for a moment on the framing of “intimacy” that Tareen chooses. I want first to insist that intimacy and politics alternative to the state are not unrelated: indeed,  it is through alternative modes of belonging, requiring an upsetting of the abstraction of the modern state, faces instead of facelessness, that makes intimacy of all sorts subversive. Intimacy in this model is the enemy of identity: whether it be through a union of opposites, or even those adjacent, it militates against the stately logic of clearly defined communities and the borders that sequester them. Clearly, Tareen’s interlocutors see its danger as well.  When does intimacy collapse into indistinguishableness, they appear to ask (as the frequently cited hadith states “those who appear like another people are in fact of them”, man tashabbaha bi-qawmin fa-huwa minhum, see Chapters 5 and 6 of Tareen)? But, we must ask, as Tareen does here, when also does intimacy—and this is its radical possibility—point to new modes of being, new creations, beyond the divisive politics of nationalism and minoritization on which the modern state relies?

SherAli Tareen, Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire.  Columbia University Press, 2023. 360 pg. $35 (paperback)

For Tareen, intimacy is  a subcategory of friendship and even hospitality, and I want to try and unpack the precise place in which it fits, perhaps pushing him a bit on the question of the node of a shared ownership over the self, rather than pure sovereignty, and so on yet another destabilization that the coalition politics debated in Chapter 3, for example, make so clear: friendship directly correlates to the loss of sovereign political power when solidarities necessitating compromise become thinkable.Tareen’s reading of hospitality emerges out of Derrida, wherein it is a term of generosity and dominance (a wilaya/walaya node in Islamic terms). “The law of self-contradiction that shadows the idea of hospitality,” in Tareen’s framing.

How then, we must ask, is intimacy a modern condition, as well as a public modality as much as a (or more than) a feature of the private within which it is usually situated? Tareen doesn’t exactly answer this up front, but there is ample material from which we might make conclusions. First, there seems to be a deep homosocial element to this sort of hospitality. When he takes us in Chapter 1 to Jan-i-Janan’s writings he tells us that his sympathetic attitude and endorsement of Hinduism was “epistemologically limited to elite Hindu scholarly traditions [and that] his charitable evaluation and assessment did not extend to popular Hindu devotional practices of which he was deeply critical…[here] his language was often highly gendered: women, whom he regarded as especially vulnerable to the allure of such festivals, represented the primary target of his repudiation.”  Thus, intimacy is not simply with the Hindu other, but rather with a certain sort of elite intellectual brotherhood that raises a kind of homosocial dynamic. It is women’s religion that holds danger, whereas men’s religion can be engaged with a little less peril. The everyday, it turns out, is not unmarked, and private religion (that of women) becomes the counterpoint to new homosocial publics.

Note that this friendship is also about a marker between elite and masses: Tareen points us to the phrase: al-‘awwam ka-l-an‘am the masses are like cattle. These kind of exceptions in and of themselves are quite typical, but when paired with the topic of intimacy we see how the fear of loss of self is not just about Muslims and Hindus but a certain kind of protection of gendered and class norms that are equally constitutive of normative Muslim identity as is religious doctrine.

Finally, what do the limits of intimacy as explained by Tareen’s interlocutors tell us about the theory of (other) religions that underlies the debates engaged? The illuminating and pathbreaking book of my colleague at the University of Virginia, Shankar Nair, Translating Wisdom, which Tareen also cites affirmatively, asks this question about comparative religion in resonant ways, even trying to mine the practices of his interlocutors for how we might understand the academic endeavor of comparative religion in our Euro-American context in new frames, beyond liberal modes of tolerance. Yet Tareen has a different outside to which he speaks: the political context of present-day Pakistan and India and the question of minorities therein that serves a substrate to this volume, pulsating just beneath the surface throughout. Translation(and the intimacy required for a good translation, and the friendships that emerge) is also, as Tareen suggests, an act of shared sovereignty.  It is an expression of vulnerability as much as a hope for a better future. But what now in these distressed and distressing times: in India, Pakistan, and beyond? Here, Tareen perhaps points to a solution. In landscape striated with the scars of failed political projects of yesteryear, friendship might be just that: as Tareen so astutely puts it, a way of finding “Sovereignty in the ruins…”

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Noah Salomon is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and author of the award-winningbook For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2016).