IDEAS Book Talk & Book Signing
IDEAS is pleased to invite you to attend our upcoming Book Talk & Book Signing event with Professor Ali Usman Qasmi, author of the book ‘Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship & National Belonging in Pakistan’.The book talk will be moderated by IDEAS Research Fellow Maryam S. Khan and co-organised with Hast-o-Neest and Bazm-e-Alam, and will be followed by a book signing by the guest speaker.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, courtesy of Readings.
Date: Thursday, 3rd October 2024
Time: 05:30 PM
Venue: Hast-o-Neest, 3 Iftikhar Ahmed Shariff Colony, Iftikhar Ahmad Malik Road, Gulberg 2, Lahore, Punjab
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/GfCUMrYPYfcVQ32f9
Guest Speaker
Born and raised in Lahore, Ali Usman Qasmi is a historian of modern South Asia and Islamic reform movements. He has published extensively in his area of expertise, including three monographs and three edited volumes. His most recent monograph is Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2023), which won the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) Book Prize for 2024. Since 2012, Qasmi has taught history at LUMS University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently, Qasmi also serves as the Director of the Gurmani Center for Languages and Literature.
About the Book
After the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation-states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium-long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence.
Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country’s formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a “national festival”—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.