Abstract Though scholars are critical of unilinear and teleological notions of time, the form of reasoning that accompanies this time, contextual reasoning, remains dominant. This article grapples with the problem of contextual reasoning by examining a central Sikh institution, Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, in the late nineteenth century and its relation to colonial law. This article explores the colonial state’s violent attempt to produce a proper context for Sikh sites and institutions. But Darbar Sahib caused much trouble for the colonial state, and colonial officials continually suspended the law at the site and explicitly produced Darbar Sahib as an exception. The author examines both the reach and the absence of colonial law by turning to hukam and the Sikh tradition to supplement context and offer a parasitic history: one that is irreducible to context, although lodged within it.
Abstract This essay considers insurgent mobilizations against British and Ottoman rule in southern Iraq during World War I, along with conflicts and disjunctures within these mobilizations. Departing from analyses that read acts of resistance as codes for identity or as historicizing markers of agents’ location in time, the author follows archival marks left by heterogeneous forms of life—institutions, laws, discursive traditions—that bound members of communities to sometimes conflicting obligations in a time of precarity, occupation, and war. The essay also shows how the failure of these mobilizations led to constitutions of new kinds of community—including by actors invoking a modern constitutionalist tradition outside any direct relation to a state—without providing any justifiable cause for a redemption narrative. Drawing mainly from the writings of one actor in these events, a mid-level Shiʿi religious scholar named Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani, the article considers local and irregular (non-state) participation in the 1914 Ottoman call for jihad against the British invasion; the “time of fitna,” or a series of anti-Ottoman rebellions in the Shiʿi shrine cities that disobeyed the guidance of religious authorities; and a failed 1918 uprising in Najaf against the British occupation.
Abstract Drawing on research carried out at an Islamic institution in India, this article argues that the symbolic and practical place of law has intensified in recent decades. Legal discourses and practices have become key sites of in/capacitation in this context. The article argues that law is both disciplinary and productive, in Foucault’s sense, and that for Muslim leaders it is one important mechanism for uniting Muslims, bringing them together under the authority of religious leaders rather than that of the state and its courts. The case study thus invites a reassessment of law’s productive power and its role in producing the conditions for in/capacitation.
Abstract For secular social science, declarative claims of Muslim unity are not tenable, and the discourse of religious community serves ideological functions. Meanwhile, contemporary discourses and practices variously register the ongoing destruction of the Islamic community (umma): assailed by vicious regimes and civil war, subjected to capital and colonial borders. This article presents two exchanges from my broader fieldwork in and around Syria to ethnographically articulate historical forms of loss named by the umma today. In the first of these dialogues, transcribed and excerpted from a debate in Damascus in 2004, two Muslim scholars argued about how to understand the postcolonial fate of Islamic political institutions. Here the umma appears interrupted and abandoned. In the second dialogue, held in 2018 with the director of an Islamic charity serving Syrian refugees in Jordan, the umma appears ruined. In place of a positive history, these forms of loss—interruption, abandonment, and ruin—offer figures for the life of the umma.
Abstract The June 2025 Israeli and American bombardment of Iran reignited a debate on the fate of Iranian freedom dreams amid domestic and foreign forces of violence and destruction. Most participants in this conversation settle on identifying the Islamic Republic and Israel as the sources of evil, thereby perpetuating a politics of enmity characteristic of these very states. This essay offers an alternative psychoanalytical and archeological problematization that emphasizes the limits of impersonal, epistemic, and political-theological traditions to sublimate destructive drives and existential dangers and create the possibility of self-fashioning and political debate. The author recognizes this condition as the incapacitation of tradition and theorizes it dialectically to encompass both the external, geopolitical, and environmental thresholds of debate and its internal, historical, and epistemological limits. The author suggests that the politics of enmity characteristic of our times can be denaturalized as a symptom of the incapacity of ethical and political paradigms: “the enemy” psychopolitically protects against a confrontation with limits of debate and the impossibility of politics.
Abstract Scholars have long examined the varied capacities of ethical, political, and theological traditions to engage contemporary predicaments and political crises. This special issue instead problematizes the capacity of tradition, seeking to articulate multiple registers of its incapacity. By shifting our attention from affirming capacity to exploring incapacity, we do not seek to rehearse tired conclusions about the modern interruption of tradition. Rather, we aim to explore both how a tradition’s forms of life and learning are incapacitated and their responses to destruction and discontinuity.
Abstract To contribute a conceptual framing for this issue on in/capacitation, the author employs two dimensions of the discourse around capacity in the work of Michel Foucault between 1974 and 1984. The first discourse involves his critical estimation of how disciplinary subjects are shaped through capacity “in a relation of strict subjection” from Discipline and Punish (completed in August 1974). The second discourse (between 1980 and 1984) turns to Foucault’s critique of strict subjection through his developing engagement with ethics in ancient Western contexts. The possibilities for challenging capacity formation and modern subjection are opened through ancient Cynic attention to deformation and challenges to authority in word and deed, in short, as a way of life.
The author argues that Müntzer offers an unrecognized conception of sovereignty as popular, disseminate, and prophetic. The grounding for this conception of sovereignty can be found in Müntzer’s use of common, vulgar, and scatological language, and the ways in which his use departs radically from Luther’s.
This essay examines the dismantling of native sovereignties to establish postcolonial sovereignty in South Asia, focusing on the 1948 military annexation of Hyderabad. It argues that forming postcolonial states involved both self-determination and the dismantling of other sovereignties. Sovereignty, both as a criterion and an object of cognition, entailed denying self-determination to contested polities and imposing new forms of alienation and subjection. The colonial/anti-colonial genealogy and postcolonial nation narratives foreclosed the politics of territory and obscured the historical nature of territory. By focusing on states that disappeared after 1945, the essay underscores the need to rethink the links between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the politics of self-determination.
This article rethinks nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism and abolitionism in relation to contracts of indenture of Black and Indigenous workers from Mexico’s borderland regions of Texas and Yucatán. These contracts reveal practices of unfree labor that blurred the conceptual boundaries between slavery and freedom and the physical boundaries between “slave” and “free” territory. This ambiguity complicates Mexican elites’ creation of an abolitionist politics and culture that presume the linear progress from slavery to free labor. This article situates these contracts within Mexico’s recurring transition to freedom, the longue durée history of colonial New Spain’s attempts to eradicate Spanish colonial Indigenous slavery, which gave rise to documentation that performatively reinterpreted unfree labor as legitimate forms of bondage and exploitation. This widespread dissimulation in the archives of virtual slavery, in which the enslaved person is granted a voice simulating their “consent” to bondage, suggests how these labor forms avoided prominence in the shadow of chattel slavery. This article critically analyzes a corpus of contracts that demonstrates how traffickers negotiated the borders between slavery and “free” contract labor and, in doing so, reveals gaps in the legal borderlands between “slave” and “free” territory. It also examines petitions for freedom that the same Black and Indigenous persons created as they exploited the borderlands’ divergent legal regimes and drew from their own colonial traditions of using the law to pursue justice and liberty. Their words reveal how they improvised their own meanings of freedom that eluded nationalist narratives of abolition and progress.
This essay aims to investigate the first attempt in the 1950s to translate and publish Gramsci’s works into French. It reveals the blocking if not the censorship on the part of the major French publishers. If the French Communist Party (PCF) decides to take on the edition, it is with great suspicion regarding a “liberal heresy” fueled by the anti-Stalinist line which comes from Togliatti’s PCI. It is ultimately a clandestine, contraband work undertaken by illustrious French intellectuals, historians such as François Furet and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, to make a heterodox Marxist known.
