Abstract The Shi’i Muslim marja’iyyah is undergoing a fundamental transformation from a system relying exclusively on traditional and charismatic authority to a highly hybridized model where these classical forms are sustained and operationalized by rational-legal, bureaucratic principles. Historically, a leader’s legitimacy rested on personal piety and scholarly reputation within the seminary. However, modern pressures, including globalization, complex financial networks, and technological demands, have necessitated a shift toward institutionalization. This paper uses a Weberian lens, integrated with broader sociological discussions of the religious field, public religion, and systems theory; to analyze how Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has “routinized” his authority by constructing a vast, global bureaucratic apparatus of foundations and formal rules. As Sistani’s succession looms, the office increasingly requires a leader who is both a spiritual guide and the administrator of a transnational enterprise. This evolution does not erase the traditional personal bond between the believer and the religious authority, but rather mediates it through an institutional framework, ensuring durability in a modern context.
Abstract Contemporary scholarship on South Asian Muslim life demands a rethinking of ‘regional politics’ – not as an autonomous, self-contained domain, but as a formation shaped by the transformative pressures of an increasingly interconnected global political order. To think India and South Asia anew requires that we depart from instrumentalised accounts of Western publics and India’s pluralistic experience, and attend instead to the multiplicity of forces that constitute Muslim political life from within.
Abstract This paper is an ethnographic and a critical philosophical cosmology on the Islamic healing practices which is intertwined with medical theodicies, ritualization of healing practices and mystical authority of the spiritual healer. It also discloses the therapeutic modalities, generalized precariousness of the life, convalescence of soul and constituting temporal structure of experience in the anthropological sculpting of the worldliness of cure for women in low-income settings of Old Delhi. The rouhani ilaz is discursively described through poetics of bearing witness to the local moral world of ritualization of the parchment inscription, ‘gathering-motif’ of the spiritual healer’s hand, worldliness of touch and the conviviality of spiritual transcendence through the philosophical grammar of affliction. Furthermore, this paper describes the parchment inscription as bodily archive through metaphysical mystical-pad of divine remembrance and illuminating the living present with the retention(al) traces of the ethical intertwining with the Other. Importantly, this paper gives an eschatological mooring of the Islamic religious healing without the prescriptive and hypostatic truths, presences or meaning in the immanent transcendence of the soul.
Abstract This paper draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dharavi, Bombay, in 2023 to examine the tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS burden among Muslim women and marginalised communities in the settlement’s inner lanes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Centred on Asifa – a survivor of pulmonary tuberculosis and community health activist living in Social Nagar – the study traces how the pathogenic built environment of the 120-square-foot room, the invisible domestic and care labour that sustains household survival, and the structural failures of the public health system converge to produce what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitical space: a domestic and urban geography in which death is not an event but a structural outcome. Drawing theoretically on Spivak’s framework of the subaltern and invisible labour, Veena Das’s concept of the ordinary, and Mbembe’s necropolitics, the paper makes three interlocking arguments. First, the ‘Dharavi model’ of COVID-19 containment – internationally celebrated as a pandemic success – constituted a systematic epistemic erasure of the inner-lane populations whose disease burden it did not reach, measure, or address. Second, the collapse of Directly Observed Treatment (DOTS) infrastructure during the pandemic produced a cohort of interrupted tuberculosis and drug-resistant TB cases whose mortality is recorded in no official statistic. Third, the Bangar community at Dharavi’s eastern margin – a deeply subaltern population marked by the colonial legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act – bears a convergent tuberculosis–HIV/AIDS comorbidity burden that Dharavi’s vertically fragmented public health infrastructure is architecturally incapable of addressing. The paper situates Asifa’s activism as the political form of the ordinary: the daily, embodied labour of accompaniment, referral, and boundary-crossing that sustains community survival precisely where the health system cannot see it. By reading ‘disease’ anthropologically – as structural writing on the body – the paper argues that tuberculosis in Dharavi is not a biological event that falls upon women; it is the legible outcome of a political economy that renders their labour invisible, their bodies disposable, and their deaths ordinary.
