Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2022. xvi, 208 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 9781478018032.
Omar Kasmani’s Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan is a beautifully written and theoretically innovative ethnography of fakir lives and longing, of public intimacy and futurity in the pilgrimage town of Shewan, Pakistan. Fakirs are persons who voluntarily adopt an ascetic life of poverty in pursuit of closeness or intimacy with a deceased Sufi saint. Far more than a straightforward study of fakir lives—indeed, the “unstraight affordances” of fakir lives is a central theme of the book—in Queer Companions Kasmani identifies historically overlooked intersections of religious studies and queer studies as undervalued sites to unearth “other histories of queer” (28) through “more-than-secular or differently coded archives and genealogies” (159). Probing at these intersections, Kasmani is most interested in what sits “beside” both religious (Islamic) norms that assume and privilege, on the one hand, a straight (in the sense of both linear and righteous) path and, on the other, queer norms that default to queer as a figure of sexuality. To this end, Kasmani employs queer as a “capacious hermeneutic by which we come to read not so much religion queerly…as we advance by reading queer religiously” (2).
What, then, does it mean to read queer religiously? For Kasmani, it is to “explore whether queer theorizing can find other lives in the epistemological reserves and affective resources that religious ecologies and lifeworlds have to offer” (159). He is not interested in Islamicizing queer or queering Islam. Rather, Kasmani pushes us to fundamentally rethink these categories themselves. Reading queer religiously is to problematize “religion as a nondefinable, Eurocentric, and colonialist category,” while simultaneously imagining queerness in “more-than-rights-based, nonmetropolitan, extrasecular, and beside Euro-American cultural terms” (28). His well-framed explorations are further nuanced through the additional lens of affect studies, especially the notion of public intimacy and futurity. The bringing together of these three disciplines and accompanying frameworks is one of the overarching contributions of the book. Kasmani describes them as “new companions” (26) to one another, playing on the book’s title.
The introduction and the concluding coda theoretically anchor the book with an array of terminology and frameworks that draw from Islamic, queer, and affect studies. Kasmani elaborates upon each individually at length and then in conversation with one another in the introduction, thus constructing an even larger framework within which he presents his ethnographic fieldwork in the richly drawn body chapters. Specifically, he seeks to address the empirical question that he poses at the very outset of the book: “What unfolds or takes hold as individuals draw close to deceased Islamic saints in the present?” (1). Kasmani elaborates on the tension between the private, inward intimacy fakirs develop in coming close to the saintly object of their affection and devotion, which simultaneously plays out increasingly publicly in Shewan. Concurrently, there is a tension between present realities and the futurity that public, saintly intimacy offers—and forecloses. In these unstraight affordances are “bloom spaces” that orient us in new ways and motivate us to think more expansively about “differently alternative ways of being in the world” (154).
Each of the book’s four body chapters offers a portrait or case study of individual fakir lives (one each in chapters 2–4 and two in chapter 5) and their nonnormative, nonlinear journeys towards becoming close with or being Lal, the thirteenth-century antinomian Islamic saint who is the object of their devotion and intimacy in Shewan. These fakir lives and their unstraight affordances diverge considerably in numerous ways. Kasmani introduces us to an intersex fakir, a fiercely celibate fakir who later marries, and three female fakirs, who each navigate specific social, political, and non-human challenges to their physical and spiritual proximity to Lal. Their stories unfold, respectively, in five different locations in relation to the saint’s shrine: a grove, the shrine of the Lal’s paradigmatic disciple, the courtyard, a fakir lodge, and a graveyard. Each fakir life story reveals shared journeys of intimacy with the saint and saintly worldmaking. Each illustrates Kasmani’s reading of Sufi saints as queer companions to both fakirs and the Islamic tradition more broadly. It is worth noting that Kasmani’s disinterest in queer as a theoretical lens for gender or sexuality is reinforced straightaway in chapter 1 through his consideration of an intersex fakir whose intersex status plays little to no significant role in the discussion.
Although not an explicit focus of the book, Kasmani also offers a textured ethnographic snapshot of Pakistani Islamic, particularly Shi‘i, culture and practice, and a good deal of history about Lal, his shrine, and Shewan more broadly as a pilgrimage site. This makes an important contribution in itself. Kasmani further offers glimpses of and nods to (harmonious) Hindu-Muslim interactions and co-existence in Shewan, which are also useful for scholars and students of Islam, Hinduism, and the politics and history of South Asia, past and present. Similarly, although not flagged specifically as a primary concern, gendered religious authority nevertheless emerges as a prominent theme and is one that is particularly compelling because it can be used in a myriad of teaching and scholarly contexts, especially for comparative purposes for a scholar of Hinduism such as myself.
This reader offers only two minor critiques, neither of which take away from the very important ethnographic and theoretical work Kasmani offers in Queer Companions. First, the theory and empirical ethnography sometimes sit too discretely beside one another. The introduction and coda are heavy with meticulously articulated theory and frameworks. Yet these are only lightly revisited and applied in the last pages of each chapter. While Kasmani deftly weaves together religious, queer, and affect studies, his theoretical and ethnographic discussions are less integrated—but are nevertheless enthralling. Second, Kasmani addresses questions and challenges posed by gender on numerous occasions in individual chapters (especially chapters 2, 3, and 5). This reader craved a deeper or more explicit engagement with the topic, perhaps even a brief summarizing discussion in the final coda chapter.
It is a testament to Kasmani’s engaging, poetic writing and thought-provoking theoretical intervention that I found myself mulling over the book for some time after reading it and continue to do so now months later. This is not a book to be read once. It warrants multiple (re)readings to fully tease out and appreciate the intricate suturing Kasmani performs of queer, religious, and affect studies to make an insightful, transformative argument for tarrying at the intersections of these disciplines to rethink their very constitution and possibilities.
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz
The Pennsylvania State University, State College