Time and Fantasy in Narratives of Jihad: The Case of the Islami Jamiat-I-Tuleba in Karachi

• Authors: Nichola Khan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article proposes an analytical framework for thinking about violence in the Islami Jamiat-i-Tuleba (IJT), the student organization of Jamaat e Islami (JI), Pakistan's longstanding Islamist party. It prioritises the intersection of the psychic and the social, and the role of politics, history and biography in mediating the modalities, narration and praxis of violence in the city of Karachi. The dominant explanations tend to emphasise political instrumentalism, and structural and ideological factors, and to "Islamicise" the violence, collapsing Islamic rhetoric into an extemporization of conditions, ignoring the deep affective appeal of violence to individuals, and leaving unelaborated the role of intersecting national, local and individual contexts and temporalities in structuring political subjectivity and violent action.

Keywords

EN

Pakistan; Jamaat e Islami; political violence; life-history; jihad; fantasy

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 241-248

Dates

published

2010-09-01

online

2010-09-22

Contributors

author

Nichola Khan

• Mayfield House, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton Falmer, East Sussex BN1 9PH UK

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-010-0025-9