RESEARCH

Dissertation Research:

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword: How the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Enacts Peacebuilding

What are the possibilities of conceptualizing agency for religious actors beyond secular biases? The goal of my dissertation is to explore the tensions within secular conceptualizations of religious practice, agency, and opposition by studying the constitutive relationship between religious practices and sociopolitical contexts within a persecuted religious community. Studying the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community contributes to debates on theorizing secular-religious encounters, specifically through the community’s peacebuilding efforts and evocation of religious freedom.

Jama’at-i-Ahmadiyya, or the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, is a persecuted and marginalized Muslim group that originated in India during the British colonial period. This community self-identifies as Muslim and this identity claim has been challenged by many South Asian and global Muslim leaders since its inception (Khan 2015). In Pakistan, Ahmadi adherents are legally designated as non-Muslim, according to the Second Amendment of the Pakistani Constitution. Ahmadi communities also face various forms of persecution in Muslim-majority contexts, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and in Muslim-majority areas of the UK (Acquah 2011; BBC 2019; Burhani 2014; Haron 2018; Samwini 2006). Due to their sociopolitical persecution and marginalization, notions of ‘opposing’ claims of heresy, I argue, are constitutive of Ahmadi interpretations of Islam.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community challenges the constructed binaries between the secular/religious, subaltern/elite, and opposition/submission. The tensions between the community’s socioeconomic positionings and its marginalized status as Muslims allows me to theorize the fluidity through which religious actors engage as local and global political actors. My study goes beyond challenging the long-standing debates on how notions of “the religious” have been mischaracterized and misunderstood in our “secular age” (see Taylor 2007, among others). Through Bhabha’s (1994; 1997) theories on agency, and Lynch’s (2009; 2014) neo-Weberian approach, I will explore the negotiations occurring in religious communities between interpretations of their religious guidelines and their sociopolitical contexts that are beyond secularized understandings of ‘opposition.’ In theorizing the intersubjective understandings of ‘opposition’ within religious communities, I interrogate the possibilities of studying the “religious agent,” “subaltern/postcolonial agent,” and “resistant agent.”