Using love to fathom religious difference – contemporary formats of Sufi poetry in Pakistan

Abstract

Since September 11, Pakistan has been at the precarious ‘front-line’ of the ‘Global War on Terror’. Inside Pakistan, religious difference has increasingly been connected, at least ostensibly, with attacks on religiously defined targets. Furthermore, actors with links to Pakistan have been implicated in terrorist incidents abroad, notably the recent discovery of Osama Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. This context of heightened religious conflict has prompted a dual-purpose ideational response by certain Pakistani elites, on the one hand, to religious violence at home and, on the other, to external narratives depicting Muslims and Pakistanis as ‘religious extremists’. This paper traces the ideas of the contemporary music initiative, Coke Studio Pakistan that renders Sufi poetry to fusion formats in order to refashion a Muslim identity for its producers. Specifically, I examine the Sufi concept of love, offered by this group to undergird a ‘good’ Muslim's attitude towards religious difference in a discursive setting increasingly complicated by perceptions of Western ‘Islamophobia’ intermingled with fears about rising religious extremism at home.

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