Sovereign Attachments

Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan

Shenila Khoja-Moolji

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520974395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

Sovereign Attachments rethinks sovereignty by moving it out of the exclusive domain of geopolitics and legality and into cultural, religious, and gender studies. Through a close reading of a stunning array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Shenila Khoja-Moolji theorizes sovereignty as an ongoing attachment that is negotiated in public culture. Both the state and the Taliban recruit publics into relationships of trust, protection, and fraternity by summoning models of Islamic masculinity, mobilizing kinship metaphors, and marshalling affect. In particular, masculinity and Muslimness emerge as salient performances through which sovereign attachments are harnessed. The book shifts the discussion of sovereignty away from questions about absolute dominance to ones about shared repertoires, entanglements, and co-constitution.

PART ONE

Sovereign Islamo-Masculinities

ONE

Narrating the Sovereign

THE HEAD OF THE STATE

RECALLING THE MOMENTS FOLLOWING THE 9/11 ATTACK, Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan and its former military head, writes in his memoir, In the Line of Fire (2006):

[Colin] Powell was quite candid: “You are either with us or against us” . . . [US Deputy Secretary of State] Armitage. . . told the director [of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence] not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age. This was a shockingly barefaced threat . . . . I made a dispassionate, military-style analysis of our options, weighing the pros and cons . . . . Underlying any leader’s analysis has to be a keen awareness that on his decision hangs the fate of millions of people and the future of his country . . . . I war-gamed the United States as an adversary.¹

Musharraf had come to power in 1999 after removing Nawaz Sharif through a military coup. In 2001, he found himself in the midst of the Global War on Terror. He ultimately sided with the Americans, allowing them access to Pakistani airbases and personnel with which to fight the war in Afghanistan. What is of interest to me is that, in this autobiographical text, written five years later while he was still in power, Musharraf produces himself as an analytical leader who skillfully engaged with American bullying. The text not only narrates a past but also fashions Musharraf as an ideal leader for the present by inviting conviction in his capabilities. His autobiography can thus be viewed as an object that mediates a relationship of confidence and trust between him and the reading public. This attachment ultimately fosters the public’s consent for his sovereign exercises of power. In this chapter, I examine political autobiographies of heads of the Pakistani state written in the shadow of the Global War on Terror. I posit these texts as performative acts that bind subjects to the sovereign. Their study reveals how state leaders locate threat and injurability in other bodies, and assign themselves, and through them the state, the right to govern and engage in violence.

While expressions of national sovereignty are diffused across multiple institutions and leaders, the head of the state often appears as the nation’s symbolic apex. Gendered usually as male, he is imagined as the patriarch, the guardian of the masses, and a savior. Milinda Banerjee notes that such imaginations of the head of the state result from the desire for embodied, concrete, and visible forms of sovereignty.² In a similar vein, Najeeb Jan argues that while modern liberalism assumes that rule of law has replaced the sovereign (that is, monarchical sovereignty), it is still the sovereign who gives force to law.³ He therefore calls for studying the personifications of sovereign power in order to understand how this power circulates symbolically. Studying the autobiographies of state leaders can furnish us with insights into a dominant personification of sovereignty as well as into the discourses and affective exchanges that leaders mobilize to hail an allied public.

Autobiographies are memory acts through which writers present their lifeworlds for the consumption of the reading public. These presentations are not disinterested; writers carefully decide which events to highlight and which ones to leave out. They also provide readers with an interpretive frame for understanding their actions and decisions. Autobiographies of state leaders memorialize not only the life of the leader but also that of the nation. In her analysis of autobiographies written by postcolonial state leaders, Elleke Boehmer observes that the leaders’ lives often follow the arc of national development and in so doing supply the nation with a self-determining history and a myth of progress.⁴ In this chapter, I examine autobiographies written by Pervez Musharraf (chief of army staff, 1998–2007; chief executive of Pakistan, 1999–2002; president, 2001–2008), Benazir Bhutto (prime minister, 1988–1990 and 1993–1996), and Imran Khan (prime minister, 2018–present). All three were active in the political landscape during 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Their autobiographies expressly take up the topic of terrorism and set out to either validate statist policies (as is the case with Musharraf) or provide an alternate vision for Pakistan (Bhutto and Khan). By examining these texts, we can understand how state leaders set in motion what the public identifies to be the domain and body of the sovereign, and how the discourses they mobilize fashion attachment to themselves and to Pakistan.

Written in English and often published simultaneously in Pakistan and Western countries, the autobiographies considered in this chapter are aimed at a particular public—urban, upper-/middle-class Pakistanis, as well as foreigners.⁵ In the texts, leaders tell tales of the past replete with characters that threaten the integrity of the nation as well as heroes whose supernatural courage is needed to rescue us. To articulate themselves as singular, inviolable sovereigns, each leader mobilizes different discourses. Yet, masculinity emerges as a salient idiom across all three; it appears not only as a set of values historically associated with male-coded bodies, such as strength, athleticism, and physicality, but also as a practice of power through which domination is enforced. The latter performance of masculinity is visible when all three leaders caricature the masculinities of their competitors. The discourse of masculinity, however, is crisscrossed with, and draws its weight from, other discourses, in particular that of Islam. Each leader advances a specific version of an Islamic subjectivity required for national welfare. In doing so, they also demarcate improper interpretations of Islam, often those harbored by militants. We thus encounter in the chapter three unique and overlapping performances of Islamo-masculinity, which simultaneously nurture confidence in the sovereign and skepticism about competitors. Autobiographies, of course, are one element of a broader corpus of cultural productions related to the leaders under consideration; my reading, therefore, is not meant to provide a comprehensive assessment of their (often fluid) performances of Islamo-masculinity during the course of their careers. Instead, I engage specific texts, written under specific sociopolitical conditions, to glean the salient discourses and affects through which relationships of sovereignty unfolded at particular historical junctures.

MILITARY MASCULINITY

Pervez Musharraf was made chief of army staff in 1998 by the then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who a year later attempted to remove him from the position. Musharraf was on his way back to Pakistan from a trip to Sri Lanka when Sharif ordered that his plane not be allowed to land. A number of senior army officials launched a coup; Sharif was relieved of his command, and Musharraf installed himself as the chief executive of Pakistan. While Musharraf did not institute martial law, he did amend the constitution to allow himself to be the head of both the civilian and military branches of the state. Musharraf promised swift elections, which did not happen until three years later. In the meantime, through a referendum that Musharraf himself admits had irregularities, he installed himself as the president of Pakistan in 2001.⁶

The 9/11 attacks created the conditions that extended Musharraf’s rule, as the United States looked to him for collaboration in the War on Terror. In return, Musharraf received economic aid, which artificially propped up the economy, giving a semblance of progress. He did, however, endorse the creation of private media channels, leading to a boom in the Pakistani mediascape that continues to the present. Over time, as the United States began unilateral drone strikes in Pakistan, Musharraf’s popularity began to wane. However, he continued to enjoy support from segments of the Pakistani elite, who viewed his agenda of “enlightened moderation” as a way to curb the influence of extremists, particularly the Taliban.⁷

Written at a time when Musharraf’s popularity was declining, In the Line of Fire attempts to regain the population’s confidence. The text fashions military masculinity as the ideal sovereign masculinity, and constructs Musharraf, the military man, as a paradigm of patriotism and physical strength predestined for national leadership.⁸ Musharraf emerges as such against the figure of the corrupt, nonmilitary politician, and his moderate religious stance provides the ideal foil against the zealous militants. The autobiography naturalizes the connections across military, maleness, patriotism, moderate Islam, and sovereign power, working through and with already prevailing positive sentiments associated with the army in Pakistan. Yet in its striving, it also reveals the constructed nature of its own project by providing evidence of moments when soldiers act in ways that can be deemed as less than patriotic.

The Military Man as the Ideal Sovereign

The male body is highly visible throughout In the Line of Fire. Musharraf recounts moments in his childhood and adulthood when his superior physical prowess and strongheadedness were his saving graces. We learn about the occasions when Musharraf stood up to bullies, including punching and thrashing a boy who harassed his older brother, which earned him the title of “dada geer . . . a tough guy whom you don’t mess with.”⁹ When his family moved to a rough neighborhood, the only way to survive was to be street-smart: “needless to say . . . I was one of the tough boys.”¹⁰ In college, he competed in “gymnastics, cross-country running, bodybuilding, and athletics,” and was praised for his “muscular physique.”¹¹ Through these narratives, Musharraf produces tough masculinity as a...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Public Lives of Sovereignty
• Part One: Sovereign Islamo-Masculinities
• Part Two: Stylizing Political Attachments
• Conclusion: Imbricated Sovereignties
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index