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This chapter evaluates Pakistan's history of armed politics. The combination of a contested but powerful articulation of Muslim nationalism stretching back to the colonial period with the Pakistan Army's particular version of this project has led to a relatively consistent threat perception and corresponding pattern of armed politics. The state's security managers have viewed ethno-linguistic separatists as ideologically opposed, while having a complex but ultimately more sympathetic view of Islamist armed actors as existing in the gray zone or being ideologically aligned. The chapter thematically explores state responses to linguistic/regional armed groups, strategies toward “Islamist” actors, and electoral violence. It then offers a deeper discussion of patterns of discrimination in targeting of armed groups in Pakistan's Northwest between 2002 and 2015. Finally, the chapter concludes with implications for understanding Pakistani nationalism and security policy.

This chapter focuses on the incorporation of the Cotabato sultanates into the Philippines colonial state. It argues that the origins of Muslim nationalism are to be found not in the anti-Spanish struggle, but in the practices of American colonialism. The chapter examines the depictions of Cotabato datus as both colonial subjects and rulers, and describes the complex power relations of colonial Cotabato and the construction of a transcendent Philippines Muslim identity during the colonial period.

This chapter examines the period of Muslim reform that came in the wake of the Mutiny of 1857. It argues that a second wave of literary invention takes place in North India which attempts to recast the once-aristocratic, culturally cosmpolitan Muslim as a compliant bourgeois cog in the colonial machinery. In particular, it examines how Muslim women are reinvented in the works of Nazir Ahmad, Altaf Hussain Hali, and Abdul Halim Sharar as the socio-religious reformers of an emergent qaum or nation. Above all, it argues how a modern Muslim identity is now located as originally foreign to India.

This chapter examines the use of cinema to promote an agenda of a common national identity and cohesiveness among Karachi's ethnically diverse population. Focusing on the 1960s, it argues that Karachi had gained some distance from partition by that decade, and that the ethnic-and Islam-based politics of today has still not overwhelmed the city's social life. The chapter begins with an overview of the religious facet of Muslim nationalism in Pakistan before turning to a discussion of urban planning in Karachi and Pakistan's cultural politics, along with the linguistic and cultural diversity underlying the claims of Muslim nationalism. It then looks at the cinema-going habits of the family of Zeenat Hassam, a journalist and author based in Karachi, by offering a reading of the film, Behen Bhai (1968). Within the context of Behen Bhai, the chapter discusses the social changes that Karachi (and Pakistan) witnessed during the postpartition years as well as the question of national unity during the rule of the military strong man Ayub Khan.

This chapter investigates three movements that took place within half a decade of each other — Assam (1985–1992), Punjab (1984–1993), and Jammu and Kashmir (henceforth Kashmir, 1989–1994). It traces how these movements represent the three “hotbed” regions of ethno-national separatism in India. Muslim and Sikh nationalism in Kashmir and Punjab dominated regional, national, and even international headlines for years. The Northeast, meanwhile, has proved problematic for India to placate for decades, and Assam is the central state in the region. The chapter focuses on these cases because of the two basic clusters of secessionist movements in India: immediately after independence, and in the late 1970s through the 1980s. It then zooms in the most populous state in the Northeast of India region — Assam. It characterizes Assam as the “heart of this region” and considers it an apposite window to understand the secessionist conflict in the restive Northeast. Ultimately, the chapter elaborates on the interaction between the Indian state and Sikh nationalists in the 1980s as well as the crisis in Kashmir, set off by a fraudulent election in 1987, which pushed Kashmiri nationalists to launch a secessionist struggle.

The epilogue details recent cases of intolerance against obeah in the Caribbean and beyond to argue that modern ideas of religious tolerance have inherent limits. I trace ideas of religious tolerance in Liberalism back to Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” I show how this founding document for Anglo-American ideals of religious freedom is based on intolerance for forms of religious practice that attempt to exercise juridical power. I show how such an idea of religion still underwrites the limits of citizenship in the U.S. and the anglophone Caribbean today, focusing on the 2017 deportation of three “Hindu priests” accused of obeah in Antigua and expressions of anti-Muslim nationalism during the Trump era in Texas. Both of these attempts at excluding people from basic rights on the basis of religion showed how Liberal secular ideals of tolerance have remained impossible in practice, in part due to the implicit biases that such ideals contain. Rather than tolerance, I show how contests for sovereignty over lived space in highly unequal settings characterize assertions of “religious freedom” today. The epilogue closes by reiterating the role of obeah in addressing the limitations of state legal regimes of tolerance and protection.