Queer Companions : Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints. "Queer Companions is an ethnographic account of Sufi fakirs at Pakistan's most important Sufi site, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Omar Kasmani argues that these pilgrims' affective connections to the site's patron saint, who lived and died in the thirteenth century, lead them to queer forms of living. While some of the ethnographic interlocutors in the book are themselves LGBTQI, and a few are women who trouble the gendered ordering of the shrine, Kasmani attends to the queer forms of relationality, intimacy, and affinity that the site allows for rather than on the individual identities of the people themselves. He shows how their relation to the world is altered by embodied and imaginative modes of moving away from social objects and expectations and toward the saintly. As the site is a state-run national heritage site, Kasmani considers how this form of queer living brings individuals, society, and the state together through a public architecture of intimacy. In tracing the veering paths of these religious figures, Kasmani demonstrates how this form of intimacy might offer not a withdrawal from the world, but rather a different kind of queer worldmaking"-- Provided by publisher Omar Kasmani theorizes the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important Sufi site by examining the affective and intimate relationship between the site’s pilgrims and its patron saint.