Sadia Saeed Speaks of “Hailing the ‘Muslim’ Citizen: National Identity, State and the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan”
On February 15, Sadia Saeed, ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, will speak in the South Asian Studies Colloquium about her research on the historic formation of the “Muslim” citizen in Pakistan. Drawing on the empirical case of the historically shifting responses of the Pakistani state to the question of the religious status of the controversial Ahmadiyya community, her talk explores how legal boundaries of the category of “Muslim” have been historically negotiated and re-defined by the Pakistani state at three critical moments defined as accommodation (1953-4), exclusion (1974), and criminalization (1984).
4.30pm • February 15 • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
Sadia contends that the Pakistani state has drawn upon a range of interpretations, symbols, and discourses with regard to state imaginaries, national identity, and citizenship rights to consolidate different legal representations of the religious status of the Ahmadiyya community – ‘Muslims’ in the first moment, ‘non-Muslims’ in the second, and ‘heretics’ in the third. In order to explain this historical variation, her talk explores the multifold levels – cultural, institutional, and discursive – from which state action emerges.
Sadia received her PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include historical sociology, political sociology, law and society and religion. Her work focuses on intersections between state formation, nationalism, law and religion in Pakistan. She is currently working on her book manuscript, provisionally titled Criminalizing Heterodoxy: Politics, Identity and Law in Pakistan, which examines the relationship between state formation, Islamist social movements and nationalist discourses in Pakistan through a focus on the shifting legal representations of the heterodox religious minority, the Ahmadiyya community. She is also beginning work on a project that undertakes a comparative examination of minority rights in Muslim societies in South-east Asia and the Middle East. Her research has appeared in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. Before joining Yale, Sadia held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington. At Yale, Sadia is teaching courses on Law in Muslim Societies, a Comparative Research Workshop, and Foundations of Modern Social Theory.