The essays in this volume complicate the sense of Pakistan as prone to failure. It is recast as a prolonged meditation on the artificiality of the state form, the difficulty of committing to a single nationalist vision, the foreignness that resides within, etc.

Acknowledgements 1. Foreword by Veena Das 2. Introduction by Naveeda Khan Part I: Artificiality of the State 3. Towards a Lyric History of India by Aamir Mufti 4.The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State by Tahir Hasnain Naqvi 5. A Real Terrorist, An Excerpt from Sayyid Pakistani and the Wedding of the Dead by Oskar Verkaaik 6. Re-imagining the `Land of the Pure': A Sufi Master Reclaims Islamic Orthodoxy and Pakistani Identity by Robert Rozehnal Part II: Nationalist Visions 7. Registering Crisis: Ethnicity in Pakistani Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s by Iftikar Dadi 8. Listening to the Enemy: The Pakistani Army, Violence and Memories of 1971 by Yasmin Saikia 9. Strength of the State Meets Strength of the Street: The 1972 Labour Struggle in Karachi by Kamran Asdar Ali 10. Learning to be Left: Jama'at-I Islami in Pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar Part III: Foreignness Within 11. From Muslims to Apostates: The Legal Construction of Muslim Identity and Ahmadi Difference by Asad A. Ahmed 12. Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu and Muslim Publics in Bombay by Deepak Mehta 13. Itineraries of Conversion: Judaic Paths to a Muslim Pakistan by Sadia Abbas 14. Iqbal and Karbala: Re-Reading the Episteme of Martyrdom for a Poetics of Appropriation by Syed Akbar Hyder Part IV: The Everyday 15. Look Who's Talking Now: Voice and Authority in Pakistani Shi'i Women's Gatherings by Amy Bard 16. Madrassa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrollment in Pakistan by Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Tristan Zajonc 17. Uncivil Politics and the Appropriation of Planning in Islamabad by Matthew Hull 18. What is it to build a Mosque? Or, the Violence of the Ordinary by Naveeda Khan 19. Afterword 20. Living the Tensions of the State, the Nation, and the Everyday by David Gilmartin 21. Anthropology and the Pakistani National Imaginary by Katherine Pratt Ewing Notes on Contributors Glossary Bibliography Index