State and Subject Formation in South Asia

Amen Jaffer is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research focuses on the sociality of urban life in Pakistan by examining the interconnections between social, religious, and cultural dimensions of Sufi shrines, the politics around infrastructure in mohallas, and the social economy of recycling waste in Lahore. He is currently preparing a manuscript for publication that is provisionally titled, Making Islam Real: Everyday Life in Pakistan's Urban Sufi Shrines. He was invited as a Visiting Scholar to École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 2021 and was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study's (Princeton) Summer Programme in the Social Science in 2018–2019.

Mashal Saif is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Clemson University, US. Dr Saif’s research interests include Islam in contemporary South Asia; ulema and madrasas; the trans-temporal dynamics between medieval and modern Islamic discourses; contemporary Muslim political theology; and the anthropology of the state. Her first monograph, The ‘Ulama in Contemporary Pakistan: Contesting and Cultivating an Islamic Republic, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020. She has also published an array of articles and book chapters. In 2021 she was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. She is currently working on her second monograph, tentatively titled, Traditional Islam and Modernity in Pakistan: An Intimate Account.