What happens or takes shape as devotees draw close to otherworldly Muslim saints, visiting their shrines in the pilgrimage town of Sehwan in Pakistan’s southern Sindh Province? This is the question that guides Omar Kasmani’s Queer Companions, an evocative ethnography of rich spiritual lifeworlds coalescing around intimate encounters with Muslim saints and their ascetic followers (fakirs). Straddling the horizons of at once metaphysical and concrete, passionate and divine love, or ʿishq, the book tells the story of an enveloping intimacy (qurb) that enchants the fakir into the hidden realm (ghayb) of selfhood and/in otherness, beyond outwardly social relations. Kasmani sees this realm and experiences of ʿishq as tellingly “unstraight”, in need of an affective analysis that reads “queer religiously”, in that this capacious term-of-art no longer gravitates solely around sexuality (itself a term from elsewhere, in as much as ṣufi metaphysics is concerned in its heterodox South Asian variant, which guides Sehwan’s saintly intimacies) but becomes a hermeneutic for innermost encounters (2). Through such unstraight, queer openings, the reader is invited into an affective otherwise, social and spiritual, iterative and obstinate, in which the long-deceased Muslim saint becomes the fakir’s lover and companion. One such paradigmatic saint is Laʿl Shahbaz Qalandar, an irreverent mystic who left this (outer) world in the thirteenth century CE, albeit persists as a spiritual guide, or rather queer companion, to great many a devotee visiting his tomb-shrine in Sehwan. True to his interest in ghayb and saintly intimacy, Kasmani follows Laʿl and his relationships trans-temporally, from Laʿl’s love for his contemporary disciple Bodlo, through Laʿl’s spiritual affairs with his twenty-first-century followers in Sehwan, to an affective closeness that the researcher, Kasmani, experiences encountering Laʿl and his fakirs in the queer religious otherwise.

The book is composed out of seven chapters that read themselves as spiritual stances, reflecting phases or chief realisations that the seeker undertakes on their affective journey towards saintly closeness—a journey that also presupposes meeting a whole host of remarkable fakirs. For instance, in the introduction, we encounter Zaheda, a woman in her forties whose spiritual intimacy with Laʿl sustains her precarious public itineraries (9). In Chapter One, on “infrastructures of the imaginal”, where “imaginal” stands in for a distinct ṣufi realm of perception (37), we meet Baba, a gender-nonconforming khwajasara, who switches “between female and male registers” (50) when referring to themself. Baba’s journey as a fakir is narrated in the most beautiful and considerate ethnographic prose. In Chapter Two, Amma, an experienced Shiʿi fakir woman, guides the faithful, including men, towards an ungendered “distance” (80), a form of fakir selfhood that can transgress the burdens of societal patriarchy. In Chapter Three, Zaheda returns to instruct the reader in many mystical properties of a fakir’s disguise, or bhes, “a collectivity of attributes that include […] styles of dressing, bodily adornment, and social behavior, spatial practice and place-based relationships, codes of diet and sexual conduct, and manners of sitting and walking as well as styles of speech” (91). In Chapter Four, Murad the teacher (murshid) and Dost the disciple (murid) tell a complex story of celibacy, dedication, and same-gender intimacy—reflective of the thirteenth-century Laʿl-Bodlo loving relationship—“to understand how spirituality is not always in antagonistic relation to sexuality, but rather, the two are complexly conversant” (129). In Chapter Five, a graveyard in Sehwan is the site of Jamal’s and Shah-Bibi’s encounters with the unrevealed (ghaybat), the more-than-human spirits (bhoot) that frequent such places.

Finally, in the coda, Kasmani resummons queerness as a repository of religious knowing, asking poignantly: “What epistemic obstinacies might we come up against or which lines of interpretation are to unfold if we were to read religious lifeworlds, in this instance Islamic ones, not just queerly, or with the aim of queering religion? More still, faced with congealed volumes of queer and affect studies’ respective and joint theoretical constitutions, how might we learn to read queer religiously” (152–3)? These queries lead to a sustained engagement with some of the mainstays of queer theory to argue for a more capacious, and multifarious, analysis of queer histories, and other temporalities, including those that guide diverse Islamicate relationships, past and present. In this, Kasmani relies on a queerly rearticulation of the word suhbet—a term that at once signals companionship, spiritual meeting, auspicious conversation, and having sex. Suhbet, in a way, presents a corrective in analysing saintly affects as “purely” otherworldly. As Kasmani notes, “fidelity to saints or attachment to their tombs does not always equal a recoiling from the worldly. Instead, fakir lives, loves, and labors in Sehwan reveal a becoming worldly by affective means” (160). Relatedly, then, Queer Companions is an exquisite attempt to “unstraighten anthropological shapes of devotional Islam” (163), or to intervene substantively, methodologically, and epistemically in the ways that ethnographic narration ordinarily prefigures Muslim saintly encounters, revealing a generative queer otherwise.

For a book radiating with innermost ruminations, mystical dispositions, and trans-temporal lifeworlds, there is something so grippingly earthly in Queer Companions, which recentres the perishable, uncertain everyday as a source of knowing-in-love. A ṣufi project par excellence, it invites the reader to rupture the inherited registers of academic praxis and storytelling, towards a form of situated learning-in-the-world that not only portrays, but enacts, an intimacy that binds as it befuddles, unsettles as it becomes familiar. A tour de force in the anthropology of Pakistan, this book is certain to break new grounds in our understanding and engagement with the microcosm of South Asian Muslim devotional selfhood, in all its internal diversity.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2024