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Predicaments of a "Post-Conflict" Generation
Reading Room
Nijhawan, Michael (2010). “‘Today, We Are All Ahmadi’: Configurations of Heretic Otherness between Lahore and Berlin”. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27(3): 429-447.
The Ahmadis are widely regarded as heterodox in Pakistan, where they have moved after the Partition of British India in 1947, and where they have later been declared by the state as being ‘non-Muslim’. Faced with violence and discrimination on a regular basis, they have migrated in large numbers to Europe, including Germany. There, they are free to continue their religious practice, but at the same time have been treated with hostility as they become part of central city life. Faced with suspicion both at home and now in Europe,this article explores the double sense of heterodoxy which the Ahmadis now face, and explores the complex reactions, including media campaigns to which they have given rise in Germany.
Nijhawan, Michael (2011). “Sikhism, Traumatic Repetition, and the Question of Aesthetic Sovereignty”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23: 128-142.
This article provides a detailed discussion of Arvind Mandair’s new work Religion and the Specter of the West. Written from a sociological vantage point, which is informed by a long commitment to Sikh Studies, the argument presented here focuses on three organizing concepts of Mandair’s work: (1) repetition and how it is to be read within the process of subject formation, (2) trauma as a conceptual tool to rethink postcolonial identity, and (3) aesthetic sovereignty as providing possible exit out of hermeneutic dilemmas of ‘translating religion.’