Arsalan Khan


Arsalan Khan Entered 2006 akk5m@virginia.edu
Cultural Anthropology Regional focus: Pakistan. Topical interests: Proselytizing movements. I am currently a third-year graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. I completed my high school education in Karachi, Pakistan and acquired my undergraduate degree at Beloit College in Wisconsin where I majored in International Relations. I wrote my senior thesis on Muhajir nationalism in Pakistan and it was primarily through the study of nationalism that I became familiar with anthropology theory. My current research focuses on a rapidly growing proselytizing movement, Tablighi Jama'at, in Pakistan. As a reform movement, the Tablighi Jama'at seeks to purify Islam of deviations and is especially concerned with eliminating beliefs and practices associated with saint worship. Proselytizing movements like the Tablighi Jama'at bring into sharp focus the tension between egalitarian and hierarchical forms of Islam in contemporary Pakistan. I hope that an ethnographic exploration of the Tablighi Jama'at may reveal dimensions of modernity that are otherwise ignored by scholars focusing on the tension between secularism and religion in Pakistan.

Entered 2006
akk5m@virginia.edu

Cultural Anthropology

Regional focus: Pakistan.

Topical interests: Proselytizing movements.

I am currently a third-year graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. I completed my high school education in Karachi, Pakistan and acquired my undergraduate degree at Beloit College in Wisconsin where I majored in International Relations. I wrote my senior thesis on Muhajir nationalism in Pakistan and it was primarily through the study of nationalism that I became familiar with anthropology theory. My current research focuses on a rapidly growing proselytizing movement, Tablighi Jama'at, in Pakistan. As a reform movement, the Tablighi Jama'at seeks to purify Islam of deviations and is especially concerned with eliminating beliefs and practices associated with saint worship. Proselytizing movements like the Tablighi Jama'at bring into sharp focus the tension between egalitarian and hierarchical forms of Islam in contemporary Pakistan. I hope that an ethnographic exploration of the Tablighi Jama'at may reveal dimensions of modernity that are otherwise ignored by scholars focusing on the tension between secularism and religion in Pakistan.