Secular misfits: Trajectories of doubt and dissidence in contemporary Pakistan

Abstract

Secularism in Pakistan has mainly been studied from the anxious perspective of the country’s
so-called “identity crisis” and the betrayal of Jinnah’s secular project (Shaikh 2009). This paper
moves away from abstract intellectual and historical debates to bring secular people and their
individual trajectories back in. Based on ethnographic material, intensive fieldwork and firsthand
testimonies of freethinkers in urban Punjab, it explores their quest for a meaningful yet
save life in an environment characterized paradoxically by broader avenues for free expression
and by a more diffuse violence. Yet, it counters the narrative of an intolerant Pakistan where
every free-thinkers would be at risk. Rather, it identifies the specific temporal, social and
political conditions that produce evolving modes of violence against them. By doing so, this
study also aims to contribute to a better understanding of freethinking, religious indifference
and non-religion (Quack and Schuh 2020) by reconceptualising critics of religion as “misfits” –
rather than using the problematic category of “atheists” in a Muslim context –, while also
stressing the diverse and ambivalent ontologies and (dis)sentiments that animate them.