Ameem lutfi

This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi’s historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of sociopolitical
life in the city, while reaffirming others. Together, these narratives help re-conceptualise Partition as a temporally and spatially dilated series of migrations and transformations, rather than as an event unproblematically tethered to the space and time of nation-states.

The dizzying pace of events churning the Middle East since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 has left experts at a loss for adequate frameworks of analysis. From the multi-front wars in Syria and Yemen to the Iran nuclear deal and the Qatar crisis, there has been an active re-alignment of Cold War alliances and geostrategic partnerships that defies our conventional view of the region as shaped primarily by oil, religious politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Iran moves closer to Turkey and Qatar, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia deepen their strategic ties with Israel beneath the chaos and debris of war, the political fault lines are being redrawn. Signs of a new regional order are becoming visible on the horizon.

We in the Arabia-Asia research cluster at the Middle East Institute and the Alagil Arabia Asia Chair Programme at the Asia Research Institute conceptualise this emerging geopolitical order as part of an East-West, Asia-Europe/Africa geography of trade, energy and strategic partnerships dividing the Middle East along a horizontal line: a transcontinental axis on the Northern Tier, and a maritime axis along the Southern Tier. Having charted the course of diplomatic and political developments in the Northern Tier defined by Iran, Turkey and Russia at a workshop organised by the Middle East Institute in the past year, we move on to the Southern Tier and the turn of events bringing it to life for the Asia Research Institute’s Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Annual Conference this year.

At the helm of the Southern Tier and driving the maritime order in the Middle East is the UAE, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Israel. A string of ports, special economic zones and naval bases, stretching out from Jabal Ali and Jeddah to Doraleh (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland) and eventually Limassol and Benghazi (Libya) in the Mediterranean, a Middle East with arms spreading across the wider arc of the Indian Ocean to as far as India, perhaps even Southeast Asia, is Abu Dhabi’s game plan for commercial dominance and global supply chain preeminence in an age of big power rebalancing and rivalry.

Abu Dhabi seeks to graft this maritime order onto a map of port operations, shipping lanes and logistics corridors that an ambitious Dubai Ports World had come up with as part of its business strategy in the mid-2000s. As the global recession of 2008-9 hit Dubai’s expansion plans, and more states began to compete for domination of the global supply chain trade, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a bailout and proceeded to rebuild DP World’s network, adding a dimension of military protection. We see the unusual partnerships it has entered into with countries within and beyond the Middle East as pathways to this goal which Abu Dhabi, with its limited naval and strategic capacities, cannot accomplish on its own. Abu Dhabi’s interests notwithstanding, its strategy makes political and strategic sense to its allies, especially with the US drawing down its military presence and Iran and its partners threatening commerce in the Persian Gulf.

We invite participants to flesh out the framework of the two-tiered Middle East and test its analytical limits from the economic, political and security perspectives of different states, and in relation to questions of national, regional and global significance. How resilient can alliances within each of these tiers be, particularly when players have as many differing goals as they have shared ones? Can carving up the Middle East roughly into a transcontinental axis and a maritime one stimulate peace instead of war, and avert the risk of a larger conflict between nuclear armed states in the region? How will a two-tiered Middle East hold out to players like China and Russia that are seeking to expand their footprint in the region as well as the Indian Ocean world at large? Will Abu Dhabi and its partners look to these states to replace the US in its role as the military hegemon in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or will it re-define the receding security architecture on a new and unfamiliar set of terms?

What can the past tell us about the present? This question, once the bedrock of historical enquiry, faded from the academic imagination after the poststructural turn. As utilitarian and deterministic understandings of the past came under attack for ossifying ‘traditions’, a new periodization took shape--now familiar to anthropologists and historians alike--of a post-colonial present separated from its ‘authentic’ past by the unbridgeable gulf of European imperialism and colonial modernity. The workshop aims to probe the limits of this approach by bringing together anthropologists and historians interested in exploring the manifold relationships various pasts have with the present day world.

The workshop focuses on Muslim societies as the primary context to conceptualize the interplay between historical enquiry and analysis of emergent social forms. Included in our understanding of Muslim societies are the European powers that ruled over and through Muslims, and non-Muslim communities whose stories have inextricably been part of the Muslim experience. Our focus on Muslim societies is driven by recent scholarship on Muslim empires and networks. These studies venture beyond both postcolonial and textual approaches to Islam to highlight the complicated relationship of Muslim societies with the cultural geography of Eurasia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. However, despite employing anthropological categories of analysis, this scholarship has yet to engage with ethnographic work on present day Islam. To initiate a conversation between these ships passing in the night, we hope to press historians of Muslim empires and networks to speak about the past’s resonances with the discourses, practices, and structures explored in ethnographies. Conversely, we encourage anthropologists working on emerging social networks and political struggles in the broader Muslim world to focus, not only on the conditions of postmodernity, neoliberalism, and globalization, but also on regionally specific histories and memories, no matter how layered, distorted, or uneven.

We ask: what are the multi-layered pasts of the Muslim societies that escape the grand-narratives of colonialism and post-colonialism? How does one go about tracing the legacy of such pasts through texts from different genres such as hagiographies, genealogies, epics, letters, diaries, and contract? How does one do that in the absence of such representations? How do Muslims themselves mobilize these pasts to sketch in the present and summon possibilities for alternative futures? How do such mobilizations inform social imagination and geographical reach of itinerant Muslims today, be they scholars, fighters, missionaries, merchants, or diplomats? What are the possible analytical angles that would help us understand such processes beyond “ahistorical traditions” or “inventions of the present?”

A series of emerging developments in Asia such as China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, Iran’s Shi’a Crescent, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, Gulf states’ sectarian outreach, and reconnection of Indian diasporas evince increasing regionalism across Asia. Many of these new regionalisms depend on channeling histories and memories of oceanic and territorial routes carved over centuries by movements of people, ideas, and goods across the interconnected terrain of Eurasia and Indian Ocean. Central to bringing this past to the present are transnational networks of trade, trade, religion, kinship, and labor constituted over the longue durée. This interdisciplinary conference brings together anthropologists, historians, sociologists and political scientists to conceptualize emerging regional political aspirations and infrastructure projects through the past of networks. By bringing regions separated in space and pasts disconnected in time, this conference looks to conceptualize how order is constructed beyond borders.