Talk by Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology, Cornell University)

What role can a religion have for those outside its fold? Against a political landscape that frames Islam as an insular and adversarial presence, this talk follows a Muslim civic organization in India as it seeks to establish Islam as an ethical resource across religious boundaries. By tracking the group’s shift away from attempts at sermonic reform toward ordinary practices of volunteering and charity, the talk examines how organizers negotiate majoritarian governance to carve a social space for Islam that extends beyond Muslim identity. Although prevailing scholarship generally considers efforts to render religious traditions publicly accessible as unwittingly complicit with secular dominance, I argue that this critique misses their potential to extend an ethos beyond its usual territory.

Nomaan Hasan is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University. His current book project seeks to develop conceptual resources for living with difference at a moment when cultural particularity is mobilized by exclusionary political projects. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India, it explores the ideological and aesthetic strategies through which ordinary citizens confront the rise of post-liberal populism. This research has been supported by grants from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His writing has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.