The children of Afghan refugees provide important insight into the way that universities can be crucial sites of racial formation. This chapter explores how second-generation Afghan American college students navigate their racial and ethnic identities and build community on a college campus. The results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted at George Mason University, located in Northern Virginia, which is home to one of the largest Afghan diaspora populations in the country. Findings revealed the disparate impact that the withdrawal of the US military and subsequent arrival of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into the United States had on students, the role of family and collectivist culture in their decision-making, how ethnic student organizations were a method of ethnic preservation and co-ethnic support, and how attending a university with a large Afghan student population exposed internal conflicts within the community. This chapter provides important insight for universities aiming to create inclusive environments and support the diverse experiences of second-generation immigrants, Muslim, and Afghan American students.

Relying on a spectrum of sources tackling sexual practices ranging from the normative and historical to the didactic and entertaining, this chapter approaches sexuality in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad as an organizing principle in Abbasid society. It focuses on prescriptive sexuality and sexual ethics as they were regulated and delineated in early Islamic religious texts. Sexual practices, depicted mainly in literary texts, are discussed within the context of the institution of the harem. Finally, nonconformist sexuality is addressed through the lens of an eclectic collection of genres ranging from literature and poetry to medical manuals. A comparative appraisal of the sources shows that while in the caliphal harem concubinage eventually replaced marriage, in elite and common urban households marriage appears to remain the dominant institution. Nonconformist heterosexual and homosexual behaviour was generally depicted as part and parcel of the lifestyles of the urban and ruling elite. A main conclusion is that the influx of enslaved women granted the institution of female slavery a prominent historical and discursive role in shaping the contours of normative and nonconformist sexual relations.

The chapter focuses on religious and ethnic affiliation as social factors that influence the structure of variation in several Arabic-speaking communities. We go beyond the simplistic correlations between religious/ethnic groupings and language, and seek to uncover the histories and social meanings of variation based on such groupings. We include examples, both old and new, to illustrate variation according to these factors.

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth exploration of the more open state opposition structure of the Hosni Mubarak regime – which groups were co-opted, which were included and allowed to participate, and which were excluded from formal political participation – and traces the impact of these different types of opportunity structures on the political and outreach activities that different groups undertook. We see that opposition groups that were excluded from the formal political system, such as Islamist groups and pro-reform umbrella groups, adjusted their strategies in response to exclusion and were alternately tolerated and repressed by the regime. During periods of toleration, these groups – especially Islamist groups – were able to establish an extensive grassroots presence through charities, community self-help organizations, private mosques, and individual religious outreach activities. These activities at the grassroots level, while not always directly confronting the state, constituted the construction of a “parallel society” that quietly contested the regime’s legitimacy. During periods of repression, members of these groups retreated underground and into informal networks until they found new venues through which to engage with their communities.

Faiz’s literary pursuits are difficult to disentangle from the wider political trajectory out of which he emerged and impacted. I argue that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ethical self-fashioning as a political subject was deeply rooted within Perso-Arabic, Indo-Persian, and Urdu literary traditions even as he became increasingly invested in internationalist solidarity. I show that Faiz’s poetry, deeply rooted in Urdu literary and ethical traditions and composed during incarceration and exile, demonstrated his revulsion for the narrow confines of territorial nationalism and the authoritarianism of the postcolonial state.

This chapter contends that Manto’s trials signify a paradoxical sociopolitical context when it came to questions of women and sexuality: middle-class women became more visible in public and more highly educated in the formal sense, but there was also a shift in expressions of sexuality. This chapter argues that a complex and critical reassessment of Manto’s ethical self-fashioning through an examination of official documents, literary materials, and debates within progressive literary circles over representations of sexuality, enhances an understanding of the larger cultural and political developments of a turbulent period when it comes to the politics of sexuality. Finally, moral discourses, particularly around sexuality, were also prevalent within progressive, communist, and socialist intellectual circles as well, giving rise to hegemonic definitions and distinctions about who constituted the ideal literary progressive.

“Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship,” is devoted to historically contextualizing the work of feminist Urdu poets of the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan. It argues that the burgeoning of feminist Urdu literature in this period represents a revitalization of the progressive literary movement, which is often schematized as having come to an end by 1950s or 1960s. The chapter begins by tracing the genealogies and the long history of South Asian Muslim women’s writing in Urdu, the gender politics and patriarchal modes of Urduphone progressive intellectual spaces, and Pakistani nationalism. Then it turns to the life, work, and context of the Urduphone intellectual and feminist poet and writer Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018) who was at the vanguard of feminist politico-literary transformations in Pakistan.

A historiography of South Asian Muslim nationalism and the place of Urdu progressive literature within a broader political context of independence struggles against colonial rule in India and Pakistan.

This chapter examines the practice of internal self-determination in the context of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It examines the Tamil minority struggle for self-determination, and how the demands for both federalism and separatism have been made through the broader language of self-determination. The chapter shows how different minority groups make demands which amount to internal self-determination, how the government responds to such demands, and also how the language of internal self-determination has been viewed skeptically by the Tamil minority. The chapter shows the potential and problems internal self-determination as a concept holds in the context of a protracted ethnic conflict.

Shows how narrative approaches and storytelling within communities can be an important way of tracing how community and individual identity are tied to interaction around sacred texts and rituals, even in informal settings.