Ruhail Andrabi

Education

BA, Kashmir University

MA, University of California San Diego

CPhil, University of California San Diego

Research

At the University of Virginia, my current project traces the connections between the modernity, religion, and the formation of secular within the postcolonial societies. I’m examining the intellectual and religious traditions of Kashmiri Muslims whose critical engagement with emerging modalities of Indian secular thought marks a crucial turn at the beginning of 20th century  to grapple with the limits of modern nation states and the pitfalls of secularism that formed the bases of its moral habitation. Understanding these disparate, conflicting genealogies of political thought requires one to place  the sovereignty of Kashmiri Muslims within the distinctive conceptual history, the one which is attuned to vernacular genealogy exceeds the way sovereignty came to define the minority question in the arc of Global history. Thus, nodes of modernity, and the secularism became two crucial non linear shifts which came to define what Taylor calls modern identity in unique ways and its imperative to recuperate, unmoor and grasp the voices of marginal subjects by examining their authority from a unique moral standpoint of Islamic tradition. I’m particularly keen to track the circulation of different conceptual categories of secular, it’s complicated history, and it’s formation in consolidating the posture of sovereign power that became, otherwise, defined the language of empire. 

The second strand of research that I engage with is the genealogy of three intellectual traditions of Islam, in other words, Islamic revivalist movements in Kashmir, and how these movements established their prominence through the reception, circulation and translation of Islamic traditions. Instead of examine these critical engagement as timeless snippets which are often assumed to sustain the ritualistic sense of religious belonging, I place them with the larger moral, intellectual and political project that undergirds the versatility of tradition in sustaining itself within the destructive forces of modernity and the competing visions of modern sovereignty which relegated certain populations outside the purview of modern secular identity.  I ask, what makes it possible for different movements, and the social actors within those movements to think about the questions of loss, community, tradition and critique to wrestle with the new forms of disciplinary  modes of power and the law of modern empire.

Publications

"The Logics of Counterinsurgency Education and Resistance in Thirdspace." In The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies, edited by Haley Dushinski, Mona Bhan and Cabeiri deBirgh Robinson.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, 265-280.

Working Papers:

"God’s Property, the Self-Determination Movement, and Sovereignty and its Language Games in Kashmir."