Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore's speculative real estate market

Abstract

The city of Lahore, Pakistan, has expanded by 20% in the past twenty years alone. Lahore's exponential growth is fueled by a speculative real estate market that incentivizes quick trades of plots of land rather than constructing buildings. At the city's ever‐expanding periphery, real estate developers armed with village maps and legal teams scout for cheap land, while agricultural landowners negotiate within extended families over whether to sell and demand higher prices based on their knowledge of market rates. In WhatsApp groups, overseas Pakistani investors carefully monitor land acquisition efforts by sharing news articles, personal photos and videos, Google Earth images, and copies of government documents to make their own assessments about the value of land. But although real estate is the most popular financial investment in Lahore, it is also extraordinarily risky. Developers sell land before they have acquired it; investors make high‐risk, high‐reward purchases in illegal projects; and even gains become losses due to an unstable national currency. On the basis of twenty‐eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyzes how developers and investors navigate risk through the concept of rizq, or the Islamic belief that material wealth is provided by God. I show how rizq mediates the worldly economy of real estate and the otherworldly economy of Islam, dual economies between which all credits and debts are eventually settled. Reducible to neither Islam nor capitalism, I argue that rizq enables a uniquely audacious form of risk taking that is transforming the landscape of Lahore.