The politics of piety: Muslim self-fashioning in Pakistani cricketers’ autobiographies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a pioneering exploration of the cultural politics of Muslim self-fashioning in the autobiographies of three Pakistani cricketers. It examines the autobiographies of Javed Miandad, Shoaib Akhtar, and Mushtaq Ahmed, and proposes that the very assertions of the players’ Muslim identity have the potential to serve as counter discourses vis-à-vis the racist and Islamophobic perspectives on Pakistan and its cricketing cultures. It further demonstrates that the cultural politics of these religious discourses are contingent on the nature of the particular texts’ engagement with certain Eurocentric conceptions of modernity. It argues that the autobiographies of Miandad and Akhtar have counterhegemonic implications in that the references to divine intervention and divine will serve to construct partially non-modern cricketing subjectivities that form a counterpoint to the normative status of rational and/or technological discourses in modern cricket. The article further argues that certain forms of Muslim self-fashioning assume regressive, Occidentalist overtones. Such an ‘othering’ of Western modernity is explicated with reference to the autobiography of Mushtaq Ahmed. By examining the heterogenous cultural politics of religious discourses found in these texts, the article underscores the complex ways in which the non-Western cricketing discourses engage with the predominantly Eurocentric semiotics of the contemporary sport.