Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Through ethnographic research among the Sufi silsila (community) of Naqshbandia Awaisia in Pakistan, this project is interested in understanding practitioners’ formulation of the unconscious as Divine Consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on the Sufi practice of zikr which enables the self’s recognition of its own spirit as well as the experience of its transcendence from the temporal and spatial boundedness of the body. Practitioners’ theorizations of their experiences reveal that the unconscious elicited through zikr is neither a lack constituted in language nor a cathartic return of the repressed, but rather an “active” spirit whose presence becomes visualized and verbalized through the performance of breath. How do zikr practitioners cultivate and make sense of their spiritual experiences? What kind of ethics of the self do these spiritual experiences generate? What does political Islam look like if the unconscious rather than religious authorities is considered the source of (self)knowledge? By bringing to the forefront a radically different approach to the unconscious whose presence and recognition is agentially cultivated, my research opens an aperture through which another regime of desire, another conception of political Islam, and another way of being human are made possible.