Naveeda Khan's Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan is an original and substantive contribution to scholarship on contemporary Islam, and, more generally, to cultural anthropology, which is experiencing a “Deleuzian turn.” The book engages the everyday trajectories of middle- and lower middle-class Muslims residing in Pakistan's second largest city of Lahore, the legal and bureaucratic practices of the postcolonial state, and the writings of the Indian subcontinent's most influential Muslim intellectual and literary figures, such as Muhammad Iqbal. These “sites” are connected—at times concretely, at times heuristically—by Khan to give shape to the book's primary theme: the movement of Muslim “aspiration” within the Pakistani national imagination.

In Pakistan, aspiration is the embodied, continuous striving of Muslims for moral perfectibility. Taking inspiration from W. C. Smith's early reflections on Pakistan, Khan argues that aspiration does not take the teleological form of a subject or identity striving toward a definite end. Rather, it is characterized “by a striving to an as-yet unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one” (p. 55). This tendency for continual striving is characterized as “experimental” and “open to the future,” but, in a crucial and challenging sense, is also inextricably caught up with socially and ideologically coded forms of action.

Muslim Becoming interrogates the dominant tendency in studies on Pakistan to approach the nationalist project through an analytic of “lack.” Notwithstanding the critical orientation of this approach, argues Khan, it is overly fixated on diagnosing the failure of Pakistani state and society to reach “consensus” on the definition of Muslim nationhood. Acknowledging the complicity between aspiration and skepticism (the destruction of the social fabric) in Pakistan, Khan calls for a counteranalytic of “plentitude” in which emphasis is placed on “experimentation in seeking points of relatedness” between the national and religious self (p. 9).

Khan's study enjoys a place next to Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); both are theoretically sophisticated works of revision that are intimately attuned to the questions of postcolonial inheritance, loss, and potential that animate Pakistani national existence. It does not replicate the terms of recent influential ethnographies of Muslim piety that interrogate liberal secular conceptions of agency through the coherent lens of movements and techniques of moral self-cultivation. Although such movements are abundant in Pakistan, Khan favors the more diffused (and unstable) terrain of “relatedness” between Islam, Pakistan, and everyday social existence. Furthermore, the tendency toward aspiration charted in this monograph does not amount to either a liberal or vernacular culture of religious tolerance. For instance, when assessing the framing and enactment of a series of constitutional amendments that denied Pakistan's Ahmadi community legal status as Muslim citizens, Khan notes the distinction between the “exclusionary effect” that such amendments undoubtedly entailed and the countervailing “tendency to strive” exhibited by proponents and critics alike during the process of becoming law. For Khan, this tendency does not resist or even work against the “closures” of exclusionary policy so much as defer their “finality.”

In conclusion, Khan is most interested in attending to how historical contingency operates within the nationalist theological imagination of postcolonial Pakistan, and more specifically, to the “spiral that aspiration produces, creating doctrinal and legal closures yet also spaces of doubt, uncertainty, and further experiments within daily life in Pakistan” (p. 109). In this sense, the book carves out its own object of enquiry and invites us to judge it on its own terms.