UC Irvine

What are the possibilities of agency in which resistance and conformity are taken seriously? How can scholars “take ‘the religious’ seriously” within conceptualizations of agency? This dissertation studies the religio-political ethics of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a persecuted and marginalized Muslim group that originated in 1880s when India was under British colonial rule and is legally designated a ‘non-Muslim minority’ in Pakistan today. I argue that even if it might appear to researchers and external observers that this community is resisting its heterodox labels by calling itself the “True Islam,” Ahmadi ethical intentionality is more complex. The intention for Ahmadis is to enact the “True Islam” by submitting themselves to Allah as part of their religious ethic – while opposition is not an explicit part of their logic, it is constitutive of their enactment due to their marginalization. With this, I theorize Ahmadiyya agency such that resistance and conformity are mutually constitutive and held in tension with one another, and term this as sabr [perseverance]. Within my conceptualization of sabr as co-constituted by resistance and conformity, I emphasize the importance of ethical intentionality in how I hold goals of empowerment and submission in tension with one another. Furthermore, the exclusion of the Ahmadiyya from the Muslim ummah [global community] in various geographical and discursive contexts is an important part of why Ahmadis are not “just” enacting conformity. Ahmadiyya agency cannot be disentangled from resistance because the community’s claims to be the “true” Islam inherently opposes those who deny this claim. As such, I interrogate the importance of Ahmadiyya subaltern identity to unpack how the interplay between resistance and conformity is enacted by Ahmadis across geographic contexts. In North America and Ghana, where I have conducted virtual and in-person fieldwork observations and interviews, the subalternity of the Ahmadiyya is not as clear and takes on different forms from that of South Asia. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the ethical intentionality of religious actors is not taken seriously within existing scholarship on agency and resistance, and this under-theorizes the importance of intentions within actors’ religious ethics. The Ahmadiyya is a generative case to explore the tensions between the community’s ethical intentionality and participation in religio-political spaces because of its complex subalternity.