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1 INTRODUCTION Beyond Territoriality The organizational dynamics of the Ismaʿili Muslim community raise important questions about the nature of citizenship and political identity at this moment in history. They present a basic challenge to theoretical and popular understandings of the state, of globalization, and of Islam. They point to a transformation in the relationship between territory and allegiance , a fundamental shift in the possibilities for sociopolitical organization . The Ismaʿilis are widely scattered across the planet, but their community ’s institutional infrastructure is highly centralized and provides for subjects a vast array of services, symbols, and social spaces. Ismaʿili institutions penetrate deeply into participants’ lives; they suffuse the fabric of their daily activities. In this way, the complex of Ismaʿili forms, processes, and structures seems to represent a new possibility for transnational social organization, for sociopolitical participation beyond the nation-state, for citizenship without territory. The Ismaʿili community is neither national norethnic; it is bound neither to a territorial unit nor to a government; it is politically anomalous while it enjoys, in many contexts, legal recognition and autonomy; at its foundation is religion, and yet it provides for its members a staggering set of secular structures. While in some cases these services are provided in addition to those provided by the state, in others, where the state is either unwilling or unable, they are provided in the place of state infrastructure. Thus in some settings Ismaʿilis live and move within a centralized, nonnational, nonterritorial polity from which they derive the central emblems of their identity. They enjoy both material and symbolic benefits from their membership in this transnational network. This book is an exploration of the complex and intricate details of global Ismaʿilism. But it is also a meditation on the nature of sovereignty and political subjectivity and on their historical transformations. Through an examination of the implications of the Ismaʿili transnational complex, I seek 2 INTRODUCTION to raise questions about certain aspects of human sociopolitical organization , to examine the longue durée of identity and territoriality through the example of a community in which long-distance consolidation of its membership has been central for over a thousand years. The time-depth of Ismaʿili organization presents exceptional possibilities for the examination of the effects of empire, capital, and the nation-state on the construction of communityacross (rather than within) territory. My interest here, however, goes beyond political forms alone; the scale of the inquiry is at once more intimate and less quantifiable. I also seek through the lens of the Ismaʿili community to explore the role of the personal, the subjective, the phenomenological in transnationalityand human organization.Thus this book is also an excavation of shifts in identity, citizenship, and affiliation in the context of rapidly changing social worlds. Locating the Subject: Ismaʿili Lives and Selves It is individual lives, in my view, that most clearly demonstrate the meaning of historical conditions and social change. For that reason there might be no better place to begin the intellectual exploration of Ismaʿili globalization, and Ismaʿilis’ engagement with globalization, than in the home of myoldest Ismaʿili friends, Sher Ali Khan and Sultan Ali Khan, in the Hunza valley of Pakistan’s Northern Areas. When I read the news on September 23, 2008, that the Islamabad Marriott had been destroyed, I feared the worst. For several years Sher Ali had been working as an assistant and bellhop in the front office of the hotel. Almost every time he called me it was from work. So as I looked at images of the building in flames, I was unable to suppress a growing feeling of certainty that he had burned in that inferno. I tried to reach Sher Ali immediately . Unable to track him down, I tried throughout the day, without success, to find his older brother, Sultan Ali. And finally, at the end of the day, I got through to Sultan’s cell phone: Sher Ali was on his way home from work when the blast happened and escaped unharmed. I could not bear to imagine the alternative. Shortly thereafter, the boys’ mother, deeply unsettled, asked them to travel the long distance back to the village.Within days, they had returned to their settlement, where they remained for a time, in the company of Ismaʿili family and friends. It had been a long time since I first met the two brothers, and they had come a long way from...

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