Reproducing Khwāja sarā : From Premodern, Colonial to Postcolonial Cultural and Legal Discourses

Farooq, Maria and Naguib, Shuruq and Hamilton, Ellie (2026) Reproducing Khwāja sarā : From Premodern, Colonial to Postcolonial Cultural and Legal Discourses. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

The contemporary contestations of the khwāja sarā identity present a significant cultural and social problem within Pakistani society. This thesis interrogates how the legal and cultural status of khwāja sarā is being reconfigured in Pakistan today. A critical review of the contemporary understandings surrounding khwāja sarā revealed that these understandings are embedded within historical, cultural and colonial legal contexts. In this thesis, I do not define the term khwāja sarā as it has undergone layered historical, cultural, and legal shifts across premodern, colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary contexts, and defining it would undermine the spirit of this thesis. This thesis seeks to excavate meanings that have been obscured, reconfigured, and buried under colonial weight through encounters with South Asian land, histories, and epistemologies. Therefore, this thesis took a tripartite approach by pursuing three levels of enquiry to chart the conceptual genealogy of the khwāja sarā; (i) a historical-cultural exploration of premodern Islamic and colonial legal discourses in the context of the Indian subcontinent; (ii) an examination of contemporary legal, judicial and activist discourses; and (iii) the contemporary fictional media (cultural) discourses in Pakistan. These three lines of enquiry are developed to understand how colonial and classical Islamic epistemes converge and overlap in ways that conflate historical cultural and legal trajectories of khwāja sarā identity. This convergence and overlap create epistemic conflicts and tensions, which continue to entangle the khwāja sarā identity in the ongoing confusion of gender categories in Pakistan today. Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA) was used in an original and innovative way to examine a range of materials: colonial legal texts, contemporary legal, judicial texts, the transgender activist discourses within Pakistan and beyond, and ethnographic research on khwāja sarā. These materials are seen as interconnected and deeply contextualised, revealing the ways in which colonial configurations have persisted and continued to shape the contemporary khwāja sarā discourses. This study also introduces a cross-genre approach by bringing together law and fiction into conversation – genres that have never been examined together – demonstrating the ways in which law and culture shape each other. Based on my analysis along these three lines of inquiry, I argue in this thesis that the convergence and overlapping of colonial and classical Islamic epistemes produces gendered epistemic conflation with regard to sex, sexuality and desire of khwāja sarā in both colonial and postcolonial discourses. This concept can be defined as disparate ways of knowing which merge different cultural and historical frameworks without resolving the tensions or recognising the genealogies.” In the first line of enquiry, I argue that this epistemic conflation results from the displacement of classical Islamic legal categories (khunthā and liwāṭ) through the colonial legal discourse. In the second line of enquiry, I argue that the contemporary legal, judicial, activist and modernist/Islamic discourses reproduce this epistemic conflation in ways where the gender/sex distinctions collapse, and criminal and pathologizing narratives are mapped onto the Islamic and historical cultural categories (khunthā and khwāja sarā). Consequently, this epistemic conflation obscures the historical distinctness and cultural complexity of the khwāja sarā. In the third line of enquiry, I argue that the selected media representations perpetuate these epistemic conflations by reinscribing stereotypes that were the outcome of the colonial machination, and by supporting the contemporary transgender legal gender categories, often translating them into characters and narratives that align with global transgender taxonomies. This study contributes to the study of Islam, gender and sexuality – particularly Khaled El-Rouayheb, Joseph Massad and Vanja Hamzic – that contends premodern Islamic/Muslim trajectories of understandings of sex, gender and sexuality are rooted in fluidity and complexity but also demonstrate that Western/European frameworks and epistemologies disrupt the Islamic/Muslim traditions/epistemologies. To this body of knowledge, I contribute the illustration and conceptualisation of the gendered epistemic conflation which emerges from the overlapping, and at times contradictory, frameworks of modern and pre-modern, Western and Islamic conceptions of gender and sexuality. Overall, this thesis recognises the need to reclaim epistemic distinctions. It argues that the complex and open model of sex, sexuality and desire of Islamic law and premodern Muslim traditions has the potential to contribute to rethinking of a cultural and legal gender model that accommodates legitimacy of homoerotic desires for all sexes, not just for the khunthā. This model provides an opportunity to avoid the polarising narratives that dominate the contemporary legal, cultural, Islamic and activist discourses, and instead proposes an approach that is historically, culturally and Islamically sensitive, and is conducive to addressing the needs of the khwāja sarā community.