On the Other Side of the Rainbow?: Khwaja Sira Pieties, Politics, Performances, and the Tablighi Jamaʿat

This chapter follows khwaja sira-trans engagements with the transnational Islamic missionary Tablighi Jamaʿat, which has risen in visibility alongside Pakistan's transgender rights movements (2009-) entailing repentance on the NGO-madrassa circuit, through to couplings of preaching and dancing. Foregrounding tablighi khwaja sira embodied navigations through the shifting scripts of religious reform and liberal-secular rights, the author shows that khwaja sira people are finding a multiplicity of pious, political and/or aesthetic possibilities through their tablighi affiliations. While these movements have sometimes been disparaged variously by religious and secular adherents, the chapter invites us to consider a broad spectrum of khwaja sira pious agencies, desires and doings that signal elsewheres to thinking religiously and queerly.