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About this talk

The centrality of individual responsibility in South Asian and Islamic conceptions of justice is in some tension with the importance of the community in these traditions. How justice is operationalized in specific contexts allows an insight into the ways in which this tension plays out and the range of possibilities it allows. Focusing on the practice of jirga or community justice in the tribal areas of Pakistan I build upon anthropological research and oral histories to work through specific ideas about the individual and the community that structure these practices. In the process, I also make a methodological argument about the ways in which intellectual historians approach the study of ideas. Humeira Iqtidar is Professor of Politics in King's College London. Her research bring together postcolonial theory, critical political theory and Islamic thought with a focus on modern South Asia. Thematically, her research has been concerned with questions of justice and tolerance, the place of religion in contemporary political imagination, the politics of knowledge, and the legacies of colonialism. Methodologically, she has argued for greater interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary research. She has two books in production at the moment: a volume on Maududi's text Al Jihad fil Islam with the Cambridge Texts in History of Political Thought series, and a monograph titled Justice Beyond Rights: Haqq, Critical Theory and the Global South, also with Cambridge University Press.

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