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X-WR-CALNAME:Seduced by God or Man? Framing Religious Conversions and Women
 ’s Desire in Pakistan
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260617T003228Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_48216481694052
DTSTART:20250414T161500Z
DTEND:20250414T171500Z
DESCRIPTION:Talk by Ghazal Asif (Anthropology\, Lahore University of Manage
 ment Science)\n\n \n\nFor the past decade\, the press in Pakistan has rema
 ined rife with stories of the kidnapping\, forcible conversion to Islam\, 
 and marriages of young Hindu women at the hands of Muslim men. Women’s r
 ights and minority advocacy groups have demanded a state-led response\, bu
 t two attempts at legislation have already failed. In courts\, legal redre
 ss requires a clear\, visible difference between forcible abduction and wh
 at is termed “free will” elopement. However\, these matters are compli
 cated further when the very nature of Hindu women’s desires appears inde
 terminate. Accusations that young Hindu women have been seduced (warghalan
 a) into conversion by Muslim men compete with claims that such women leave
  their natal homes upon becoming irrepressibly attracted to Islam and the 
 Prophet. Drawing on an archive of conversions\, elopements\, and love affa
 irs that I have been collecting since 2014\, in this talk I problematize r
 eductive binaries that focus only on the presence or absence of “free wi
 ll”\, to ask how hierarchies of il/licit desire feed into the public que
 stion of just who can claim control of young Hindu women’s bodies in Pak
 istan. I argue that the seeming unknowability of women’s desires undersc
 ores the entangled sexual and religious stakes at the heart of these event
 s.\n\n \n\nGhazal Asif Farrukhi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology 
 at LUMS\, Lahore. In 2024-25\, she is a fellow at the Women’s Studies in
  Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Ghazal is currently completi
 ng a book manuscript provisionally titled Hindu Intimacies Amidst Pakistan
 ’s Muslim State\, which focuses on how Hindu women navigate ritual\, dev
 otional\, and social boundaries while constituting the interface for the s
 tate-led reform of religiously minoritized communities. She also writes on
  the politics of caste emancipation in Pakistan. Her research has been pub
 lished in American Ethnologist\, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies\, and South 
 Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
GEO:42.447296;-76.482254
LOCATION:Uris Hall\, G08
SUMMARY:Seduced by God or Man? Framing Religious Conversions and Women’s 
 Desire in Pakistan
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/seduced-by-god
CATEGORIES:Lecture
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