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The work of time:

Abstract:
What is the work of time on a marriage, and how does it transform people as they struggle to
change and leave traces on others? Through reflections of middle-class women in Pakistan who
married men who did not share their religious aspirations, I focus on how difference is
negotiated and conceived in these marriages, and on the unexpected outcomes in the religious
outlook of both spouses. The work of time, articulated through the concept of sabar
(forbearance), emerges here as canvas for a confluence of human and non-human interventions,
influences and motivations, urging us to think of individual agency neither as autonomous
action as theorised in the liberal tradition, nor as wilful submission, as elaborated in Islamic
contexts. Rather, agency, the capacity to assert one’s own visions and hopes, depends on the
malleability and openness of persons to time, leaving those who desire change in others equally
exposed to transformation.

Key words: marriage, religious difference, everyday Islam, destiny, self-cultivation

What is the work of time on a marriage, and how does it transform people as they struggle to

change and leave traces on others? If time and contingency shape people, altering their

behaviour and of those around them, what does this mean for who they are as persons? I found

myself asking these questions as I listened to women in Lahore explain how they had been

ambivalent and hesitant about marrying men who did not share their own religious aspirations

and desires for a pious life. After a few years, however, some found that the religious outlook

of their spouses had shifted, and that they had become more observant and pious. Although

they did not deny that they had hoped for and actively sought this outcome, neither did they

not claim full responsibility for it. Deploying conceptions of sabar (forbearance), time was

used to both mark and explain shifts in attitudes as well as to speak of the contingencies that

had shaped their married life and relationship. But just as time had ‘worked’ on their husbands,

it also had not left the women unchanged in their own religious practices and beliefs. While

some found themselves with little time for prayer and learning, others found themselves in

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states that were in sharp contrast to their earlier desires and yearning for the future. Agency,

the capacity to assert one’s own visions and hopes, depends on the malleability and ‘openness’

(Mittermaier 2011, 2012) of persons to time, leaving those who desire change in others equally

exposed to transformation.

Openness, the sense that the actions of others act on and constitute the self, has been touched

upon in debates in various disciplines. In recent years, it has been central in Judith Butler’s

formulation of constitutive vulnerability (2004), an idea that emphasizes the interdependence

of subjects, ‘that the ties that we to others … compose’ (Butler 2004: 23). In anthropology, this

idea of relationality as constitutive of self has been long present in debates around personhood,

originally discussed largely in relation to non-western persons (LiPuma 1998, Strathern 1988,

Marriott 1976) and now viewed as a general feature of all selves (Osella and Osella 2004;

Englund and Leach 2000; Ewing 1990). My focus, however, is more on how these questions

have come up in discussions of agency in non-liberal contexts. More specifically, I reflect on

relationality in thinking about forms of agency that, as Mittermaier argues, are centred ‘neither

on acting against’ structures of power, as commonly theorised in the liberal tradition, ‘nor as

acting within them’ (2012:17), as elaborated by Saba Mahmood (2001, 2005). In her

ethnography of visitations and divinatory dreams within a Sufi community in Cairo,

Mittermaier emphasizes the centrality of an ‘openness’ to being ‘acted upon’ in the religious

lives of her interlocuters (2011, 2012). She thus speaks of a ‘more open and dialogically

constituted subject, one who is not only an agent but also a patient who is acted upon’

(Mittermaier 2011:86).

Here, I draw upon this notion and the openness of the subject and, like Mittermaier, write of

an environment where multiple forms of agency converge and foreshadow the centrality of

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individual action and intention. But the focus here, as in Mittermaier’s account, is not on an

openness to the Elsewhere – ‘(in)visible, the barzakh, the imaginary and the emergent’

(2011:56) but the various kinds of networks and interplay between divine agency and human

actions, and the interactions with and influence of others on self. Ultimately, the openness

described here is an openness towards time, in and through which these relations play out, and

the recognition and reliance on its capacity, even if unpredictably so, to transform, unravel and

make self and others. To understand how a person carves out a meaningful life in a world where

they have limited control, we need to decentre the individual as the seat of action.

I reflect upon these concerns of time, agency and personhood through the life-stories, accounts,

and experiences of young married women from upwardly mobile backgrounds in Lahore,

collected in fieldwork conducted in 2016-2017. Most of my interlocuters were in their twenties

or early thirties, some had recently wedded while others had already been married for several

years when we met. My focus on pious women marrying men who are not equally religious

reflects some of the ongoing trends in the broader demographic that is the focus of my

fieldwork. As I discuss more in the next section, my interlocuters belong to, what has been

broadly described, as ‘the new middle-class’ (Maqsood 2017) circles. There is a noticeable

trend towards piety and Islamic learning in these circles, but one that has disproportionately

more common in women than men. Within these circles, like in Pakistan more broadly, the

socioeconomic importance of marriage, especially for women is immense and arranged unions

remain the ‘norm’ (Author 2021, 2021b). Thus, many women often find themselves in matches

where their spouses do not share their religious aspirations.

More broadly, focusing on such marriages also allows me to reflect on how difference is

negotiated over time in such settings. Following recent perspectives, emanating from

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ethnographic work on South Asia, I treat difference as productive, in that it carries potentialities

for experimentation, ‘becoming’ and exchange even as it threatens to disrupt and break apart

(Gilmartin 2010; Ring 2006; Khan 2006, 2010, 2012). Given the security-centric frame that

predominates analyses of Islam in Pakistan, it is tempting to think of sectarian differences as

imploding into violence. Yet in my fieldwork, I routinely come across families where some

members follow a particular movement, while others have opted for a different sect. However,

although these differences may occasionally erupt into estrangement or threats of violence,

they are, for the most part, ongoing and open-ended negotiations between people and families,

and in different areas of public and intimate life (Ring 2009). Marriage is one such intimate

site where difference does not collapse but becomes a means through which people relate to

one another, evaluate their relationships, and make sense of their lives. The generative

capacities of difference, here, are not located in extraordinary encounters (Khan 2006),

moments, and figures or in (the spectre of) spectacular violence (Das 1995, 2007), but within

the mundane, in the very ordinariness of women in South Asia being expected to ‘adjust’

(Uberoi and Tyagi 1994) in married life.

The ethnographic focus of this argument is on selfhood, marriage and relationality but it is

enmeshed within the ambit of Islam, both in terms of my interlocuters’ religious influences and

the theoretical debates that are engaged with and addressed. While some have critiqued, what

they view, as a singular focus on piety and self-discipline by pointing towards fragmentation

and conflict (Soares and Osella 2009; Schielke 2009, 2015; Schielke and Debevec 2015),

others have been sceptical of this criticism, viewing their emphasis on the ‘everyday’ as

undermining non-liberal subjectivities (Fadil and Fernando 2015). My interest in my

interlocuters’ religious pursuits and sabar does not privilege a ‘disciplinary’ analytic and, nor

do I, in tracing their lapses or shifts over time, take an ‘everyday Islam’ approach (Fadil and

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Fernando 2015; Scielke 2015). Rather, following Menin’s call for placing the ‘everyday and

the transcendent’ (Menin 2020:517) in the same conceptual frame, I attend to how the notion

of sabar inflects the ordinary tasks of domestic life, chance events and contingencies take on

deeper meaning as my interlocuters reflect on their marriage. The ethnography thus remains

mindful of the emphasis on an individual relationship with Allah noticeable in new forms of

piety. But it broadens the scope to include interactions and relations with others, viewing self-

cultivation as a process that depends on influences from kin and affine as well as on the

workings of larger processes and events, sometimes interpreted as destiny. In this sense, it

reinserts both my interlocuters and the study of Islam within wider networks and relationships

that shape them.

The next section offers a broader picture of the intersections between socioeconomic mobility,

new forms of piety and the centrality of marriage for women from new middle-class

backgrounds. The discussion then turns towards an openness of time, and a reliance on sabar

to transforms lives, and the limits, ambivalences and the unexpectedness of the transformations

that occur.

Piety, marriage and becoming

Sameen was in her late twenties when we first met, and had been married for six years, with

two small children.1 She had a graduate degree in economics, but did not work, while her

husband, Haider, was a policeman. When they had first got married, Sameen had been

ambivalent about the prospect. Raised in a family that she herself called ‘traditionally

religious’, in the sense that her parents were observant of most Islamic precepts but not learned

in such matters. Inspired by her aunt, who had become a Quran schoolteacher, Sameen had

started reading the Quran to ‘understand our faith better’ and was keen to marry someone who

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shared her religious aspirations. But none of the suitors seemed suitable in this regard - ‘it was

important for me that a person observed the rituals of Islam (prayer, fasting etc.) and understood

their meaning’. Her parents, meanwhile, anxious not to delay her marriage were putting

considerable pressure on her to choose from the available proposals. Her aunt, reminding her

that marriage pleases Allah, advised that rather than not marry at all, she should consider

someone whose heart was open to His message (c.f. Nolte 2020). Ultimately, Sameen accepted

a proposal from Haider, who was not observant of the daily rituals but, as she described, ‘had

a good heart and was kind and open towards all’.

Sameen’s dilemma highlights the entanglements and tensions between desires for pious

becoming, familial obligations and practical concerns faced by many young middle-class

women in urban Pakistan. Over the last two decades, there has been a general rise in personal

piety across genders in Pakistan, but one that is particularly noticeable amongst women.

Although women were traditionally excluded from religious learning and much of the focus

was on men, there has been a rise of Islamic movements centred on (and often led by women)

across the Muslim world. Within the upwardly-mobile urban families that I focused my

fieldwork around, almost all women have – at least at some point in their lives – attended dars

(Quran study circles) gatherings, while a few have completed full courses and diplomas from

Quran schools. In practice, not everyone who seeks religious guidance is actively or equally

committed to cultivating Islamic ethics. There are, instead, a range of attitudes; there are some

who are actively attempting to bring their daily life strictly in line with prescribed practices,

others who attempt for some time and then lapse and yet more who plan to become more

observant someday but have not yet reached such as status. The overall environment though is

one where there is greater observance of Islamic practices amongst women, and the presence

of greater possibilities for, what Naveeda Khan terms, ‘Muslim becoming’ (Khan 2012).

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The increased emphasis on piety has not, however, reduced the social importance of marriage

nor provided greater choice to women in such matters. In other parts of the Muslim world, and

especially in diaspora contexts, the prevalence of female-led and centred Islamic movements

has led to increased autonomy in marital matters as women assert their religious knowledge to

counter parental decisions and practices, that they view as, steeped in ‘tradition and culture’

(Liberatore 2016, 2017; Hoque 2019). The picture in Pakistan is more mixed. Although Islamic

learning has given authority to advise and give opinions, much of it is confined to other women

and usually of the same age. Amongst my interlocuters and, more broadly, in the Quran schools

dars study circles that I have attended, the duty upon all women to marry and raise a family is

rarely questioned.

Teachers and sermon-givers place great emphasis not just on getting but staying married,

urging women to practice sabar in the face of marital strife and pointing towards the ills in

societies where there are many broken families. In line with traditional mainstream Islamic

discourses, teachers and learned women all talk of the importance of getting married young to

avoid temptation and propagate marriage as an act that pleases Allah is part of the way of

Prophet (Sunnah). In situations where women are unable to find a match that is in line with

their religious ideals, they are usually counselled, as Sameen was to accept the proposal that is

available. Similarly, those in unhappy marriages are advised to stay together for the sake of the

children and to remain open to possibilities of positive change in their marital life in the future.

The religious insistence on forming and maintaining a marriage dovetails with wider

socioeconomic pressures. For middle-class women, marriage not only marks social adulthood

but is also means for securing an economic future. Although educated, often to bachelors or

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masters level, most women in these circles do not work outside the house and are largely

dependent on male affine.2 More broadly, in the new middle-class groups that I work with, a

combination of increased desires for consumption and an uncertain economic environment has

led to greater dependence on family and joint living (author 2021a: 96, 2021b; see also de Neve

2016). Many of the families I interact with are involved in small businesses and, in a larger

environment of little state support, rely on collective family investment for start-up and running

costs. Meanwhile, typical middle-class professions, such as administrative posts or

professional positions (doctors, lawyers, engineers) in state institutions, rarely come with the

income and privileges that can support such a lifestyle. Those who are involved in state

employment or in other professions augment their income through investment in urban

property, which also requires collective investment. It is through living together and family

support that individuals achieve success in their entrepreneurial ventures and are also able to

enjoy the pleasures of their success. In these circumstances, it is important for my female

interlocuters to marry into families that can provide economic support and, more importantly,

to maintain social relations with different members.

Thus, although pious women place immense importance on a suitably religious partner, these

aspirations sometimes conflict with other concerns, such as socioeconomic mobility and family

obligations, or are not realised due to lack of choices. Like Sameen, another interlocuter, Hania,

had been keen to marry someone who shared her religious convictions. She had finished a

bachelors degree in Islamic studies and had also completed a diploma from a madrasa – like

her family, she was observant of the traditions precepts of Ahl-e-Sunnat (locally called

Barelwi), a sect that gives centrality to Sufi elders and shrines.3 In the absence of any viable

proposals, Hania had started teaching Islamic Studies in a small school which gave her

something to do, but she and her family remained concerned and worried about her marriage

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prospects. The few proposals she did get were of men who lived abroad, which her father did

not want to entertain as he was against sending her outside Pakistan. When finally, they

received a proposal from a family that belonged to the same sect, with the boy well-employed

in the local courts, Hania felt that she had to proceed. Another interlocuter, Alia, now a

housewife in her late twenties, had also been persuaded to marry her first cousin due to lack of

other options and a sense of duty towards her father, who was keen that she marry his sister’s

son.

While some women are compelled to make marital decisions that sit uneasily with their

religious goals, many others turn to Islam precisely as a solution to the difficulties or delays

that they encounter in their marriages. In accounts of how and when they decided to come to

dars or became more observant, a broken engagement or general delays in getting married are

often cited as a triggering reason. The centrality of marriage in establishing social and

economic security for women, not to mention the social taboo and lack of support (Javaid

2019), means that few see divorce as an option when faced with an unhappy alliance. In such

situations, many find both solace and distraction in cultivating Islamic virtues. Tania and

Kaukab, whose stories I turn towards later in the article, had started attending Quran school in

the face of marital difficulties – the former’s husband had an extramarital affair and the latter’s

spouse had a longstanding drug addiction that ultimately led to his demise. Attending dars

gatherings and seeking advice from and counsel of Quran teachers offered them not only a

sense of solidarity but also hope for a different future from their present. For all these

interlocuters, as with many others that I encountered, marriage represents another form of

becoming that offers new possibilities, and it both merges and conflicts with pious aspirations.

Concepts of time and destiny, towards which I now turn, play an important role in how these

tensions are mediated.

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Destiny, openness and time

One day, as she reflected on how she has changed over the years, Sameen said, ‘people assume

that faith is standard, unchanging, but that is not the case’. She had a graduate degree in

economics and, true to her training, drew me a graph when I said I did not understand her

meaning. ‘Look here,’ she said, labelling the vertical axis ‘faith’ and the horizontal ‘time’, ‘this

dot is you’. Pointing towards a point in the middle of the graph, she elaborated, ‘you don’t stay

the same, as time goes on, you either move up or down’. Recent studies on destiny have pointed

towards its ‘malleable fixity’ (Elliot and Menin 2018; Homola 2018), which lends life both

with certainty and a preordained limit, and an uncertainty about when this truth will reveal

itself and how it will interact with human actions and strategies. This unknowability often

produces a ‘labour of hope’ and ‘anticipated actions’ to help realise the future (Elliot 2016) or

to thwart and manipulate its intended course (Homola 2018; Elliot and Menin 2018). For my

interlocuters, alongside a ‘labour of hope’, uncertainty about the future that destiny holds for

them is also a cause of unease. Both these aspects – hope and trepidation – are present in

Sameen’s graph, which suggests an ambivalence about the impact of the passage of time on a

person.

Destiny, as others have also noted, ‘reveals itself with and through time’ (Elliot and Menin

2018: 295; see also Homola 2018; Palmié and Stewart 2016). As depicted in Sameen’s graph,

time carries both possibilities for becoming and of unravelling of plans and aspirations. At the

time Sameen made this graph for me, her tone was almost rueful, as we had been discussing

how she was not as actively engaged in Quranic learning as before. But when she was getting

married, the uncertainties of time and destiny, and how they could transform a person, had also

held promise. She had seen Ali as someone with an ‘open heart’ and had hopes that perhaps,

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with time, Allah would turn him towards Islam. In similar vein, after accepting the proposal,

Hania had planned that she would help her husband’s family become more observant by

reading the Quran to them every morning and encouraging them to pray. As I discuss later,

although there were changes over time, neither of their plans worked quite as they had

imagined, uncertainty created an open-endedness about the future that allowed them to hope

even as they feared that this may be the beginning of an unravelling.

Sameen’s remarks reflect both a sense of individual responsibility for cultivating piety and an

acceptance – reluctantly so – that not everything is in human control. In her seminal work on

the mosque movement in Cairo, Saba Mahmood urges us to think of forms of agency that lie

outside of liberal contexts and, especially, are centred not on resisting but operating within

structures of power and authority (2001, 2005). In other words, she highlights that the desire

to cultivate piety and a state of submission reflects a form of agency concerned with inhabiting

norms. Mahmood’s intervention is largely focused on challenging the universalising

assumption, stemming from liberal political theory, of agency as resistance, but it can be

extended to explore forms of agency that, as Amira Mittermaier puts it, ‘that are centred neither

on acting against or acting within’ (2012: 7) structures of power. Mittermaier’s interlocuters

are acted upon by the ‘Elsewhere’; a believer can only invite or prepare a dream, but it is not

in their control whether or when it will come to them. Sameen’s belief in individual

responsibility to maintain piety reflects a desire for submission but her rueful acceptance makes

her different from the ‘self-contained’ subjects (Mittermaier 2011: 5) that Mahmood talks of

who intentionally cultivate themselves. Sameen’s remarks betray an openness of self, a sense

that agency does not always lie in the human but also the metaphysical realm.

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An attitude of ‘openness’ and acceptance of being ‘acted upon’ is common in everyday life in

Pakistan. Within pious circles, irrespective of denominational leanings, there is a widespread

belief that although it is incumbent on all to attempt closeness with Allah, only those who are

destined for this connection will succeed. The sense that not all is in human control also plays

into the actions and fears of those who may not be particularly religious, and nor is it limited

to matters of religiosity. In fact, it is particularly noticeable in matters of romance and marriage.

Even as they practice a ‘labour of hope’ by entering and encouraging romances with men they

think are eligible husbands, many women worry about what the future holds for their

relationship. While such concerns often make people try to seek knowledge of the future, by

doing an istikhara for instance, many also avoid it in case it reveals that the match is

undesirable.4 The limitations of human control are also visible in processes around arranged

marriages, and the uncertain directions that life-courses take are accepted as destiny, locally to

as qismet or nasīb. As in other Muslim contexts, even as they run careful background checks

on prospective spouses and their family, everyone insists that, ultimately, conjugal and

marriage futures depend on destiny (see Schielke 2015b: 202). In most upwardly-mobile

households, there is increasing space for premarital communication (especially over the phone)

between intended spouses and such actions are, at times, even encouraged. Yet many of the

women I became acquainted with choose to have limited contact, arguing that since the course

that the union will take depends on their qismet, there is little point in getting to know someone

now and that it can until after marriage.

It can be argued here, with more than a grain of truth, that perhaps destiny is used as a

euphemism for making the best out of limited choices. As Schielke writes, freedom is often

absent from the language of destiny (Schielke 2015: 203). Certainly, given the high stakes of

marriage, less communication before the wedding reduces the chances of any

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misunderstanding that may lead to it being called off. The larger expectation for women to

‘adjust’ (Uberoi and Tyagi 1994) to the demands of their new homes, many feel that they may

as well delay getting to know their husbands-to-be. For my interlocuters, as for women from

upwardly-mobile backgrounds more generally, there is sometimes no option but to accept the

cards laid out for them – succinctly put by Alia, when explaining her decision to accept her

cousin’s proposal, ‘this was my qismet, there was nothing else to do’. Viewing it as a kind of

fatalistic acceptance, however, does not capture the richness of possibilities that emerge with

an ‘openness’ towards time and the work that it does on selves and others. An attitude of

‘openness’ is used to negotiate the absence of any significant freedom and choice,

simultaneously calling for an acceptance of the inevitable while opening the potentiality of

change in the future. Going back to Sameen’s example, the very same ‘openness’ that she had

feared was making her less pious had also given her reason to think that her husband would

change over time. The work of time, manifested in the act of sabar, is a relational space where

individual agency and predestined futures intersect with the presence, influence, and destinies

of others.

Sabar, agency and change

The ‘labour of hope’ (Elliot 2016) in the marriages of my interlocuters involved the practise of

sabar, described by Veena Das as a ‘shadowing of time’, acting more ‘like a stalker than a

rebel’ (Das 2007: 87). Commonly used in Urdu and Punjabi to mean ‘patience’, sabar is widely

used in South Asia, in and out of Muslim contexts, to talk of forbearance in the face of difficulty

and suffering (Das 2017; Queshi 2013; 2018). It is a marker of virtuous comportment and

personhood, predominantly amongst women but, in some contexts, also men. Although there

is a wider gendered expectation of all women demonstrating sabar in married life, for my pious

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interlocutors, the idea that one’s spouse is predestined inflects marital difficulties as a test

meted out by Allah.

This is how Alia viewed the difficulties she faced in the initial years of her marriage. She had

married her cousin – while her own nuclear family were very observant, with all the women

veiling, her husband’s side of the family were, what she described, ‘liberal’. The marriage had

taken place in the aftermath of an altercation between Alia’s father and her aunt; to assure her

brother of her affection towards him, the sister had wanted her son to marry his daughter. Even

though Alia never said this, I suspect that the heart of the altercation was that the family was

finding it difficult to find a suitor for Alia and the father was upset that the sister was not

offering her son. Her husband had not wanted to marry a religious girl but felt obligated to

listen to his mother. Soon after the wedding, he demanded that she stop veiling. He told her

that that he had ‘married a woman, not a Maulana’ and that he had no interest in a wife that

looked like one.

Alia resented his demand, but partly afraid that he may ask her to leave otherwise and partly

out of a sense of duty, she acquiesced. ‘Keeping your husband happy keeps Allah happy, the

Quran tells women to abide her husband’, she told me as she elaborated how she slowly got

used to going out in public without a veil. Alia admitted that, occasionally, she would get upset

and fight with her husband but, overall, she silently agreed to his demands, all the while praying

to Allah for something to change. Similarly, Hania’s husband would get annoyed when she

asked him to observe the five-time daily prayers and was dismissive of her religious

sensibilities. After a while, she stopped saying anything and quietly went about her daily tasks.

‘I would feel so annoyed’, she told me, ‘But I never let anyone see it, doing all the housework,

[his clothes] always pressed and ready’.

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The women quietly complied to all the demands upon them, but their silence also afforded

them to access to spaces of selected privacy, part of the ‘practical logic of kinship’ (Das 2007)

that allowed for the maintenance of religious difference. For instance, Sameen’s in laws

regularly held milād gathering, commemorating the Prophet, that she personally considered

bidat (innovation) but did not want to offend anyone by refusing to attend. Whenever there was

a milād in the house, Sameen would come up with an elaborate reason not to attend; for

instance, her infant son was unwell or that she herself was ill. She reckoned that others probably

knew what she was doing but her mother-in-law would always accept her excuses and never

said anything. Such forms of accommodating differences are possible only for they do not upset

established hierarchies and authority in the household.

The quiet waiting of sabar opens up such spaces, but it does not end there. It is also

underpinned by a hopeful expectation that their sabar will result in something. Although the

rewards of any act that pleases Allah can be meted out in this life or in hereafter, much of the

focus in Islamic discourses and discussions, especially in relation to suffering, is on the latter.

Amongst my informants, although no one denied that this world is of no significance compared

to the one that awaits, the emphasis was very much on this life, right now. ‘Sabar can soften

even a heart of stone’, Hania would frequently say to me and, similarly, Alia often mentioned

‘witnessing the sabar of someone else can affect the other … it can create an immense impact’.

Other interlocutors too would talk of the unpredictable and surprising ways in which Allah

could reward sabar. In this sense, the waiting of sabar is not passive. Instead, it is charged with

anticipation, much like the uncertainty of return described by Bourdieu (1990: 98), even if the

form, shape, and timing of it remains unknown.

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The practice of sabar emerges here neither as active self-cultivation through submission, as

Mahmood has argued, nor as an autonomous agency of individual self-interest. Neither does it

fully fit with Mittermaier’s orientation towards the Elsewhere as, even though it extends

beyond ethical self-cultivation and beckons to divine agency, it remains very much tethered to

worldly relationships and interactions. To take a cue from Qureshi’s work on chronic illness

and care among British Pakistani women, where she deploys Mattingly’s concept of ‘moral

laboratory’, sabar is not simply about ‘internal efforts’ but in play with ‘something more

external, more inter-subjective, the world of social action’ (Mattingly in Qureshi 2018: 206).

Qureshi’s interlocutors actively cultivated sabar, viewing their suffering as both a test from

Allah and a path for achieving greater closeness to Him. Yet, in the ‘long haul of the everyday’

(Quershi 2018: 205), they also expected and yearned for some kind of acknowledgement and

recognition of their suffering. Sabar, she then argues, represents a form of moral and ethical

becoming where ‘habitable routines are experimented with, invented and revised in response

to challenging circumstances’ (Qureshi 2018: 206).

There are similar entanglements here, between efforts directed towards the self and those

oriented outward. While Qureshi’s interlocutors look towards others for recognition, the

women in my ethnography strive for transformation, in and through others, by self-making. At

the same time as they anticipate and hope that their self-cultivation elicits a response in and

from human and non-human actors, they deny their own agency when it does occur. There is a

simultaneous acknowledgement and effacement of the self. In the six years since they got

married and Alia was told to stop veiling, her husband’s own preferences and ideas started

changing. Making frequent use of the expression ‘waqt ke sāth’, literally meaning ‘with time’,

she explained how her husband slowly started to become more religious and, presently, prayed

regularly and even sported a beard. Alia had been praying all these years for him to change,

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saying to Allah that he had to save her from becoming distant from Him and to give her a way.

Meanwhile, she kept trying to educate her husband on Islam, showing him clips of sermons

and reminding him of the temporariness of this world, efforts that there – it seemed at the time

– largely dismissed by him. She found unexpected support in her mother-in-law, who had been

once inclined towards Islam like Alia but had not lived up to her aspirations. She was

sympathetic towards Alia, often chiding her son for not listening to his wife more. Meanwhile

members of the faith renewal movement Tablighi Jamaat started frequenting the market where

her husband owned a shop and preached Islam.

In describing these events, Alia was both at the centre of this narrative of change yet, at the

same time, not directly responsible. ‘Waqt ne apnā khel dikhaya’ (time showed its hand), she

reflected, ‘perhaps this was my husband’s destiny, Allah wanted this for him’. Later, she turned

to her own waiting and forbearance, ‘maybe my sabar softened his heart and opened it for

learning’. In our later conversations, she mentioned the forbearance of her mother-in-law, and

reflected on whether she was rewarded for the trials she had faced. Alia’s account both

acknowledges her efforts yet at the same time effaces them, pointing toward an uncertainty on

who acted, on whom and because of what. Her own efforts become diffused with those of

others – was it her prayers and sabar that Allah answered or had this always been predestined

from him? Was it her in-laws own histories that prompted them or her own sabar? There is an

acknowledgement, even a certain pride about what she has accomplished, but there is also a

deflection of responsibility towards human and non-human others. Agency is embedded in a

network of relations that presents itself over time.

Personhood and the work of time

17
It can be argued that the displacement of agency that I have described point towards the

gendered limitations on asserting an autonomous self, as also noted by Mody in India (2008:52)

and Spencer in Sri Lanka (1997: 705). This, of course, has relevance especially given that there

are few roles and positions that women can occupy in South Asia where the dominant model

of virtue is not of silent suffering and self-sacrifice. However, what I am suggesting here is a

form of self-making and personhood that is open to acting upon and being acted on by human

and non-human divine others (c.f. Spencer 1997). It speaks of a mode of action and existence

where the individual is decentred and multiple forms of agency converge (Mittermaier 2011),

but personal aspirations are not always forgotten. In the larger waiting and anticipation for

change induced through the actions of others, contingencies and external events take on special

significance, and are ‘seized upon to impose one’s own vision of truth’ (Das 2007: 85) and

aspirations for the self.

Much to her disappointment, Sameen’s husband took little notice of the emphasis she placed

on the daily rituals that, in her eyes, was an integral part of Muslim family life. Three years

ago, he was posted to a small town while Sameen and their two young children continued to

live in the joint family. Away from his young family, he began to realise that it is difficult to

impart moral guidance to children without them following from example and watching others.

‘My husband was always about the meaning behind things and did not give importance to the

act of prayer’, Sameen said, ‘but being away from us, and with young children, he realised that

all these abstract things mean nothing to kids, they get attached and exposed to religion through

the ritual’. To have more influence in his children’s life he started to pray more regularly,

especially in front of them. ‘He started wanting to have more of a presence in their lives, that

they should copy and follow him, so he prays in front of them so that they watch and do the

same’, she said. For Sameen, this change in her husband – caused through the contingency of

18
an out of city transfer – or the appearance of a faith renewal movement at Alia’s husbands shop

present themselves as fleeting opportunities to take up and assert one’s own hopes and desires

in a marriage. This is the work of time in married life-course; as Das argues, time is ‘not purely

represented’, but is an agent ‘that works on relationships, allowing to be interpreted, rewritten,

scratched over, as different social actors struggle to author stories’ (Das 2007: 67).

The work of time provides possibilities to carve out an individual and married future, rewriting

and crossing older histories and weaving new narratives of self-making and of bringing change

in others. In sharp contrast to Sameen’s linear depiction in her understanding of faith in her

graph, the practice of sabar involves multiple notions of time and temporality. In the narratives

of sabar, time is suspended as women wait for change and in the capacity of their patience to

erase previous histories and shape new paths. And, when change does occur, it often connects

older events – Alia’s mother-in-laws desire for pious living, for instance – with contemporary

happenings and new potentialities. The past, present and future exist simultaneously in these

moments. And, similar to Das’ account of histories and relations across generations being

drawn upon as couples negotiate differences in the present (Das 2010), differing temporalities

coexist and bear upon ordinary occurrences in the everyday of marital life. The practice of

sabar challenges progressive assumptions of time in that, although its direction is hopeful, it is

unpredictable and does not necessarily depend on actions within one’s control. Such a notion

of time both centres and decentres the individual; on the one hand, emphasizing the

responsibility on self to cultivate sabar and, on the other, dispelling the notion that the

individual is at the seat of choice and action.

Being open to being acted upon by others leaves a person exposed to the work and designs of

others over time. Ever since her husband has become more pious, he no longer stops Alia from

19
veiling. Alia often tells me that she will soon restart although, in the three years I have known

her, she has not made any attempt. Once when we were talking about her son’s schooling, she

told me that when she goes to collect him, she notices how all the other mothers are dressed.

‘Everyone is tip top, they all look modern, how will my son feel when his mother is in a burqā’.

She immediately explains that this is not something that will stop her from veiling in the future,

but she does reflect on it in relation to her husband’s life. He had also gone to a school where

very few children came from families that veiled, and his circle of friends were not

conservative. When he demanded that she stop veiling, he had spoken of how he did not want

to feel cut away from his social networks. Alia had been dismissive then but, speaking of her

son and how he would feel in school, she remembered her husband’s feelings. It was as if time

had worked to bring his vision forward and changed some of Alia’s own aspirations. Hania’s

persistent continuation of daily tasks of care and household work did perhaps soften the heart,

for her husband began to give greater credence to saints and sufi – often taking her to visit

shrines and pay their respect. But in the daily rhythms of the household, she herself became

laxer in her prayers. ‘I had planned that I will change all of them’, she said, ‘but living with

them, I too have become lazy’. Hania felt bad about these changes in herself and wondered if

‘this was my destiny’. ‘Perhaps,’ she said when we had last met, ‘something will happen with

time that will change all of us’.

The ambivalence of sabar

The unpredictability of sabar, however, is such that the manner of the change and its timing

can catch a person by surprise. It can transform a person so drastically that their past wishes,

desires and life becomes unrecognisable to them. This is what happened to Tania in the

aftermath of her husband’s infidelity. They had been married for ten years when Tania found

out that he was having an affair and wanted to leave her to marry the other woman. Devastated

20
by his betrayal and worried about her two children’s future, she was besides herself and did

not know where to turn. She was not very religious at the time, although she had always looked

with interest at the Quran school close to her children’s school and had thought that she would

perhaps visit it one day. In the weeks after learning of the affair, she would often drive around

mindlessly after dropping her children to school and found herself at the Quran school. Her

visits there became regular; at first, they were largely therapeutic as the teachers and students

there listened to her and offered solace but, later, she started attending the classes.

Tania would worry and cry all the time; she did not want to leave her husband and return to

her parents’ home, partially because she did not want to become a burden on them. Her father

had offered his support but Tania had been conscious that it was her brother who was the main

contributor to household expenses and that his wife would not welcome her addition. ‘As your

parents age, it is no longer their house, and you are beholden to your brother and his wife. It’s

her [brother’s wife] house and you are a guest, better to be miserable but at least be in your

own house’. Tania also held out hope that her husband would leave the other woman and love

her again. She told me that she was desperate for their life to go back to how it was and would

pray for that all the time. The teachers at the Quran school, in line with their views on the

sanctity of marriage, advised her against divorce and to try her best to avoid. They encouraged

her to practice sabar, and to not respond to any of his taunts and demands for a divorce but just

to quietly go about her daily work and look after children and house. Tania followed this advice

as best as she could; she supressed her anger and tears when her husband disappeared for hours

and never asked him where he had been and, when he brought up getting a divorce, she would

remain quiet or just tell him to think about the children. All this while, she prayed day and

night, asking Allah for strength and for her husband to come back to her.

21
After a year of living like this, Tania got her wish in that not only did the affair end but her

husband began to regret the hurt he had caused his family. He begged Tania to forgive him,

which she did, but she no longer felt the happiness and satisfaction she had thought she would

feel at his return. Thinking about the time, she said ‘one thing I realised [in her religious

journey] is that in moments of great distress and pain is that you stand alone in front of Allah,

there is no one, it is just you’. It is this knowledge, entrenched in her through sabar she

practiced in the face of all the hurt and indignity, that has transformed how she feels about

many of the things that previously mattered to her. ‘I am happy that my husband is back and

that he is with us [her and the children], and I know that his sorrow over what happened is

genuine’, Tania admitted, ‘but I no longer feel the same pleasure from my married life as I

once did’. She tried to look after her husband, children and her home as she used to but her

main focus these days was her relationship with Allah, which she cultivated through daily

prayers and reading the Quran. When she confided in one of the teachers at the Quran school

that there are times when she feels irritated when her husband makes demands on her time, she

was told that it was part of her duty as a Muslim to lead a fulfilling family life. ‘Some days, I

think that who was that woman two years ago’, she said, as she thought of how she had changed

… ‘perhaps, with time, I will feel differently [about my marriage]’.

The work of time, here, is relational, giving Tania what she had desired in that her husband

returned to their family. But it also acted on her in the process, bringing about an internal

transformation and a new sense of purpose, so much so that she no longer felt satisfied in her

family life. Agency, her experience reminds us, is not the same as control as sabar opens a

person to unexpected outcomes and change. In other words, sabar draws a person into the

influence of others, whether it is the past experiences and habits of spouses and family members

or to god’s will. For my interlocuters, sabar is closely entwined with individual aspirations but

22
it is also about opening themselves to and accepting god’s plans for them. This, as Tania’s

ambivalence about her situation suggests, sometimes sits uncomfortably with individual

aspirations and intentionality – both of which are not absent in the their understanding of self

– but is recognized as part of being acted upon. The work of time, then, is as much about the

interpretation of events as it is about their occurrence, an aspect that I draw out more through

the following story.

While time had worked an intense transformation on Tania, it felt that change had perhaps

come too late for Kaukab. Married to a distant cousin, Kaukab had an unhappy marriage and

had blamed everyone around her for the state of affair. Her husband had a drug addiction,

which his family was aware of but had never mentioned when arranging his marriage with

Kaukab. When Kaukab found out, a couple of months after the wedding, she – understandably

so – felt betrayed by both his family for not disclosing and her own for not finding out more

about the groom. Angry and bitter about the situation she found herself, Kaukab frequently

fought with her husband and locked herself in her room for hours to avoid seeing him or other

members of the joint family with whom they resided. One evening, almost a year into their

marriage, her mother-in-law banged on her door, imploring her to come out and see her

husband who, she said, had come home semi-conscious and looked dangerously unwell.

Kaukab ignored her pleas, assuming that it was just another attempt to get them to talk and

instead went to sleep. She was woken up a few hours later by more banging on the door and

given the horrific news that her husband had passed away. In the months that followed, Kaukab

was overcome with grief and feelings of guilt. She would spend her days sitting listlessly in

the same spot for hours. Eventually, with the encouragement of a family friend, she turned

toward prayer as a way of finding solace. When I met her, two years since her husband had

died, she was enrolled in a course at a Quran school.

23
‘My husband was not a bad man … he was kind … and he had needed strength’, Kaukab

reflected, as she recounted her life story. ‘He had even told me several times that he needed

my support to get out of this habit, but I was too angry to listen’ she said, with regret. She felt

that if, instead of being angry, she had helped him then he could have perhaps overcome his

addiction. It was only now that she understood that the answer to her predicament had been

sabar, not bitterness. She was filled with sadness that she had not come out of her room and

that he died thinking that she did not even care enough to see him. She no longer felt angry

with her family for choosing such a life for her and, in fact, told me of how the support of both

her and her deceased husband’s relatives gave her enormous strength. Instead, she thought of

the marriage as her destiny (nasīb), and that it perhaps could have had a different outcome had

she acted differently and with sabar. But although she always talked of sabar as the best

recourse for her predicament in the past as well as for her grief and overwhelming sadness, her

feelings about what it entailed and the promise it held for the future revealed a sense of

ambivalence.

Once, when discussing how becoming close to Allah had helped her in understanding her loss,

she was speaking of how He could transform a life in a matter of minutes when she suddenly

fell silent and I saw that her eyes were filled with tears. Wanting to comfort her, I said that

perhaps her life would change for the better in the future. She shrugged in response, and said,

‘yes, perhaps … but what is the point of change coming now, when so much has been lost’. I

was not certain whether she was referring to the future or that the change in her had come too

late to change her past. And neither could I tell whether her next comment referred to the state

of all humans in relation to Allah’s plans or to her own position, of a young window living

with her in laws, ‘what is there for us to do but do sabar’. When we spoke about this again,

24
she only talked of sabar as a way of living as we waited and prayed for Allah to reveal His best

plans for us. In the face of ambivalence of what life has to offer, sabar is almost akin to a

postponement or buying of time.

Kaukab’s struggle in coming to terms what had happened suggests that agency lies not just in

the passage of time but also in what is revealed and how that is interpreted over a life-course.

Interpreting life events and changes as part of one’s destiny and to learn from them opens

possibilities for taking charge of a narrative and to carve out a purposeful life. In taking this

line of argument, my intention is not to offer an intellectualised version of or an apology for

the common gendered expectation in Pakistan on women to accept their lot in life without

complaint. Nor is to normalise the patriarchal demand for submissiveness. Instead, my aim has

been to draw out, in a social world of unequal power relations and limited choices, the

possibilities that exist and are taken up to build a life. Far from being passive, an opiate in the

Marxian sense that it quells dissent, sabar is active and charged with anticipation of change,

even as the shape and timing of it remains unpredictable. In the stories and perspectives shared,

time – articulated through sabar – is multi-faceted, talked of sometimes in linear terms but

often experienced differently. Chance events, contingencies, interpreted through the lens of

destiny, lend to the agency of sabar and provide moments that can be seized to rewrite the past

and to, as Das puts it ‘author one’s own story’ (Das 2007: 67).

Sabar as a non-liberal form of agency reveals a complex interplay between self and

relationality. Although focused on and requiring individual self-cultivation and, in this respect,

about developing a unique relationship with Allah, it is not confined to ‘wilful submission’

(Mahmood 2001, 2005). In its acceptance of being ‘acted upon’ (Mittermaier 2011, 2012), it

reveals an openness of self, not just to divine agency but also to the work of time. Sabar is

undergirded by a larger trust in an ethics of waiting, a form of self-making that seeks to carve

25
an individual future and narrative, but through and with the presence of others, and with an

acknowledgement that these outcomes are never predictable or within human control. In these

circumstances, marriage represents a form of endless becoming, creating new possibilities of

making oneself and others, while introducing dangers of these plans unravelling.

26
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1
Throughout this article, I have used pseudonyms for people and also changed some identifying details. My
interlocutors spoke in Urdu, Punjabi, and English. All translations are my own.
2
Although women do not make any economic contribution to the household, the duty of maintaining social
relations within the family falls upon them which, given the centrality of kin support, is important ‘work’, although
no one ever calls it that. One of the reasons that women are reluctant to work outside the house is that they do not
want the double burden of a financial contribution as well as these duties. See
https://www.dawn.com/news/1468369.
3
In scholarship on Sunnī Islam, fiqh refers to the four schools of jurisprudence – Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki and
Hanbali. In Pakistan, most people belong to Hanifi fiqh but use the term to refer to denominations within them –
particularly Deobandi and Barelwi.
4
Istikhara is a prayer recited in order to ask for divine advice on a decision, which is revealed in a dream.

30