Suvaid Yaseen helps explain the religion and politics of the Kashmir Valley
Our Bureau
Providence, RI
A Kashmiri scholar, Suvaid Yaseen has been awarded the admired Joukowsky Prize for his thesis at Brown University in Rhode Island. The thesis titled ‘Islamic Intersections: Religion and Politics in Kashmir in the Long Twentieth Century’ brings out the lives and ideas of Kashmiri poets, teachers, ulema (Muslim scholars), and activists.
Yaseen’s thesis examines the Kashmir Valley, a beautiful mountainous area at the intersection of India, Pakistan, and China, and presents an innovative reassessment of one of the most severely contested regions in the world today.
Yaseen’s thesis is exemplary in terms of the fieldwork and skills needed to collate the data which includes a substantial amount of theoretical and historical information. He visited libraries and private archives throughout the world and studied many papers in Kashmiri, Urdu-Hindi, Persian, and Arabic. His archival research has discovered and established linkages to enable the use of Kashmir as an illustration of a different perspective on Islam, identity, and politics during a period of many major transformations.
“Working with five languages in small vernacular archives in a conflict zone, I consider his thesis ground-breaking as an intellectual history from below that demands a substantive rethinking of religious political imagination,” said associate professor of History, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar.
“Transforming the thesis into a book is the next big step. It involves a different kind of intellectual labor than drafting a thesis. I look forward to working through my ideas and writing over the coming years,” Yaseen said.
