Abstract

In Northern Pakistan, Nizari Isma’ili and Twelver Shi’i communities use painted or arranged rocks to write monumental messages on the Karakoram Mountain range. On one side of the Hunza River, and the Gojal Valley, mountain writing celebrates the continuation of the Imamat, a supra-national institution led by the forty-ninth Imam. Messages congratulate the Nizari Isma’ili community on experiencing Didar, an event that puts them in the presence of “Hazar” or present Imam. In Nagar, on the other side of the river, Twelver Shi’i communities signal their loyalty to their own system of Imamat, which paused at the hidden Twelfth Imam, Mahdi, whose return promises to restore justice to a world bereft of it. Nizari Isma’ili and Twelver Shi’i mountain writing is in direct conversation, continuing a long-standing dialogue between the communities over the relationship between the temporal present, presence, and divinely appointed authority.

Usually elided in favour of burdensome pasts or anticipated futures, the present is an understudied area of the humanities and social sciences. Drawn from ongoing ethnographic research, I test several ways of understanding the present(s) to which Nizari Isma’ili and Twelver Shi’i mountain writing lay claim. First, by understanding the mountains themselves as a media form that brings with their contemporaneity a sense of precarity and impermanence. Second, by examining the materiality of disclosure and guidance among Nizari Isma’ilis in Gojal. Third, I look to some of the ways that these Nizari Isma’ili and Twelver Shi’i communities distinguish between one another’s present concerns through the issue of mourning.

About the speaker: Timothy P.A. Cooper is an anthropologist studying religion, ethics, and comparative media in contemporary Pakistan. Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, his first book, Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace is out with Columbia University Press in 2024 and was awarded the Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion