In Queer Companions Kasmani examines the affective bonds between fakirs and Islamic saints in Sehwan, Pakistan, home to a historic site of pilgrimage for Sufis. The book shows how men, women, and khwaja-sara (transgender and non-binary individuals) establish this intimacy outside of the gender-specific norms of their society, thereby distancing themselves from their otherwise predestined roles as father/mother, husband/wife, or son/daughter for example. Based on long-term ethnographic research and informed by queer studies and affect theory, Kasmani’s work asks how these relationships open up the possibility of shaping intimate bonds with the saints and enable modes of queer world-making. Within the national context of Pakistan, where shrines and religious sites are inseparable from state power and its infrastructures, the intimacy with saints that Kasmani describes challenges conventional ideas about official historical records and public forms of affect. The AQA’s announcement of the award winners was effusive in its praise of Kasmani’s work: “This book is gripping from the first page to the last, and, for the committee, unlike anything we have read before.”

Omar Kasmani received his doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies in 2016. He then went on to work as a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 1171 “Affective Societies – Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds,” focusing on questions of embodied emotions, affective belonging in the context of migration, as well as religious diversity and governance in Berlin. In October 2023, he started a position as visiting lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.