Saadia Toor
Saadia Toor is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island. Her research lies at the intersections of culture and political economy. She has worked on: nationalism and state formation in Pakistan; the ways in which liberal discourses around Islam, gender and sexuality are used to legitimize the Global War on Terror; the racialization of Islam and Muslims in the West; the cultural politics of the Cold War as they unfolded in Pakistan; and tensions within anti-war solidarity work in the West. Her most recent work focuses on the racial dimensions of the student debt crisis in the U.S.
Collected Work
The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan
This book tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly defined ‘political’ realm, Toor examines cultural politics to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.