ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the need for cosmopolitanism as a tool against the limits on planetary conviviality posed by the national, ethnic, and religious boundaries of ethnocentric nationalisms and parochialisms. It argues that Salman Ahmad constructs a rooted cosmopolitanism that critiques Pakistani and Indian nationalisms to ultimately foreclose a nationalist basis for identity, instead focusing on a much smaller unit of identification, the Sufi notion of “self.” Talk of cosmopolitanism originally signaled, then, a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged first to one community among many. Ahmad’s cosmopolitanism begins with the personal notion of “self” but also extends into the political realm. In contrast to ascendant South Asian nationalisms—both Indian and Pakistani—Ahmad’s comparative cosmopolitanism is local and embodied, reaching out into the world and to others in a way that prizes the particular as the highest goal of the self.
