The `Ulama' and the State: Negotiating Tradition, Authority and Sovereignty in Contemporary Pakistan

This dissertation is an account of how contemporary Pakistani ulama grapple with their political realities and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The central conceptual question that scaffolds my dissertation is: How do Pakistani ulama negotiate tradition, authority and sovereignty with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In engaging with this issue, this dissertation employs a methodology that weds ethnography with rigorous textual analysis. The ulama that feature in this study belong to a variety of sectarian persuasions. The Sunni ulama are Deobandi and Barelvi; the Shia ulama in this study are Ithna Ashari.

In assessing the relationship between Pakistani ulama and their nation-state, I assert that the ulama's dialectical engagements with the state are best understood as a dexterous navigation between affirmation, critique, contestation and cultivation. In proposing this manner of thinking about Pakistani ulama's engagements with their state, I provide a more detailed and nuanced view of the ulama-state relationship compared to earlier works. While emphasizing Pakistani ulama's vitality and their impact on their state, this dissertation also draws attention to the manners in which the state impacts the ulama. It theorizes the subject formation of the ulama and asserts the importance of understanding the ulama as formed not just by the ethico-legal tradition in which they are trained but also by the state apparatus.

US imperialism in action: An audit-based appraisal of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq

This paper drawing from audit reports reflects upon the post-Iraq war administration the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It argues that the CPA’s compliance with basic levels of decent public administration were akin to Guantanamo’s compliance with basic levels of natural justice. The audit reports demonstrate that the CPA was a chaotic administration which spent billions without proper controls or procedures and left precious Iraqi oil revenues open to fraudulent acts. The CPA failed to comply with its obligations under UN resolutions. It identifies the geopolitical/economic implications of the US government which was partly motivated by economic concerns but it was also motivated by political concerns—the imposition of US hegemony. It then turns to the broader economic imperatives of the falling rate of profit and the imposition of neoliberalism (market fundamentalism).

Performance Analysis of Novel Randomly Shifted Certification Authority Authentication Protocol for MANETs

The provision of security in mobile ad hoc networks is of paramount importance due to their wireless nature. However, when conducting research into security protocols for ad hoc networks it is necessary to consider these in the context of the overall system. For example, communicational delay associated with the underlying MAC layer needs to be taken into account. Nodes in mobile ad hoc networks must strictly obey the rules of the underlying MAC when transmitting security-related messages while still maintaining a certain quality of service. In this paper a novel authentication protocol, RASCAAL, is described and its performance is analysed by investigating both the communicational-related effects of the underlying IEEE 802.11 MAC and the computational-related effects of the cryptographic algorithms employed. To the best of the authors' knowledge, RASCAAL is the first authentication protocol which proposes the concept of dynamically formed short-lived random clusters with no prior knowledge of the cluster head. The performance analysis demonstrates that the communication losses outweigh the computation losses with respect to energy and delay. MAC-related communicational effects account for 99% of the total delay and total energy consumption incurred by the RASCAAL protocol. The results also show that a saving in communicational energy of up to 12.5% can be achieved by changing the status of the wireless nodes during the course of operation. Copyright (C) 2009 G. A. Safdar and M. P. O'Neill (nee McLoone).