Saad Lakhani

Saad Lakhani is a PhD candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. An anthropologist of politics, ethics, and religion in South Asia and the Muslim World, Lakhani's research explores the relationship between marginalization, value creation, and political struggle.  

His current project is an ethnography of the Tehrik Labaik Pakistan (TLP), an authoritarian religious movement led by working-class Muslim men that calls upon the ‘poor masses’ to reclaim their dignity and achieve recognition by taking violent action against ‘blasphemers’ and their co-conspiring elites. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research and extensive digital media and archival analysis, his dissertation shows how it becomes possible for ordinary people to not only translate their lived experience of marginality into the deeply felt need to punish blasphemers but also how they situate the anti-blasphemy movement within the narrative of their life quest for dignity.