Everyday Muslim Labor in Pashto “Books of Trade”

Abstract This article analyzes early twentieth-century Pashto-language kasbnamahs, or “books of trade,” to ask how textual sources help us understand the intersections of quotidian laboring and religious practices. These short, printed treatises describe idealized Muslim practices of blacksmithing, carpentry, and pottery, providing prophetic and Sufi lineages for work, as well as Quranic verses that workers should recite during their daily labor. The article examines how kasbnamahs represented labor as sacralized. This reading does not necessarily tell us how Islam was practiced in the context of daily work—or how work was practiced in the context of Muslim faith—but rather how some Muslims sought to cultivate and promote a concept of labor as a daily pious practice. Subsequently, the article positions Pashto-language kasbnamahs as social objects. I ask what their circulation and use might tell us about how laborers (and other users of the text) interpreted and experienced the intersections of religious and laboring practices, beyond their textual representation. The article considers specifically how craftworkers’ engagement with kasbnamahs may have shifted in the context of economic, social, and political pressures faced laborers in the early twentieth century.