For his book Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (2022, Duke University Press) Omar Kasmani was awarded with the Ruth Benedict Award 2023. The award is named after the American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) and has been presented by the Association for Queer Anthropology - a subgroup of the American Anthropological Association - since 1986. The prize recognizes outstanding academic books that focus on LGBTQ people and/or different gender or sexual formations and make a decisive contribution to the field of queer anthropology. Omar Kasmani is the first social and cultural anthropologist working at a university in Germany to receive the award.

In his book "Queer Companions", Omar Kasmani sheds light on the affective relationships between fakirs and Islamic saints at Pakistan's most important Sufi pilgrimage site in Sehwan Sharif. He shows how men, women and khwaja-sara (trans and non-binary persons) establish these relationships outside the gendered norms of their society, distancing themselves from their designated roles as father or mother, husband or wife, son or daughter. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and insights from queer studies and affect theory, Omar Kasmani shows that these relationships are a way of developing an intimate bond with the saints and also become a form of "queer" world-making. In the national context of Pakistan, where shrines and religious sites are always integrated into the state infrastructure of governance, the approach to saints described by Omar Kasmani is an engagement with unofficial history and public forms of affect. The selection committee for the award wrote: "This book is captivating from the first to the last page and unlike anything we have read before."

Omar Kasmani completed his doctorate in social and cultural anthropology at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies in 2016. He then worked as a research assistant in the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1171 "Affective Societies: Dynamics of Living Together in Moving Worlds" in projects on embodied emotions and affective belonging in migration contexts and on the governance of religious diversity in Berlin. Since October 2023, he has been a guest lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.

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