A discussion of the contradictory roles of networks in the construction of images of community. Networks (particularly connected with the press and publications, but also to the schools of the ulama) helped to create the image of an autonomous community, independent of the colonial state, that came to be central in mobilizing Muslims politically in the late 19th c. and first half of the 20th c. This was an image of community that challenged traditional forms of patronage and authority (linked to the state) by defining community identity as essentially internalized within individuals. Identification with the community was thus embodied for some (particularly the ulama) in reformed personal behavior. For many others it was embodied in public acts of personal devotion that were dramatized in a series of public movements focused around the protection of Muslim symbols. The increasing prominence of networks of information allowed many to imagine community as not intrinsically requiring institutionalized structures of authority. But for this very reason, networks also raised, the specter of division in the community. This was not new, but the prominence of networks in defining community focused it in new and dramatic ways. The dangers of fitna increasingly creep into community rhetoric in the 1930s and 1940s. The demand for Pakistan as a new state (and a symbolic focus for authority) arose in significant part from the very contradictions inherent in the growing role of networks as definers of community. These networks created images of community significantly free of institutionalized structures of authority, even as they created new forums for conflict and division, which provided a critical impetus for the symbolic creation of a Muslim state.