In Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan, author Sadia Saeed has produced a realistic and unavoidably biting critique of how Pakistan has behaved as a state after its formation.
The text challenges the “ideological” premises of the Pakistani state living in modern times, offering examples throughout history, with an emphasis on the status of Ahmadis as a beleaguered minority.
Sovereignty of Allah
At the time of Partition, there was no consensus on how the idea of a territorially based Muslim nation-state would translate into state formation. The Preamble of the Constitution, termed the “Objectives Resolution,” adopted in 1949, explicitly vests sovereignty in Allah and privileges a Muslim national identity for Pakistan. Yet debates and contestations over how this identity ought to inform state policies continue to be a defining feature of public life. The “religion question,” that is the question of the relationship between religion and state in Pakistan is striking because of this political vibrancy, animating citizens across the ideological spectrum and bringing high-level officials into conversation with ordinary citizens.
Modern polities can be distinguished by whether they have settled or unsettled state-religion relations. Saeed writes that “unsettled sate-religion relations” refers to cases in which the normative relationship between religion and state formation is a deeply contentious issue and keeps arising across different time periods and in different guises. States where state-religion relations are relatively settled, by contrast, do not grapple with this kind of contentious politics, having arrived at basic norms that are relatively stable and enjoy wide social consensus.
The case of Ahmadis
Describing the Ahmadi question as a controversial issue predating Pakistan, Saeed recalls that the Ahmadiyyah movement launched toward the end of the 19th century under British colonial rule in India. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), its founder, held that he had received divine revelations from Allah and deemed himself a prophet. While he upheld the supremacy of Islam’s Prophet (PBUH), his claims met hostility and suspicion from the very start because they contravened the traditional Muslim belief of the finality of Prophethood. There are thus, she notes, distinctly theological roots to the Ahmadi question.
The controversy, she writes, became prominent in 1891 when a group of Indian ulema issued a joint fatwa condemning Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Allama Muhammad Iqbal famously raised the issue of the religious status of Ahmadis in 1935 and deemed them separate from the rest of the Indian Muslim community. The impulse toward forcibly creating a minority within the Indian Muslim community, incidentally itself a minority, was thus present even prior to the independence of Pakistan. However, the colonial state’s policy of religious equality ensured that hostilities directed toward Ahmadis were confined to public arenas, because colonial courts unequivocally deemed Ahmadis a Muslim sect.
Rights of man and the citizen
Analytically, the Ahmadi question is both reminiscent of, and divergent from, another pivotal minority question of our modern age that has received much scholarly attention: the “Jewish question. For example, drawing on the experience of Jews in interwar Europe, Hannah Arendt dew attention to a fundamental paradox that lies at the heart of the modern nation-state. On the one hand, she argued, the rise of the state in France coincided with the establishment of a constitutional government meant to protect people from arbitrary administration and despotism. The ideal of legal equality of all citizens enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was designed to replace the system of privileges that characterized the preceding feudal order.
It was premised on the notion of natural rights of “man”—those inalienable human rights that were to accrue to the “abstract” individual human being. On the other hand, those rights were to be ensured by the state that would exert sovereignty in the name of the people of the nation. There was, thus, a core contradiction at the very heart of the modern nation-state manifest in two opposing ideals—one extolling the pre-political natural universal human rights that supposedly belong to all human beings and the other affirming the rights of the people of the nation-state.
Allama Iqbal
The most significant public event that undermined the position of Ahmadis within the Indian Muslim community was the position taken by Allama Iqbal on the religious status of Ahmadis. A philosopher, poet, and politician credited with inspiring the Pakistan Movement, Iqbal (1877-1938) joined the All-India Muslim League in 1908. In 1926, he won a seat in the Punjab Legislative Council and formally entered professional politics. From 1930-1932, Iqbal served as president of the Muslim League.
In his famous presidential address at the League’s 1930 annual session, Iqbal proposed “the creation of a Muslim India within India” that would be part of an all-India federation. The realization of his vision, he told his audience, demanded “complete organization and unity of will and purpose in the Muslim community.” Iqbal took care to spell out the boundaries of the relevant Muslim community: “We must look at the Indian problem not only from the Muslim point of view, but also from the standpoint of the Indian Muslim as such.”
Because he was a Kashmiri, Iqbal had taken an interest in the Kashmiri Muslim cause prior to the events of the early 1930s. It is widely believed that before turning antagonistic toward Ahmadis, Iqbal had been highly impressed with the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad; while not an Ahmadi himself, a number of Iqbal’s family members were confirmed Ahmadis. Perhaps because of these ties, Iqbal extended support to the appointment of Bashiruddin Mahmud, leader of the Ahmadiyya movement, as the leader of the All-India Kashmir Committee in July 1931.
The Ahrar factor
The nomination of Bashiruddin Mahmud deeply antagonized the Ahrar movement of conservative Muslims and led them to launch their own campaign. This initiative was as devoted to opposing Ahmadis as it was to supporting the cause of Kashmiri Muslims. Ahrar charged Bashiruddin Mahmud with collusion with the British, the loyalist Unionists, and the Hindus. Due to these internal conflicts, Bashiruddin Mahmud was forced to step down from his leadership role of the Kashmir Committee. Later, Iqbal resigned from the post, declaring that he was unable to carry on the task because Ahmadis were unwilling to accept his leadership. In fact, Iqbal’s appointment had generated considerable criticism within Muslim circles because Iqbal was more readily accepted as a man of letters and less so as an effective organizer and politician. The Kashmir agitation slowly petered out within a year, and the Kashmir Committee was dismantled.
The preceding discussion provides the political context in which strife between Iqbal and the Ahmadiyya movement appeared. During the Kashmir agitation, “Iqbal was at the beck and call of the Ahrars.” Iqbal’s hostility toward the Ahmadiyya movement increased further after appointment of the prominent Ahmadi lawyer Zafrullah Khan to the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1934, a position coveted by Iqbal himself. Iqbal’s indictment of Ahmadis thus must be situated in the political context, characterized by internal Muslim struggles over the articulation and representation of the interests of the Indian Muslim community. Seen from this lens, we can appreciate how material political interests and aspirations were a key component of conflicts among Muslim leaders.
Kudos for Nawaz Sharif
Describing Nawaz Sharif as one of Pakistan’s most popular political leaders, Saeed notes he is politically a religious conservative. During his tenure as prime minister in 1998, Sharif had attempted to pass a constitutional bill that could have made sharia the main source of law in Pakistan. But upon his return to Pakistan after years spent in exile during the martial law of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, he broke from the past and expressed solidarity with the vulnerable Ahmadi minority In the aftermath of terror attacks targeting the community in 2010. In response, conservative religious groups publicly rebuked Sharif for sympathizing with a religious community that they deem heretical. By pitting Sharif against “Muslims all over the world,” these groups sought to link the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) leader with religious deviance while establishing themselves, the ulema, as the legitimate purveyors of fundamental religious truths.
From Sharif’s perspective, the existence of laws rendering Ahmadis non-Muslim did not strip them of their right to practice their religion without the threat of physical harm from an outlawed religious group. For the vocal ulema, the symbolic import of Sharif’s statements trumped the gravity of the attacks. Expressing solidarity with Ahmadis and referring to them as citizens was, in their view, tantamount to violation of the law of the land that had already relegated Ahmadis to an inferior non-Muslim status. Notwithstanding the religious controversy that his comments generated, Sharif steadfastly stood by his statements.
Conclusion
This book examines Pakistan’s desecularization processes through the lens of the “Ahmadi question.” It notes how the Pakistani state has moved from accommodating members of the Ahmadiyya community as full citizens of the state to forcibly declaring them non-Muslim and eventually criminalizing them for adhering to nonconventional interpretations of Islamic religious tenets. The genealogy of the Pakistani state’s highly troubled and historically shifting relationship with Ahmadis crystallizes a core feature of modern public Islam—its contested and unsettled relationship with the nation-state.
While “Islam” was symbolically linked with the Pakistani national community at the very onset of its independence, questions about if and how this religious identity ought to translate into state policies have seen extensive social struggles entailing wide spectrum of discourses about secularism, religion, and nationality. The text demonstrates that Pakistan has allowed a trajectory of “unsettled de-secularization,” arguing that in the absence of an authoritative state ideology about religion, Islam has been selectively and systematically folded into official nationalism, ordinary politics, positive law, and jurisprudence due to extensive struggles in the political field.