ISLAM

In discussing the role of Islam in these years, one should make some mention here of what is perhaps the most repeated quote from Jinnah’s inaugural speech to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, one that gets continual replay even in contemporary political discussion in the country:

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan.

This public affirmation of a divide between a private realm of religious practice and a public ‘political realm’ of equal citizenship has faced endless challenge in the course of Pakistan’s history. There was perhaps nothing controversial about the speech at the time that it was given; as shown in the previous chapter, Muslim nationalism in South Asia was not founded on the striving for a theocracy. The Ulema, with some exceptions, had taken a stand for a unified India prior to Partition.^[109] The amplification of Jinnah’s speech in the service of maintaining an official secularism needs to be understood in reference to changes that were perceptible even as it was being delivered.

After Partition, while some classically trained jurists would try to establish a political foothold through elections, these parties would eventually face almost insurmountable competition from Abul-ala- Maudoodi, a towering figure whose influence extended through much of the Muslim world.^[110] Maudoodi organised the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 in a unified India and after first counselling non-participation in political processes, his interest in seizing and reforming the state towards a holistic implantation of Islamic law came to be articulated.

The first quasi-constitutional document that was forged and advanced in the Constituent Assembly was the Objectives Resolution in 1949. As a list of aspirational norms, much of what the Resolution enunciates is a banal recycling of features generally accepted as coterminous with liberal democracy: an independent judiciary and the vesting of fundamental rights in citizens. It furthermore avows the desirability of a federal system. What were considered controversial from the start, however, were the following clauses: ‘Wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed’; and ‘Wherein the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and the Sunnah’.

Considerable debate raged in the Assembly over these clauses. Members from East Pakistan, many of them Hindu, were most vocifer­ously denunciative. They remarked that the recognition of a religious principle in the constitutional structure of the country would mark a clear betrayal of promises made to the Bengalis in particular about the realisation of Pakistan as a multi-faith and secular state. Some of the members felt that the incorporation of religion was to ‘cripple reason’, curb the possibilities of dissent and set in train an inevitable trajectory towards authoritarianism in the country.^[112]

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s defence of the Resolution was impassioned. He noted that the Resolution ‘lays emphasis on the prin­ciples of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice and further defined them’ by saying that these principles should be observed in the constitutions, as they have been enunciated by Islam.

It is important that the debate about the Objectives Resolution seems to square the existence of the Quran and the Sunnah with the status of textual authority so that authoritative pronouncements about Islamic law could be derived from them. Further, a faith in the compati­bility between Islamic legal precepts and liberal democratic principles is overwhelmingly expressed. In an episode that would have far-reaching impact on constitutional development in the country and the place of minorities, the anti-Ahmadiyya movement that unfolded in the Punjab over the years 1952—1954 would severely test this notion.

The Ahmadi are a minority sect who consider themselves to be within the community of Muslims. The founder of the sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835—1908) ‘claimed the status of prophet but while upholding the supremacy of Prophet Mohammad’.^[114] It has traditionally been an article of faith amongst Muslims that the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh)^[115] is the ‘seal’ upon a long line of Prophets who brought divine revelation to the earth’s inhabitants and founded the religion of Islam. Whilst Ahmad’s declaration of Prophethood set off protests among the faithful even during his lifetime, a movement to uphold the finality of the Prophet Mohammad’s revelation and counter what was consid­ered the pernicious ‘modernising’ influence of the Ahmadi movement, gained its fuller expression in the years after Partition.^[116]

A constellation of religious parties and Ulema sought the state’s aid in declaring Ahmadis non-Muslim.

This was not the only sectarian issue expressed in the early years to mark divides amongst the Muslims of Pakistan. A major cleavage that has come to be increasingly important is that between Shia and Sunni, the predominant sects in modern Islam. While there had been local sites even prior to Partition where Sunni and Shia conflicts about the bounds of correct, and often public practice of ritualised forms of worship had boiled over into conflict, there was much, particularly in the sense of retaining a common antipathy towards the majority Hindu community and in denouncing colonial governance, that maintained political unity amongst them.^[120] After Partition, the All Pakistan Shia Convention was formed to voice distinct demands informed by the jurisprudential and rights traditions inherent to the minority Shia community.^[121]

The place of Islam within a constitutional order is one that inscribes authoritative judgment about the texts and sources of Islam.

IV