ISLAM AND STATE

Zia’s radical changes cannot be accounted for without recognition of anteceding events that created a terrain of receptivity for his innova­tions. In addition to alienating the Ulema, which was aggrieved for having been shunted away from power, Ayub’s authoritarian manage­ment energised additional groups that were consolidating political programmes and resistant strategies in an Islamic idiom.

While Ayub Khan’s programme of national development was osten­sibly one of staunch secularism he did seek the services of liberal and reformist Islamic scholars to try and enact a broader social reforma­tion. Prominently, the modernising theologian, Dr Fazl-ur-Rahman was appointed the first head of the Islamic Research Council, an institution established by the 1962 Constitution. Ayub had previously passed the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance (MFLO) amidst great hue and cry amongst members of the Ulema. The MFLO contained provisions for the registration of marriages, the limitation and regularisation of polygamy and other features that were decried for being ‘un-Islamic’ by scholars of Islam. Even in the face of such protest Ayub directly patronised the development of Rahman’s rationalist interpretation of Islamic law. In his more radical departures from traditionalist thought, Rahman questioned the veracity of some traditional sources of Islamic law and counselled that not every law and prohibition within the text of the Quran was meant to have universal application. The radical nature of Rahman’s work incited great opposition and in the face of popular protests against him he was forced to flee the country.¹

Through the same period, the incorporation of a liberalised Islam into the legal structure had an unlikely proponent in the Supreme Court Chief Justice AR Cornelius (1960—1968).

As a counter to the liberal Islam that was patronised by Ayub, political Islamists were gaining popular currency through the anti­authoritarian stand taken by Maudoodi and the Jamaat-e-Islami as well as the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami (JUI). These parties joined forces with an array of non-religious parties to support the candidacy of Fatima Jinnah in the 1965 presidential elections as a counter to the rule of Ayub. This decision caused fractures within the Jamaat, with a faction breaking away because they viewed such an alliance as counter to a clear Islamic prohibition on the elevation of a woman to the position of head of state.^[544] In spite of a growing constituency amongst profes­sional and lower class urban voters, the Jamaat gained few seats in the 1970 elections in either Eastern or Western wings of the country. The JUI, however, became a coalition partner of the secular left NAP in the NWFP Assembly.

After the loss of Bangladesh and through the course of Bhutto’s rule, Islamist parties and members of the Ulema acted as a pressure group against what were viewed as Bhutto’s personal impieties as well as a denunciatory force against his agenda of Islamic socialism. Over 100 members of the established Ulema signed a petition that cited the un-Islamic basis of Bhutto’s drive to implant some vestiges of social­ism in the country. To a greater extent than the Ulema though, Islamic parties have been credited with success ‘in instituting many Islamist assumptions in popular political culture and framing key debates in an Islamist frame of reference’, eventually contributing in some ways to the ‘collapse of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s experiment with socialism’ (1971-1977).^[545]

Bhutto’s socialism was prefixed with the appellation of ‘Islamic’, both as authenticity claim against his religious detractors as well as in an anti-imperialist gesture of pan-Islamist solidarity, which was gaining ground in the post-colonial world. It was devoid of any Islamic deriva­tion per se, but this cloak of legitimation facilitated the maintenance of the Objectives Resolution among the preambular statements of the 1973 Constitution; it also allowed for the inclusion of further provisions, such as the prescription that the head of state should be a Muslim.

Bhutto was, however, open to appeasing religious sentiment where it threatened his rule and it was shortly after the promulgation of the 1973 Constitution that the NWFP Assembly, under the Chief Ministership of Mufti Mahmood of the JUI, began a regional programme of Islamisation. In this process some certainty was sought about whether Ahmadis were non-Muslims. Amongst the justifications offered for calling upon the state to enter into the terrain of theological disputation was that as the recently passed Constitution ‘required the head of state to be a Muslim, it was incumbent so as to prevent a non-Muslim from becoming the head of state’.^[546] Against the 1954 Munir Report’s claims that no consensual definition of who constituted a Muslim could be established,^[547] the NWFP Assembly, shortly preceded by the Azad Kashmir Assembly, passed a resolution calling upon the central gov­ernment to label Ahmadis non-Muslims. A Saudi Arabian-based Ulema council showed support for this resolution. Members of the anti­Ahmadiyya movement used a face-off between students and some members of the Ahmadi community in their spiritual base at Rabwa in Punjab to push this agenda. Bhutto himself appointed a judicial commission to enquire into the ‘Rabwa incident’, the report for which remains classified.

The result was the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which specifically delegated Ahmadis the status of a non-Muslim religious minority. The Act specified that Ahmadis were thus relegated because persons of this faith did not

believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after MUHAMMAD (Peace be Upon Him), or recognises such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer, is not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or law.

Given the provision’s constitutional status, it has been the backdrop for a range of administrative and legal measures to further constrain a range of rights that the Ahmadis can assert in Pakistan, many of which were later introduced by Zia.

While the Second Amendment surely reflected a consensus amongst Sunni and even Shia Ulema on the bounds of allowable innovation to Islamic doctrine, it did not itself introduce any particular prohibitions on the Ahmadi community in Pakistan. The founding of a movement to uphold and protect the finality of the Prophet in the early years after Partition, having been left out of the political consensus of the state for so long, would, after the passage of the Second Amendment under its belt, have far greater opportunities to alter law and governmental policy during the reign of Zia-ul-Haq.

II.