Conclusion
Nation-building projects in Sunni Hanafi Muslim majority countries of Pakistan and Turkey have resorted to state law as an ideological apparatus and instrument of top-down social engineering to create modern Muslim citizens.
These two Muslim nations had completely different trajectories in their approach to Islamic law. The staunchly secularist Kemalist Turkish state tried to ‘cleanse’ the public sphere of Muslim laws by transplanting the Swiss Civil Code and completely disregarding Muslim laws. On the other hand, Pakistan’s similarly secular civilising elite could not jettison Islamic laws because creating a pure state for Muslims (Pakistan) was thejustification of their partition from India. For this and possibly for some other reasons, they decided to continue the centuries-old personal law system. In this official legal pluralist arrangement (the Ottomans also had this system that was called the millet system), the state allows different religious personal and family laws to officially co-exist. Nevertheless, being modernising and civilising, the Pakistani power elite also embarked on reforming the majority’s personal laws. Their reform attempts, similar to Turkey, have faced resistance from people in rural areas, patriarchal culture, local and tribal traditions, conservatives, some culama, Islamists and Salafists.As a result, regardless of their different trajectories, the instrumental use of law in these two nation states to reform family, to create modern citizens and to empower women has paved the way for unofficial (strong) Muslim legal pluralism. In these two Muslim nation states (one secular and the other an Islamic Republic), some sections of society still obey the unofficial Muslim laws as traditionally understood and practiced for centuries.
This co-existence of official and unofficial laws in the socio-legal sphere is not static.
Neither do these laws operate in isolation from each other. They are intermingled and they interact. As a result, new hybrid official and unofficial laws are being continuously constructed. The case law, statistical data, official reports, surveys and field research on age of marriage, registration and solemnisation of marriage, polygamy and divorce in the Pakistani and Turkish contexts show once again that the modern nation state’s claim to monopoly over law has been continually challenged in practice. In the socio-legal realm, various official and unofficial laws do not exist in isolation but rather interact in many ways. This interlegality is also a highly dynamic process. Different laws are superimposed, interpenetrated, and mixed in people’s minds as much as in their actions.[483] Muslims in these two countries have been subject to competing ethnic, national, cultural, religious and especially legal reference points.[484] Vanderlinden[485] called these types of individuals ‘sujets de droits’ about five decades ago. Rather than gradually fading away, it seems that with the increasing globalisation, this phenomenon will be more complex.As a result, new hybrid formations of laws have been continually constructed. These new hybrid laws are mostly unofficial, but the Pakistani and Turkish cases also show that official laws have been influenced by the unofficial Muslim laws, too. Especially in the Pakistani socio-legal sphere, case law is full of contradicting judgments as a result of this case of strong legal pluralism. With the increase in the authoritarian Islamism of the Turkish government, thejudi- ciary that once was a stronghold of the anti-religious laicism of the Kemalist hegemony has gradually been taken over by Islamists. As a result, early signs of the, "Pakistanisation of Turkish official laws” have started to emerge. Until recently, the state, while turning a blind eye to unofficial Muslim legal pluralism, has resisted legalising it. But it seems that this is slowly changing. Unofficial Muslim laws, similar to Pakistan, may make inroads into the official law.
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