Introduction
Similar to many others in different parts of the world, modernising “power elites”1 of Muslim majority countries assigned themselves a civilising mission and imagined[345] [346] their societies as nations following the model of Western modernity. Their hegemonic nation building projects have always given prominent place to state law as an instrument of top-down social engineering. Thus, law has become an ideological and repressive apparatus of the state in the Althusserian sense.[347] In this ideological use, law is not only employed as an instrument of social control but also as a hegemonic mode of organising and even fabricating beliefs and values, in addition to manufacturing the consent of the masses.[348] Law is seen in utilitarian terms as a tool, “an amoral and infinitely plastic device of government”.[349] Nation-building legal instrumentalists treat the social space between legislator and individual implicitly as a normative vacuum and envision that the state is more or less autonomous from the social context in which the law is to have its effects, the subjects of the rule are atomistic individuals and the legislator’s command is uninfluenced by the social medium.[350] Nevertheless, even a brief perusal of TheJournal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law that has been published for the last fifty years would show that an impressive number of socio-legal and social anthropological studies have repeatedly and consistently found that “the state is not necessarily the only entity in charge of what goes on, in law and in life”.[351] Unlike legal modernists have assumed and legal positivists have argued, “the state in the form of courts is not actually completely in charge of things”.[352] Pakistan and Turkey are two remarkable examples of this socio-political phenomenon of unofficial legal pluralism.[353] These two countries have followed different trajectories in their nationbuilding endeavours vis-a-vis Islam and Muslim laws. Some Muslims in these two countries have developed their own ways of reconstructing the socio-legal arena, paving the way for unofficial dynamic Muslim legal pluralism. Despite the states’ social engineering attempts, subalterns have resisted in one way or another to the hegemonic power of the modern nation state. In these contexts, national, international, secular, religious, and customary law all interweave[360] and more than one source influences and guides the attitudes and behaviours of individuals?[361] This situation is not static and new hybrid unofficial laws are being continuously constructed by skillful post-modern legal navigators?[362] By looking at the available case law, statistical data, official reports, surveys and field research on age of marriage, registration and solemnisation of marriage, polygamy and divorce, this chapter, which draws on and updates my earlier work?[363] aims to present the current socio- legal picture of Muslim legal pluralisms in Pakistan and Turkey. 2