The Ideology of Pakistan
From the moment that Pakistan came into existence, its leadership was confronted with a serious existential problem. As I discuss in Chapter 3, most of the people who finally voted for the All India Muslim League and the nebulous notion of Pakistan in the 1946 elections did so without really understanding what Pakistan would be (Haqqani 2005). The entire campaign for Pakistan was based on a communal argument: Muslims comprise a separate nation from Hindus and could not live with dignity and security within a united India because they would be subjected to the tyranny of the Hindu majority and its antipathy toward Muslims. The communal violence that raged before, during, and after Partition seemed to prove the validity of this view. The concept gained even more salience as Indian political leaders either rejected the legitimacy of Pakistan’s statehood outright or grudgingly accepted it out of fear that the British would otherwise refuse to transfer power or would provide the princely states with an option for independence, leaving India with a moth-eaten political geography of its own. In many cases, Indian leaders publicly stated their conviction that Pakistan would fail and be quickly absorbed into India (Cohen 2004; Haqqani 2005).
However, once Pakistan became independent these communal appeals became dangerous. Pakistan was home to many minorities, including Hindus, Parsees, Christians, and Sikhs. The divisive rhetoric that had pulled apart the sub-continent had to be tempered and subdued if Pakistan’s varied peoples were to live harmoniously within a new nation with a precarious political geography and strained resources. However, Pakistan could not completely abandon the communal argument or its counterpart, the two-nation theory, divisive as they were, because they formed the basis of Pakistan’s demand for Kashmir and provided the justification for the state’s very existence. Despite the obvious tension between Pakistan’s ideology and its reality, Pakistan’s leadership retained the two-nation theory and the communal basis of identity as the founding logic of the state, hoping to manage the consequences of this choice (Nasr 2005).
As communal violence raged through out much of north India, Jinnah sought to stop the violence. In one of his late speeches, given before the August 11, 1947 meeting of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, he declared:
You are free, free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state. … [You] will find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of Pakistan (Haqqani 2005, 12–13).5
The speech was and still is used by more secular Pakistanis as evidence that Jinnah wanted a Pakistan that was inclusive rather than an Islamic republic.
Unfortunately, when it came to Islam’s role in Pakistan’s constitution and governance structures, Jinnah often said different things to different audiences. This multiplicity of his statements has permitted proponents of one vision or another to selectively quote Jinnah’s speeches in support of their position. Farzana Shaikh (2009) offers perhaps the best exposition of these multiple interpretations of Jinnah and his varied visions of the state. Jinnah, who died within a year of independence, never clarified his actual vision for Pakistan. This left his successors “divided, or confused, about whether to take their cue from his independence eve call to keep religion out of politics or to build on the religious sentiment generated during the political bargaining for Pakistan” (Haqqani 2005, 13). Pakistan’s leaders had to find some way of managing the implicit contradiction between the clearly communal underpinnings of Pakistan and the imperatives of state consolidation and of securing a multiethnic and multireligious polity. They chose to do so by forming and promulgating what various civilian and military leaders alike have labeled a state ideology based on Islam.
There is a widespread belief that Zia ul Haq was responsible for promulgating this ideology, in part because Zia remains tightly associated with the project of Islamizing Pakistan. In reality, Pakistan’s political and military leadership instrumentalized religion even before independence, and after 1947 it became the principal tool used to strengthen Pakistan’s identity. Shortly after independence, the Islamists demanded an Islamic constitution. Their efforts, spearheaded by Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani (a prominent Islamic scholar and supporter of the Pakistan movement), culminated in the Objectives Resolution, which Liaquat Ali Khan put before the first constituent assembly in March 1949. This vote was perhaps the first irreversible step in Pakistan’s path to becoming an ideologically Islamic state. The resolution, which would become the preamble to the constitution, affirmed the commitment to making Pakistan an Islamic rather than a secular state, proclaiming that “whereas sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan, through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust” (Objectives Resolution, n.d.). It also declared, over the objection of minority legislators, that “the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed. … 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” (Objectives Resolution, n.d.; see also Shaikh 2009).6
Most members of the first constituent assembly, including Khan, were members of Pakistan’s secular elite. Their decision to make Pakistan an Islamic state and to employ Islam as the ideology of the state (albeit vaguely defined and with a role that would vary widely over time) was motivated by the realization that Pakistan had multiple identities and that the adoption of Islam as the unifying ideology of the state offered the best prospect of dampening the divisive potential of Pakistan’s diversity (Haqqani 2005).
After the loss of Bangladesh in the 1971 war, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought to promote Islam as a unifying factor to mitigate fissiparous tendencies among the remaining ethnic groups in Pakistan. The government and Islamists alike viewed embracing Islamic ideals of governance and society as the most likely means of maintaining state cohesion. Bhutto deepened Pakistan’s connections to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, expanded the role of Arabic in the public school curriculum (creating new jobs for those who specialized in Islamic studies), declared Ahmediyas to be non-Muslims, outlawed drinking and gambling among other efforts to promote his notion of Islamic socialism, and enshrined Islamization within the 1973 constitution, which identified Pakistan as an Islamic state for the first time (Nasr 2001).7 It should also be noted that Bhutto undertook these initiatives to bolster his sagging popularity and to co-opt Islamist groups who were rallying against him.
After he ousted Bhutto in 1977, Zia worked to enlarge the role of Sunni Islam within the Pakistani state and polity. His Islamization efforts were “regulative, punitive and extractive” (Rizvi 2000a, 170). Zia reconstituted the Council of Islamic Ideology to give conservative and orthodox ulema (Islamic scholars) more power to advise the government on Islamization, including efforts to review extant laws and bring them into greater conformity with the Quran and Sunnah. In 1979 Zia amended the constitution to establish a shariat bench within each of the four provincial high courts as well as an appellate bench in the Supreme Court. In 1980, he established a federal shariat court that replaced those benches (171). Also in 1979, Zia’s government strengthened four laws (known as the Hudood Ordinances) that prescribed so-called Islamic punishments (amputation, stoning, and whipping) for sex-related crimes, possession of drugs and alcohol, and property theft, among other transgressions (ibid.; see also Nasr 2001). In addition, Zia introduced interest-free banking, based on an alternative system of profit and loss sharing, and a highly controversial compulsory Islamic tax, the zakat (Rizvi 2000a, 171–172). Shia Muslims, outraged by the imposition of
zakat, which is contrary to their religious practice, mobilized to resist it. The tax became a flash point for sectarian strife in Pakistan, which was exacerbated by regional developments such as the Iranian Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, and the anti-Soviet jihad.
Zia’s government, with financial assistance from the Arab Persian Gulf states, founded a sharia faculty within Islamabad’s Quaid-i-Azam University in late 1979 and later established a separate Islamic University in Islamabad. Zia, building on the efforts of Ayub and Yahya Khan, continued to instrumentalize school courses and syllabi, revising them to provide a greater emphasis on the ideology of Pakistan as well as on Islamic principles and teachings. Zia’s government, like previous regimes, informed the electronic media and press that their content should reflect orthodox Islamic values. In addition, obligatory prayer breaks were imposed in government offices, and private-sector employers were encouraged to do the same (Nasr 2001; Rizvi 2000a, 171–172).
Zia came to depict Islamization as the justification for his imposition of martial law. This was an important contrast from Ayub, who viewed his takeover as revolutionary; Islam was a means of building the state Khan envisioned rather than of legitimizing his particular approach. Zia’s reliance on Islamization intensified as his legitimacy began to wane. Public dissatisfaction with his regime deepened when he refused to hold promised elections and continued to enlarge his goals (Cohen 1984). Nonetheless, the effort to Islamize society was hindered by the military government’s failure to appreciate the number and diversity of the Islamic schools of thought found in Pakistan, most of which had fundamental disagreements on various points of sharia. Thus, Zia’s efforts to impose sharia devolved into an intersectarian struggle over which version would prevail.
In Pakistan, there are five main interpretative traditions of Islam (masalik, pl. of maslak). Besides the Shia maslak, which itself has multiple sects, there are four Sunni masalik: Barelvi; Deobandi; Ahl-e-Hadith; and Jamaat-e-Islami, which purports to be suprasectarian. Each maslak has its own definition of sharia and looks to different sources of legitimacy. Another hindrance to the emergence of a Pakistani Islamic orthodoxy was, and remains, the lack of a clerical hierarchy in Pakistan’s Sunni tradition. This is an important contrast with Iran, to which Pakistan is often compared. Iranian Shia Islam has a defined hierarchy, which enabled a revolution led by a supreme leader and the subsequent consolidation of the clerical regime. The multiple interpretative traditions and lack of any clerical hierarchy diminish the likelihood of Pakistan emerging as a theocratic state along the lines of Iran.
Unfortunately, despite all of the ink that has been spilled about the purported Islamization of Pakistan, there is no way to empirically demonstrate the impacts of these various trends on Pakistanis’ views on Islamism, militancy, or piety, much less on the views of personnel in the Pakistan Army in particular. Simply put, while historical accounts posit a slow but steady process of Islamization of Pakistani institutions—including the army and civil society—there are few means of validating these claims. This is because the existing surveys of Pakistani opinion that address Islamism (e.g., political Islam), piety, Islamist militancy, and related issues were all conducted after September 11, 2001. Thus, these data sources do not permit any assessment of trends prior to this date. In addition, many of the available surveys employ samples that are not representative of Pakistan’s population distribution or that have very high nonresponse rates on sensitive questions. Equally problematic, none of these surveys permit identification of military households, much less specific officers, and none have the sample size that would allow analysis of the views of military households or officers, even if they included variables that indicated that either the respondent was an officer or whether the household included such persons (Fair et al. 2010; Shapiro and Fair 2009–2010).
The Army’s Embrace of the Ideology of Pakistan
Cohen (2004) writes that it was in the 1960s that the army increasingly linked itself to the ideology of Pakistan and thrust itself into the role of protecting this ideology, the cornerstones of which were Islam and a perpetual hostility to India. Haqqani (2005) suggests that this process took place somewhat earlier, in the 1950s. Almost immediately after independence, “ ‘Islamic Pakistan” was increasingly defined through the lens of “resistance to ‘Hindu India’ ” (15). With respect to the army, Haqqani contends, in mild opposition to Cohen, that “notwithstanding the fact that the Pakistani army had been created out of the British Indian army and had inherited all the professional qualifications of its colonial predecessor, within the first few months of independence it was also moving in the direction of adopting an Islamic ideological coloring” (29).
But the Pakistan Army’s adoption of a religious ideology did not, in fact, conflict with the British model. After all, the British had long made use of religion in their military training. The British emphasis on martial races compelled them to devise elaborate handbooks so that officers could identify and recruit such races, including the Punjabi Musalmans and the Sikhs. This attention to religion continued once the recruits had joined the force and resulted in the codifying of some forms of religious practice and even of appearance, such as the requirement that Sikhs keep their hair uncut and wear a turban (Gell 1996). The British also took care to enforce religious practice among its officer corps, as attested in some Pakistani officers’ biographies. Brig. Mirza Hamid Hussain (2003), for example, who was a cadet at the Royal Indian Military College in Dehra Dun between 1926 and 1932, notes that the British required recruits to attend religious parades in uniform:
We lined up according to our religious beliefs and marched to our respective places of worship. There were three main religions, that of the Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims and we fell in lie in accordance with the number of people in each religious group. This meant that if the Sikhs were more in number then they took the front position, the Hindus and Muslims, depending on whichever group was greater in numbers, occupied the second position. … It always struck me as strange that the British who ran the school and were so very anxious to keep religion as far always as possible from the boys during the day, would in the evening, without fail, undertake this duty of separating us into various religious groups. This, I presume, was to impress upon us that we were really different people following different religions (72–73).
Given that the British made use of religion, it should not come as a surprise that the Pakistan Army continued to do so upon independence.
The army’s role in defending Pakistan’s ideological frontiers began with Mohammad Ayub Khan, who became the first Pakistani army chief on January 17, 1951, following the departure of Gen. Sir Douglas Gracey (Haqqani 2005). Britain’s transitional role officially ended when Ayub became the chief of the army. In 1958 he took over the state in a bloodless coup, which he described as “the Revolution in October 1958” (M.A. Khan 2006, 15). There is no evidence that Ayub or his colleagues had any serious interest in Islamism or Islamic orthodoxy; in fact his autobiography, Friends not Masters, demonstrates contempt for religious leaders and evinces his desire for Pakistan to adopt a modern Islam, as detailed in his volume and elsewhere (M.A. Khan 1960, 2006).8 Ayub sought to build a strong central government that would be reinforced by Islam.
Some of the strategies that Ayub employed included changing the significance of Pakistan’s numerous Sufi shrines and the relevance of the saints attached to them. Ayub used these shrines as a means of modernization (Ewing 1983). He aimed to limit the direct participation of the ulema in politics but also to associate his government with Islam. He also wanted to restrict the role of the hereditary religious leaders (pirs) associated with Sufi shrines. Both the pirs and ulema had goals and views of Islam that were at odds with Ayub’s own vision of a modern Muslim state. These pirs, along with their sometimes millions of followers, had long become embedded in politics. After all, they could easily deliver the vote banks of their followers.
Ayub sought to associate himself with this popular f
orm of Islam to legitimize himself while also stripping the pirs of their political influence. To do so, he established the Department of Auqaf to oversee all of these shrines and other religious endowments. In this way he sought to demonstrate to the public that the government, rather than the pirs, was best equipped to take care of these shrines. Under Ayub, Auqaf sought to shift the activities of the shrines away from those rituals that directly involved the pirs and to remake the shrines as “centers of more general social welfare by building hospitals, schools, and other facilities for poor and rural people” (Ewing 1983, 261). Medical services were a particularly direct way of displacing pirs’ traditional authority because they claimed spiritual powers of healing. Ayub’s government also used the shrines to host agricultural and industrial exhibitions during Urs (lit. wedding) celebrations (ibid.) of the death of a saint and his union with his beloved god. Despite Ayub’s efforts, the pirs remain an important political actor in Pakistan as evidenced by the many contemporary politicians who are hereditary spiritual leaders associated with shrines.
Under Ayub the army arrogated to itself the task of protecting Pakistan’s ideological as well as physical frontiers. In a 1960 article for Foreign Affairs, Ayub reiterates his support for Pakistan’s ideology and seeks to define it. In offering his definition, he draws heavily on the famed Pakistani Islamist political philosopher and poet Dr. Mohammad Iqbal:
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