The "Shariatization" of Pakistani Nationalism

Farzana Shaikh
Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge

More than fifty years after independence, the idea of Pakistani nationalism is still vigorously contested. Much of the debate has tended to centre on the subject of Muslim identity in South Asia, and whether an ideology based on Islam was sufficient to mould a nation from a society as ethnically diverse as Pakistan. Since the 1980s, however, Islamist groups inside Pakistan who seek to impose a "transnational" or "Shariatized" version of Islam, which is directly at odds with the idea of the nation-state, have emerged to compound the challenge. This has raised two main questions, which will form the object of this enquiry. First, is there a relationship between the rise of "global Islam" and the "Shariatization" of Pakistani nationalism? Second, could "global Islam" and the concomitant process of "Shariatization" blur the idea of the nation-state in Pakistan? The aim will be to track the "mutation" of Pakistani nationalism, identify its agents and explore the impact of "global Islam" upon a variant of Asian nationalism whose founding idea the "two-nation theory" is now widely discredited.