The "Shariatization" of Pakistan Nationalism

Farzana Shaikh
Center of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge

More than fifty years after independence, the most important change in the nature of Pakistani nationalism is its turn towards global and political Islam. At independence, the issue of Muslim identity in South Asia, and the question of whether an ideology based on Islam was sufficient to mould a nation from a society as ethnically diverse as Pakistan were moot. Since the 1980s, Islamist groups inside Pakistan who seek to impose a ‘transnational’ or ‘Shariatized’ version of Islam that is directly at odds with the idea of the nation-state have emerged to compound the challenge.

This development poses a significant challenge to the assumptions that originally shaped the main themes of the Workshop but which have since been subjected to some scrutiny (cf. ‘Statement from the Organizers’). It suggests that the use of ‘categories of nationalism’, whether ‘left-wing’ (‘inclusive’) or ‘right-wing’ (‘exclusive’) are extremely problematic when applied to Muslim societies. The Pakistani variant of ‘cultural nationalism’ would seem to indicate that it is (pace Tom Nairn and Jayant Lele) as ‘Janus-faced’ as most other forms of nationalism, and ridden by internal contradictions. As such it has proved to be both patently ‘inclusive’ by evoking universal Islamic values, as well as highly ‘exclusive’ by seeking to restrict membership of the political community to Sunni Muslims. The Pakistani case also suggests the need to re-think the opposition (or tension) between nationalism and globalization. Indeed, the phenomenon of ‘cultural nationalism’ in Pakistan is very much the product (rather than the anti-thesis) of world forces, in this case, of global Islam. As such its relationship to globalization has been more complex than a straightforward ‘nationalism-globalization’ dichotomy would imply.

Three main questions will form the object of this enquiry. First, to what extent, if at all, does the process of ‘Shariatization’ in Pakistan represent a break from other and/or earlier expressions of nationalism, including those with a strong ‘developmental’ bias favoured by the Ayub and Bhutto regimes of the 1960s and 1970s? Second, what is the relationship between the rise of ‘global Islam’ and the ‘Shariatization’ of Pakistani nationalism? Third, could the process of ‘Shariatization’ eventually serve to weaken ‘cultural nationalism’ and blur the very idea of the nation-state in Pakistan?

The aim is to track the ‘mutation’ of Pakistani nationalism, identify its exponents and explore the impact of ‘global Islam’ upon a variant of Asian nationalism whose founding idea – the ‘two-nation theory’ – is now widely discredited.