the ideological struggle for pakistan

THE IDEOLOGICALSTRUGGLE FOR PAKISTAN

Z I A D H A I D E R

Since its establishment, the IslamicRepublic of Pakistan has had three major

fault lines that have underpinned its insecurityand that must be carefully navigated to ensureits future stability and prosperity: civil-militaryrelations, ethnic fissures, and Islamic ideology.This essay is about ideology. It provides a polit-ical and cultural understanding of the role anduse of Islam in Pakistan’s evolution. Such a ho-listic understanding must guide domestic andinternational efforts to strengthen Pakistan as amodern state at peace with itself and its neigh-bors and to address the pervasive extremismpoisoning it and posing a global threat. Paki-stan’s viability as a state depends in large part

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Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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on its ability to develop a new and progressiveIslamic narrative.

THE IDEA OF PAKISTAN

From its inception in 1947, the idea of Paki-stan was a contested ideological matter. Hav-ing lost their privileged status when the Britishsupplanted India’s Mughal rulers, IndianMuslims divided in response to a deepeningcultural and political insecurity under colonialrule. Culturally, a schism emerged between theAligarh tradition, which balanced selectivelyembracing Western notions of modernity andlearning with retaining an Islamic identity,and the Deoband tradition, which rejected West-ern mores as a deviation from religious ortho-doxy. Politically, as the independence strugglegained momentum, Indian Muslims dividedinto three primary groups. The first was affili-ated with the Indian Congress Party, which ad-vocated territorial nationalism. The second wasaffiliated with the All-India Muslim League ledby Muhammad Ali Jinnah, which contended

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that Muslims had a special identity that wouldbe erased in a Hindu-majority India—an argu-ment that evolved from calls for political safe-guards and a federation to an eventual demandfor a separate Muslim homeland. The thirdincluded the religious parties that opposed aseparate Muslim homeland to avoid dividingthe Muslim ummah yet shared the MuslimLeague’s concerns. Ultimately, the MuslimLeague prevailed and Pakistan was carved outof the subcontinent.

The irony of the dedicated struggle for Paki-stan, however, was the ambiguity over the endgoal. Indeed, one prominent South Asia histo-rian, Ayesha Jalal, has argued that the lack ofconsensus over Pakistan’s ideological and terri-torial contours was vital to its establishment:‘‘Jinnah’s resort to religion was not an ideologyto which he was ever committed or even a de-vice to use against rival communities; it wassimply a way of giving a semblance of unity andsolidity to his divided Muslim constituents.Jinnah needed a demand that was specificallyambiguous and imprecise to command generalsupport, something specifically Muslim though

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unspecific in every other respect. The inten-tionally obscure cry for a ‘Pakistan’ wascontrived to meet this requirement.’’1 This am-biguity played out in the pivotal 1945–46 elec-tions in which the Muslim League was able todemonstrate that it was the sole representativeof India’s Muslims and Jinnah the sole spokes-man. Jinnah and many of the Muslim League’sleaders, though secular in their personal orien-tation, invoked Islam to make their case for anundefined Pakistan to Muslim voters, partly ca-tering to pressure from their own coalition: ‘‘Ifyou want Pakistan, vote for the [Muslim]League candidates. If we fail to realize our dutytoday . . . Islam will be vanquished fromIndia.’’2

Proponents of Jinnah’s secular vision for Pa-kistan often point to his eloquent speech deliv-ered before the Constituent Assembly threedays before independence on August 11, 1947:‘‘You are free, free to go to your temples; youare free to go to your mosques or to any otherplaces of worship in this state of Pakistan. Youmay belong to any religion or caste or creedthat has nothing to do with the business of the

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state. . . . In the course of time Hindus wouldcease to be Hindus and Muslims would ceaseto be Muslims, not in the religious sense, be-cause that is the personal faith of each individ-ual, but in the political sense as citizens of theState.’’3 The speech’s inclusive message, how-ever, has been diluted with time. Subsequentofficial accounts of Jinnah’s life have includedonly edited versions of the speech with refer-ences to religion having no role in the businessof the state being deleted.4

Yet the climax of this ideological debate inPakistan’s nascent days was the passage of theObjectives Resolution in 1949. The Resolutionlaid out the principles for Pakistan’s futureconstitution, notably calling for a state wherein‘‘the principles of democracy, freedom, equal-ity, and tolerance as enunciated by Islam shallbe fully observed’’ and ‘‘the Muslims shall beenabled to order their lives in the individualand collective spheres in accordance with theteachings and requirements of Islam as set outin the Holy Quran and Sunnah.’’5 The Resolu-tion thus injected religion into the core of Paki-stan. Such a formal association between Islam

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and Pakistan was in many ways natural; how-ever, it was the subsequent manipulation anddistortion of religion for political and strategicends that sadly emerges as a central theme inPakistan’s Islamic narrative.

In reflecting on the rampant religious ex-tremism and sectarianism wracking Pakistantoday, many liberal Pakistani commentatorswistfully point to how far Pakistan has deviatedfrom Jinnah’s original vision as articulated be-fore the Constituent Assembly. There is clearcomfort and utility in remembering Jinnah’swords as a guiding star in troubled times.Nonetheless, despite his personal beliefs andpivotal role as Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader),Jinnah was ultimately part of a movement thatwas shaped by circumstances and alliances—one that evolved from fashioning an equitablepostcolonial constitutional arrangement for In-dia’s Muslims to securing an independent na-tion. Indeed, throughout the movement, therenever was a uniform vision of Pakistan or therole of Islam. Pakistan was and remains a prod-uct of contesting visions.

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FORTIFYING A NATION

Upon achieving independence, Pakistan’sleadership was faced with the daunting task ofdefending and consolidating a fragmented stateagainst real and perceived external and internalthreats. Emerging from the ravages of Parti-tion, Pakistan consisted of an ethnically frac-tured West Pakistan and East Pakistan dividedby one thousand miles of Indian territory.Many Muslims had remained in India, under-cutting the two-nation theory of Muslimsneeding a separate homeland. Looming overthis ideological and territorial vulnerability wasthe conviction that an irrevocably hostile Indiawas bent on unraveling Pakistan, as it contin-ued to stonewall on the delivery of Pakistan’svital and due share of resources inherited fromthe British. It was in this atmosphere of insecu-rity that Pakistan’s rulers embarked on theprocess of using Islam to fortify a nation.

An early manifestation of this was to lever-age the notion of jihad in shoring up the coun-try’s borders. Squaring off against India over

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the disputed territory of Kashmir in the hour oftheir separation, officers in the Pakistan armyinvolved in the Kashmir operation of 1947–48invoked jihad to mobilize tribesmen from thefrontier and send them to raid and seize Kash-mir; the government in turn called on religiousscholars to issue supportive fatwas or religiousdecrees. This was to be the beginning of a long-standing state policy of using religiously moti-vated proxies to asymmetrically secure politicaland territorial gains vis-a-vis a seemingly hege-monic India. As the Bureau of National Recon-struction—an intelligence and research unitunder General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first mili-tary ruler—put it in 1963: ‘‘In its manpower,Pakistan is very fortunate. In some of the re-gions, people have long traditions of irregularfighting. Now that they have got a homelandand a state based on their own ideology theyare bound to show great courage and determi-nation to defend them.’’6

The notion of jihad has historic roots in Pa-kistan’s frontier in particular. In Partisans ofAllah: Jihad in South Asia, Ayesha Jalal de-scribes the Deoband-inspired Sayyid Ahmad’s

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jihad against the Sikh empire in his quest foran Islamic state in the northern areas as a land-mark event.7 In the early days of Pakistan, thearmy—though defined by a secular British mil-itary tradition—tapped these jihadi sentimentsas part of its campaigns. Unsuccessful inwresting away Kashmir in 1948, the armyagain sent in irregular forces into Kashmir in1965 only to fight an all-out war resulting in astalemate. The war was rife with Islamic senti-ment, as an officer of the Inter-Services PublicRelations wrote: ‘‘There was a spurt of gal-lantry stories, of divine help, of superhumanresistance and of unrivalled professional ex-cellence in the face of overwhelming odds. . . .The story of the suicide squad—a band ofdedicated soldiers who acted as live landmines to blow up the advancing Indian tanksin Sialkot—became one of the most popularwar legends.’’8

Just as Islam was leveraged in response to theexternal threat of India, it was also used totackle internal challenges, from discreditingpolitical adversaries to unifying a divided na-tion. As early as 1953, Jinnah’s vision of a

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pluralistic Pakistan was challenged by streetprotests calling for a declaration that Ah-madis—followers of an alleged nineteenth-century messiah called Mirza Ghulam Ahmed—were non-Muslims. The protests were or-chestrated in part to destabilize the federal gov-ernment by calling for the resignation ofPakistan’s first foreign minister, Sir ZafarullahKhan, who was an Ahmadi.

It was in this explosive milieu that the 1954Munir Report, authored by two justices of theFederal Court, was issued sounding perhapsthe most farsighted and eloquent warningabout the nascent nation’s ideologically de-structive tendencies. Calling on the govern-ment to refrain from declaring Ahmadis asnon-Muslims, the report cautioned against thenotion that Pakistan was an Islamic state andthat the state should define who is a Muslim;this would only foment charges of apostasy, di-vide the nation, and be inconsistent with Jin-nah’s vision of an inclusive polity: ‘‘The resultof this part of inquiry, however, has been any-thing but satisfactory and if considerable con-fusion exists in the minds of our ulama

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[religious scholars] on such a simple matter,one can easily imagine what the differences onmore complicated matters will be. . . . Keepingin view the several different definitions givenby the ulama, need we make any comment ex-cept that no two learned divines are agreed onthis fundamental. If we attempt our own defi-nition as each learned divine has done and thatdefinition differs from that given by all others,we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam.And if we adopt the definition given by any oneof the ulama, we remain Muslims according tothe view of that alim, but kafirs [unbelievers]according to the definitions of everyone else.’’9

These words were to fall on deaf ears; in 1974,Ahmadis were officially declared non-Muslimsthrough a constitutional amendment.

In a similar strain, during the first indirectpresidential elections held under Ayub Khan in1965, Khan’s allies sought to discredit his pri-mary adversary, Fatimah Jinnah—the sister ofPakistan’s founder—by having a fatwa issuedthat Islam did not allow a female head ofstate—a refrain that would be echoed decadeslater vis-a-vis Benazir Bhutto—Pakistan’s first

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female prime minister. Such attempts to Islam-ically delegitimize political players and seg-ments of civil society—be it Ahmadis or laterthe Shia—has assumed an increasingly lethalundercurrent in Pakistan as many militantspave the way for killing their fellow Muslim cit-izens through takfir or declaring them as non-Muslims.

A more legitimate challenge, however, facingPakistan’s political and military elite was howto glue together a fractured state. For many,despite their secular orientation, the answer layin the systematic promotion of an Islamic ide-ology as part of a top-down nationalist proj-ect.10 Upon assuming power, Ayub Khan in a1960 Foreign Affairs article spoke of his inten-tion of ‘‘liberating the basic concept of ourideology from the dust of vagueness.’’11 Elabo-rating in his autobiography on a peoples’ needfor an ideology, he stated, ‘‘they will have tre-mendous power of cohesion and resistance.Such a society can conceivably be bent but notbroken. . . . Such an ideology with us is obvi-ously Islam. It was on that basis that we foughtfor and got Pakistan, but having got it, we

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failed to define the ideology in a simple andunderstandable form. . . . The time has nowcome when we must get over this shyness, facethe problem squarely and define this ideologyin simple but modern terms and put it to thepeople, so that they can use it as a code ofguidance.’’12

Yet the execution of this thinking was paro-chial, as reflected in the education sector. Astaught in schools, the history of Pakistan wasno longer a product of a postcolonial constitu-tional power-sharing struggle or the subconti-nent’s syncretic and shared Hindu-Muslimheritage, but an almost inexorable culminationof the arrival of Islam on the subcontinent. No-tions of implacable Hindu and Indian hostilitywere reinforced, as reflected in Ayub Khan’sown autobiography: ‘‘India particularly has adeep pathological hatred for Muslims and herhostility to Pakistan stems from a refusal to seea Muslim power developing next door.’’13

In a reflection of the continual contestationof the idea of Pakistan, Ayub Khan’s visionof Islamic ideology did not go unchallenged.In the spirit of the Munir Report, Huseyn

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Shaheed Suhrawardy, who briefly served as Pa-kistan’s prime minister from 1956 to 1957, ar-gued that an emphasis on ideology ‘‘wouldkeep alive within Pakistan the divisive com-munal emotions by which the subcontinentwas riven before the achievement of indepen-dence.’’14 Instead, he argued for a Pakistan with‘‘a durable identity between government andpeople derived through the operation of con-sent’’—a vision that has yet to truly prevail.

IDEOLOGY AND INTEGRITY

Under Ayub Khan’s military successor, Gen-eral Yahya Khan, developing an Islamic identityfor Pakistan’s unity and defense remained par-amount. Brigadier A. R. Siddiqui, head of mili-tary Inter-Services Public Relations, describedthe ideology and rhetoric espoused as follows:‘‘Expressions like the ‘ideology of Pakistan’ andthe ‘glory of Islam’ used by the military highcommand were becoming stock phrases. . . .They sounded more like high priests than sol-diers when they urged men to rededicate them-selves to the sacred cause of ensuring the

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‘security, solidarity, integrity of the countryand its ideology.’ ’’15 Seeking to retain power,Yahya Khan utilized the intelligence agencies toorchestrate attacks by Islamic parties againstthe two major political parties—the AwamiLeague and the Pakistan People’s Party. Bothwere accused of being un-Islamic due to theirsecular and socialist beliefs. Suspicious of itsown Islamic political allies such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, the regime even encouraged the emer-gence of other countervailing Islamic groups.As political and ethnic tensions boiled over inEast Pakistan, the military launched a cam-paign that descended into a full-blown civil warwith Indian intervention.

Once again, the war in 1971 was framed as astruggle for Pakistan’s Islamic identity, threat-ened now by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, whothough Muslims, were periodically depicted ascorrupted Muslims and in collusion withHindu India. As in previous wars, religious zealwas systematically employed to motivate sol-diers and frame the cause. General A. A. K.Niazi, who led the forces in East Pakistan, in-voked the ‘‘spirit of jihad and dedication to

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Islam’’ that would enable the defeat of anenemy ‘‘whose goal and ambition is the disin-tegration of Pakistan.’’16 The Jamaat-e-Islamiwas enlisted in East Pakistan in helping launchtwo paramilitary counterinsurgency wings. Theenemies of Pakistan, according to Yahya Khan,were doing ‘‘their level best to undo our dearcountry[,] . . . a people whose life is pulsatingwith love of the Holy Prophet. . . . [E]veryoneof us is a mujahid [holy warrior].’’17

The 1971 war ended in catastrophe for Paki-stan. East Pakistan separated, becoming Ban-gladesh, while nearly eighty thousand Pakistanisoldiers became prisoners of war. Pakistanifears of India’s hegemonic designs deepened;Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan’s instrumentaland parochial use of Islam to promote Paki-stan’s ideology and integrity failed; the rhetoricmasked military interventions that weakenedcivilian rule, papered over legitimate ethnicgrievances, and resulted in the loss of over halfthe nation. As in the wake of previous crises,an invaluable opportunity arose in the ashes ofdefeat to create a new national narrative.

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ISLAMIC SOCIALISM

The task of defining this new narrative fell toZulfikar Ali Bhutto—the first civilian politicianto rule Pakistan after nearly fifteen years ofarmy rule. Bhutto was a flamboyant aristocratfrom the province of Sind, educated at the Uni-versity of California at Berkeley. Havingformed the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) onlyfour years earlier, Bhutto ascended to poweron a development platform embodied in theslogan ‘‘roti [bread], kapra [cloth], makan[house].’’ Like his predecessors at the helm ofPakistan, Bhutto had to wrestle with questionsof Islam and ideology. Some contemporarycommentators pointed out that the separationof East Pakistan had resulted in a more com-pact entity where Islam was presumably nolonger needed to bind the state. Unity couldhave derived from a robust democratic processaccommodating political and ethnic differencesand looking toward ‘‘geological, geographic,ethnic, and historic grounds for regarding theIndus Valley and its western and northern

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mountain marches as a distinct national unitseparate from the rest of South Asia.’’18 The Is-lamic parties however vociferously attackedBhutto and his socialist ideology as a threat toIslam. Bhutto settled on the concept of ‘‘Is-lamic socialism’’ as his governing ideology tostave off his critics on the religious right and tocreate a new national narrative that promis-ingly leveraged core Islamic principles of jus-tice, equity, and poverty alleviation to tackle adeveloping nation’s fundamental socioeco-nomic challenges.

Yet with the passage of time, Bhutto’s regimeadopted a more conservative bent—a posturefueled by his insecurity vis-a-vis the militaryand his authoritarian tendencies. Bhutto intro-duced a ban on alcohol and gambling andmade Friday a non-work day. In 1974, unwill-ing to stand up to street protests by the Islamicparties against Ahmadis and risk his govern-ment, he supported a constitutional amend-ment that declared Ahmadis non-Muslims. Forthe first time in the country’s history, a minis-ter for religious affairs was appointed to thecentral cabinet. Eager to burnish his Islamic

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credentials, in 1976, Bhutto invited the Imamsof the Prophet’s mosque in Medina and themosque at the Kaa’ba—two of Islam’s holiestsites—to visit Pakistan.

Bhutto’s Islamic orientation was also re-flected in his foreign policy. In 1974, Bhuttohosted a major Organization of Islamic Con-ference meeting in Lahore, reorienting Pakistanaway from South Asia and toward the MiddleEast. Following India’s allegedly ‘‘peaceful nu-clear explosion’’ in 1974, Bhutto launched Paki-stan’s nuclear weapons program, rhetoricallydeclaring ‘‘There’s a Hindu bomb, a Jewishbomb and a Christian bomb. There must be anIslamic bomb.’’19 In light of Pakistan’s unsettledborder with Afghanistan that divided a restiveethnic Pashtun population between both coun-tries, the Bhutto government also began to sup-port two Afghan Islamist militias to gainleverage over Kabul on the border issue: Burha-nuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami and Gulbud-din Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami. The decisionwas to have far-reaching consequences. Bothmilitias played a key role in the uprising againstthe Soviets; today Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami

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remains one of the three key militant networksU.S. troops are targeting in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, Bhutto’s promise of Islamic so-cialism was compromised by narrower politicaland foreign policy objectives as he failed tofully realize a new and progressive national ide-ology. In the wake of rampant street agitationled by the Islamic parties in conjunction withthe intelligence agencies, he was deposed byGeneral Zia-ul-Haq. It was Zia who would ini-tiate the wholesale process of converting Paki-stan to an Islamic state.

THE ISLAMIZATION OF PAKISTAN

General Zia’s decade in power was a setbackfor a faltering democratic process and usheredin an era of religious obscurantism that affectedevery facet of domestic life and foreign policy.In his very first speech as chief martial law ad-ministrator after removing Bhutto from power,Zia, who was sincerely devout, described him-self as a ‘‘soldier of Islam’’ and spelled out hisvision: ‘‘Pakistan, which was created in thename of Islam, will continue to survive only if

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it sticks to Islam. That is why I consider theintroduction of Islamic system as an essentialprerequisite for the country.’’20 As such, in con-trast to Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, who sawIslam as part of an ongoing and overarchingnationalist project, Zia saw Islam as part of arevolutionary process to overhaul Pakistan.

The domestic impact was manifold. Begin-ning with the army, Zia, upon being appointedarmy chief by Bhutto, changed the slogan ofthe Pakistan army to ‘‘Iman [faith], Taqwa[piety], and Jihad fi Sabil Allah [jihad for thesake of God].’’ Officer evaluation forms in-cluded a box of comments on an officer’s reli-gious sincerity. Evangelical groups such as theTableeghi Jamat linked to the Deobandi tradi-tion enjoyed greater access to military officersand civil servants. Like his military predeces-sors, Zia cynically used the Islamic parties asa counter to his civilian political foes but alsoextended them unprecedented political patron-age, initially appointing a number of Jamaat-e-Islami members to head key ministries. In theprocess, Zia also politicized other Islamic par-ties that had largely remained apolitical to dateand empowered them. Along with separate

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electorates being introduced for non-Muslims,registration criteria that excluded most secularparties were introduced during elections.

Zia’s Islamization also encompassed Paki-stan’s judicial system. The government consti-tuted provincial Shariat benches at the HighCourt level and an appellate Shariat Bench atthe Supreme Court level tasked with decidingif any parliamentary law was Islamic or not andwhether the government should change them.Particularly troubling was the introduction ofthe Hudood Ordinance based on a distortedunderstanding of Quranic injunctions and in-troducing punishments such as flogging, ston-ing, and amputation (punishments that thestate albeit never applied). The ordinance’smost controversial application was and re-mains the imprisonment of female rape victimson the grounds of adultery. An effort was alsolaunched to Islamize the education sector. In1981, the University Grants Commission is-sued the following directive to prospective text-book authors: ‘‘to demonstrate that the basis ofPakistan is not to be founded in racial, linguis-tic, or geographical factors, but rather in theshared experience of a common religion. To get

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students to know and appreciate the Ideologyof Pakistan, and to popularize it with slogans.To guide students towards the ultimate goal ofPakistan—the creation of a completely Islamic-ized State.’’21

The underlying motive behind these variousgenuine and cosmetic ‘‘reforms’’ was a moralzeal that animated Zia. Islam was no longer justan overarching ideology to harness to unifyand defend the state; it was the road to salva-tion. Decrying endemic corruption and eco-nomic ills in Pakistan in a 1979 interview, Ziastated as follows: ‘‘In the last thirty years ingeneral but more so in the last seven years therehas been a complete erosion of the moral val-ues of our society. . . . Islam from that point ofview is the fundamental factor. It comes beforewheat and rice and everything else. I can growmore wheat; I can import wheat but I cannotimport the correct moral values.’’22

Under Zia a similar moral zeal characterizedPakistan’s central foreign policy preoccupationin the 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghani-stan. During Zia’s rule, Pakistan became a stag-ing ground for the insurgency against theSoviet Union, which was characterized as jihad.

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In this effort, the Pakistani military leveragedthe proxy Islamic groups it had backed since the1970s, providing them with arms and financingin coordination with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia,among other states. Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami,in particular, was a favorite of the Inter-ServicesIntelligence (ISI), which spearheaded the covertoperation in Afghanistan. As an ethnic Pashtun,Hekmatyar was viewed as a potential leaderunder whom Afghanistan would be more favor-ably disposed toward Pakistan in the spirit ofIslamic unity and less disposed to play the eth-nic card. Ultimately, Zia’s goal in transforminga limited Islamist rebellion into a full-scale jihadwas to extend Pakistani influence into Afghani-stan in light of its historic territorial concerns,secure significant assistance by helping the U.S.bleed its Cold War adversary, and allegedly ‘‘tomake Pakistan the source of a natural Islamicrevolutionary movement, replacing artificial al-liances such as the Baghdad Pact.’’ ‘‘This wouldbe the means,’’ continued one of Zia’s confi-dants in describing his vision, ‘‘of starting a newera of greatness for the Muslim nations of Asiaand Africa.’’23

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In pursuing these strategic goals, the Zia re-gime with international aid systematically cul-tivated a virulent strain of Islamist ideologyin Pakistan. The ISI made right-wing Islamicparties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami and JamiatUlema Islam key partners in recruiting amongthe millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistanand students at religious schools or madaris—lionizing those who volunteered as muja-hideen fighting in the name of God. In theprocess, these parties developed extensive net-works throughout Pakistan and deepenedtheir influence. Students from impoverishedbackgrounds at the madaris were taught anobscurantist understanding of Islam with nomodern subjects, making them easy prey fortheir handlers. Meanwhile, Saudi and UnitedStates funding directly facilitated this indoc-trination. From 1984 to 1994, for example, theUnited States Agency for International De-velopment gave a $51 million grant to theUniversity of Nebraska-Omaha to developtextbooks filled with violent images and mili-tant Islamic teachings as part of a covert effortto inspire anti-Soviet resistance.24 Zia further

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opened Pakistan’s doors to volunteers fromall over the world who participated in thejihad in Afghanistan and who established of-fices, raised funds, and issued statements onPakistani soil. Pakistan became the epicenterof a global jihad movement.

Alongside this jihadi culture, Pakistan underZia also witnessed an unprecedented rise insectarianism—once again triggered by both ex-ternal and internal factors—which has claimedtens of thousands of lives in Pakistan. Exter-nally, in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolu-tion in Iran, the Khomeini regime beganexporting its revolutionary message across theMuslim world. Neighboring Pakistan became abattleground in a ‘‘transplanted war’’ betweenIran and Saudi Arabia that sought to limit Shiainfluence—a struggle that violently played outamong a hydra of sectarian groups.25 On oneside was the Iranian-backed Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqh-i-Jafria (Movement for the Implementa-tion of Shiite Religious Law); on the other wereSunni extremist groups such as the Sipah-e-Sa-haba, ideologically equipped with fatwas issuedby Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan and India

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declaring the Shia as apostates. Sipah-e-Saha-ba’s political demand was that the state shoulddeclare the Shia—15–20 percent of Pakistan’spopulation—non-Muslims through a constitu-tional amendment, as done with the Ahmadis.Zia’s support for the anti-Shia groups was largelyin deference to Saudi Arabia. Not only was theKingdom central to funding the jihad, but alsoit enabled Pakistan’s initial acquisition of F-16sfrom the U.S., provided oil to Pakistan on adeferred-payment basis, and hosted a largenumber of Pakistan expatriate workers.

The cumulative effect of the Zia years in Pa-kistan was not just a wholesale Islamization ofthe Pakistani state to varying degrees but alsothe explosion of a jihadi and sectarian culturein response to external forces that were nur-tured for political and ideological reasons. Itwas in the throes of this period that Pakistan’sdrift into extremism began.

IDEOLOGICALLY ADRIFT

Upon the demise of General Zia in 1988, Pa-kistan entered a tumultuous decade of political

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instability, near bankruptcy, international iso-lation, and a hardening jihadi culture—a pe-riod during which it remained dangerouslyadrift.

The decade saw four consecutive democraticgovernments—alternating twice under BenazirBhutto and Nawaz Sharif—come crashingdown before any could finish a full term. Thejostling among Pakistan’s power troika—thearmy chief, the president, and the prime minis-ter—kept Pakistan at the brink of a politicalprecipice. Although Bhutto and Sharif ’s gov-ernments were discredited in large part by theirown corruption and malfeasance, as in thepast, the intelligence services in collaborationwith a range of Islamic parties and other ele-ments undermined them and the democraticprocess. The prime example was during the1988 election that brought Bhutto to power.During this election, the ISI-backed IslamiJamhoori Ittehad (IJI) bitterly attacked Bhuttoon the grounds that Islam did not permit awoman to serve as a head of state and that shewould be unable to safeguard the country’sideological and national security interests.

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Yet Pakistan’s mainstream politicians werenot immune to such manipulation either. In1999, Sharif as prime minister tried to makeShariat (Islamic law) part of Pakistan’s consti-tution. The bill passed the lower house and wasslated to pass the upper house in 2000 whenSharif ’s party was expected to gain control ofthe Senate. Prior to that, however, Sharif wasdeposed in a coup by his handpicked armychief, Pervez Musharraf, marking the end ofPakistan’s lost decade of democracy. Duringthis period, no attempt was made to chart anew course for Pakistan as it swirled in a politi-cal maelstrom with stunted development, pro-viding fertile ground for unemployment,illiteracy, and extremism.

Yet, in contrast to its internal political vicis-situdes, Pakistan externally pursued a consis-tent policy of leveraging Islamic proxiesagainst its neighbors to advance perceivednational security goals. With the Soviet with-drawal from Afghanistan and the imposi-tion of sanctions on Pakistan in light of itsnuclear program, Pakistan entered the 1990sisolated, economically crippled, and, in its

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view, abandoned by the United States with ajihadi corps in its midst. Many of these ele-ments were redirected to Kashmir to wage aproxy war against India, hijacking the nation-alist movement that had emerged in Indian-held Kashmir. Although Pakistan claimed toprovide political and moral support to theKashmiri struggle, the strategic rationale wasto tie down Indian troops in Kashmir andbleed it by a thousand cuts in order to bringit to the table to negotiate on Kashmir. On thewestern front, keen to avoid at best a continu-ing descent into chaos in Afghanistan and atworst a hostile regime that might play thePashtun card in Pakistan, the army, with thecivilian leadership fully on board, began toback the military campaign of a new class ofwarriors that had emerged from Pakistan’smadaris—the Taliban. Both in Kashmir andAfghanistan, the goal was to leverage Islamicgroups to offset Pakistan’s seemingly hostileneighbors—a policy with clear historical ante-cedents. Although the goals were rational, themeans resulted in lethal blowback.

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ENLIGHTENED MODERATION

With Musharraf ’s coup and alignment withthe U.S.-led ‘‘war on terror’’ after 9/11, Paki-stan once again arrived at a critical crossroadsfollowing a regional crisis. Forced to confrontthe specter of Islamic extremism in the interna-tional limelight, the country faced an age-oldquestion: What was its Islamic ethos? Mushar-raf ’s answer was ‘‘enlightened moderation.’’

Beginning with his landmark address to thenation in January 2002 where he called for re-jecting terrorism in Kashmir and combating ex-tremism and intolerance, Musharraf throughouthis time in power made his plea for enlightenedmoderation.26 Enlightened moderation, as out-lined by him, was a two-pronged strategy: ‘‘Thefirst part is for the Muslim world to shun mili-tancy and extremism and adopt the path of so-cioeconomic uplift. The second is for the West,and the United States in particular, to seek toresolve all political disputes with justice and toaid in the socioeconomic betterment of the de-prived Muslim world.’’27 Although Musharraf’s

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formulation was an important attempt to pro-vide an overarching vision for Pakistan and tonationally delegitimize extremism, its executionwas deficient and resulted in anything butmoderation.

While taking some tentative steps in thespirit of enlightened moderation, Musharrafeventually faltered. Measures such as banning anumber of key militant groups and beginningthe process of registering madaris and reform-ing their curricula proved tentative: militantgroups sprung up under other names, the reg-istration process came to a grinding halt, andlongstanding deficiencies in the public educa-tion curriculum remained largely unaddressed.Meanwhile, Musharraf ’s alliance of politicalexpediency with the Islamic parties and ban ofthe heads of the two mainstream political par-ties—Bhutto and Sharif—resulted in a politicalvacuum that was filled by the Islamic partiesand enabled the further flourishing of obscu-rantism in the country.

Moreover, while largely forward leaning intackling Al-Qaeda, the army did not fully sever

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links with the Taliban or with a number of mil-itant groups operating in Afghanistan andKashmir, again in the interests of retainingstrategic proxies. Compounding the challengewas that some groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba,operating in Kashmir, had over time becomepart of the social fabric of Pakistan in terms oftheir perceived heroism in allegedly champion-ing the Kashmiri cause and also in deliveringcritical social services, for example in the wakeof the Kashmir earthquake. Moving againsttheir erstwhile proteges at the seeming behestof the United States or India could trigger apublic backlash.

In sum, Musharraf failed to successfullyanchor enlightened moderation in Pakistan,largely due to policies that empowered the Is-lamic parties and tolerated militant groups.Militant groups that had once trained theirguns across the border turned them inwardand expanded their control in the frontierregion through government-initiated peacedeals; fiery clerics and vigilante youth squadswho tasked themselves with enforcing Islamic

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morality proliferated in parts of the country,culminating in the taking over of the RedMosque in Islamabad in 2007 and its storm-ing by the army. As enlightened moderationdimmed, it gave way to a darker phenomenon:Talibanization.

TALIBANIZATION

Today, Pakistan faces an existential militantIslamist threat that its elected government is try-ing to combat in fractious collaboration with thearmy. Suicide attacks against army headquarters,to academic institutions, etc., reflect the criticalthreat the Pakistani state faces as these extremistsstrike at the hardest and softest of targets andinstill pervasive fear and insecurity. Whereasonce Islam underpinned the state’s flawed nar-rative of nation building and strategic security,nonstate actors have hijacked that narrative withan extremist interpretation of Islam for a varietyof motives, including the pursuit of a new Is-lamic order. It is this hijacking of the nationalIslamic narrative that is a defining feature of Pa-kistan’s current troubles.

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On one hand, there are groups that regardthe Pakistani state as an enemy of Islam forhaving sided with the United States in the inva-sion of Afghanistan and applying force againstthem. The army remains locked in a strugglewith the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP),commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban,in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas(FATA)—once a staging ground for the Sovietjihad. The reach of extremism in Pakistantoday, however, can only be fully understoodby examining the presence of a multitude ofestablishment-spawned jihadi groups in thePunjabi heartland of Pakistan that are turningon the state. These include the Sipah-e-Sa-haba Pakistan (SSP), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ),Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), who thrive in southern Punjabamidst poverty and unemployment. Their re-cruits come from the more than three thou-sand madaris in Punjab, many of which haveprovided foot soldiers for the Soviet jihad, theKashmir struggle, sectarian conflict, and nowAl Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Pakistanand Afghanistan.28

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Alongside these groups are ones waving thebanner of an Islamic state and a return to reli-gious purity as the antidote to the Pakistanistate’s inability to provide basic services, tackleeconomic inequities, and deliver justice. Theirnarrative is a direct function of state failure;their goal is a new if entirely undefined Islamicstate—a struggle reminiscent of Sayyid Ahmad’sjihad against the Sikhs. The conflict in Swat is aprime example where a longstanding movementfor the implementation of Shariah law, fueledby anger at a broken system of justice and anexploitative landed class, violently boiled overwith TTP support. Through a series of agree-ments with the government to cease fire in ex-change for the implementation of Islamic law,militants steadily moved within one hundredmiles of Islamabad, with one of the leadersclaiming that democracy was not an appropriatesystem of governance in Pakistan. Although themilitary eventually rebuffed these groups, for thefirst time their territorial and ideological aspira-tion vis-a-vis the Pakistani state became clear.

Although the military response to combatthese groups is well known and documented,

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the ideological response is equally important.Here the role of the Islamic parties and clericsis of particular interest. There has always beensome tension among Pakistan’s Islamic partiesabout whether to pursue their avowed goal ofan Islamic state through democracy or insur-gency. Although they have never gotten morethan 12 percent of the national vote, and thatduring the Musharraf era, riding a wave ofanti–United States sentiment following the in-vasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic parties con-tinue to project influence well beyond theirnumbers. They have however largely boughtinto the democratic process and have periodi-cally spoken out against the violent tactics ofinsurgents. Alongside the role of the Islamicparties in disavowing such violent means is thequestion of mounting an ideological defenseand reclaiming, if not the narrative, at least aless radical understanding of Islam. The cur-rent government has attempted to do this bysetting up of a seven-member Sufi AdvisoryCouncil (SAC) with the aim of combatingextremism and fanaticism by spreading Sufism—a more peaceful and less rigid form of Islam

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anchored in the subcontinent’s history—throughout the country.29

Currently, as the state finds itself on the de-fensive against an array of groups claiming towave the banner of Islam, it must decisivelycounter their ideology. In doing so, it and theWest must recognize that the core issue is notalways a quest for Islamic purity but a relianceon Islamic rhetoric to mask more earthy con-cerns related to power, poverty, and justicethat circle back to the need for better gover-nance in Pakistan. At the same time, jihad—long sanctioned by the state for its strategicsecurity reasons—to achieve these ends mustbe delegitimized. ‘‘It is time for the govern-ment to come out in public and explain thenature of the enemy,’’ said Khalid Aziz, aformer chief secretary of the North-WestFrontier Province. ‘‘The national narrative insupport of jihad has confused the Pakistanimind. . . . All along we’ve been saying thesepeople are trying to fight a war of Islam, butthere is a need for transforming the nationalnarrative.’’30

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YEH HUM HAMEEN (THIS IS NOT US)

To stave off the ideological inroads of ex-tremism and generate a progressive narrative inPakistan, the most important constituency isthe people of Pakistan. In the Western media,Pakistan is often portrayed as a radicalizing so-ciety, caught between the mosque and militaryand teetering on the brink of fundamentalism.The reality is more complex. Pakistan has a ro-bust civil society as seen in the recent lawyers’movement; its media is among the most pro-lific in the Muslim world. A moderate majorityexists that rejects extremism and suicide bomb-ing yet believes in the concept of a Muslimummah and is anti-U.S. on a host of issues; thatcondemns the actions of the Taliban and theirilk as a distortion of Islam yet is uncertainabout the means to counter them, particularlythe use of force against fellow citizens andMuslims. Deep schisms exist among ‘‘moder-ate’’ Pakistani Muslims, tracing back to the di-vide between the Aligarh and Deoband schoolspre-Partition—those who embrace religions

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and notions of modernity and those who seeksalvation in Islam’s perceived fundamentals. Tounderstand Pakistan’s Islamic ideology, it isvital to examine this not just at the state levelbut also at a societal level.

The pervasive strand of Islam among thesubcontinent’s Muslims has historically beenSufi or Barelvi Islam. Sufi Islam is viewed asmore inclusive and flexible, paying no heed tocaste, creed, ethnicity, or race. Its physicalmanifestation in the subcontinent has longbeen the plethora of shrines across Pakistanfrequented by the masses seeking relief fromliving saints or pirs for their ills, though thisinsertion of a conduit between man and Godhas been ripe for manipulation. Since indepen-dence, Pakistan’s Sufi culture has come undergreat strain due to internal and external rea-sons. Internally, successive regimes have co-opted influential pirs, who, in becomingincreasingly politicized and prosperous, cameto be viewed by many as part of the hegemonicsocioeconomic order in Pakistan. Meanwhile,beginning in the 1970s, more conservative

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Deobandi and Wahabi views gained greater cur-rency based on four factors: the importation ofthis ideology by Pakistani workers who went toSaudi Arabia and the Gulf to capitalize on theoil boom; the embrace of these views by manyin the middle class as Sufism came to be identi-fied with a particular hegemonic order and thestate’s failings came to be viewed as only reme-diable by returning to a purer if amorphousform of Islam; the pan-Islamic revivalism follow-ing the Iranian revolution and Saudi attemptsto ideologically counter Iranian influence, in-cluding in Pakistan; and the aggressive pro-motion of Wahabi and Deobandi thought inPakistan during the Soviet jihad through aburst of Saudi financing, madaris, and statepolicy. As such, Pakistani society’s complex Is-lamic texture has emerged from the top downand bottom up as a more conservative form ofIslam has gained currency in a changing socio-economic context.31

The ramifications of this can be seen in Paki-stan today as encapsulated in the trenchantcriticism of one Pakistani commentator: ‘‘In

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Pakistan’s lower-middle and middle classeslurks a grim and humorless Saudi-inspired re-vivalist movement that frowns on any andevery expression of joy and pleasure. Lackingany positive connection to culture and knowl-edge, it seeks to eliminate ‘corruption’ by regu-lating cultural life and seizing control of theeducation system.’’32 Indeed, over the decades,there has been an increase in conservatismranging from more women taking to wearingthe veil, music and dancing being viewed bymany as un-Islamic, increased censorship inthe name of Islam, and, in light of a defunctpublic education system, madaris churning outthousands of students who project a parochialmoral zeal and fear far beyond their numbers.A pervasive austerity has hardened across Paki-stani society.

Yet many Pakistanis are cognizant of the dis-tinction between conservatism and fanaticism.One example of this was the strong support fora military response in the Swat Valley underTaliban sway in the spring and summer of2009. This support was catalyzed by the release

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of a video showing a woman being brutallyflogged by the Taliban—a video that provokedwidespread public anger, highlighting the in-creasing power of Pakistan’s media in shapingperceptions. Another powerful public rejectionof Islamic extremism can be seen in the successof the movie Khuda Ke Liye (For God’s Sake),released in 2007. One of the all-time highestgrossing films in Pakistan’s cinematic history(and the first to be screened in India in fortyyears), the movie was a powerful critique ofboth the distortion of Islam to extremist endsas well as U.S. policy toward Muslim-Ameri-cans post-9/11. A third expression is the YehHum Naheen (This Is Not Us) movement inPakistan, with billboards in major cities urgingPakistanis to reject extremism and claimingthat Islam is a religion of peace. These expres-sions of civil society even when emanatingfrom specific strata are important to considerin understanding the way ordinary people inPakistan perceive the role of religion in theirlives as well as its distortion. Indeed, a coherentconsolidation and injection of such expressions

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into the national discourse are a vital antidoteto the extremism coursing through the veins ofPakistani society.

A NEW NARRATIVE

From the very creation of Pakistan, Islam hasbeen and will always remain a central socialand political force. This report sought to painta broad picture of how Islam has been harn-essed through Pakistan’s history for everythingfrom nation building to strategic security—anenterprise that was radically escalated duringthe Zia era. The blowback of this is clear today.The Islamic narrative in Pakistan has been hi-jacked by an array of groups who use religionas a means to diverse ends: to secure politicaland territorial power, exorcise corrosive West-ern influence, engage in class warfare, redressperceived injustices, and even overturn thestate in pursuit of a purer Islamic order. Theuse and understanding of Islam in Pakistan hasalways been in flux, evolving in response totime and internal and external events. The

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question that arises, then, is not whether reli-gion has a role in Pakistan but how it can bechanneled as a force for progressive change.What form should an enabling narrative ofIslam in Pakistan assume? Part of the answerlies in focusing on building an inclusive androbust Pakistani state invoking progressive Is-lamic values. The onus lies with the Pakistanileadership and people, but the internationalcommunity can help in the promotion of goodgovernance, education reform, and economicopportunity, as well as in the resolution ofdeep-seated regional insecurities and griev-ances that have led to the cultivation of extrem-ist entities as a matter of state policy. Thehistory delineated in this report provides criti-cal context in this effort, but the report inten-tionally refrains from prescription orprojection. Indeed, it concludes with the over-arching lessons that Pakistan was and remainsa contested idea and that embedded in everycrisis is a vital opportunity to create a newnarrative.

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the ideological struggle for pakistan

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