THE year 1953 proved to be prophetic for Pakistan’s future political course as two grand Pakistani themes, religion and military, intersected. State policy abetted holy judgment-spewing clerics against the Ahmaddiyas (from whose ranks arose, among others, Pakistan’s first and only Nobel laureate in 1979).

As Lahore erupted in an uprising led by the clergy against the Ahmaddiya sect, Pakistan got its first taste of martial law. This is, arguably, the first confluence of religion and military in Pakistan’s history.

Religion is in Pakistan’s blood almost in the same way, in hindsight, as military intervention. Being the first nation-state, prior to Israel, to be founded on theology, Pakistan often gave the upper hand to the Islamic clergy — most happened to be the disciples of Maulana Maududi — to fix the rules. These more often than not conflicted with Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s scintillating Aug 11, 1947, Constituent Assembly speech conferring equal and integral rights on the country’s minorities.

This may have been driven by nationalistic fervour to differentiate from Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a multicultural, secular and pluralistic India. Post-Jinnah, the Pakistani state and state-fostered popular imagination elevated the interests of Muslims over Pakistani minorities. This was a natural countervailing tendency; unfettering the newborn state from the inchoate Indian subcontinent.

Even during the nominally secular regimes of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the clergy coalesced to advance Maududi’s Wahabi values pressuring, for instance, Mr Bhutto to repackage his regime as Islamic.

This marked yet another ideological conflict between an avowedly secular, populist agenda, under Mr Bhutto, and the call of the clergy rebelling against him. A popularly elected government’s charismatic leader, Mr Bhutto tactically sang the religious singsong in order to compensate for perceptions of him being non-religious.

But such instances of expediency came at the cost of further mangling the identity of the country. Some argue that Mr Bhutto’s measures were merely cosmetic and intended to mollify the maddening mullahs. However hard it is to gauge intentions, Mr Bhutto nonetheless dealt a blow to the Pakistani polity through these concessions.

In 1974, 21 years after the Lahore martial law, Mr Bhutto declared the Ahmaddiyas non-Muslims, demoralising the secular Pakistani mindset. The true potency of religion as a weapon, however, came to the fore with General Ziaul Haq. Embarking upon a project of martial institutionalisation of the Pakistani religion and the Pakistani military, General Zia sought to remould the Pakistani identity which further denuded the country of Jinnah’s ideals of liberalism, secularism and rationality.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the state-sanctioned puritanical surge in the Pakistani military, sanctifying a professional army as a religious fiefdom. Through an extensive Islamisation programme introduced in the country, General Zia appealed to his sole constituency — the military — for strict adherence to Islamic injunctions. If a soldier were to deviate from the prescribed dogma, it could lead to his demotion or forced ejection from the military.

Adhering to strict Islamic guidelines meant that military matters came to be viewed through a holy lens, presenting a fuzzy sense of religious superiority, to break the back of opposing forces. This newfound religious mooring, enshrined in the concept of jihad, in the military was hand in glove with the Americans’ aims as they went deep inside Afghanistan for a battle with the Red Army. Imbued with a missionary zeal, the Mujahideen — holy warriors — acted as America’s proxy ground forces.

Clandestinely, US Congressman Charlie Wilson and General Zia successfully drew American largesse into that last frontier of the Cold War, turning Pakistan into a conduit of the drugs-for-arms bazaar — all in the name of faith. Although General Zia’s public stance may have been feverishly Islamic, his private leanings suggested a morbid degree of expediency over faith as evidenced by his involvement in Black Friday in 1970, where Pakistani troops slaughtered Palestinians in Jordan, and willingness to secretly deal with Israel during the Afghan war.

Remnants of the Afghan war’s infrastructure — composed of orphaned children easily misdirected, army officers sustaining ghosts and retaining their loyalty to their holy cause, and the proliferating trades of drugs and arms — as we now well know gave an impetus to the terror networks that have darted about in blatant breach of national sovereignty and security.

With the wilful support of General Zia and his cronies, these nascent, transnational actors quickly rose to represent Maulana Maududi’s dogma, the difference being that they had little or no remorse about resorting to violence as a device. The effect was a far cry from the Pakistan Mr Jinnah had envisaged — it was tottering from the threat of being declared a ‘terrorist state’ in early 1993 to become ‘the world’s most dangerous place’.

Present analyses of Pakistan inevitably ascribe the doomsday scenario to the currents the country finds itself in. These currents, whether they be waves of suicide bombing, political assassinations, Talibanisation or the export of jihad etc, are rooted in the Cold War’s layered framework binding the intelligence agencies and mercenaries’ corps. Underneath lies the bubbling legacy of Maulana Maududi, whose disparate international movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, morphed into a globalised entity, i.e. Al Qaeda, churning out jihadis. The western border and more so, Pakistan, geographically, by fate, became the world’s terror cauldron.

Unfettered by the checks and balances anchored in a true democratic government, Pakistan fumbled towards a coherent identity in its first few decades. Without a constitution, the Basic Law drawn up in 1956 was overthrown by the 1958 coup. The country finally got a constitution 26 years after its creation. This void opened up space for the military and clergy to manipulate to their converging advantage, i.e. pursue the goal of a theocratic, military-run, frontline state.

Various episodic bursts of ‘niche repression’ strained the young nation-state’s fabric. As the events of 1953 established, the minorities in Pakistan were viewed with suspicion by the mighty. That, in turn, disturbed the equilibrium that Mr Jinnah had deftly calibrated in the formation of Pakistan.But the final nail in the state’s battered religious-notion came with General Zia’s blasphemy law, so malleable in its application that an accusing finger by anyone sufficed to implicate any Pakistani, especially Christian or Hindu.

The formidable effects of Islamisation carried out under General Zia cast a shadow on the civilian governments of the early nineties. Benazir Bhutto battled with an entrenched religio-military lobby, surviving merciless machinations such as Operation Jackal in 1989, but time was not on her side as her government was booted out.

Her successor, Nawaz Sharif bridged the chasm between General Zia’s and his term by pandering to the clergy. Mr Sharif tabled his desired Islamic Sharia Bill during his second term but failed to have it passed into law by one vote in the Senate.

These acts were reminders of Zia’s imprints and emboldened a flourishing religio-military lobby to pursue the victimisation of minorities, arrest women’s empowerment, seek a universal strand of religion, abort civilian superiority over a military course, propagate jihad in the Islamic hinterlands, encourage the proliferation of unenlightened madressahs and reinforce Maulana Maududi’s ideology.