Illustration by Abro
Illustration by Abro

A steady but intense debate is taking place all over social, print and electronic media in Pakistan. The trigger has been the worrisome condition of the state and polity of the country that have been facing a serious existentialist crisis ever since extremist militancy began to reach unprecedented propositions from the early 2000s.

The debate is squarely based on the following question: What role (rather, how much of a role) should faith be playing in the matters of the state, governance and society in a country like Pakistan that came into being as a Muslim-majority entity?

This question (and the debate that it usually triggers), is certainly not a new phenomenon. It has cropped up before. But the urgency that it seems to have gathered today had been missing for over three decades now.

This urgency is largely the result of some extraordinary policies that the state and the government finally decided to enact from early 2014 to curb the once seemingly uncontrollable menace of extremist violence and bigotry that Pakistan has been in the grip of, especially after 2006.


Sixty-eight years on and we continue to brawl over the validity of the Pakistan ideology


The decision of the Pakistan armed forces (under General Raheel Sharif) to exhibit certain overt maneuvers to tackle the mentioned menace; and the (albeit hesitant) anti-extremist actions of the current PML-N regime, have opened up the debate, giving it the kind of fluency that it had been lacking for decades.

In a nutshell, one section in the debate insists that whatever that was concocted in the name of a national ideology (after Jinnah’s demise in 1948; or more so, after the late 1970s), is largely to be blamed for popularising an idea of nationhood engineered through the state’s many experiments that seeded a non-organic ideology.

They believe such an ideology characteristically mutated into becoming a dogma that has contributed the most to whatever that has gone down in the country in the way of faith-based violence and the ever-increasing episodes of bigotry.

The other section disagrees. It suggests that it is the opposing section that is to be blamed because it undermined the true raison d’etre of Pakistan’s creation by imposing ‘alien / Western concepts’ of governance and nationhood and (in the process) stalled the infusion of divine laws and culture in a country that came into being in the name of faith.

As the debate rages on and the military establishment, the state and government of Pakistan now find themselves urgently trying to carve out a much clearer middle-ground between the two poles, it should be remembered that this debate is not a sudden occurrence that emerged from a manic vacuum.

A similar debate had raged in the country almost four decades ago (in the 1960s). The question that triggered that debate was quite similar to the one that is prompting the current one.

The only difference is that the 1960s were a more tolerant period in which an intellectually superior debate was likely to thrive and in which various well-known scholarly figureheads from both sides of the divide participated.

The debate had erupted with the coinage of the term, ‘Pakistan Ideology’.

As author and historian, Ayesha Jalal, has often observed, the term ‘Pakistan Ideology’ was nowhere in the speeches during the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Nor was its Urdu expression ‘Nazriya-i-Pakistan’.

When the 1962 Constitution of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s regime highlighted its understanding of Pakistani nationhood to mean being a Muslim (as opposed to a theological) state where a modernist and reformist spirit of Islam would guide the country’s politics and society, the religious parties opposed it.

It was at this point that the term Nazriya-i-Pakistan first emerged. It is largely believed that the expression was first used by the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) who suggested that Pakistan’s ideology should be squarely based on policies constructed through the dictates of the faith, striving to turn Pakistan into a theological entity.

The debate about exactly what kind of a vision drove Jinnah to demand a separate Muslim country in South Asia, and what should constitute Pakistani culture and nationhood peaked in the late 1960s when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed the left-leaning Pakistan People’s Party (PPP); and when Sindhi, Baloch, Pushtun and Bengali nationalists accelerated their agitation for provincial autonomy.

After witnessing the ascendency of leftist parties in Pakistan in the late 1960s and the growing agitation by ethnic nationalists, JI’s founder and prolific Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi, declared that socialism was an anti-religious ideology.

Prominent progressive intell­ectuals such as Hanif Ramay and poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz responded by emphasising that Pakistani nationhood and culture were multi-ethnic and multicultural and best served by democracy and socialism.

Maududi struck back by explaining leftist and liberal Pakistani political organisations and cultural outfits as ‘Trojan horses’ who had infiltrated Pakistani society and government to ‘damage the country’s faith-based fabric.’

Responding to Maududi’s outburst, the popular Urdu literary magazine, Nusrat (that had been founded by Hanif Ramay) began to run a series of essays explaining ‘Maududiat’.

Though the term had been first coined by Maududi’s opponents in another religious outfit, the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI), which had accused Maududi of trying to construct a separate sect, Nusrat and eventually the PPP used the term to define Maududi’s philosophy as being opportunistic because he had originally opposed the creation of Pakistan but was now using the politics of the same country to safeguard his ‘economic (industrialist) and foreign (Western / capitalist) allies (from socialism).’

Maududi bounced back and accused the leftists of being on the strings of the Soviet Union. The JI began publishing Maududi’s new Nazriya-i-Pakistan thesis along with his earlier writings.

Author and journalist, Safdar Mir, claimed that JI had omitted republishing the essays that Maududi had written before Pakistan’s creation and in which he had lambasted the Pakistan Movement because (according to Maududi) Muslim Nationalism was contrary to the universality of Islam.

Mir sardonically lay into Maududi’s thesis by reproducing the contents of the missing essays. On the other end, famous lawyer, A.K. Brohi (who, ironically, was part of the anti-JI Ayub regime before its fall in 1969) and popular novelist, Naseem Hijazi, sided with Maududi and denounced the period’s leftist forces for being ‘anti-religion’ and ‘anti-Pakistan’.

The debate abated after the 1970 election. But the separation of East Pakistan (1971), the economic failure of the first PPP regime (1971-77), the emergence of a reactionary dictatorship (1977-88) and the fall-out (in Pakistan) of the Afghan Civil War, retarded the debate.

Decades later it has returned; or rather, it has returned to become a proper polemical entity again as opposed to being a one-sided narrative which began explaining opposing ideas (of what constitutes Pakistani Nationhood and ideology), as a threat to the country’s existence.

Thus, one section of the debate is now claiming that such an existentialist threat actually emerged due to the myopic egoism of the post-’77 narrative, while the other section is suggesting that this happened because what the narrative suggested was never properly implemented.

It is still too early to determine which way the debate would turn. But the way it has opened up once again after years of becoming extremely narrow and mutated, the changing conducts of the military establishment and the government in this context should encourage the debate by drawing in more scholarly-sound men and women from both sides of the divide. Because so far, unlike the one in 1960s, this debate is still being largely moderated and defined by somewhat ill-informed and ‘ahistorical’ opinions (especially on the electronic and social medias).

After all, it is the synthesis emerging from such a debate that can surely provide the key to any positive outcome of a country and polity in turmoil.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 29th, 2015

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