The 1947 Partition of India took place as a consequence of growing violence and tensions between the region’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority.

But the constitutions of the two countries that came into being due to Partition — i.e. Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan — were largely woven from elements of what is called civic-nationalism.

Civic nationalism aims to construct a political identity on the basis of shared values such as civil rights; and a shared respect for democratic and state institutions.

Civic nationalism celebrates multiculturalism and ethnic, religious and sectarian diversity. But its implementation is only possible if this diversity adopts a political and national identity based on mutual economic, political and social goals — goals not driven by the interests of any one particular ethnic or religious group.

It is true that the 1956, 1962 and 1973 constitutions of Pakistan highlight the fact that Pakistan was a Muslim-majority country in which no laws that are “repugnant” to the faith’s scriptures would be legislated.

It is also correct that from 1974 onward, the 1973 constitution had been constantly amended — so much so, that by the early 1990s its civic-nationalist tenor had been replaced by a rather narrow version of so-called “Islamic nationalism.”

The fall of the Muslim modernism project in Pakistan is tied to the mutilation of the constitution

The 1956 and 1973 constitutions declared Pakistan to be an “Islamic Republic.” So how could they have been civic-nationalist in nature?

This question often attracts some rather interesting answers. And even more interesting is the fact that the roots of these answers often lie in the 1962 constitution, which, initially, had actually changed the country’s name to “Republic of Pakistan.”

Also, this constitution was authored and passed by a parliament dominated by the members of an authoritarian government (Ayub Khan).

To push through certain social and economic reforms which the religious parties had deemed “secular” and “anti-Islam,” Ayub inducted the services of some well-known “modernist” Islamic scholars such as Ghulam Ahmad Parvez and Dr Fazal Rehman Malik and to a certain extent Justice Javed Iqbal, son of Muhamad Allama Iqbal.

With their input the Ayub regime created a narrative which emphasised that pre-partition Muslim scholars such as Syed Ahmad Khan, Muslim nationalist philosopher and poet Muhammad Allama Iqbal, and Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, all advocated a reformed, progressive and modernist strand of Islam.

According to the narrative, Islam was inherently progressive, inclusive and had preempted concepts such as pluralism, and political and economic modernity long before they were adopted by the secular West.

So those Pakistani politicians and intellectuals who describe the 1956 and 1973 constitutions as being civic-nationalist in nature do so by pointing out that an “Islamic Republic” has an inherent spirit of civic-nationalism because Islam in essence is democratic, progressive, inclusive and pluralistic.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, this is perhaps no more the case due to the many amendments to the 1973 constitution between 1974 and the early 1990s. It had been a consensual deed whose initial intent was to construct a modernist, inclusive and progressive Islamic republic.

But it eventually became a document which began to eschew these values, if not entirely enshrine certain disconcerting aspects of bigotry and religious segregation.

During the Ayub regime (1958-69), a colourful poster appeared in the first half of his government. It shows Ayub’s face superimposed on an old painting of the third Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605).

In his 1971 book The Ayub Khan Era, Lawrence Ziring writes that Ayub was a great admirer of Kamal Ataturk, the modernist Turkish nationalist leader, and Charles De Gaulle, the former French World War II hero and president. There are those who claim that Ayub was also an admirer of Emperor Akbar.

But what exactly was the aforementioned poster that was published by his regime in the early 1960s trying to convey?

Since the religious parties were hostile towards Ayub’s reforms, the poster might have appeared in 1964 when the regime banned Jamaat-i-Islami, one of its loudest critics.

A leading historian, I.H. Qureshi, authored a book The Muslim Community of Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, in which he had criticised Akbar’s ‘inclusive’ policies which (according to Qureshi) had begun to weaken Muslim rule in India.

Ironically, Qureshi was close to the Ayub regime, but his thesis in this respect was immediately picked up by those critical of Ayub’s version of Islam.

In 2008, another eminent historian, Dr Mubarak Ali, saw the funny side of this confusion. In 1582, Akbar had tried to formulate a syncretic idea of a universal set of beliefs by fusing together “the best elements” from Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Christianity.

After Akbar’s death, some Islamic scholars began claiming that Akbar had blasphemed by trying to create his own religious cult. Historians such as Qureshi informed that this so-called creed was called Din-i-Illahi.

But in a June 9, 2009 interview published in Dawn, Ali said that Akbar never called it Din-i-Illahi nor explained it as a religion. The misperception about exactly what it constituted was largely proliferated by the faulty translations of the writings of Abu Fazal (one of Akbar’s ministers), by the British in the 19th century.

Akbar’s move in this respect was just an extension of the overall Muslim-Mughal ethos of inclusivity which had helped the empire rule over a Hindu majority.

So historians such as Qureshi and many others basically used the flawed British translations to form their opinion about Akbar, despite the fact that Qureshi was close to the Ayub regime which had begun to portray him as a modern-day Akbar.

In his quintessential 1967 book Islamic Modernism in India & Pakistan, Aziz Ahmad, an eminent scholar and author, insinuated that such overlapping confusions were at least one of the reasons why the Muslim modernist and civic-nationalist project in Pakistan began to wither away.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 18th, 2018