Pakistan has transcended its initial fear of being reabsorbed by its giant neighbour, India. The fear was real because the creation of Pakistan was a messy affair. It happened suddenly and on some rather shaky ideological grounds.

The Muslim nationalism that led to the creation of Pakistan, had explained the Muslims of India as a homogenous whole, or a separate nation in contrast to (and in historical conflict with) a Hindu whole. Yet, as political scientist and author Mohammad Waseem writes in his recent book Political Conflict in Pakistan, the Muslim elite only became conscious of an Indian Muslim mass during the constitutional reforms of 1919. This mass of Muslims, existing well outside the universe of Muslim elites, began being seen as an electorate that could physically populate the conceptual idea of a nation. 

Nations are built on shared languages, religions, territories and histories. But Waseem demonstrates that, whereas the Muslim mass in India shared a faith and geography, the faith was practised in different ways by communities within this mass.

Over the centuries, highly syncretic variants of Islam had developed in India. Thus, after 1919, the anticipation of the coming importance of consolidated electorates saw increased activity among the Muslim elites of India, to create a meta-narrative for the mass. This was done to organise the heterogeneous fragments of the Indian Muslim community into a homogeneous conceptual whole. 

The conceptual whole was pitched against the sectarian, sub-sectarian and ethnic diversity existing within the Muslim mass. To achieve this, a ‘history’ of an eternal conflict between the Muslims and Hindus was manufactured. The fact is that this conflict was very much a late 19th/early-20th century phenomenon. But it did aid in getting the Muslim mass to vote for a separate Muslim country.

Who is going to point out that, in a society riddled with sectarian and sub-sectarian tensions, the answer does not lie in the state presenting its own, ‘correct’ variant of the faith?

However, once Pakistan came into being, there were no more Hindus as ‘the other.’ And whereas this ‘other’ (now Hindu-majority India) became an important ploy to continue rationalising the creation of a Muslim-majority region, it did not help in stemming the resurgence of the many sectarian, sub-sectarian and syncretic realities that were temporarily suspended and turned into an urgent electoral whole in the late 1940s. 

A holistic ‘modernist’ Islam was adopted by the state to retain this whole. But 24 years later, the modernist variant was replaced with a more theological version — especially after East Pakistan broke away in 1971, on an ethnic basis.

The modernist version, it was believed, had failed to solidify the unifying significance of Islam in the national body. The theological version was constructed by the state, with input from political groups and Islamists. But it was still a single, monolithic variant, just as the modernist version had been.

Thus, it too began being seen as hegemonic by those sectarian, sub-sectarian, and syncretic variants who lamented that it was leaning towards versions of the faith that were antagonistic towards them.

This tension is still ripe. It continues to witness violence from various variants against the state, and against each other. Many do so under the cover of the 1973 Constitution that gradually, but without much thought, began absorbing various Islamist points of view.

The violence is also because of a curious and complex process, in which the state goes from embedding Islamist views in the polity to justify the country’s existence and using sects/sub-sects to subdue other sects/sub-sects or political foes, to launching armed operations against those non-state actors who insist they should have a monopoly over how Islam is to be implemented, politically and socially. 

The remedy to this mess lies in accepting and allowing all sectarian, sub-sectarian and syncretic expressions of Islam (and of other religions) to exercise their right of worship in public — but without them misusing this right as a political ploy to grab state power, or to establish theological hegemony through propagating hatred towards the state or against another sect/sub-sect or religion; or to initiate campaigns of moral policing to play out their vigilantist fantasies.

This should not mean that the state alone should monopolise all these elements. What this means is that the state should remain impersonal towards religious matters, as long as these matters are not threatening the state, or the life and property of the polity. Even then, the state should act in the name of securing these, and not in the name of ‘defending’ a ‘correct version of Islam’ against an ‘incorrect’ one. 

But who will bell the cat in a reality in which society is rife with sectarian and sub-sectarian tensions, and in which the Constitution and state are trying to address these with their own variant of the faith?

The solution should not be about why my variant is better than yours. Nor should Pakistan’s raison d’être as a nation-state continue to be about the state and polity constantly trying to establish their religious credentials. 

The raison d’être for a Muslim-majority Pakistan is, ironically, being consolidated by the current Hindu nationalist regime in India. Let it do it. As India stumbles down the rabbit-hole that we fell into decades ago, Pakistan should move forward as a diverse civic-national society, attached to an integrated market of economic, creative and political activity that seeks to achieve individual goals.

The sum-achievement of these individual goals will lead to combined national progress. We really need to stop proving that we are some monolithic, homogeneous bastion of piety. We are not. We need to start becoming a normal nation-state. Not a self-injuring ideological indulgence.

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 6th, 2022