SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE IDEA OF CIVIC NATIONALISM
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the 1973 constitution had been constantly amended — so much so, that by the early 1990s its civic-nationalist tenor had been replaced by a rather narrow version of so-called “Islamic nationalism.”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.