Authored by: Syed Muzammil Ahmad Shah
LUMS (Lahore University Of Management Sciences )
Abstract
In this piece, the aspect of religious extremism in Pakistan is characterized, not as something like a religiously spontaneous movement, but as something orchestrated by the political machinery of the state. Through this production-lineage is traced the oldest codification in the blasphemy acts, and, thus, this establishes a fault-area in politics prior to partition, when the state was compelled into the majoritarianism pressure, and before the regime of Zia, when jihad was re-structured as an agent of political purpose. The radicalization apparatus is the short-term technique, as explained in this paper, a self-contained technological device, in which no governmental strategies could be implemented to modify the same. The critique destroys the traditional explanation by dismantling the idea of extremism as a political and not a religious or socioeconomic heritage, thus explaining the key role which the state plays in enacting the mechanisms by which the structures and institutions of the state are dismantled in the present.
Introduction: The Blueprint of Intolerance.
Religious extremism looms over Pakistan. The inability of traditional criticism to provide a sufficient distinction of the fact that this phenomenon is not a mere theological deviation, a transgression of the peaceful religious traditions, is its limitation. This type of diagnosis, though, to write, is solitary and incomplete in all respects. There exists an even more tapering fact, than is commonly believed; sectarian decree and violence are no byproducts of faith.
It is instead the product of an engineering exercise of long and expensive political existence. It is argued in this article that even the machineries of the state have, at crucial points of time themselves, served as the very machine upon which intolerance was produced. This analysis will unravel how policy decisions mediated tactical choices in order to put together the blueprints of dissent by translating a lineage between the colonial instrumentality of the machinery of blasphemy laws and the Cold War construction of a kind of jihadist surrogate. It is a deliberately suggested point of view that would take the emphasis off of the reductive explanations based on the factors of poverty or on madrassas per se and which would necessitate a face to be reckoned with its part in the nurture of those forces that now threaten its own wholeness.1
Colonial Incubation: Legislating Religious Fault Lines
Islamic extremism in Pakistan is an assembly line that did not begin at independence: the blueprints were worked out at the colonial workshop. This piece of machinery introduced by the British Raj in the effort at administrative control is the blasphemy law.2 And this was not a singular effort but a larger policy of governing the subcontinent through classification and codification of religious identity and, thus, politically irreconcilable theological results. It was during this period that what can be called competitive scarification of the public sphere took place. The resurgence of Orthodoxy through the introduction of organizations such as the Ahmadiyya sect in 1889 of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad would trigger vigorous defensive reactions among other Muslim revivalist movements3 (exemplified by an immediate violent counteraction by Deobandi scholars), responding to Ahmadiyya publications with a narrative constructing their own past and commencing sectarian rivalry rooted in narrative debates over the authentic and authentic-inauthentic text of the Quran and the Sunni belief system to which Ahmed was a dissident.4 The colonial state’s blasphemy law provided the legal framework for this contest, a point tragically illustrated by the 1927 prosecution of Ghazi Alam Din, the first individual to be formally punished under this statute. ⁵
In this era, the British did not create religious discord ex nihilo, but they provided the state apparatus to institutionalize it, laying the foundational stone for the politics of religious exclusion that would later be fully weaponized.
The Post-Partition Furnace: State-Sanctioned Sectarianism
The nascent state of Pakistan inherited the colonial blueprint and, rather than dismantling it, chose to operationalize it. The political utility of religious mobilization became apparent almost immediately, transforming the state into a furnace where sectarian identities were heated, hammered, and hardened. The primary fuel for this fire was the orchestrated campaign against the Ahmadiyya community. In 1949, the Tehreek-e-Khatam-e-Nabuwat emerged as the first major organization dedicated to this cause,⁶ swiftly followed by the Majlis-e-Ahrar-ul-Islam, which pivoted to a purely religious agenda. ⁷ Their objective was the systematic purge of Ahmadis from key positions in the state apparatus, a demand that culminated in the violent Punjab Disturbances of 1953. The state’s response, while initially involving a military crackdown, was fundamentally ambivalent. Justice Munir’s seminal report into the disturbances meticulously documented the social and religious factors at play, yet the underlying sentiment was not eradicated but merely driven underground. ⁸ This established a perilous precedent: religious agitation could force the state to the negotiating table.
The movement simmered until 1974, when it successfully pressured the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to officially declare Ahmadis non-Muslims through a constitutional amendment. ⁹ This was a watershed moment, a state-sanctioned act of exclusion that formally inscribed a specific religious orthodoxy into the legal fabric of the nation. The Constitution itself became a tool for majoritarian demarcation, with clauses specifying the Islamic identity of the state and restricting the offices of President and Prime Minister to Muslims. ¹⁰ This state recognition of a particular sectarian world-view sent an unmistakable message to all religious minorities: they were going to be treated as conditional citizens of the nation. What had foremost been initiated by the British in the first place, had been exemplified by themselves, by the Pakistani state, which produced an eminently conspicuous indication of the direction being followed, by the creation of a new identity and by the artificiation of a religious factor even though the complete development of this was only just beginning.
The Zia Doctrine: Forging the Arsenal of Jihad
If the early state provided the furnace, the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq provided the anvil, systematically forging religious extremism into a cold, strategic asset. The Zia doctrine represented the full-scale weaponization of faith for state power, a project that would irrevocably alter Pakistan’s societal fabric. This process was driven by a confluence of domestic ambition and external geopolitics. Domestically, Zia’s “Islamization” campaign sought to legitimize his military rule by embedding a particular, conservative Sunni interpretation of Islam into the legal and educational systems. ¹¹ This was not merely a cultural project; it was a constitutional one, with numerous amendments designed to base the Pakistani state explicitly on Islamic ideology. ¹²
The project found its ultimate expression and funding in the international arena, specifically the Soviet-Afghan War. Pakistan, in partnership with the American CIA and Saudi petrodollars, became the central conduit for a massive, global jihad.¹³ The state actively recruited, trained, and armed a multinational force of Mujahedeen, allowing an influx of ideologically driven Arab and Afghan fighters into the tribal areas and introducing a pervasive Kalashnikov culture.¹⁴ This was not an oversight but a deliberate strategy to create a proxy force to achieve strategic depth against India and influence in Afghanistan. The state-sponsored seminaries, or Madaris, expanded exponentially, often with foreign funding, to cater to this jihadist ecosystem, propagating a narrow and militant interpretation of Islam, ¹⁵ the policy also had a deliberate domestic sectarian dimension. The establishment of groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan in 1985, with state tolerance, was aimed at countering the influence of the Shia community, which was seen as bolstered by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. ¹⁶
When Zia’s government attempted to enforce compulsory Zakat deductions, nation-wide Shia protests forced an exemption, demonstrating both the community’s mobilization and the state’s willingness to negotiate belief along sectarian lines. ¹⁷ In the Zia era, the state did not merely tolerate extremism; it became its chief architect, manufacturing jihadist groups as strategic tools and in the process, industrializing the production of religious intolerance.
The Contagion of Contempt: From Proxy to Paramount Threat
The tools manufactured during the Zia era soon escaped the control of their creators, turning against the state itself. The Mujahedeen, fragmented after the Soviet withdrawal, morphed into a hydra-headed monster of militant organizations, including the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Jaish-e-Mohammad. ¹⁸ These groups, once proxies, developed their own agendas and sufficient autonomy to challenge the state that had nurtured them. Pakistan, in a tragic irony, became characterized as a safe haven for the very terrorist networks it had helped create. ¹⁹
The blowback has been catastrophic. The nation has endured a relentless onslaught of terrorist attacks targeting civilians in markets, mosques, imam dargahs, and schools. It is estimated that over 35,000 Pakistani citizens and security personnel have lost their lives to this violence. ²⁰ US drone campaigns targeting militants within Pakistan’s borders further complicated the dynamic, causing civilian casualties and fueling anti-state sentiment. The state’s own military operations in regions like Swat and Waziristan, while necessary, underscore the grim reality that it is now fighting a war against its own Frankenstein’s monsters. The manufacturing process had reached its logical, horrific conclusion: the product had become the primary existential threat.
Beyond Poverty: The Political Economy of Radicalization
While often cited, poverty alone provides an insufficient explanation for Pakistan’s extremism. Empirical evidence challenges this simplistic correlation. A comprehensive survey of 6,000 Pakistanis found that poorer individuals are less likely to support militant groups, often because they are the primary victims of terrorist violence. ²¹
In fact, support for militancy appears to be higher among more affluent segments of the population. ²² This is not to say that socioeconomic factors are irrelevant. Rampant poverty, unemployment, and a sense of deprivation create a pool of disaffected youth. ²³ However, it is the political and ideological framework the “manufacturing blueprint” that channels this discontent into religiously motivated violence rather than other forms of social unrest.
The role of Madaris is also more complex than often portrayed. While some have undoubtedly served as recruitment grounds, studies show that their students do not uniformly exhibit significantly greater support for violence than public school students. ²⁴ the critical factor is not the type of school but the specific ideological curriculum and the presence of militant networks. Due to their plugging into the larger jihadist ecosystem, which the state helped to build, mosques and Madaris have proven to be far stronger drivers of extremism than poverty alone. 25 When instruments of the broader jihadist ecosystem, such as the provision of a coherent and inclusive national-level identity, are lacking, the state becomes an instrument in the creation of these ideologies itself, which are more inclined toward extremism.26
Conclusion: Disassembling the Machinery
The issue of religious fundamentalism in Pakistan is not an epidemic that manifests itself overnight but a chronic disease that has a historical background. It is the byproduct of a state that has time and again decided to produce and capitalize on religious scorn as a shortcut in achieving legitimacy and contrived power. Through the colonial jurisprudential bills, the sectarian balance of the early state, and the full-blooded jihadist operation of the Zia period, an unmistakable bloodline of the state is fulfilled. To destroy this inherited machine, state policy will have to change fundamentally. Military activities can be considered only as the reactive response, the response that should be proactive and ideological. It requires a long process of demolishing the very foundations of intolerance. This involves the mainstreaming of Madaris by educating reform not merely by introducing subjects but by actively consolidating a kind of curriculum of civic citizenship.27 It demands that the state itself should come to a definitive end of its employment of religion to score political points and also seek to enforce legislation against minorities.
Reference(S):
¹ This conceptual framework is informed by the historical analysis presented in H. Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (M.E. Sharpe 2004).
² The specific sections were introduced in the Indian Penal Code (1860), notably Section 295-A, which criminalized deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.
³ T Kamran, ‘Tracing the Roots of Religious Extremism’ (Lecture, 2011) <www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QYoymbNcLk> accessed 20 May 2012.
⁴ U Javaid, ‘Genesis and Effects of Religious Extremism in Pakistan’ (2011) 2 IJBS 234, 235.
⁵ Kamran (n 3).
⁶ Javaid (n 4) 237.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Munir Report) 1954.
⁹ The Constitution (Second Amendment) Act, 1974.
¹⁰ The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, arts 1, 41, 91.
¹¹ R B Oakley and F S Gady, ‘Radicalization by Choice: ISI and the Pakistani Army’ (2009) 247 Strategic Forum 1.
¹² For example, the Constitution (Eighth Amendment) Act, 1985.
¹³ Abbas (n 1) 120-145.
¹⁴ M Ali, ‘Tracing the Roots of Religious Extremism’ (Lecture, 2011) <www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuHLmwxdSvw> accessed 25 April 2012.
¹⁵ C C Fair, The Counter-terror Coalitions: Cooperation with Pakistan and India (RAND Corporation 2004) 45.
¹⁶ Oakley (n 11) 5.
¹⁷ Ibid 6.
¹⁸ I Macdonald, ‘Afghanistan 1996 – 2001: Taliban Regime, Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ (2011) http://flagspot.net/flags/af_talib.html accessed 20 August 2012.
¹⁹ D Martin, ‘Inside a Terrorist Safe Heaven in Pakistan’ (2012) <www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57485845/> accessed 20 July 2012.
²⁰ Martin (n 19).
²¹ F Taj, ‘Poverty and Extremism’ Daily Times (Pakistan, 11 June 2011)
²² Taj (n 21).
²³ The Express Tribune (Pakistan, 18 July 2012).
²⁴ Fair (n 15) 78.
²⁵ M Kenney, Organizational Learning and Islamic Militancy (Pennsylvania State University 2008) 45.
²⁶ K K Aziz, Pakistan’s Political Culture: Essays in Historical and Social Origins (Vanguard 2001) 305.
²⁷ These recommendations synthesize the original article’s proposals with the analytical conclusion of this Paper.
