Encyclopedia of Global Religion

Pakistan

Contributors: Mark Juergensmeyer & Wade Clark Roof Print Pub. Date: 2012 Online Pub. Date: September 15, 2007 Print ISBN: 9780761927297 Online ISBN: 9781412997898 DOI: 10.4135/9781412997898 Print pages: 968-971 This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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10.4135/9781412997898.n549 The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a nation born from the partition of the South Asian subcontinent by the British at the end of their colonial rule, was founded in 1948 on the idea that a nation should be carved out of South Asia to protect the region's Muslim population. Hence, it has had an Islamic character from the beginning. It is also home to several important Sufi shrines, including the Data Ganj Baksh Shrine in Lahore, and to what was for three centuriesuntil another surpassed it in 1986the world's largest mosqueLahore's Badshahi mosque. As of 2009, Pakistan contained more than 174 million Muslim citizens, making it the second largest Muslim country in the world, after Indonesia. Though Islam unites the country, it is separated along several distinct ethnic lines: Punjabis and Sindhis in the eastern side of the country and Baluchis and Pashtuns in the mountainous areas adjacent to Iran and Afghanistan. More than 96% of the population are Muslim; most are Sunn#, and approximately 20% are Shi'a. Hindus account for an additional 2% of the population and include many who have lived in the region before the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan; Christians constitute an additional 1%. Many Pakistani Christians come from the lowest castes, known as Dalits or untouchables.

History Prior to Independence

The Pakistan region was populated by members of the Pashtun ethnic group as early as 2000 BCE, though their origins have yet to be fully documented. What is now Pakistan was the region that was for many centuries the gateway to the Indian subcontinent for invading armies, traders, and explorers from the west, including the Aryans in 1500 BCE and Alexander the Great and his Greek armies in the fourth century BCE. Islam came to the region as early as the eighth century CE through traders and pirs, wandering Sufi mystics, and some units of the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads did not achieve great success in Islamicizing the region, but the settlements that remained following their retreat slowly made progress and gained assistance from the 10th-century Turkish and Afghani conquests. From the 12th through the 16th century, the region was governed by Islamic Turko-Afghan dynasties, which imposed
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taxes known as jizya on non-Muslims and oppressed the Hindus who constituted the majority of the population. The high point of Muslim rule in the subcontinent came with the Mughal Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The imperial government [p. 968 ] allowed wandering Sufis to convert many Hindus and Buddhists to Islam while neither explicitly supporting nor prohibiting the proselytization. As the Mughal Empire declined, the British East India Company claimed substantial control over the trade routes to the subcontinent and paved the way for the British Rajcolonial rule over the entire Indian subcontinent. By the end of the Moghul Empire, a quarter of the population of the subcontinent was Muslim. In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand in cooperation with the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan fixed the boundary known as the Durand Line, designating the Afghani and British spheres of influence along an imaginary border running from Chitral to Baluchistan. This action would have repercussions reaching into the 21st century, as the threshold passed through the middle of traditional Pashtun lands, thereby effectively dividing a single ethnic group into two separate nations. The area was still under tribal governance under the British (who required a buffer territory to the Russian Empire more than more subjects), and the resiliency of tribal identity would prove problematic for both countries attempts to create nationalist sentiment. In the 19th century, a reform Muslim movement based in the Deoband seminary tried to purify Islam and rid it of indigenous and extraneous elements. The Deobandis were the spiritual ancestors of 20th-century activists of Islamic movements, including the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Muslim political thought was being refined by thinkers such as Maulana Mawdudi, who advocated a kind of Islamic politics different from the secular rule promulgated by the British. New Islamic parties were created, including the Jamaat-ul-Ulama-i-Islam party. Wealthy and educated Muslim leaders established the All-India Muslim League in 1906 to provide political representation for Muslim communities in the emerging parliamentary politics. Demands were successfully made to the British for separate electorates for Muslims that would guarantee seats in the legislature. The Khilafat movement after World War I added to the conversation by repudiating Muslim loyalty to British rule and received support from the Deobandi movement and the champion of Indian independence, Mohandas Gandhi. Though the
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movement served only to exacerbate tensions between Hindus and Muslims, the first steps toward an independent Pakistan had been taken.

An Independent Pakistan
Between 1937 and 1940 Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, set about promoting the Two Nations Theory, leading to the Lahore Resolution in 1940, which stated that the areas of Muslim majority in India should become independent and autonomous. It is important to note that while the proposed nation was a nation of Muslims, it was never intended to be an Islamic state. During World War II, the movement for Pakistan was subdued, but at the end of the war, the Muslim League boycotted the Indian Congress, which curried favor with the British, and on June 3, 1947, when the British Parliament introduced the bill for the independence of India, it successfully campaigned for the partition of the subcontinent into two new states: India and Pakistan. More than 8 million people relocated from different areas of the subcontinentMuslims moving into Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs moving out creating a situation of turmoil and violence in which perhaps 1 million people were killed. Pakistan was established as two parts: The western one consisted of the Punjab-SindBaluchistan region, which later became known simply as Pakistan; eastern Pakistan was in the Bengal region, which in a later war of separation in 1971 broke away from the western wing and established itself as a separate country, Bangladesh. The region of Kashmir was contested between India and Pakistan, and a war between the two countries over the disputed region in 1948 ended in a stalemate with a UN-patrolled line of demarcation between the two sides of Kashmir, one controlled by Pakistan and the other by India. Part of the problem was that the leader of the region, the Maharaja of Kashmir, was Hindu, while the majority of the population were Muslims. Jinnah became the leader of the new nation of Pakistan. Though the country was intended for Muslims, Jinnah's vision of politics was decidedly secular. One group of opponents were members of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party founded by Maulana Abu'l-a'la Mawdudi. Though it and other religious parties in Pakistan were never successful at the ballot boxthey never received more [p. 969 ] than 10% of the vote their political influence has been significant. Mawdudi's idea that the country should
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become an Islamic state and accept traditional Muslim Shari'a law became the law of the land under the leadership of Zia al-Haqq in 1977. His political opponent at the time was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of Pakistan's later Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was toppled from power, arrested, imprisoned, and later executed by Zia's government. Zia himself died in 1988 in a mysterious plane crash. Zia's rule was propped up by Islamic ideology, and he did much to bring Islam into political life. Zia installed members of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim League in his cabinet and declared that all Pakistani laws must conform to Islamic law. In 1979, he established Shari'a courts in the nation and even tried to implement a new financial system based on the Islamic prohibition of riba (interest or usury). The year of his death, Zia introduced a bill written by the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which placed Islamic law above the courts and laws of the country. Later, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto blocked the bill in 1988, but it was passed in a revised form in 1991. Persecution of the Ahmadiyya sect also began to increase at that time. Among Zia's other legacies was Pakistan's nuclear program and the development of close ties to Islamic nations in the Middle East.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Taliban

Pakistan played a notable role in the repulsion of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s, providing financial and military support for the mujahideen fighters in cooperation with the Reagan administration of the United States. It is estimated that approximately 40% of the mujahideen were trained in Pakistan. Later, some of the fighters who received this support joined the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which gained control over the Swat Valley area of Pakistan in 2009. When the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Pakistan, led by a military regime headed by General Pervez Musharraf, became America's ally in the War on Terror. Funds were channeled through the Pakistani military organization to fight the remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's (d. 2011) al Qaeda movement, which had sought refuge from Afghanistan in the mountainous regions of Pakistan. The Pakistani complicity with the American military presence also helped fuel the growth of radical Muslim groups within
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Pakistan, especially in Baluchistan, Waziristan, and elsewhere in Pashtun regions along the border with Afghanistan. A Pakistani Taliban emerged with a program of violence aimed at both the U.S. military and the secular Pakistan administration. It was a Taliban militant, Baitullah Mehsud, who was thought to be behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned to be elected again as Prime Minister in 2007. Her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, took her place and was elected as Prime Minister. Also in 2007, a siege against protesting Muslim students in the Red Mosque in Islamabad resulted in the death of the radical mullah of the mosque and more than a hundred others. Pakistani Muslim extremists associated with the jihadi movement, Lakshar-e Taiba (the army of the pure), were also involved in clashes with the government, and individuals said to have been associated with this movement launched a brazen series of attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, killing 164 and wounding more than 300. In 2011, the governor of the State of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was assassinated by his own bodyguard. The assassin was said to have been influenced by jihadi ideology and persuaded that Taseer was violating Islamic principles in defending a Christian woman who was sentenced to be executed for allegedly violating Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The secret American military raid on May 2, 2011, that uncovered Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed the al Qaeda leader revived anti-American sentiments when it was revealed that no Pakistani officials had been consulted or notified in advance about the raid. The political culture of Pakistan remained moderate, however, even though extremist activists in Pakistan in the first decade of the 21st century instigated a series of attacks on each other, American diplomats and journalists, and government officials. Though Pakistan is officially an Islamic republic, there is no clear consensus on what that means or to what degree religion is expected to permeate public life. John Soboslai, Mark Juergensmeyer 10.4135/9781412997898.n549 See also Further Readings

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Bhutto B. (2008). Reconciliation: Islam, democracy, and the West . New York: Harper. Ikram S. M., and Embree A. (1964). Muslim civilization in India . New York: Columbia University Press. Jalal A. (1994). The sole spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the demand for Pakistan . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jalal A. (2010). Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Metcalf B. (2006). Islamic contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan . New York: Oxford University Press. Wolpert S. (2005). Jinnah of Pakistan . New York: Oxford University Press.

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