The Pakistan Ideology: History of a grand concoction

By Nadeem F. Paracha
Most school text books that are called Pakistan Studies usually begin with the words, Pakistan is
an ideological state.

Pakistan Studies was introduced in the national curriculum as a compulsory subject in 1972 by the
government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Over the decades, these books, that are regularly taught at all Pakistani schools and colleges, have
gradually evolved into becoming one-dimensional manuals of how to become, believe and behave
like a true Pakistani.
Though the content in these books pretends to be of historical nature, it is anything but.
Its a monologue broken into various chapters about how the state of Pakistan sees, understands
and explains the countrys history, society and culture and the students are expected to believe it
wholesale.
Many detractors have even gone on to call it an indoctrination tool.
It was introduced as a compulsory subject (almost in a panic) by the Bhutto regime soon after the
country lost a war with India in 1971 and consequently its eastern wing (East Pakistan).

Murmurings
Pakistan had come into being in 1947 on the back of what its founders called the Two Nation
Theory.
The Theory was culled from the 19th Century writings of modernist Muslim reformists in India who,
after the collapse of the Muslim Empire in South Asia, began to explain the regions Muslims as a
separate political, cultural, and, of course, religious entity (especially compared to the Hindu majority
of India).
This scholarly nuance, inspired by the ideas of the nation-state introduced by the British Colonialists,
gradually evolved into becoming a pursuit to prepare a well-educated and resourceful Muslim
middle-class in the region.
Eventually, with the help from sections of the Muslim landed elite in India, the emerging Muslim
middle-classes turned the idea into a movement for a separate Muslim homeland comprised of those
areas where the Muslims were in a majority in India.
This is what we, today, understand to be the Pakistan Movement.
However, when the countrys founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah a western-educated lawyer
and head of the All India Muslim League (AIML) navigated the Movement towards finally reaching
its main goal of carving out a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia, he was soon faced with an
awkward fact: There were more Muslims in India than there were in the newly created Muslim-
majority country of Pakistan.
Jinnah was conscious of this fact when he delivered his first major address to the countrys
Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947.
Though during the Movement some factions of his party had tweaked the Two Nation Theory to also
mean that the Muslims of India desired an Islamic State, Jinnah was quick to see the contradiction in
this claim, simply because more Muslims had either been left behind in India or refused to migrate to
Pakistan.
Islam during the Movement was largely used as an ethnic card to furnish and flex the separate
nationhood claims of the Muslims. It was never used as a theological roadmap to construct an
Islamic State in South Asia.
In his August 11 speech, Jinnah clearly declared that in Pakistan the state will have nothing to do
with matters of the faith and Pakistan was supposed to become a democratic Muslim-majority nation
state.
He went on to add: you will find that in course of time (in Pakistan) Hindus would cease to be
Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims; not in the religious sense, because that is the
personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.
Some extraordinary circumstances (World War II, the receding of British Colonialism and rising
tensions between the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities in India) had combined to hand Jinnah a
Muslim-majority country that had fewer Muslims compared to those who stayed behind in India.
Within this Muslim community were various sects and sub-sects with their own understanding and
interpretations of the faith.
Then, the country also had multiple ethnicities, cultures and languages some of them being more
ancient than Islam itself!
Keeping all this in mind, Jinnahs speech made good sense and exhibited a remarkable
understanding of the complexities that his new country had inherited.
But it seems many of his close colleagues were still in the Movement mode.
A number of League members thought that with his August 11 speech, Jinnah was being a bit too
hasty in discarding the Islamic factor from the new equation and opting to explain the new country as
a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Muslim-majority state.
So soon after Jinnahs speech, an attempt was made by these leaders to censor the draft of the
speech that was to be published in the newspapers.
It was only when the then editor of Dawn newspaper, Altaf Hussain, threatened to take the issue
directly to Jinnah that the League leaders relented and the full text of the speech was published.

Jinnah died in 1948 leaving behind a huge leadership vacuum in a country that had apparently
appeared on the map a lot sooner than it was anticipated to.
The leadership of the founding party, the Muslim League, was mostly made up of Punjabs landed
gentry and Mohajir (Urdu-speaking) bourgeoisie elite.
The bureaucracy was also dominated by these two communities, whereas the army had an
overwhelming Punjabi majority.
Either the multi-cultural connotations of Jinnahs speech were not entirely understood by his
immediate colleagues or simply side-lined by them.
There is very good reason to believe that these connotations somewhat threatened the Leagues
leadership because the Bengalis of East Pakistan were the majority ethnic group in the new country
and the democratic recognition of multi-culturalism and ethnic diversity of Pakistan would
automatically have translated into the Bengalis becoming the main ruling group.
After Jinnah had promptly watered down the Islamic aspects of the Pakistan Movement, the
Leagues leadership that followed his unfortunate death in 1948, decided to reintroduce these
aspects to negate the multi-cultural and multi-ethic tenor of Jinnahs speech.
But things, in this respect, get even more complicated when one is reminded of how it was actually
Jinnah who triggered the first serious expression of ethnic turmoil in Pakistan.
In March 1948, Jinnah delivered two speeches in Dhaka (the largest city of the Bengali-dominated
East Pakistan).
The speeches were delivered in English and were made at the height of a raging debate within the
ruling Muslim League on the question of the countrys national language.
Bengali leadership in the League had purposed the Bengali language on the basis that Bengalis
were the largest ethnic group in Pakistan.
However, the partys Mohajir members led by one of Jinnahs closest colleagues, Liaquat Ali Khan
(who was also Pakistans first Prime Minister), disagreed by claiming that Pakistan was made on the
demands of a hundred million Muslims (of the sub-continent) and that the language of these Muslims
was Urdu.
Of course, it was conveniently forgotten that the majority of these millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims
had been left behind in India and that at the time of Pakistans inception, Urdu was spoken by less
than 10 per cent of the countrys population.
Faced with this dilemma and aggressively pushed by the arguments of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali
Khan to declare Urdu as the national language, Jinnah arrived in Dhaka and in his two speeches
there insisted that, indeed, Urdu was to become the countrys national lingua franca.

Jinnah (left) and Liaquat in Karachi, 1948.
As the Bengalis went on strike and held widespread demonstrations protesting the contradiction in
the governments decision, Jinnah ordered that the Bengali writing system (close to Vedic and
classic Sanskrit) be replaced with Arabic script and even with the Roman script.
It was as if the government was suggesting that Bengali could not be adopted as the national
language because its writing system looked too much like that of Hindi.
Jinnahs desperate attempt to replace the Bengali writing system was vehemently challenged by
Bengali intellectuals and politicians and he had to beat a hasty retreat on the issue.
But Urdu did become the national language.
The Bengalis resentment found immediate sympathisers within other non-Punjabi and non-Mohajir
ethnic communities.
Sindhi, Pushtun (and eventually Baloch) intelligentsia were alarmed by the way the state and
government had treated the Bengalis demands, and foresaw the same happening to their own
languages and ethnic cultures.
But instead of anticipating future fissures in the country on ethnic lines, the League (after Jinnahs
death), became even more myopic and wallowed in its self-serving naivety about using Islam as a
slogan that was supposed to dissolve ethnic nationalism among the Muslim majority of the country.
The slogan might have worked to haphazardly pull together the Muslim minority of various ethnicities
and cultural leanings of India during the Pakistan Movement; but there was no guarantee that it
would be able to do the same in a country where this minority had become an overwhelming
majority.
Ideally a system and constitution advocating direct democracy should have been worked out to
facilitate and streamline the political and cultural participation of all ethnicities in the nation-building
process.
But this wasnt done. Political and cultural expressions of ethnicity were immediately treated as
being threats to the unity of the nation and the answer to this threat, ironically, came from elements,
most of who were once staunchly against the creation of Pakistan.
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, though steeped in the progressive Modernist Muslim tradition of Sir
Syeds Aligarh School of Thought, was, however, willing to continue to use Islam selectively to
maintain the cherished unity of the Muslim majority of Pakistan.
Being a Mohajir, he wasnt the son of the soil. Meaning, unlike most Sindhis, Pushtuns, Punjabi,
Baloch and Bengalis, he was born outside of what eventually became Pakistan and didnt have a
large constituency based on language and ethnicity in the country.
So it is understandable why the notion of Islam being a unifying factor was important to him.
But the question was what kind of Islam?
This question hadnt really mattered during the Pakistan Movement in which the Muslims of South
Asia were agitating as a minority. But then when a large part of this minority became a majority in
Pakistan, the historical, political and theological divisions and crevices between this majoritys many
sects and sub-sects began to seem starker than before.
To men like Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan was to be explained as the organic culmination and natural
result of what poet/philosopher Muhammad Iqbal had been contemplating and advocating before his
death in the 1930s.
That is, Islam in Pakistan was to make all ethnicities and sectarian differences secondary compared
to the precepts of Pakistani nationhood.
But what exactly was this nationhood about?
A good part of the answer first came from a man who during the Pakistan Movement had denounced
Jinnah as an infidel.
Islamic scholar and chief of the fundamentalist Jamat-e-Islami (JI), Abul Ala Maududi, was not an
Islamic cleric.
He was a well-read and prolific journalist and thinker.
Though his commentaries on Islam were highly conservative, this was a radical conservatism of
sorts. Because not only did he take to task the Muslim nationalism of the likes of Jinnah (claiming
that nationalism had no place in Islam); he even managed to offend many scholars of the Deobandi
and Barelvi Sunni sub-sects, accusing them of being wedged in ancient clerical traditions (Deobandi)
and distorting the true message of Islam through unsavoury innovations (Barelvi).
Thus, it can be claimed that Maududi emerged as a renegade branch from the same tree that was
planted by Modernist Muslims like Sir Syed and then carefully nurtured by Iqbal.
The difference was that to him the Muslims renewal as a political and cultural force depended not on
Muslim nationalism but on an evolutionary process in which Muslim societies were to be Islamized
from below so that they could be prepared for Islamic laws (Shariah) to be imposed from above (the
state).

Abul Ala Maududi
Another problem Maududi had with Pakistan was that he considered the new country to be in a state
of jahiliyat Arab word meaning ignorance which describes the time in Mecca before the arrival of
Islam.
So it was ironic when Liaquat and his aids, agreed to adopt a portion of Maududis thesis on Political
Islam while passing the 1949 Objectives Resolution.
When the Resolution was passed in May 1949 in the Constituent Assembly, it was supposed to be
an outline of what the final constitution of the country should look and sound like and also what
Pakistani nationhood should be about.
Just a year and a half after Jinnah had described Pakistan as a democratic Muslim-majority state
where religion and state would largely be separate, the Resolution now declared Pakistan to be an
Islamic entity in which no law or policy would be allowed to contradict the teachings of the Quran
and the Sunnah.
There was uproar among the countrys Hindu and Christian communities (called minorities). Their
leaders accused the government of ignoring Jinnahs original vision and of submitting to the dictates
of his enemies (Maududi, etc.)
Liaquat tried to pacify the detractors by pointing out that the Resolution had envisioned a
progressive and democratic Islamic country and that the minorities need not worry.
Maududis party, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI), decided to end its boycott of doing politics in Pakistan after
the Resolution, despite the fact that the Resolution did not translate into meaning that the
government would begin to legislate Shariah laws immediately (or was even willing to).
The government might have thought that it had successfully defined the finer points of Pakistani
nationalism through the Resolution, but the truth was, things in this context got even more complex.
In 1953 vicious riots erupted in Lahore against the controversial Ahmadiyya community when JI and
another fundamentalist party, the Majlis-e-Ahrar, demanded that the community be declared non-
Muslim.
In 1956, shaken by the riots, constantly challenged by Sindhi, Baloch, Bengali and Pushtun
nationalists, and finally realising that the 1949 Objectives Resolution had done precious little to clear
the foggy notion of Pakistani nationalism, the Constituent Assembly got down to finally author the
countrys first full constitution.
In the constitution, the ethnicities and leftists were appeased with the promise of holding direct
elections based on adult franchise, while the fundamentalists were given the space to officially and
constitutionally define Pakistan as an Islamic Republic.
Whereas most activists and politicians on the left werent entirely happy with the contents of the
Constitution, Maududi readily exhibited his satisfaction by declaring it to be, sufficiently Islamic.

Members of the Muslim League and the Republican Party sitting outside the Constituent Assembly
in Karachi just before passing the 1956 Constitution.
In 1957 most of the detractors came together in the left-wing and secular National Awami Party
(NAP) and were confident that the party was in a good position to win the most seats in the promised
direct elections (that were to be held in 1958).
But in late 1958, President Iskandar Mirza, who wasnt happy with the Constitution nor with parties
like NAP, conspired with the military chief, Ayub Khan, and dismissed the assembly and imposed the
countrys first Martial Law.
Mirza had described the 1956 Constitution as a prostitution of Islam for political ends.

President Iskandar Mirza (third from left) with heads of Pakistan armed forces (1958). Mirza
suspended the 1956 Constitution calling it a prostitution of Islam for political gains.
Just 20 days after the imposition of Martial Law, Mirza was in turn dismissed by Ayub and forced to
leave the country. Ayub, as Chief Martial Law Administrator, became the sole centre of power in the
country.
He wasted no time in exhibiting his disgust at what had transpired in the countys politics after
Jinnahs death, and got down to completely scrap whatever had emerged as Pakistani nationhood in
the preceding decade and took it upon himself to once and for all give a definitive shape to Pakistani
nationalism.

The great debate
Today, one often comes across ageing liberals and former leftists who fondly remember the decade-
long Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-69) as being perhaps the most liberal and secular era in the
countrys history.
The irony is that most of them had opposed and actually agitated against the regime as student
activists and young journalists.
They often speak about how the people of Pakistan rejoiced when Ayub took power because they
were sick of the power games between the politicians and the bureaucrats.
However, there are also those who accuse Ayub of setting the precedence for military intervention in
politics in Pakistan, and giving the institution a taste of direct political power that led to three more
military dictatorships in the next four decades.
Ayub was a practicing Muslim but almost entirely secular in his political and social outlook and (in
one of his first speeches) promised to liberate the spirit of religion from superstition and move
forward under the forces of modern sciences and knowledge.
But understanding that a nation-state requires powerful myths to base its justification upon, Ayub
became the first Pakistani head of state to overtly use the state to devise a more holistic national
ideology.

Ayub Khan addressing the nation.
He formed the Advisory Council on Islamic Ideology (ACII) and the Islamic Research Institute and
populated both with liberal Islamic scholars.
Imagining himself to be a latter day Ataturk and a Muslim de Gaulle, Ayub claimed to express
Jinnahs vision of Pakistan which, to him, was about a modern Muslim-majority state with a strong
economy (based on heavy industry) and a sturdy military that would not only protect the countrys
borders but its ideology as well.
The religious parties, incensed by Ayubs secular policies and the fact that he was getting most of
these sectioned by the ACII, finally moved in to directly challenge him.
Political parties had been banned by Ayub in 1959 but he lifted the ban in 1962.
The parties on the left like the National Awami Party (NAP) opposed him for his overt capitalist
manoeuvres, his regimes close relationship with the United States, and his refusal to entertain the
demands of the Sindhi, Baloch, Bengali and Pushtun nationalists for decentralisation, democracy
and provincial autonomy.
Religious parties, especially the fundamentalist Jamat-i-Islami (JI), largely focused their opposition
on Ayubs secular policies. And rather uncannily, by attempting to mould a national ideology, Ayub
gave the JI the idea to take the concept and turn it on its head.
The term Pakistan Ideology (Nazriah-e-Pakistan) was nowhere in the founders speeches during
the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
When Ayubs 1962 Constitution highlighted his regimes understanding of Pakistani nationalism to
mean a Muslim (as opposed to an Islamic) state where a modern and reformist spirit of Islam,
culture and science would guide the countrys politics and society, the JI opposed it.
It was at this point that the nation for the first time heard the term Nazriah-e-Pakistan.
It was first used by JIs Professor Khurshid Ahmed who suggested that the Pakistan Ideology should
be squarely based on policies constructed on the teachings of the Quran and Sunnah and should
strive to turn Pakistan into an Islamic State because it was on the basis of Islam that the country had
separated from the rest of India.
Of course, very little was mentioned in this context by the Professor about the fact that the JI had
been one of the many Islamic parties that had actually opposed the creation of Pakistan, calling it a
nationalist abomination.

An economist and one of the leading members of Jamat Islami, Prof. Khurshid Ahmed, is said to
have first coined the term Nazriah-e-Pakistan in 1962.
The debate as to exactly what kind of a vision drove Jinnah to demand a separate Muslim country in
South Asia, and what should constitute Pakistani culture and nationhood reached a peak in the late
1960s, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto formed the socialist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and when Sindhi,
Baloch, Pushtun and Bengali nationalists had accelerated their agitation for provincial autonomy.
To the JI, the story of Pakistan began not during the Pakistan Movement, but with the invasion of
Sindh by Arab commander, Muhammad bin Qasim, in the 9th Century who defeated the regions
Hindu ruler, Raja Dahir.

Sindhi scholar and nationalist leader, GM Syed, rubbished the notion and went to the extent of
declaring that to the Sindhis, Muhammad bin Qasim was a usurper and Raja Dahir the hero!
Sindhi scholar and nationalist, GM Syed, rejected Ayubs modernist interpretation of Pakistans
Muslim nationhood, as well as JIs Islamic version. He suggested that both were not compatible with
the cultural and historical moorings of Pakistans non-Punjabi ethnicities.
After witnessing the ascendency of leftist parties and student groups in West Pakistan, and the
growing agitation by Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan, the JI declared that socialism and
secularism were anti-Islam ideologies akin to atheism.
This claim drew the newly-formed PPP into the debate.
Prominent intellectuals in the PPP and those sympathetic to its cause, especially Hanif Ramay,
Safdar Mir and poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, retaliated by first emphasising the JIs pre-1947 anti-Jinnah
rhetoric, and then suggesting that Pakistani nationhood and culture were multi-ethnic and multi-
cultural and best served by democracy and socialism.
JIs founder and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi, wrote that the leftist, liberal and secular
Pakistani political organisations and cultural outfits were the Trojan Horses through which they had
infiltrated the Pakistani society, government to erode Pakistans Islamic character.

In 1969, progressive poet and thinker Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote an extensive paper that defined
Pakistani nationhood to mean a multi-cultural/multi-ethnic entity with roots in progressive Islam and
with the potential to become a culturally rich, progressive and politically modern state.
Interestingly, as the movement by leftist political parties and student groups against the Ayub
dictatorship gained momentum in the late 1960s, Ayubs Information Ministry had already begun to
mend fences with the JI.
By the time Ayub resigned in 1969 and handed over power to General Yahya Khan, the JI
rebounded to become an ally of the military regime.
General Yahya was a notorious drinker and womaniser but smart enough to use Maududis status as
a prolific Islamic scholar to blunt the leftists push against the military regime.
Informed by his intelligence agencies that an election at best would produce a hung verdict, Yahya
agreed to his opponents demand to hold the countrys first direct election based on adult franchise.
As Ayubs idea of Pakistani nationhood dwindled, JI made its own concept of Nazriah-e-Pakistan
one of the main planks of its election manifesto.
Expecting to bag an impressive number of seats in the Parliament, JI (along with most other
religious parties), was soundly beaten by the PPP and NAP (in West Pakistan), and by the Bengali
nationalist party, the Awami League (in East Pakistan).
Yet again the project of moulding an ideology of Pakistan acceptable to all Pakistanis had come to a
dead-end. In fact, it seemed that it was now destined to end up in the dustbin of history.

The compromise
It might as well have, had Pakistan not gone to war with India and then badly lose that war.
Shiekh Mujeebur Rhemans Awami League had won the highest number of seats in the 1970
election (albeit all in East Pakistan).
In theory, his party should have been invited by Yahya to form Pakistans first popularly elected
government.
The military, dominated by the Punjabis in West Pakistan, and Bhuttos PPP, pointed at Mujeebs
anti-Pakistan rhetoric and suggested that he would use the Parliament to separate East Pakistan
from the rest of the country on the basis of Bengali nationalism.
A delay in the handing over of power to the Awami League saw the eruption of a full-scale civil war
in East Pakistan.
Thousands of Bengalis lost their lives in the conflict as the Pakistan Army employed brutal tactics to
stem the Bengalis march towards independence.
The military also recruited members of the JI in East Pakistan to form death squads against Bengali
intellectuals, journalists and students.
Acts of brutality were also committed by the militant wings of the Bengali nationalists against military
personnel, non-Bengali residents of East Pakistan and those Bengalis who were accused of
collaborating with the Pakistan Army.
Thousands of Bengalis crossed over into Indian Bengal as refugees. Though India was by now
backing the nationalists, it was in December 1971 that it entered the fray, decimating the Pakistani
armed forces.
The defeat saw East Pakistan become the independent Bengali state of Bangladesh. In early 1972,
a group of officers forced Yahya Khan to resign and hand over power to Z A. Bhutto.
Bhuttos party the PPP that had swept the 1970 election in former West Pakistans two largest
provinces, the Punjab and Sindh, on a socialist manifesto, formed the government at the centre and
in the mentioned provinces.
Another left-wing party, the National Awami Party (NAP) that had won the largest number of seats in
the former NWFP and Balochistan was able to form coalition governments in these provinces.
The first phase of the Bhutto regime (1972-74) was dominated by the radical left-wing of the PPP.
However, since Pakistan found itself reeling from an expensive war, a demoralised army, and fears
that India and the Soviet Union may go on to fan separatist movements in NWFP, Balochistan and
even in Bhuttos own home province of Sindh, his government sanctioned a project to mould an
ideological narrative that would help the state redeem the floundering belief in a united Pakistan.
It is believed that the new nationalist narrative was first and foremost devised to uplift a defeated
army. But by late 1972 it began to make its way into school text books.
In a nutshell, the narrative went something like this: West Pakistan was always the real Pakistan
because its a cohesive and seamless region that runs from north to south along the mighty Indus
River. This regions population had predominately been Muslim (ever since the 12th Century), and
though it may have a number of ethnicities, they all had similar views on Islam.
This was to suggest that the Bengali-dominated East Pakistan that lay thousands of miles away from
West Pakistan had always been an unnatural part of what had appeared on the map as Pakistan in
1947.
The study of Pakistan Studies, a subject that exclusively dealt with the history and culture of the
country (based on the above narrative) was introduced and then made compulsory for school and
college students.
In the early 1970s the new narrative was still very much a work-in-progress and largely retained
content from history books that were in circulation before 1971.
Thus, in 1973, the PPP government organised a large conference in Islamabad in which some of the
countrys leading intellectuals, historians and scholars were invited.
They were requested to debate and thrash out a nationalist narrative that could then be turned into a
state ideology and imposed through legislative means and proliferated trough school textbooks.
One of the most influential scholars to appear from the exercise was the veteran conservative
historian, I H. Qureshi.
Qureshi was not much of a Bhutto supporter. Yet, the Bhutto regime decided to use Qureshis
writings on the Pakistan Movement to make up for the bulk of the content that made its way into the
Pakistan Studies books.

Though the Bhutto regime was populist, socialist and largely secular, in 1973 it managed to get a
consensus from all the parties to unveil a new constitution that rebranded Pakistan as an Islamic
Republic and proclaimed that all laws in the country would be made in the light of the teachings of
the Quran and the Sunnah.
JI and other religious parties had explained the break-up of Pakistan in 1971 as a consequence of its
rulers refusal to turn the country into an Islamic state and thus, giving secularists and ethnic
nationalists enough reason and space to dictate terms and harm the unity of the country.
The second phase of the Bhutto regime (1974-77) saw the slowing down of its socialist projects and
the declining influence of PPPs socialist and Marxist ideologues in the policy-making process.
The regimes capitulation in the event of the agitation and the demands of the religious parties to
declare the Ahamadiyya community as a non-Muslim minority was at least one symptom of Bhuttos
rightward shift.
By the time of the 1977 election, the PPP manifesto all but eliminated the word socialism from its
manifesto. Its regime, elected on a relatively radical socialist and largely secular program in 1970,
had (within a matter of five years), become a somewhat odd mixture of nationalist populism, and an
equally populist expression of Political Islam.

Z A. Bhutto
Bhutto it seems had sensed the Islamic revival taking place across the Muslim world after the 1973
Arab-Israel War.
Though the war had ended in a stalemate of sorts, oil-rich Arab monarchies enjoyed a sudden rise in
profits from after they slowed down oil production and greatly jacked-up oil prices.
The profits gave the oil-producing Arab countries power to influence Muslim regimes that did not
have the fortune of owning vast oil fields.
Saudi Arabia hardly played a role in the matters of Pakistan before 1973. But after 1973 Bhuttos
Pakistan (just like Sadats Egypt) began to court the oil-rich Saudi monarchy, hoping to fatten their
countries struggling economies with hearty hand-outs from their wealthy Muslim brethren (Petro-
Dollars).
But the money came with a condition. The Saudi monarchy was a passionate proponent of a rather
puritanical strand of Islam (Wahabism). It had alarmingly seen the rise of socialist regimes in Egypt,
Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia and Pakistan in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s.
After 1973 when it began to pump money into Muslim countries, with the money, also came the
allusions and nudges to undermine leftist ideologies and kick-start an intellectual and political
exercise to Islamize governments and societies according to the Saudis interpretation of faith.
Arab monarchies had struggled to stay afloat against the onslaught and rise of secular Arab
nationalism (Arab Socialism) in the 1950s and 1960s. And in spite of the fact that most of these
monarchies were allies of Western powers, they were also conscious of Western political ideas such
as democracy trickling into the mind-set of their citizens, especially the younger lot.
From 1973 onwards, Petro Dollars began to be disbursed and distributed among Western and
Muslim academics, intellectuals, governments and (Muslim) religious leaders, along with, of course,
on the construction of beautiful mosques.
What began to appear from this exercise was a Political Islam that was anti-left, anti-Zionist, anti-
secular but pro-West, pro-business, pro-monarchy and with a healthy bank balance.
After trying to appease the Islamic lobby by introducing certain Islamic clauses in the 1973
Constitution, and then agreeing to constitutionally declare the Ahamadiyya community as a non-
Muslim religious minority, the Bhutto regime moved in to appease its new-found Saudi friends and
donors.
Since by now the Pakistan Ideology had begun to place Pakistans historical roots in lands from
where Arab horsemen had begun to invade India from the 8th Century onwards, it was decided that
the Arabic language too should be adopted and taught in schools.
Since till about 1975, the Pakistan society and government had remained largely secular, Bhutto
might have felt secure in believing that he was successfully keeping his left and liberal
constituencies satisfied along with the conservative religious sections of the society and Pakistans
new Arab donors.
So it must have come as a rude shock to him when in December 1976, a 9-party alliance of religious
and anti-Bhutto parties united under the umbrella of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA).
The alliance geared up to face Bhuttos PPP in the 1977 election. And it was only when the PNA
used the words Nizam-e-Mustafa (The Prophets System) as its main slogan, it became apparent
that the Bhutto regimes experiments in the still elusive territory of the Pakistan Ideology had actually
ended up providing his opponents the space and idea to use Islam as an electoral tool.
Another factor that Bhutto might have undermined was that Saudi Arabia was not only cultivating
relations with the Bhutto regime, it was also on very good terms with religious parties such as the JI.
Instead of countering PNAs religious overtones by falling back on its original appeal of being a
populist pro-poor party, the PPP went on the defensive because according to Bhuttos analysis,
now it was the Islamic revival factor that needed to be eyed and then grabbed.
The word Islam outnumbered the word socialism in the partys new manifesto and for the first time
religion became the central point of debate and discussion during an election in Pakistan.
Claims and counterclaims of the PPP and the PNA on who was a better Muslim became so intense
that an editorial in Pakistans largest English daily, Dawn, pleaded to both the camps to keep Islam
out of politics.
The PPP trounced the PNA in the National Assembly election. The PNA cried foul and accused the
Bhutto regime of rigging the polls. The truth was that the regime had rigged only a handful of seats
(in the Punjab) and would have won the election anyway.
But Bhutto wanted to change the countrys parliamentary system into a Presidential one and for that
he desired a big majority in the National Assembly.
PNA refused to contest the Provincial Assembly elections and instead, began a protest movement
that soon became violent.
Demanding Bhuttos resignation and fresh elections, PNA supporters, mostly made up of right-wing,
urban middle-class youth and supported by the industrial and trader classes that were greatly stung
by the Bhutto regimes socialist manoeuvres, poured out onto the streets.
Surprised by the tenacity of the protesters, Bhutto began emergency talks with the PNA leadership.
The ironic aspect of the movement was that when the PNA and the protesters began to use Islamic
symbolism and slogans, these were culled from what the Bhutto regime had inducted into school
textbooks and governmental lingo.
But since both PNA and PPP were going on and on about Islam without ever bothering to explain
exactly how they were planning to turn a religion based on moral and social codes into a functioning
political and economic system, this eyewash was addressed by another eyewash.
In July 1977, Bhuttos own General toppled his regime in a military coup and promptly arrested him.
General Ziaul Haq was handpicked by Bhutto, in spite of him having a history of being highly
conservative and an admirer of JIs chief and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi.
When he imposed the countrys third Martial Law, Zia took PNAs Nizam-e-Mustafa rhetoric and
turned it into a draconian, and then a legislative ideological project, giving the whole concept of the
Pakistan Ideology its starkest and weightiest Islamic aspect thus far.
Bhutto was hanged in April 1979 through a sham trial.

The grand concoction
General Zias interpretation of Islam was derived heavily from the Deobandi Sunni Muslim view.
The model undertaken by Zia for his Islamization project was based on Maulana Maududis theory of
the state, and the Jamaat-e-Islami became the only political party that could freely function during
the time.

Ziaul Haq
Zia had shrewdly noted how even some of the most secular Pakistanis had largely remained silent
when Bhutto declared the Ahmadiyya community non-Muslim.
Islam was the perfect kind of excuse for a tyrant to flex his muscles, especially in a country where
the middle-classes and upstarts who had travelled to oil-rich Arab countries had confused the power
of the Petro-Dollar with the power of the strict strand of Islam that they came into contact with there.
Maududis Pakistan Ideology that had been battered by the voters in 1970 and then mutated into
meaning something closer to Bhuttos equally convoluted Islamic Socialism, fell into the hands of
Zia who gave it his own twist.
But he not only made it a part of school textbooks; he also began to actually express it through the
draconian laws that he described as being Islamic.
Law after law based on a particular and orthodox understanding of Islam was rolled out, so much so
that by the time of his death in 1988, the 1973 Constitution, that had originally been a product of
progressive and democratic intent, became the enshrinement of laws that till even today give both a
religious, as well as a constitutional cover to what are indeed acts of religious violence and bigotry.
Video:
1982 PTV footage of Zia announcing his dictatorships new set of so-called Islamic Laws.

But while all this was being weaved into a more aggressively propagated ideology by the state, the
Zia regime was soon confronted in this respect by a number of close colleagues of Muhammad Ali
Jinnah and secular historians.
They suggested that the so-called Pakistan Ideology was always a concoction of the religious right
and the military-establishment to sustain and justify their undemocratic hold over a multi-ethnic and
multi-sectarian polity.
After toppling the Z. A. Bhutto government in July 1977, Zia almost immediately got down to the
business of transforming the ideological complexion of Pakistan, peddling it as a state that was
supposedly conceived as a theocratic entity.
However, Zia and his ideological partners, mainly the Jamat-i-Islami (JI), soon hit a brick wall in this
respect when they couldnt endorse their revisionist narrative with any of the sayings and speeches
of Jinnah.
Zia thus banned the mention (in the media and school textbooks) of Jinnahs famous speech that he
made to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, and in which he clearly described Pakistan
as a progressive, non-theocratic Muslim-majority state.
His Information Ministry then advised PTV and Radio Pakistan to only use those sayings of Jinnah
that had the word Islam in them.
The practice only stopped with Zias assassination in August 1988 and Jinnah was finally spared the
false beard Zia kept pining on the founders otherwise shaven chin.
Nevertheless, no civilian government has dared to alter or expunge the Islamic laws planted in the
Constitution by the Zia regime.
The fear of being declared anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan Ideology overrides the will to throw out
these laws that have wreaked havoc on various sections of the society, especially the women and
the minority communities.
These laws have also ended up actually institutionalising moral hypocrisy and even religiously-
motivated violence.
Thus, in the last two decades, whole generations of educated, middle-class, young Pakistanis have
grown up believing that Shariah was Jinnahs main aim, and that the so-called Pakistan Ideology
emerged from the sacrifices rendered by their elders during the Pakistan Movement.

Liberals, leftists and ethnic nationalists have continued to oppose these views and moves. They
describe them as being tools of the Punjabi ruling elite and their religious allies, as a way to keep
certain ethnicities (and now sects) on a tight leash.
But the truth is, with the help of the private Urdu media and the growing economic, judicial and
political influence of the urban middle-classes, the Pakistan Ideology as it has stood ever since
Zias time is what that defines most young Pakistanis today.
Even if, ironically, it is more likely to make them say they are Muslims first and Pakistanis later.
References and Resources:
Afnan Khan, The Threat of Pakistans Revisionist Text (The Guardian, 18 May, 2009).
Stephen Alter, Amritsar to Lahore: a journey across the India-Pakistan border (Penn Sylvania Press,
2002). p.22
Maneesha Tikar, Across the Wagah (Bibliophile South Asia, 2004). p.210
Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz, Samina Choonara, Politics of Language (Simorgh Publication,
2005). p.162
T Rahman, Government Policies & The Politics of Teaching Urdu in Pakistan (Annual Urdu Studies,
2002).
Amy Bik May Tsui, James W. Tollefson, Language Policy, Culture and Identity in Asian Contexts
(Routledge, 2007). pp.244, 245
Thomas Oberlies, Pali: A Grammar of the Language of theTheravda Tipiaka, (Walter de Gruyter,
2001).
Ayesha Jalal, Self and sovereignty: Individual & Community in South Asia Islam Since 1870
(Routledge, 2002). pp.174, 175, 176
Manas Chatterji, B. M. Jain, Conflict & Peace in Asia, (Emerald Group Publishing, 2008). p.251
Irfan Ahmad, The Transformation of Jamat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press, 2009). p.6
The 1956 Constitution declared Pakistan to be an Islamic Republic and consequently, the country
began to be called the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Abul Ala Maududu, The Islamic Law & Constitution (Islamic Books, 1986).
Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, Dennis Kux, India & Pakistan: The First Fifty Years (Cambridge
University Press, 1999). p.47
GS Bhargava, Pakistan in Crises (Vikas Publications, 1971). p.75
John L. Esposito, Islam & Politics (Syracuse University Press 1998). pp.120-121
Husain Haqani, Pakistan: Between the Mosque & Military (Carneige, 2010). p.43
Martin E. Marty, R. Scot, Fundamentalisms Observed (University of Chicago Press, 1998). p.473
Ishtiaq Ahmed, State, Nation & Ethnicity in Contemporary South Asia (Continuum International
Publication, 1998). p.284
Martin E. Marty, R. Scot, Fundamentalisms Observed (University of Chicago Press, 1998). p.474
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Culture and Identity (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Saadia Toor, The State of Pakistan (Pluto Press, 2005). pp: 112-115
KK Aziz, The Murder of History (Renaissance Publishing House, 1998). p.111
A Zubair, The Silent and the Lost (Pacific Breeze Publishers, 2010). p.321
Strategic Digest Vol: 3 (Institute of Defence Studies & Analyses, 1973). p.16
Aitzaz Ahsan, The Indus Saga (Roli, 2005).
Dr. Mubarek Ali, Interviews & Comments (Fiction House, 2004). p.66
Zaid Haider, The Ideological Struggle For Pakistan, (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). p.16
Walid Phares, The War of Ideas (Macmillan, 2007).
Rubina Saigol, Radicalization of State & Society in Pakistan (Heinrich Boll Stiftung). p.10
Mubashir Hassan, The Miraj of Power: An Inquiry into the Bhutto Years 1971-77 (Oxford University
Press, 2000). pp.299-300
Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 2001) p.80
Khaled Ahmed, Pakistan Behind The Ideological Mask (Vanguard, 2001).
The Political Economy of Pakistan: 1947-85 (Taylor & Frances, 1988) p.180
Akbar Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan & Islamic Entity (Routledge, 2012).
Ravi Kalia, Pakistan: From Rehtoric of Democracy to Rise of Militancy (Routledge 2012). p.5