Book review - Muhammad Qasim Zaman. Islam in Pakistan: A History.
Muhammad Qasim
Zaman. Islam in
Pakistan: A History
Reviewed by Justin Jones in H-Asia (September, 2019)
Printable
Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53232
How can Islam in
Pakistan, with its overwhelming heterogeneity, be discussed meaningfully within
a single study, if indeed it can be defined as a coherent enquiry at all? These
are the questions hinted at by Muhammad Qasim Zaman in the early pages of this
encyclopedic work. Trying to elucidate a subject so broad and complex is a feat
so ambitious that no previous author has attempted it, and Zaman tries to make
sense of this complex panorama through a series of densely detailed chapters.
In doing so, he produces a rich intellectual history, focusing upon a range of
Muslim thinkers and figureheads who inhabit the religious landscape of Pakistan
and situating their formulations of Islam within Pakistan’s evolving social and
political topography.
Throughout the book,
there is a tangible point of reference that informs the whole study: Pakistan’s
foundational identity as a would-be cradle of “Islamic modernism.” The latter
is a broad category that refers loosely to the kinds of religion held to by a
range of Pakistani intellectuals and the governing elite, who have aspired to
formulate a form of Islam defined by a particular progressive “ethic” or
“spirit” that is responsive to changing conditions. Zaman argues that since
Pakistan’s creation, Islamic modernists - usually establishment intellectuals and
stakeholders - have tried to shape the Islam known and practiced in Pakistan.
Ever since the Objectives Resolution of 1949 (cited in both the opening and
closing pages) proclaimed Pakistan to be a “laboratory” for developing Islam as
a “progressive force in the world,” Pakistan’s Islamic modernists have tried to
“put their ideals into practice” (pp. 5, 265) by seeking to shape this Islam:
formulating its laws, articulating its social role, and governing its
institutions.
While this ultimately
becomes the book’s core purpose, the chapters themselves cover a range of
subjects reflecting the scale of the subject matter and can each be read as
loosely connected stand-alone pieces. A first chapter offers a purview of the
landscape of Islam in colonial South Asia and the modernist and traditionalist
trends of Islamic renewal that gave rise to their later manifestations in
Pakistan. Chapter 2 (perhaps the crux of the book’s argument) explores Islamic
modernism as a particular religious ethic held by individuals who were often
affiliated with Pakistan’s establishment and the project of governance. It
assesses the visions of Islam propounded by Pakistan’s successive rulers and
explores Islamic thinkers with political connections such as Fazlur Rahman and
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. The third chapter explores ‘ulama (Islamic
scholars) within Pakistan, especially the Deobandis, focusing
not only upon their relationships with the political sphere and
moments of patronage and cooption by modernists, but also on their
assertions of resistance toward the state.
Chapter 4 explores how Pakistan has
been conceived by various Muslim thinkers as a state destined to realize God’s
sovereignty and to enact God-given laws: this language of divine provenance has
been used especially by Islamists, but it has also been used at significant
points by modernists. Chapter 5 explores two of Pakistan’s religious
minorities, arguing that the persecutions they have suffered derive from
contentions about the wider predicament of Islam within Pakistan: Ahmadis have
been targeted due to their association with modernist thought, while anti-Shia
polemic reflects the accusation that this minority’s protests have impeded the
implementation of Islamic law in Pakistan. Chapter 6 explores Pakistani Sufism,
with particular focus on how modernists have both drawn inspiration from its individualistic
and progressive elements while also contributing to its current
precarious position by critiquing it for superstition.
The final chapter
explores religio-political violence, including the Kashmir conflict, Afghan
jihad, and Pakistani Taliban, to ask how far these examples can be explained
by, or are linked to, the machinations of the state. Through this complex
landscape, Zaman sometimes makes reference to a multifarious “religious sphere”
in Pakistan (p. 265), within which all these parties interact and jostle. This
religious sphere, he argues strikingly, has been notably resilient over time,
with many contemporary actors being traceable back to the colonial period. It
is “remarkable,” he suggests in the epilogue, that the religious sphere has
been so little changed over the century, despite the simultaneous turbulence of
society and politics.
Through these
chapters, Zaman argues that Islamic modernists, over the decades, have tried to
broker cooperative relationships with other Muslim schools and
countermovements, in order to extend their reach in the religious sphere. As
hinted at throughout the study, Islamic modernists have at points joined
themselves pragmatically with Sufis, with whom they have shared an emphasis on
spirit and progression; with Islamists, with whom they have a mutual focus on
the project of statehood and governance; and with the ‘ulama, who have been
essential for their efforts to religious legitimacy within society. However,
the study insinuates, the perpetual ignominy and failures afflicting Pakistan’s
governing elites have tarnished the Islamic modernist project itself. In turn,
the relationships between modernists and other religious groups have become
characterized by suspicion, recrimination, polemic, and caricature.
In this last sense,
the book is notable for its depiction of an Islamic modernism as having fallen
into ever greater levels of decline. Following early promise in the 1950s-60s,
the deterioration of Pakistan’s intellectual and political leadership has substantially
compromised Islamic modernism itself. Pakistan’s state, Zaman reminds us at
points, has failed to support viable Islamic modernist scholarship or
institutions of learning, and has not formulated a credible educational or
social policy that reflects it. Meanwhile, one of the key themes of Islamic
modernist discourse—that the state of Pakistan should be guided by Islam—has
had the indirect effect of giving Pakistan’s many Islamic groups a common
framework (i.e., the state) on which to engage and compete with one another. In
turn, this has perpetuated the presence of Islam in politics.
An additional reason
for the failure of Islamic modernism, alluded to several times, is that it has
long carried a so-called authoritarian streak (p. 54). Allied with governing
regimes, conflating God’s sovereignty with the power of the state, and
complicit in political interventions like the administrative takeover of waqfs
and Sufi shrines, modernists have often been too overbearing to win acclamation
beyond their immediate circles. One of the most frequently occurring figures in
the book is Fazlur Rahman, Pakistan’s most famous Islamic modernist pioneers:
yet, he is presented here as too abrasive and uncompromising a figure to build
real influence within Pakistan itself, despite his stature elsewhere.
Admittedly, the
breadth and diversity of the subject matter means that the book’s core argument
is not highlighted evenly throughout, and the work’s central claims become most
clear in the concluding sections, when Zaman summarizes this somewhat bleak
assessment of the failure of Islamic modernism in Pakistan and makes an appeal
for its renewal. One could also grumble that the clear preference of the study
for a kind of politically oriented intellectual history means that the study
cannot extensively engage much of the most exciting work to have been produced
on Pakistan in recent years, especially work that is sociological or
ethnographic in focus. The Islam discussed is thus, in many ways, that of an
elite, male religious sphere, which leaves less room for non-elite, subaltern,
female, or other participants.
Nevertheless, no study
of this scale and complexity can do everything, and this work will immediately
be established as essential reading for all specialists. Indeed, while notable
for its overall argument, the book is perhaps especially striking for some of
the vignettes included when it departs from the best-known political figures
and looks at some of Pakistan’s minor, often forgotten Muslim orators. At
several points, we are given rich commentaries on some of the so-called
intermediate intellectuals in Pakistan (p. 269): comparatively minor figures,
usually working in Urdu, who have occupied a middle-ground space between
modernists and conservatives.
These include, for example, Khalifa Abdul Hakim,
the head of the Institute of Islamic Culture in the 1950s; the literary critic
Muhammad Hasan ‘Askari; the poet and journalist Murtaza Ahmad Khan Maikash; the
‘ulama Hanif Nadwi and Ja‘far Phulwarwi, who sought to engaged with modernist
ideas and called for the reformulation of laws, and Qudratullah Shahab, the
government bureaucrat turned articulate Sufi philosopher. All these figures,
working chiefly in the 1950s-60s, offered fascinating and often forgotten
attempts to recover religion from intellectual sterility, seeking common space
between modernists and antimodernists. As remembered by Zaman, for a while they
represented one possible future for Pakistan, and perhaps an alternative to the
decline into which modernism has since fallen.
Citation: Justin Jones. Review of Zaman, Muhammad
Qasim, Islam in Pakistan: A History. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53232
