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Understanding Religious Violence in Pakistan Syeda Haider University of Connecticut, [email protected]

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Understanding Religious Violence in Pakistan Syeda Haider University of Connecticut, Syeda.F.Haider@Gmail.Com University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Honors Scholar Theses Honors Scholar Program Spring 5-5-2014 The pS ecter Of Intolerance: Understanding Religious Violence in Pakistan Syeda Haider University of Connecticut, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Other Political Science Commons, and the Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons Recommended Citation Haider, Syeda, "The peS cter Of Intolerance: Understanding Religious Violence in Pakistan" (2014). Honors Scholar Theses. 377. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/377 The Specter of Intolerance: Understanding Religious Violence in Pakistan Syeda Haider University of Connecticut Department of Political Science 2014 Honors Thesis Advisor: Elizabeth Hanson May 2, 2014 Haider 2 Abstract : The role of religion in Pakistani political and civil life has had a defining role in the political development of the nation. The country is now a breeding ground for religious extremism, with militant groups conducting brutal attacks against the Shia, Ahmedi, Christian and Hindu communities of Pakistan. There have been few explanations attempting to describe the problem of religious violence domestically, within Pakistan’s borders towards Pakistani citizens. This essay examines how, despite Pakistan’s initial conception as a secular state, the country has become haunted by intense religious violence. It links the lack of consensus around national identity with the state’s political exploitation of an exclusive and conservative version of Islam that laid the foundation for the development of groups hostile to religious minorities, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my thesis advisor, Professor Betty Hanson, in her generous guidance and support of this project. From reading half-finished drafts to fleshing out every point in this thesis, she has been an immense help on my road to completion. I am also thankful for Professor Jennifer Sterling-Folker’s help in providing a clear and critical eye over the text of the paper, as well as her willingness to answer every question possible about the process. Introduction Since the events of 9/11, the world has focused in on Pakistan, and its role as a nation caught between its obligations to secularism and democracy while confronting the problems of extremism and praetorian rule. Much of the discourse surrounding jihad 1 in Pakistan has been in relation to jihad’s effects on other nations and other peoples, including Afghanistan, India, and the United States. However, a significant number of Pakistanis are also victims of the violence that has come of the global jihad, and their lives and livelihoods are arguably in greater danger because they are citizens of a state that both actively and tacitly supports militant groups. These Pakistanis belong to religious minorities in the country, and have been subject to persecution and discrimination because of their peripheral religious status. The violence against them has become so rampant that Minority Rights Group International, in its annual State of the 1 Jihad here is defined in accordance with mainstream Western understandings of the word, as a holy war conducted by Muslim militant groups against infidels. Haider 3 World’s Minorities report for 2007 to 2010, placed Pakistan in the top 10 (out of a ranking of 150 states) of its lists of states violating minority rights (MRGI 2010). There have been few comprehensive analyses describing why religious minorities have and continue be the victims of violence. This study links the lack of consensus around national identity with the state’s political exploitation of an exclusive and conservative version of Islam that laid the foundation for the development of groups hostile to religious minorities, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This paper argues that the problem of violence against religious minorities begins with Pakistan’s initial lack of consensus around a national identity. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League 2, the founders of Pakistan, needed to create an ideological basis for the formation of Pakistan. Many Indian Muslims were against a separate state for Muslims. Jinnah, in order to mobilize broad support for a separate state, used the rhetoric of secularism and democracy and relied on the symbols of Islam to invoke support for Pakistan. What resulted was a vague understanding of Pakistan as an “Islamic state” – it was not specified whose Islam would represent the state and its people. As a result of this ambiguity, political and military leaders were able to use specific versions of Islam to cement their power. General Zia Ul-Haq used a particularly strict and conservative interpretation of Islam throughout his eleven years as head of state. It was ultimately this version of Islam that pervaded the country’s legal and military institutions and was also the version that left little room for the country’s religious minorities. Through Zia’s codification of this particular Islam in law, it became the legitimate and correct version, providing fodder for conservative religious clerics and pundits to fuel 2 The All-India Muslim League, popularly known as the Muslim League, was the North Indian Muslim political party active from the 1910s to the 1940s that called for the establishment of a Muslim state separate from India. Haider 4 their own agendas. There were few secular forces in the country strong enough to counteract this pervasion of religiosity in public and political life. The influx of hardline militant groups that rooted themselves in Pakistan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent War on Terror found an environment that encouraged and perpetuated fundamentalist agendas, especially ones that viewed “incorrect” versions of Islam as blasphemous/heresy, and a threat to the existing order. These groups were thus able to launch violence against religious minorities that remains unchecked. Research Design This paper seeks to explain why religious and sectarian attacks have taken hold of Pakistan such that members of religious minorities feel unsafe when leaving their homes. In order to accomplish this, I will establish that religious-based violence has indeed increased in the country. I will do this by outlining a definition of religious violence: targeted attacks against religious minorities because their faith is not that of the majority group’s, which in this case is Sunni Islam. I will utilize sources of data from government documents, human rights groups, and non-governmental organizations. The data obtained from these sources will span the length of Pakistan’s history, from 1947-2013. I believe that multiple explanations must be considered when attempting to explain the problem of religious violence. These explanations include, (1) the initial ambiguous national identity presented by the Muslim League that ultimately resulted in the incorporation of conservative religious elements into state identity, which also normalized a desecular understanding of statehood and citizenship; (2) the role of the state in implementing religious intolerance into law and policy, thus providing militant Haider 5 groups with the political legitimacy to conduct violence on the basis of religion; and (3) the impact of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in spearheading the rise of global Islamic fundamentalism. These explanations are the ones that appear most frequently in the literature on Pakistan’s conservative religious environment, and I believe they are most likely to explain the proliferation of violence that has wracked the country since the 1980s. The first explanation is the affirmation of an exclusive religious identity by the state, and thus the legal avowal of the inferior status of religious minorities. To fully understand this theme, I will examine the historical trajectory of Pakistani political development, with particular attention to the role of religion in law and policy. Thus, this thesis will provide background information on Pakistani history, beginning with the Muslim League’s call for a separate Muslim-majority state, and Pakistani leaders’ use of religious rhetoric to mobilize mass support for a Muslim nation-state. This section will rely mostly on secondary historical analyses of Pakistan from legal scholars and historians. The second explanation examines the presence of conservative interpretations of Islamic law in state law, as a national policy pushed by dictator Zia Ul-Haq; much of this section will be devoted to understanding how the Pakistani government’s incorporation of church (or in this case, mosque) into state has allowed for and supported intolerance against religious minorities. I will focus specifically on the 1980s as a period when state legal codes were reformulated to incorporate aspects of conservative interpretations of religious law. Understanding how the state has entwined its claim to legitimacy with religious conservatism is central to explaining religious violence. The state’s sanctioning Haider 6 of intolerant institutionalizations of religion legitimizes the actions of extremist groups, who are then able to justify their violence as part of their moral and religious obligation. I will also examine the relationship of sectarian groups to the military. Using secondary scholarly analysis, I will attempt to understand the official policies of the military, the country’s most powerful institution,
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