Introduction
In 1983 Talal Asad argued that religious ideas can be understood as a ‘product’ of prior social forces:Footnote 1 the challenge lies in selecting a particular set of religious ideas and then working backwards, genealogically, to illuminate the circumstances that allowed those ideas to emerge as identifiable ‘religious’ ideas in the first place. How do different types of power create ‘religion’?Footnote 2 How does power create a particular understanding of Hinduism, shamanism, or Islam?Footnote 3
This paper asks a similar question, focusing, primarily, on the circumstances that generated an important shift in the ‘ideas about Islam’ articulated by certain university students in Pakistan and, especially, a tendency amongst these students to reject the notion—a notion closely tied to the formation of Pakistan itself—that the terms of ‘Islam’ might be expressed within the territorial parameters of a modern ‘national’ state.
Even before the formation of Pakistan in 1947 Muslims in South Asia disagreed about the extent to which the terms of Islam might be related to the formation of a territorially demarcated entity holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence—that is, the formation of a ‘Weberian’ state.Footnote 4 Proceeding within a particular set of political circumstances during the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, some like Allama Mohammad Iqbal argued that the terms of Islam and the ideas articulated by Max Weber could be compatible.Footnote 5 But of course others like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad disagreed.Footnote 6 And, as the 1930s gave way to the 1940s and 1950s, some leading thinkers, for instance, Maulana Abul ala Maududi, simply changed their minds, turning away from a sense that the traditions of Islam could not be reconciled with the terms of a territorialized Weberian state in favour of an appreciation for the extent to which, under certain circumstances, compatibility was tactically imperative.Footnote 7
After the formation of Pakistan in August 1947, however, the terms of this debate did not disappear—particularly amongst the local students whose deliberations lie at the centre of this paper. Most students continued to believe that ‘Islam’ and ‘Weber’ were compatible. But, even within this majority, important differences persisted. Some pressed for the creation of an explicitly secular state (for example, the leftward-leaning Democratic Students Federation); others pressed for a modern ‘Islamic’ state (the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba). Some embraced a ‘sectarian’ agenda (for example, the Imamia Students Organization); and, of course, some held fast to specific ‘ethnic’ or ‘regional’ demands (the Baloch Students Organization and the Pakhtun Students Federation, see Figure 1 below). In each case, however, the question was generally the same: who defines the nation/who controls the state?
Student unions and political parties in Pakistan: an abbreviated list.Footnote 8Footnote 9
As the pattern of political competition amongst these rival student unions became increasingly intractable (and increasingly violent) throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, however, a certain number of students began to question the ‘nationalist’, indeed the ‘Weberian,’ status quo, with a growing minority returning to the notion that the terms of Islam itself were strictly set apart from any question of ‘territorialized/state-based’ power. In fact specific transnational groups like the Tablighi Jama'at, Da'wat-e-Islami, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir began to expand their membership, such that, less than 50 years after the formation of Pakistan, groups like the (Sunni Deobandi) Tablighi Jama'at and the (Sunni Barelwi) Da'wat-e-Islami had emerged as the largest religious organizations in Pakistan—particularly, but not exclusively, amongst local students.Footnote 10
Drawing attention to some of the arguments articulated by Talal Asad—above all, his notion that certain types of power ‘produce’ particular conceptualizations of religion—this paper examines and attempts to explain the shifting terrain of religious ideas on campus in Pakistan. What are the factors that might begin to account for the shifting configuration of ‘ideas about Islam’ among local students: from ‘nationalist’ to (increasingly) ‘transnationalist’ ideas? What might a deeper understanding of the factors that produced this shift tell us about the creation of new ‘Islams’? Are there, analytically speaking, any limits to this historically productive process—any limits at all?
Accounting for the emergence of an alternative religious idea
As noted above, Talal Asad articulated an interest in the conditions under which any particular notion of ‘religion’ is produced. What are the conditions under which, for example, a ‘territorialized’ notion is produced? What are the conditions under which a ‘transnational’ notion is produced? And so on.
Much of the existing work on the political production of religion in South Asia begins with an emphasis on the influence of the colonial state, including the role of this state in producing certain ideas about the ‘boundaries’ of South Asia's Muslim minority.Footnote 11 A deeper understanding of the colonial state, for instance, draws attention to many of the factors that allowed for the emergence of new ideas regarding the value of a territorially demarcated ‘Muslim nation’, as reflected, for instance, in the views of Allama Mohammad Iqbal and, especially, of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.Footnote 12 A deeper understanding of the same colonial state, however, figures prominently in the work of those like Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani who stressed the importance of religious ideas far removed from any preoccupation with ‘territorialized nationalities’ whatsoever.Footnote 13
The value of this focus on the colonial state, however, does not lie in illuminating how the terms of ‘Islam’ were used to advance the intellectual or political career of any one individual. It simply allows for an appreciation of the many ways in which the quest for power itself (between and amongst different Muslims) encouraged and, in some sense, actually produced, several new ‘Islams’, each with its own particular sense of doctrine, belief, and practice.
What follows retains this focus on the productive power of political competition, while at the same time moving away from any special interest in the power of the colonial state. I focus instead on a closely related pattern of ‘production’ within the postcolonial universities of Pakistan, not in an effort to show how specific ideas were used to advance the popularity of any one student union (see Figure 1), but, rather, to illuminate the ways in which, over time, an increasingly intractable quest for power amongst several different unions produced an alternative set of transnational (indeed, counter-nationalist) ideas about ‘Islam’. Attention will mainly focus on the productive power of what I call the structure of political competition on campus and, more specifically, the power of an increasingly intractable pattern of competition involving the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba and its many ‘Weberian’ rivals.Footnote 14
The structure of campus-based political competition throughout the latter half of the twentieth century was not characterized by specific efforts to sustain the terms of campus-based political competition.Footnote 15 In fact, this structure was not characterized by any effort to legitimize what might be described as an explicit religious or political ethic pertaining to the value of ‘competition’ itself. On the contrary, the structure of campus-based religious-cum-political competition was characterized by an informal ‘structure of stalemate’ (see Figure 2) with each party insisting on the same relatively undifferentiated desideratum: ‘one state, one party, one way’.Footnote 16
From competition to stalemate.
This campus-based stalemate was not entirely ‘unproductive’. In fact the core of my argument lies in stressing the extent which, over time, this stalemate allowed for the ‘production’ of an alternative approach to Islam, as reflected primarily in the ideas articulated by alternative (transnational) groups like the Tablighi Jama'at, Da'wat-e-Islami, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir (see Figure 3). These alternatives did not seek to capture or control any ‘territory’; they sought to embrace (and control) the worldwide ummah instead.
From political stalemate to religious innovation.
How does power (following Asad) create new expressions of religion? How does power facilitate the formation of new ‘Islams’? What follows is an attempt to account for the emergence of one rather specific religious alternative in Pakistan, drawing attention to the ways in which this alternative emerged as the ‘product’ of a particular configuration of power.
Competing notions of community-based conformity on campus
Within Pakistan, late-twentieth-century campus-based political rivalries frequently expressed themselves in the form of specific disagreements regarding the limits of acceptable religious practice. These disagreements illuminated several different expressions of Islam (simultaneously) within two very broad categories. The first tended to embrace the territorial underpinnings of modern post-colonial nationalism quite uncritically. The latter, focusing on the ummah, did not.
Nationalist rivals
Throughout Pakistan, ‘nationalist’ campus-based rivalries had a tendency to combine the terms of political and religious disagreement almost as a matter of course. In fact it would be difficult to comprehend the tensions unfolding between, for instance, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba and its leading ‘nationalist’ rivals without a clear appreciation for the extent to which each and every one of these rivals (listed in Figure 1) sought to tie its quest for comprehensive ‘political’ control to the notion that its understanding of ‘religion’ was, somehow, completely non-negotiable.
The Islamism of the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba, for instance, was deemed to be more or less completely incompatible with the secularism of its leading rivals on the left (for example, the Democratic Students Federation, the National Students Federation, and the People's Students Federation) even as the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba's commitment to comprehensive religious uniformity—there can be ‘one-and-only-one’ expression of appropriate religious conduct—routinely clashed with persistent expressions of ethnic (or sectarian) Muslim diversity (as articulated by the Pakhtun Students Federation, the Baloch Students Organization, the All-Pakistan Muttahida Student Organization, the Imamia Students Organization, and so on).Footnote 17 Throughout Pakistan the power of each student union was closely tied to the classification of secular, ethnic, or sectarian Others as ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ heretics. So, in many ways, the parameters of Islam itself became almost entirely inseparable from the question of campus-based political control.Footnote 18Question: What are the parameters of ‘Islam’? Answer: Who ‘controls’ the campus?
Two very brief examples may help to illustrate this pattern of ‘nationalist’ conflict. The first concerns sectarian differences at Punjab University in Lahore; the second concerns ethnic differences within the University of Peshawar.Footnote 19 Both examples emerged during fieldwork undertaken in 2007 and 2008, but each reflects a pattern of political confrontation that took shape as early as the mid-to-late 1950s.Footnote 20
‘Sectarian’ politics in Lahore
The sectarian conflict at Punjab University began in 2007 when a small group of Shi'a students withdrew from the campus-based collective prayers on Fridays and began to offer their prayers independently—after the Sunni prayers and behind a separate Shi'a imam. The Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba opposed this rejection of what they took to be a common standard of community-based conduct on campus. But, in due course, the Shi'a students dismissed this objection, noting that, as a ‘separate’ religious community, they were entitled to a separate place for prayer. In fact, recalling the ‘territorialized’ logic that accompanied the formation of Pakistan itself, the (Shi'a) Imamia Students Organization insisted that, as a separate religious community, they were entitled to specific territorial protections—up to and including a separate local mosque.
Naturally, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba opposed this demand for a separate Shi'a territory. In fact they appeared to embrace the pre-partition logic of Mohandis K. Gandhi, arguing that any move to accept the territorialization of religious differences would destroy the community as a whole. The Punjab University Vice-Chancellor, in turn, feared that any move to accommodate the ‘separatist’ Shi'a would provoke a violent response from the much larger Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba. And, in due course, he simply echoed the rhetoric of the last imperial viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, drawing attention to the value of enduring campus ‘unity’.
Indeed, with a history of party-based violence between the ‘assimilationist’ Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba and the ‘sectarian’ Imamia Students Organization simmering just below the surface, the value of recognizing and, in due course, even institutionalizing an appreciation for local expressions of religious difference—for example, within a commitment to individualized forms of religious expression underpinning an appreciation for shifting forms of religious and sectarian association—was never seriously considered. Both groups simply held fast to their own zero-sum positions, with the Imamia Students Organization insisting that immutable expressions of religious difference boiled down to a matter of exclusive territorial ‘autonomy’ even as the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba insisted that any expression of Muslim difference was, itself, completely ‘un-Islamic’. Indeed, both groups opted to reinforce an inflexible approach to the territorialized expression of postcolonial (campus-based) Islam.Footnote 21 For them, the logic of ‘territory’ and the terms of ‘Islam’ were fully compatible, relentless political hostilities notwithstanding.
‘Ethnic’ politics in Peshawar
At the University of Peshawar, a similar tussle emerged in 2008—this time, when competing ideas regarding the acceptability of a campus-based music programme were used to define the possibility of a ‘Pakhtun’ approach to Islam.
During the spring of 2008 the faculty wing of the Jama'at-e-Islami, better known as the Tanzeem-e-Asatizah (Organization of Teachers), swept an important round of campus-based elections within the Peshawar University Teachers Association. This was not at all unprecedented. But, almost immediately after these elections, this group of faculty members (drawn together within a like-minded coalition known on campus as the ‘Progressive’ Group) moved to define the parameters of acceptable religious conduct on campus. In particular they sought to collaborate with proxy forces drawn from the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba (IJT) to eradicate the existence of music.
‘Activists of the [IJT]. . .fired shots and chanted slogans to disrupt a party arranged by students of the Journalism and Mass Communications [JMC] Department’, reported Manzoor Ali Shah in an article of 2 March 2008 prepared for a national newspaper known as The Daily Times, adding that, within the University of Peshawar, those affiliated with the Journalism and Mass Communications Department tended to maintain close ties with the faculty leadership of a campus-based Pakhtun-nationalist coalition known as the (recently defeated) ‘Friends’ Group. In particular, Shah noted that students affiliated with the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba stormed into the Journalism and Mass Communications Department and ordered the students ‘to stop the[ir] musical programme as it was un-Islamic’. And, taking their protest one step further, they called upon the university Vice-Chancellor, who, once again fearing violence, ‘arrived at the scene and asked the students to stop the[ir] musical programme’.
As the political landscape began to shift away from the secular Pakhtun-nationalist ‘Friends’ towards the Islamist ‘Progressives’, however, the Journalism and Mass Communications students found themselves caught in the crossfire (literally). In fact when several faculty members affiliated with the secular Friends came forward to challenge the order of the Vice-Chancellor, noting that he himself had attended a similar music programme in the same hall the previous year, ‘a large group of IJT students . . . started firing [their weapons] in the air’, immediately prompting their rivals within the Pakhtoon Students Federation to respond in kind with their own weapons.
Again, following Asad, campus-based notions of acceptable ‘religious’ practice appeared to be forged in the fires of ongoing ‘political’ conflict. For all intents and purposes, campus-based notions of religion were ‘produced’ by rival expressions of power.Footnote 22
This is not to suggest that ‘one-and-only-one’ understanding of Islam was ever actually produced in any sustainable way: one mosque, two mosques; music, no music. On the contrary, the terms of Islamic orthodoxy (and heresy) were, following Asad, always ‘under production’. I simply wish to illustrate some of the underlying mechanisms whereby, over time, the parameters of a protracted political quest for religious control (Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba versus Imamia Students Organization or Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba versus Pakhtun Students Federation) generated an increasingly violent impasse—one that, eventually, allowed for the ‘production’ of an alternative approach to Islam.
Transnationalist alternatives
This alternative approach to Islam did not seek to abandon persistent ideas regarding the value of community-based conformity at the level of individual religious belief and practice. It merely sought to revisit these ideas without any ties to ‘nationalist’ concerns with exclusive territorial control. And, as I will explain, it did so in at least three different ways: in association with the (Sunni Deobandi) Tablighi Jama'at, with the (Sunni Barelwi) Da'wat-e-Islami, and, in a significant departure from the cross-class foundations of the Tabilighi Jama'at and Da'wat-e-Islami, with Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the upper-middle-class students enrolled in an expanding range of urban private-sector universities.
Hizb-ut-Tahrir
As a non-violent revolutionary party founded in Jerusalem during the early 1950s, Hizb-ut-Tahrir found its way into Pakistan via diaspora links in London.Footnote 23 Like the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba, Hizb-ut-Tahrir catered to urban, university-educated, upper-middle-class students, drawing special attention to the value of a global Islamic ‘state’. In fact it is important to stress that the parameters of this global state (described as a global khilafat) bore a striking resemblance to the monolithic transnational Islamic order envisioned by Jama'at-e-Islami founder Maulana Abul ala Maududi during the early-twentieth century—before Maududi's decision to seize political control over the ‘nationalist’ state of Pakistan. The revolutionary goals of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, therefore, were not unlike the early goals articulated by Maududi; they simply rejected Maududi's ‘territorialized’ Weberian incarnation.
Tablighi Jama'at
Like those affiliated with Hizb-ut-Tahrir, those affiliated with the Tablighi Jama'at drew special attention to the value of ‘transnational’ religious reform.Footnote 24 Unlike Hizb-ut-Tahrir, however, those affiliated with the Tablighi Jama'at expressed no interest in the formation of any global khilafat.Footnote 25 In fact, building on the foundations of an alternative religious reform movement established near Mewat (south of Delhi) during the late-1920s and 1930s, the Tablighi Jama'at sought to move as far away as possible from any form of khilafat, including the modern ‘state’.
Throughout Pakistan, those affiliated with the Tablighi Jama'at maintained no comprehensive membership rosters.Footnote 26 They trained no clergy. And, with the exception of large annual gatherings known as ijtemas, they maintained neither ‘formal’ nor ‘informal’ schools. In fact, moving as far away from a conventional understanding of the state as possible, their activities consisted of little more than spontaneous self-funded sorties fanning out across the community, the country, and the world with a simple six-point message of self-purification through prayer and proselytization.Footnote 27 They carried no weapons apart from a brief text known as the Fazail-e-Amal and, owing to their explicit aversion to violence, combined with a practiced indifference to voting, they insisted that their movement was always and invariably ‘apolitical’ (as if the parameters of politics were limited to expressions of violence or voting). In fact for many Tablighis the ostensibly ‘apolitical’ orientation of their movement was its primary attribute—the driving impulse underpinning their ‘alternative’ approach to Islam.Footnote 28
Da'wat-e-Islami
For those affiliated with Da'wat-e-Islami, founded in Karachi during the early 1980s, however, the message of the Tablighi Jama'at was not at all ‘apolitical.’Footnote 29 They insisted that the proselytizing Deobandi orientation of the Tablighi Jama'at was relentless, uncompromising, and imperial.Footnote 30 Indeed, as Thomas Gugler explains, ‘the lay preachers of [the Barelwi Da'wat-e-Islami] compete[d] with [the Tablighi Jama'at] in an aggressive rat race for supplying salvation’ to local youth.Footnote 31 Each insisted that its own approach was the only truly ‘Islamic’ approach and, across the world, each sought to portray the other as heretics, apostates, or ‘non-Muslims’.Footnote 32
Even within Pakistan's alternative realm of non-violent ‘transnationalist’ reform, then, most groups continued to insist that, in a purely religious sense, there could be ‘one-and-only-one’ appropriate expression of Islam. And of course within this environment the question was always: which one? Footnote 33
At this point it is important to reiterate that the basic question lying at the heart of this paper is not concerned with a process whereby some students came to reject the ‘monolithic’ orientation of various territorialized (or nationalist) rivals in favour of, say, an alternative ‘pluralistic’ orientation (within the same territorial boundaries). On the contrary, the central question highlights the structure of campus-based political competition in an effort to illuminate the patterns that led some students to reject the ideas associated with, say, the ‘territorialized’ Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba (and its rivals) in favour of the (still monolithic) ideas associated with specific ‘transnational’ alternatives like the Tablighi Jama'at, Da'wat-e-Islami, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
What was it that led a growing number of students throughout Pakistan to question the territorialized ‘nationalist’ orientation that played such an important part in the formation of Pakistan itself? What was it, domestically, that led them to reconnect with a ‘transnationalist’ approach to Islam?
The productive power of a protracted political impasse
Beginning in the 1950s and continuing throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, ummah-based ideas regarding the parameters of the global Muslim community became increasingly popular in Pakistan, beginning with the Tablighi Jama'at during the late-1950s and 1960s and continuing with the overlapping presence of the Tablighi Jama'at, Da'wat-e-Islami and Hizb-ut-Tahrir during the 1980s (Da'wat-e-Islami) and ’90s (Hizb-ut-Tahrir). Of course the existence of Hizb-ut-Tahrir predates its emergence in Pakistan; indeed the existence of Tablighi Jama'at predates the formation of Pakistan itself. But, within Pakistan, the basic argument rests on the notion that the expanding influence of ummah-based ‘ideas about Islam’ cannot be understood without a deeper appreciation for the structure of domestic political competition—indeed the structure of an increasingly violent religious-cum-political impasse—driven by a specific quest to secure exclusive and unyielding forms of monolithic ‘territorialized’ control.
This impasse was never confined to a pattern of competition between the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba and its campus-based ‘nationalist’ rivals. In fact the pattern unfolded within these parties as well, as numerous internal challengers battled one another to obtain specific forms of exclusive ‘factional’ control. Even apart from these tensions between and within each student union, however, additional pressures were introduced by the state itself, for example, in the form of periodic efforts to stifle would-be student leaders with an effort to ‘ban’ the practice of campus-based politics altogether.
For those with an interest in the political production of Islam in Pakistan, these multilayered rivalries were always important on their own. But, again, their most important feature lay in their ability to divert attention away from the centrality of the ‘nation’ itself—their ability to generate, over time, a powerful indifference to the territorial foundations of Pakistan in favour of an alternative attachment to the transnational underpinnings of contemporary (global) Islam.
The 1950s and 1960s: embracing the Tablighi Jama'at
Within just a few years after the formation of Pakistan in August 1947, the (founding) Pakistan Muslim League began to crumble under the weight of its own internal fragmentation. And, very shortly there after, the state of Pakistan first emerged, the Pakistan Muslim League-affiliated Muslim Students Federation followed suit. In fact, by the mid-1950s, both the Pakistan Muslim League and its increasingly fractured student wing had come to regard the relatively cohesive Communist Party of Pakistan and its loosely affiliated Democratic Students Federation as a serious religious-cum-political threat. Initially steps were taken to neutralize this threat with the formation of a new state-sponsored student union known as the National Students Federation. But, eventually, this ploy failed, and, as the Democratic Students Federation continued to dominate most student polls—despite the formation of the National Students Federation—the ruling Pakistan Muslim League decided in 1954 to ‘ban’ its rivals: both the Communist Party of Pakistan and the Democratic Students Federation.Footnote 34
As Nadeem Paracha explains, however, even this effort to ‘ban’ student politics failed outright.Footnote 35 In fact just two years after the formation of the National Students Federation, former Democratic Students Federation members hijacked the leadership of the National Students Federation, allowing the National Students Federation to re-emerge as a vehicle for the secular left, which, in due course, continued to dominate most campus elections throughout the 1960s. Eventually, however, the National Students Federation began to wrestle with its own internal factions. Each faction—for example, the Kazmi, Meraj, and Rasheed factions—agreed that Pakistan should be a secular state in keeping with the terms of its own socialist doctrine; they simply disagreed about the substance of that doctrine and the possibility of diversity within it. From a Leninist-Kazmi perspective, for instance, those affiliated with the Maoist-Meraj faction were simply ‘heretics’ (and so on): ‘one state, one party, one way’.
The banning of the leftist Democratic Students Federation in 1954, followed by the removal of Pakistan's civilian government in a military coup led by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958 (notwithstanding Pakistan Muslim League Prime Minister Firoz Khan Noon's bid to abandon the centrist Muslim League in favour of a new pro-military party known as the (Pakistan) Republican Party), completely eliminated the campus-based rivalry between the now-banned Democratic Students Federation and the student wing of the recently ousted Pakistan Muslim League.Footnote 36 In fact, after 1958, student politics throughout Pakistan were dominated by a bitter struggle between the leftward-leaning National Student Federation and Maududi's (Islamist) Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba.Footnote 37
As the competition between the National Students Federation and the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba began to take shape throughout the late-1950s and 1960s, however, the National Students Federation was increasingly weakened by its own proliferating factions. Indeed, when campus votes began to split between and amongst these competing factions, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba benefited greatly—so much so that by 1969 the rising tide of student activism targeting the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan coincided, somewhat ironically (given the mass-based popularity of leftward-leaning politicians like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto), with a wave of campus-based electoral success for the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba—for example, at the University of Karachi in 1969 and, then, during the next four years (1970–1974), both at the University of Karachi and at Punjab University in Lahore.Footnote 38
As the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba swept into power on a wave of student-led activism during the late-1960s, though, it found that it was not immune to the same scourge of internal fragmentation that had affected both the Muslim Students Federation and the National Students Federation before it.Footnote 39 In fact, just as the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba began to enjoy its first blush of electoral success at the University of Karachi in 1969, its own ‘religious’ vote began to unravel, with a prominent group of Sunni Barelwi students breaking away to establish a new union known as the (Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Pakistan-affiliated) Anjuman-e-Tuleba-e-Islam—in many ways, a competing ‘sectarian’ effort to define the ‘universal’ terms of Pakistani ‘nationalist’ Islam.Footnote 40
As an increasingly fragmented National Students Federation gave way to an increasingly fragmented Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba during the latter half of the 1960s, however, the regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan did not hesitate to intervene.Footnote 41 In particular, recalling the formation of the National Students Federation as a state-sponsored foil for the ‘communist’ Democratic Students Federation during the early-1950s, Ayub Khan stepped in to reinforce the strength of an ostensibly ‘apolitical’ alternative known as the Tablighi Jama'at, largely in an effort to reinforce a countervailing lower-middle-class alternative to the leftist National Students Federation and, simultaneously, a countervailing religious alternative to the ‘Islamist’ Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba.Footnote 42
Even as Jama'at-e-Islami meetings were ‘fired upon’ by state-based security forces, for instance, the Tablighi Jama'at received substantial encouragement from the highest levels of the administration, including ‘special trains. . .to convey people to the Tablighi Jama'at's annual conference (ijtema) in Raiwind’ and, in a direct appeal to the Jama'at's transnationalist impulse, explicit instructions to the State Bank of Pakistan to support the foreign currency requests made by Tablighis travelling abroad.Footnote 43 Indeed it is important to stress that the reach of the Tablighi Jama'at continued to expand throughout the 1960s as a non-violent, transnational, ‘non-state’ alternative with (somewhat ironically) explicit support from the state.
Again, the promise of an escape from the modern territorial state was, for many Tablighis, the most important feature of their ‘alternative’ approach to Islam. They did not seek to capture the state; they merely sought to transcend it. Indeed, as one member of the Tablighi Jama'at pointed out, drawing special attention to the Tablighi Jama'at's status as ‘a powerful alternative to the frustrations of [contemporary] political life’: ‘One cannot remain in politics for long’ without at some point failing to uphold the (ostensibly uncompromising) ‘moral values’ that are so dear to Islam.Footnote 44
The 1970s: producing Da'wat-e-Islami
As students throughout Pakistan gathered to resist the dictatorship of Ayub Khan throughout the late-1960s, however, it is important to highlight the extent to which the battles between them continued to rage. Indeed, special attention must be paid to the fact that neither the resignation of Ayub Khan in 1969 nor the emergence of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1971 managed to eliminate, mitigate, or transform ‘the frustrations of [contemporary] political life’.Footnote 45
Strangely, Pakistan People's Party Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did not appear particularly keen to bolster his putative allies within the leftward-leaning National Students Federation after 1971. Instead, he chose to purge those allies, beginning with a campaign to rid the National Students Federation of any leftward-leaning ideologues who sought to criticize his pragmatic but ostensibly ‘heretical’ ties to Pakistan's economic and religious elite.Footnote 46 In fact by the time Bhutto came up for re-election in 1976 bitter accusations of ‘heresy’ could be found flying fast and loose across several different domains of ‘economic’ and ‘religious’ doctrine.Footnote 47 And, by the time the votes were cast, none of the existing factions within the National Students Federation came out in favour of Bhutto's re-election; each insisted that, with respect to its own religious-cum-political doctrine, his record was simply ‘unforgivable’.
Neither Bhutto nor his comrades within the National Students Federation was able to resist the pull of zero-sum politics. But of course their leading opponents within the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba were equally fraught. In fact, as Bhutto proceeded to cull several important ideologues within the National Students Federation, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba began to pursue a similar course of action with the support of a special brigade known as The Thunder Squad. The Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba insisted that this special squad of campus-based vice-and-virtue vigilantes was dedicated to ‘[precisely] the kind of moral cleansing [that] students. . .had been voting the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba into power for’.Footnote 48 But, of course, over time, this squad of vigilantes did not succeed in producing anything like a hegemonic approach to Islam. On the contrary, they merely contributed to an increasingly violent campus-based political ‘stalemate’. And, within the space of just a few years, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba had alienated many of its most important supporters—including its own mother party, the powerful Jama'at-e-Islami.Footnote 49
Slowly but surely, as the violence surrounding The Thunder Squad increased, the electoral pendulum began to swing back to the left—this time, in favour of an explicitly ‘anti-Bhutto’ coalition known as the Pakistan Progressive Alliance. And, yet, precisely insofar as this was the case, the expanding level of campus-based violence appeared to drive yet another batch of students away from ‘nationalist’ forms of party-based politics altogether, not only in the direction of the ‘transnationalist’ Tablighi Jama'at, but also, as time passed, in the direction of the Tablighi Jama'at's most important religious-cum-political rival, Da'wat-e-Islami.
This trend in favour of transnationalist religious-cum-political ‘alternatives’ was particularly apparent after 1977, when a dramatic surge in Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba-led protests spurred by accusations of official rigging during the contested re-election of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto prompted General Zia-ul-Haq to launch Pakistan's second military coup.Footnote 50 Indeed, even after seizing power, General Zia refused to rein in the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba, encouraging many of its supporters to go on a rampage, ‘harassing and. . .manhandling their opponents’.Footnote 51
As the level of violence continued to increase, claiming scores and, ultimately, hundreds of student lives, however, a growing number decided to opt out of the existing student unions altogether. Many embraced the (Deobandi) Tablighi Jama'at. But, as noted above, a growing number opted to embrace the (Barelwi) Da'wat-e-Islami as well. In fact, as Thomas Gugler explains, Da'wat-e-Islami was deliberately constructed in 1981 to offset the expanding influence of the Tablighi Jama'at, with Da'wat-e-Islami's founder, 31-year-old Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Qadri Attar, being selected specifically because his name resembled that of Tablighi Jama'at founder Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi—and, moreover, because Da'wat-e-Islami was, itself, self-consciously established to recruit educated youth, a task for which Attar was thought to be particularly well-qualified as the sitting president of Pakistan's Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Pakistan-affiliated Anjuman-e-Tuleba-e-Islam.Footnote 52
With the formation of Da'wat-e-Islami in 1981, the ‘production’ of a transnational religious alternative was no longer tied to complex patterns of political support emanating from within the highest echelons of state power. On the contrary, the production of Da'wat-e-Islami was associated with an explicitly competitive push from below—in many ways, a competitive push to advance an alternative ‘sectarian’ understanding of Islam on a truly global scale.
According to Mumtaz Ahmed, Barelwis had a tendency to regard the Tablighi Jama'at as ‘their main adversary’, with Tablighi assemblies remaining completely ‘banned’ in local Barelwi mosques. Ahmed notes that Barelwis were routinely urged to avoid reciting their prayers with Tablighis, because, according to one Barelwi fatwa, ‘reciting [one's prayers] behind a Deobandi turns. . .one into a non-Muslim’ (rendering one's marriage ‘void’).Footnote 53 The ‘production’ of Da'wat-e-Islami as ‘an alternative alternative’ targeting the Tablighi Jama'at, in their words was hardly surprising; indeed within the terms of a much larger push away from the violence prevailing on campus, this pattern was little more than a sectarian extension of the process surrounding the formation of Da'wat-e-Islami's rival, the ‘transnationalist’ Tablighi Jama'at.Footnote 54
The 1980s and 1990s: enter Hizb-ut-Tahrir
As noted above, the vice-and-virtue campaign associated with the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba and its notorious Thunder Squad was prone to over-reach. In fact, by 1980, Nadeem Paracha notes that General Zia-ul-Haq's approach to the repression of leftward-leaning student groups (through the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba) ‘had left the IJT in the clutches of uncontrollable violence—so much so that the support it had managed to gather [during]. . .the 1970s now stood eroded’.Footnote 55
Very shortly after seizing power, however, General Zia-ul-Haq became increasingly convinced that the countervailing popularity of a newly reinvigorated leftward-leaning student opposition—increasingly drawn together within a new coalition known as the United Students Movement (USM)—posed a grave and growing threat to his famously ‘Islamizing’ regime, not unlike the movements that succeeded in bringing down his political predecessors, Field Marshal Ayub Khan (1969) and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1977).Footnote 56 In fact by 1984 Zia intervened to fend off this looming threat with a comprehensive ban targeting party-based student unions in general.
This ban, however, was never systematically enforced.Footnote 57 When the leadership of the Jama'at-e-Islami threatened to withdraw its support for Zia's ‘Islamizing’ regime, for instance, Zia agreed to permit the Jama'at-e-Islami-affiliated Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba to maintain its presence on most public-sector campuses—a deal that, according to Paracha, led the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba to abstain from any protests targeting Zia's regime ‘[just] as the regime began a fresh round of harassment. . .against [the] USM’.Footnote 58 Indeed, what began with an effort to limit the emergence of would-be challengers in general (not surprisingly just a few months before a special round of non-party elections) quickly altered its stripes in ways that reinforced existing cleavages on campus–cleavages that became increasingly violent after Zia was unexpectedly killed less than four years later in a mysterious plane crash.
The election of Pakistan People's Party Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto just a few months after Zia's death in 1988, however, led almost immediately to a bitter stand-off at the University of Karachi between a leftward-leaning group of former National Students Federation supporters (now drawn together within the Pakistan People's Party-affiliated People's Students Federation) and a powerful group of former Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba supporters (now attached to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-affiliated All-Pakistan Muhajir Students Organization).Footnote 59 Indeed, divergent factions within what can only be described as an increasingly fragmented United Students Movement—note that both the People's Students Federation and the All-Pakistan Muttahida Student Organization had once supported the United Students Movement in its resistance against the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq—now battled one another to construct entirely new forms of ‘monolithic’ campus-based control.
When Benazir Bhutto finally intervened to lift Zia's ban on student politics in December 1988, then, violent clashes erupted between the leftward-leaning People's Students Federation and the ‘ethnic’ (muhajir-based) All-Pakistan Muttahida Student Organization owing to fears that the government of Benazir Bhutto would follow in the footsteps of her late father (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) vis-à-vis the ethnically pro-Sindhi (read: ‘anti-muhajir’) allocation of quota-based government jobs. In fact the intensity of these clashes was so great, with both sides resorting to the use of hand grenades, AK-47s, and rocket launchers, that the Chancellor of the University felt compelled to call in the Pakistan Rangers.Footnote 60 The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, in turn, responded to the killing of its student supporters (by the Rangers) with a move to abandon Benazir Bhutto's coalition government in Islamabad. And, shortly thereafter, Benazir Bhutto herself was recalled by the President of Pakistan on charges of political incompetence.
The subsequent election of Zia-ul-Haq's former protégé Nawaz Sharif (the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N) in the fall of 1990, however, merely recapitulated this pattern—this time amongst Zia's own right-wing supporters on the ‘new campus’ of Punjab University in Lahore. Within less than a year of the 1990 election, for instance, ‘the Jama'at-e-Islami had started to accuse Nawaz Sharif of failing to. . .implement [Islamic law]’ in keeping with the Muslim League's own electoral platform. And, in the wake of these charges, deadly clashes erupted on campus, pitting the Pakistan Muslim League-N-affiliated Muslim Students Federation against the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba.Footnote 61 These clashes, in turn, prompted the Jama'at to abandon its ties to the coalition government led by Nawaz Sharif. And, shortly thereafter, Sharif himself was dismissed, like his predecessor Benazir, by the President of Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan.
Indeed, for nearly 20 years, not even the Tablighi Jama'at and Da'wat-e-Islami managed to avoid this pattern of zero-sum conflict.Footnote 62 On the contrary, both the Tablighi Jama'at and Da'wat-e-Islami merely reiterated this pattern—albeit on a non-violent basis—in the context of their own transnational rivalry. In fact as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s in a climate of increasingly intractable religious-cum-political stalemate a growing number of students once again found themselves looking for ways to ‘exit’ the politics of Pakistan's public sector.
‘[The] law and order situation has adversely affected. . .most public-sector campuses’, noted journalist Farhat Hussain, adding that, increasingly, ‘clashes among. . .[the] warring factions [had forced local families] to question the credibility of [the state].’ Indeed, as public frustration grew—not only with respect to the ‘warring’ factions on campus, but also with respect to the law-enforcement agencies of the state itself—a growing number of middle-class families found themselves compelled to pay ‘the higher fees of private-sector institutions’ in the context of what Hussain herself described as a final effort ‘to give their young ones a. . .future’.Footnote 63
This expanding middle-class push in the direction of private-sector universities, however, did not restrict the political ‘production’ of new religious ideas. On the contrary, this pattern continued apace, with Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) making its debut in 1996 as an increasingly popular private-sector alternative for the educated urban middle classes once associated with Maulana Abul ala Maududi and the intellectual elite of his party, the ‘nationalist’ Jama'at-e-Islami.Footnote 64 ‘HT now has roots in Pakistan. . .and a large number of its members are [very] well educated’, noted Mazhar Abbas in a piece prepared for The Friday Times on 1 July 2005, adding that, historically, this middle-class base was ‘a rare phenomenon’ amongst so-called religious ‘extremists’.Footnote 65
Nervous about the revolutionary rhetoric that Hizb-ut-Tahrir used to articulate its transnational programme of comprehensive religious-cum-political reform, however, General Pervez Musharraf proceeded to ‘ban’ Hizb-ut-Tahrir in the spring of 2002, describing the party as a seditious cell with dangerous ties to global terrorism.Footnote 66 This led the members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir to maintain a lower profile. But, of course, as Mazhar Abbas explained in 2005, Hizb-ut-Tahrir did not disappear.Footnote 67 As Hizb-ut-Tahrir-Pakistan spokesman Dr Naveed Butt clearly noted, Hizb-ut-Tahrir was able to carry on quite easily with a robust campaign of private study groups, carefully choreographed press conferences, and a programme of national publicity involving the distribution of simple leaflets (see Figure 4).Footnote 68
Recruitment Posters for Hizb-ut-Tahrir: English and Urdu.
As the twentieth century came crashing to an end in what can only be described as a paroxysm of public-sector campus-based violence, then, small groups of students continued to embrace ‘alternatives’. The most important thing about Hizb-ut-Tahrir was, of course, the sense of distance it sought to provide—from violence, from the public sector, and from the modern territorial state itself. Many were convinced that, after joining Hizb-ut-Tahrir, they would succeed in rising above an increasingly tiresome pattern of party-based violence on campus. Their efforts, like those of the Tablighi Jama'at and Da'wat-e-Islami, were not ‘apolitical’. Still monolithic, they were simply ‘political’ in ways that sought to transcend the territorialism of the national state.
Conclusion
As the level of campus-based violence continued to expand throughout the latter half of the twentieth century a growing number of students opted to abandon the territorial attachments so commonly identified with the formation of Pakistan. They argued that the boundaries of the Muslim community and, by extension, the boundaries of Islam, were not ‘territorialized’ but ‘transnational.’ And, in a quiet repudiation of the tactics used by Maulana Abul ala Maududi, the Jama'at-e-Islami, and the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba (not to mention the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba's most important ‘Weberian’ rivals), they rejected any specific attachment to violence. For many students the most compelling forms of religious-cum-political engagement came to involve entirely new forms of ‘exit.’ And, more often than not, these new forms of exit were defined by an explicitly transnational approach to contemporary ‘post-nationalist’ Islam.
This alternative approach to Islam was, following Asad, a product of prior social and political forces. It emerged over time as an effect of particular historical circumstances—in many ways as the effect of a multi-faceted religious-cum-political ‘stalemate’ or ‘impasse’. But of course, having said this, it is difficult to ignore the extent to which this transnational alternative seemed to revisit—in fact to reproduce—the politics of impasse it was, at least ostensibly, expected or intended to avoid.Footnote 69 Indeed the production of this alternative appeared to reflect a simple variation on that familiar slogan: ‘The [territorial] king is dead. Long live the [transnational] king!’.
This innovative-but-simultaneously-reiterative dimension is particularly striking in the light of well-known ideas regarding the political potentialities embedded within political ‘stalemates’ articulated by scholars like Dankwart Rustow during the 1970s (for example, with reference to the relationship between protracted political stalemates, on the one hand, and the possibility of historically contingent ‘democratization’, on the other).Footnote 70
Drawing on Rustow's work, scholars like John Waterbury have argued that, when it comes to patterns of democratization in Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan, it is not the a priori existence of any particular values (for example, ‘liberal’ values) that matters. What matters is the emergence of a historically specific ‘stalemate’ and, thus, the emergence of a historically embedded sense that one's political opponents cannot be totally eliminated. This, Waterbury argues, is the element that encourages the ‘politics of negotiation’ commonly associated with ‘democracy’.Footnote 71 (In fact, for Waterbury, democracy itself amounts to little more than the further institutionalization of this politics of negotiation in the form of specific rules that seek to preserve a ‘flexible’ stalemate over time.)
The interesting thing about this argument, as it takes shape in the work of scholars like Rustow and Waterbury is, of course, its empirical irrelevance in Pakistan.Footnote 72 In fact throughout this paper the presence of a complex political stalemate has been stressed at some length, largely in an effort to account for the emergence of an alternative (transnational) approach to contemporary (postcolonial) Islam. But, along the way, it would be difficult to claim that this stalemate produced anything resembling the ‘democracy’ that Waterbury had in mind. In fact, if anything, the religious-cum-political stalemate that lies at the very centre of this paper has produced little more than its own reproduction transnationally. Footnote 73 Clearly, if we turn to a ‘Rustowian’ sense of the potentialities embedded within a protracted political stalemate, the challenge would appear to lie in drawing attention to the fact that, so far, this type of stalemate has not emerged within what might be described as Pakistan's politics of competing ‘Islams’.
For those with an interest in the relationship between politics and the production of ‘new’ Islams, this is an important observation—one that, I believe, draws special attention to a certain tension lying deep within the theoretical project of scholars like Talal Asad.
The first part of this tension relates to Asad's ostensibly ‘anti-essentialist’ approach to the study of religion—his initial conviction that religious ideas are always ‘a work in progress’. (Here the suggestion tends to be that, historically, many different conceptions of Islam, indeed many different ‘Islams’, are possible.) But, of course, the second part of this tension relates to Asad's ethnographic, and to some extent his political conviction that, ultimately, each cultural and religious tradition must be considered and evaluated ‘on its own terms’. (Here the suggestion tends to be that certain conceptions of a particular religious tradition are culturally ‘anathema’ or historically ‘unimaginable’.)
Indeed, for scholars with an interest in the contingent ‘production’ of religious alternatives, these two aspects of Asad's work appear to inhabit a rather uneasy coexistence. One side clearly suggests that a ‘democratic’ understanding of Islam may be possible under particular historical conditions. And, yet, the other seems to suggest that a ‘democratic’ understanding of Islam amounts to a discursively alien imposition.Footnote 74
Indeed, for scholars like Talal Asad, the most important question is really a question regarding the full range of ‘alternatives’ that might be said to exist within an ‘indigenous’ approach to Islam.Footnote 75 What are the boundaries of this ‘indigeneity’? What are the boundaries of an ‘anti-essentialist’ (read: Asadian) approach to contemporary South Asian Islam considered ‘on its own terms’?Footnote 76
Of course the history of student-level politics in Pakistan is filled with ‘alternative’ notions of Islamic orthodoxy. (From a strictly historical perspective there may be no clear way to sustain any truly essentialized understanding of Islamic orthodoxy at all.) And yet, having said this, Asad himself occasionally seems to suggest that one might be able to identify, with reference to the text of the Holy Qur'an (and its potentially infinite scope for politically situated re-interpretation), the ‘external’ boundaries of a discrete ‘Islamic’ tradition. This is surprising. Indeed, for those with an interest in constructing a historically situated, politically sensitive, ‘anti-essentialist’ approach to Islam, this appeal to specific external ‘boundaries’ may be impossible to sustain.
It may be true that some ‘Islams’ (for example, ‘territorialized’ Islams) are more compelling in a strictly political sense at a particular moment in time. And, by the same token, it may be possible to explain, historically, the ‘production’ of any particular ‘Islam’ (for example, a ‘transnational’ Islam) over a particular stretch of time. In fact the core of this paper has been devoted to just such an endeavour. But, even so, it would clearly be a mistake to say that any specific alternative (including an alternative that Rustow or Waterbury might describe as a negotiated ‘democratic’ alternative) is, in some sense, ‘unimaginable’ if one attempts to imagine it within the discursive space of ‘Islam’.
The political production of an alternative democratic Islam—a reinvigorated Rustowian Islam—may be historically difficult to locate within the student union politics of Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi. But the weakness of this alternative is not sufficient to suggest (as some ‘essentialists’ might) that the production of such an Islam is strictly unimaginable. On the contrary, the fact that such an Islam has not emerged merely compels us to ask: ‘Why not’? What are the factors that ‘produced’ this fact. . .socially, politically, and historically?
In the context of this paper I have attempted to explain the political production of an alternative transnational approach to campus-based ‘ideas about Islam’ during the latter half of the twentieth century. I have not sought to explain why Muslim students have (so far) failed to reflect the model suggested by Dankwart Rustow. I am merely interested in suggesting that such an ‘alternative alternative’ is not inherently unimaginable within the specific terms of ‘Islam’. In fact in making this suggestion I simply aim to note that a deeper understanding of Rustow's empirical non-appearance could make for a fruitful source of follow-on research within the unavoidably contingent terms of an ‘indigenous’ approach to contemporary South Asian Islam.
