Introduction
Informed by a reading of recent history suggesting their intransigence against structural modernization and the inculcation of liberal democratic values, a re-education of Muslims in the fundamentals of their religion was sought to be enacted in the years following 11 September 2001. Certain actors within the US foreign policy enterprise set themselves with the task of redefining relations between religion and state in Muslim countries. Islam itself was catalogued and marked for reform so that the ‘subjectivities it endorses, and the epistemological claims it can make’Footnote 1 were limited in ways conducive to line-marking in the model of liberal state development.
In Pakistan, Enlightened Moderation as a national programme was outlined in November 2004 by President Pervez Musharraf in an article that appeared in a number of national and international dailies.Footnote 2 ‘Muslims must raise themselves up through individual achievement and socioeconomic emancipation’ reads the caption for the Washington Post's print. The form of uplift is one of reorienting aspirations of the population to scientize, to enable an entry into the ‘world of ideas’ that is opened up by the conditions of modernity in which Muslims may have a role to play in the future. In this initial articulation the genesis for such a reformism is claimed from within a lost tradition of Muslim virtues and achievements. There is also a discernable attempt at dissociation from ‘Westernization’ as signifying a set of amoral cultural values generally presumed to be antithetical to Muslim sensibilities.Footnote 3
The well-known jurisconsult, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, has come to be almost seamlessly associated with the global and local dimensions of religious managerialism within Pakistan. While Ghamidi has a long and distinguished career as a religious scholar in Pakistan, his broader public reputation has been built precipitously close to the official elaboration of the Enlightened Moderation agenda. Following upon a policy of media liberalization in 2002, the television talk-show came to represent this new broadcast regime's most prolific form of original broadcasting and profound forum for dispensing social commentary and political knowledge. A number of shows have featured, and in some cases been centred on, the person of Ghamidi. These shows have showcased his quiet and scholarly delivery—a certain modernism readily construed in his comportment and dispassionate demeanour. Indeed he continues to be the main attraction in a Television programme, called ‘Deen-Au-Daanish’ (Faith). The commentary he delivers is cited frequently within the liberal media to challenge vestiges of a conservative social order attributed to particularly stringent interpretations of Islamic prohibitions.
The liberal approval does not begin or end with the Pakistani media, Ghamidi's promoters have included the Boston Globe and Newsweek, with the former asserting that his popularity as a spokesperson for Islam within Pakistan approaches that of a ‘rock star—adored, hated, popular, and notorious all at once’.Footnote 4 The same article goes on to note that Ghamidi's role in Pakistan is analogous to that of well known Islamic public intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan in Europe, and to assert that his frequent appearances on television ‘have made a profound impact on public views’. Such affirmative accounts uniformly cite Ghamidi's stance on the Islamic impermissibility of private armed Jihad, as well as the permissibility of acts such as women's right to lead prayers, or to exercise choice in matters of purdah, as accounting for his favourable public reception.Footnote 5
This paper traverses a description of the conceptual underpinnings of Muslim World Outreach,Footnote 6 the imperial project tending towards secular reformation, as told through the critical lens of writers who have understood this intervention within a longer historical continuum. The history offered in these accounts decries that the redemptive languages of secularism and liberalism have implicitly or explicitly denied value to non-western and non-Christian systems of thought and social ordering. Although encapsulating such a normative heirarchy and disruptive programmatic thrust, Muslim World Outreach has, nevertheless, not impacted the Pakistani political landscape without several forms of further intermediation. Whilst the national programme is generated to a marked degree from within the conceptual grid of Muslim World Outreach, it is also responsive to competing global regulatory structures, particularly those which define statehood and sovereignty.
Tensions inherent in competing conceptions of state sovereignty, both as dictated through the particular configurations of a redefined post-9–11 global militaristic order, and as woven within the fabric of shifting domestic politics, bore heavily upon the alterations in official policy on religion and religiosity that Enlightened Moderation came to represent. In Pakistan, notions of classical sovereign control were resurgently important, given the perilous situation of managing internal and international alliances in this period, and Enlightened Moderation seemed to support certain techniques of authoritarian consolidation by the state as the expression of such a sovereignty. Simultaneously, the rights-flouting character of such a consolidation necessitated a certain mitigation or defence and thus, formal compliance with a discourse of rights abidance and popular consent was also activated in limited ways. Thus, two visions of sovereign control continued to percolate through and affect deeply the structural transitions being enacted and the forms of legitimacy sought by the Musharraf regime. This paper suggests this as the backdrop against which to measure the contributions that Ghamidi makes to the Enlightened Moderation Programme.
Muslim World Order
Although recently there has been a vast proliferation in critical secularism studies, the notion of ‘secularism as a mode of international hegemony’ arises particularly in reference to the containment imperative of a US security agenda ranged against ‘radical Islam’.Footnote 7 Such an agenda does not, however, specify the need to excise religion from all political life. Rather, in an epoch where religion everywhere continues to share space with accepted conditions of modernity such as the ‘unceasing pursuit of the new in productive effort, aesthetic experience, and claims to knowledge, as well as the unending struggle to extend individual self-creation’, an ‘enlightened and tolerant religion’ necessarily needs to be produced.Footnote 8 The Muslim World Outreach project, while professing a belief in the veracity of a liberal rights and governance conspectus seems also to affirm Talal Asad's insight that an insistence on the ‘sharp separation between the religious and secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former.’Footnote 9 The fostering of a reformist Islam to enable a correlative juridification to manage the relation between politics and religion defines one point of terminus in what is also a narrative of progressive social development; law is thereafter set with the task of negotiating these boundaries as a condition and measure of modern and liberal nationhood.
In a particularly thorough and critical description of the programmatic and ideological functions of the Muslim World Outreach programme, Saba Mahmood purposely occludes the role of certain agentive actors so as to localize her analysis and critique on the ‘strategies of domination pursued by the United States’.Footnote 10 She writes: ‘I want to explore these dimensions of secular normativity, thought outside of that domain we take to be their natural home, the nation-state’.Footnote 11 Mahmood asserts that the framers of this global project, foremost amongst them the US State Department, sought a direct interface with the subject populations situated within Muslim countries through the ‘shared assumptions about enlightened religiosity’ between them and ‘self-identified religious reformers’, ‘heroes of the secular Left’ who would be the purveyors and spokespersons of the same.Footnote 12 Ghamidi is not amongst the scholars that Mahmood cites for fulfilling the tasks of empire through an alliance that traverses shared discursive and methodological assumptions. Nonetheless, much of Mahmood's indictment of a ‘reformist method’ maps neatly onto Ghamidi's avowedly historicist assumptions about Islamic truth and this makes it worthwhile in itself to investigate Ghamidi's location in a polity marked for reform.
In deliberately leaving out particular Muslim states from her analysis, Mahmood is maintaining nonetheless that these nation-states are amongst the primary beneficiaries of ‘secular’ reformation. Mahmood's argument can be somewhat schematically summarized as suggesting that secular selves invested with the rights of liberal state subjects can be continually remade in line with the imperatives of sovereign order and governmentality. Furthermore, the state can arrogate greater regulatory space to itself as institutions, formal and informal, that were the repositories of alternate authority and normativity are vacated.Footnote 13 It is thus, suggests Mahmood, that juristic traditionalism is particularly identified with a ‘threat’ deeper than that of political Islamists but equivalent to that of Jihadist organizations in the various documents and reports that together define the Muslim World Outreach catalogue of good and bad Islams.Footnote 14 In mandating subjectivities that make epistemological claims not fully in accord with the public/private and state/religion divides of a liberal dispensation, such traditionalists are invested in turn by Mahmood with a certain aura of authenticity as against a reformism that is blemished by its serviceability to liberal governance structures.
As an existing condition of Pakistani sociality, both institutionalized sites of Islamic authority as well as more diffuse forms of ideation have fuelled competitive struggles to redefine, augment or ameliorate state power historically.Footnote 15 That the contest has nonetheless yielded formal legal structures that are deemed Islamic in inspiration or authorization also has further consequences for describing this particular historical juncture. As law reform under Musharraf becomes a site identified for the furtherance of claims related to sovereign order, the ‘modular forms of reasoning’ associated with Islamic and secular juridification are increasingly parsed in a public domain reconfigured by forms of media liberalization enacted in this period.
Without using the category in the celebratory sense of a political project complete in and of itself, the public sphere is nonetheless important for understanding the forms of competitive interplay through which scholar and state derive degrees of autonomy for their functioning. As a religious scholar without discernable affiliation with a traditionalist school of thought, Ghamidi gains salience for his claims on Islamic truth by enacting the discursive rituals associated with the establishment of religious authority. The basis of support he is able to garner in such a sphere is thus reliant upon a range of associations which cleave across the simple binary of liberal versus traditional scholar. In reference to the state, the imperative to create or expand a public sphere is also consequent upon the crisis of sovereignty it faces at this moment, and even where an appeal to the public means a circumvention of some of the immediate goals of Enlightened Moderation, its very possibility enables the state to claim to be demonstrating sovereignty.
Moderating Sovereignty/Enlightened Moderation in Pakistan
The principle of sovereignty is broadly considered to be the ‘grundnorm of international society’.Footnote 16 The place accorded to individual states in international society is contingent upon their ability to exercise sovereign authority; the localization of this authority, in turn, forms the basis for defining the legitimate locus of force and law-making in a state. In this classical theoretical articulation, sovereignty grants primacy of power to a singular authority, whether monarch or assembly, to be exercised within a defined territorial entity. In its minimalist articulation it does this without questioning or challenging the particular ways in which such authority is exercised, while only specifying that the state thus constituted has to demonstrate ‘effective control’ over the territory it rules in order to be recognized.Footnote 17 Such, at least, is the classical conceptualization of state sovereignty even if the reality has been different. The post World War II period has seen additional developments that have resulted in broad ranging qualifications of the classical conceptualization. The horrors of genocide within Europe, felt more acutely than genocide in the colonial world, as well as the aggressive assertion of self-determination by previously colonized people, introduced a moral justificatory standard through a catalogue of rights and safeguards that were solidified and coded in international treaties and a regime of internationally recognized human rights.Footnote 18 This may be seen also as the working out of a defining feature of the modern period where the notion of popular sovereignty restrained unlimited state power. Similarly, a corpus of rights protection works as a limiting condition on the nucleated authority guaranteed by classical sovereignty doctrine. Though these are not mutually antagonistic conceptions of sovereignty, there are, nonetheless, spaces of tension and competition that permeate the discourse of modern statehood, one increasingly saddled with the need to ‘justify territorial particularism on the grounds of ethical universalism’.Footnote 19 The form of such universalism, while clearly tied to a history of liberal state development in the West, is also increasingly refracted through international law and a putative ethical commitment to values such as rule of law and democracy.
While the focus of this paper is on the interweaving of sovereign order with reformist Islam in Pakistan, the starting point is necessarily the US-led War on Terror. As a manifold agenda weaving together strategic imperative and ideological apparatus it reveals itself as fractured and reactive to the tensions between the two forms of sovereign order described above. The post-9/11 reconfiguration of sovereignty in the US, ideologically powered by a claim upon civilizational and political virtues that it denies its enemies, is simultaneously marked by a heightened deference to the security imperative resulting in the large scale abrogation of constitutional rights and greater concentration of power in the hands of the executive.Footnote 20 Whilst the US has in recent years been accused of flouting international human rights laws particularly with regard to Guantanomo Bay detainees, US foreign policy did not fail to incorporate these rights and values as standards for evaluating the conduct of other states.Footnote 21 The Bush Doctrine of 2002, in which the US laid out its militarized and even ‘gladiatorial’ approach to its own security, contained a rhetorical commitment to the promotion and respect of human rights and liberal values.Footnote 22 It is in furtherance of such ‘respect’ and abidance that the pedagogic project of Muslim World Order is further elaborated.
The fostering of favourable Islamic epistemes to safeguard against radicalization and Islamism also shared space with more urgent imperatives such as the need to stabilize and support particular regimes against internal criticism in order to support the US's war on terror objectives, even as this support was additionally predicated upon a demonstration of effective sovereign control by such states. Thus, as with Mubarik in Egypt, and the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, the extra-legal character of the Musharraf regime was mostly downplayed and regime type recast as a purely domestic concern. Such circumspection is also apparent in the transnational Enlightened Moderation agenda consolidated in a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Countries in Islamabad: to undertake reforms that are both grounded within spiritual, ethical, social and economic values of Islam whilst remaining cognizant of home-grown traditions of representative government which are respectful of purported differences amongst these nations and between them and received models of liberal democracy.Footnote 23 Not just for Musharraf, but also for the other states represented there, a full-scale call for democratization would clearly undermine the forms of legitimacy to which they lay claim.
In Pakistan particularly it needs to be remembered that Enlightened Moderation was not so much a shift but a recalibration of a rhetoric that had earlier antecedents in the promotion of modernism and secularism as conjoint aspirational goals for the nation. In the period immediately following his 1999 coup, Musharraf had vaguely outlined a programme of reforms similar to those of the modernizing secularist General Ataturk in Turkey as the basis for legitimating a continued right to rule.Footnote 24 Forced to acknowledge limitations to his rule in accordance with the verdict of the Zafar Ali Shah caseFootnote 25 and as certain political exigencies made themselves more palpably felt, Musharraf's adherence to secularizing values also diminished. Nonetheless, it is notable that some of the reforms later considered to be the dispensations of the Enlightened Moderation agenda predate it by several years. Those alterations of policy that aligned with the US agenda in their initial articulation included the promotion of secular education and a modernizing reform of Madressa curricula, which were nonetheless mediated in their delivery by political bartering and an incomplete commitment to financing such a transition.Footnote 26
The 2002 elections provided greater impetus for statist interventions delivered under the Enlightened Moderation Programme as the umbrella coalition of Islamist parties under the banner of Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, won a convincing victory in the strategically important North West Frontier Province and secured sufficient seats nation-wide to become the official opposition in the national assembly. Such electoral results became the exemplar of Pakistan's slippery slide towards what was perceived to be radicalization/talibanization in the West and for the liberal-minded in Pakistan.Footnote 27 In the post-9/11 world, even the critical left in its post-Marxist turn allied itself with the project of repeating the progress narrative that would augur in freedom and political possibility through the implantation of values of secularization for the needful Muslim population. These alternate understandings, less strategic and more normatively emancipatory, borne out of a concern for the enforcement of human and particularly women's rights, provided the tropes that suggested a natural alignment of US interests with the liberal elite in Muslim states.Footnote 28
The Musharraf regime claimed sovereign control and ability in managing this slippery slide through aggressive military action in parts of Pakistan, yet it also seems that the regime manoeuvred to withstand US pressures to curtail or bar the activity of some Jihadi networks domestically.Footnote 29 Considerable effort was made to represent a separation between outfits oriented to support Kashmiri Muslim claims for independence and those allied with Afghan militias fighting the Americans. In spite of the reality of cross-fertilization of leadership and resources between them, only Jihadist groups within the North West Frontier Province and Tribal Areas were targeted by government action from late 2004 onwards. Whilst the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal government looked the other way and endeavoured instead to implement an ambitious and encompassing Shariat law in the province as its spoils of power sharing, the significance of the localization of military action for the rest of the country lay in the fact that this targeting of Pukhtoons was against a population that has been marked historically as living within a state of legal exceptionalism.Footnote 30 Pukhtoon identity was easily aligned with Jihadism and danger. The ascription of ‘tribalism’ and associated stereotypes to Pakhtoon social forms in the complex landscape of regional and ethnic divisiveness in Pakistan enabled a certain popular obeisance to such a localization. Similarly, the secret state of intelligence agencies and the military were actively involved in the disappearance of hundreds of political activists, fighting a covert war of containment primarily against Baloch nationalists under the cover of the war against terror.Footnote 31 Officially though the catalogue of Muslim World Outreach little reflected the situation on the ground as the forms of targeting suggested no discernable affiliation with either a political movement or a particular form of Islam as the point of entry into radicalization.Footnote 32
As the foregoing discussion illustrates, the conceptual features of a prescriptivist global project aligned in a broad manner with Musharraf's articulation of Enlightened Moderation, even as there were exemptions claimed on the grounds of local political compulsions. The face of Enlightened Moderation projected to the external world was of Pakistan as a transitional society overcoming the atavistic tendencies of religious extremism, expressed often and at great expense through grandiloquent tributes to the arts and fashion designing in diplomatic circuits of cultural exchange.Footnote 33 Within Pakistan this was translated into a certain type of authoritarian consolidation of marking out an ‘us’ and ‘them’. Albeit superficially, prominent political commentators defined the ‘them’ as those who did not agree that Musharraf deserved another term in office as President and military chief.Footnote 34 Officially, the unpopular alignment with the US was increasingly sold as the only rational method for ensuring the survival of the state even as it was also acknowledged as being amongst the many existential threats that the nation faced.Footnote 35 Nevertheless, the work of Enlightened Moderation was not exhausted with evidence of this contradictory and seemingly disingenuous logic. An important aspect was legal reforms that will be discussed below.
A key feature of the Musharraf era, one already cited as altering the political sphere of Pakistan at this historical moment was the liberalization of media as part of a larger programme of economic liberalization and privatization of state-held assets.Footnote 36 Through the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Ordinance 2002 private actors were afforded access to public airwaves and a large number of licences were granted for television and radio broadcast.Footnote 37 Entertainment shows representing a visibly liberalized and urban Pakistan through the sporting of western dress and with a less circumspect accounting of acceptable relations between the sexes, thereafter shared space with an array of religious programming. This privatized media provided a perfect platform for promoting and supporting Ghamidi within a public sphere that was being actively championed by state agencies.Footnote 38
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi's intellectual development has been comprehensively charted by Khalid Masud in the context of his interpretation of existing laws dealing with rape and consensual sex in Pakistan.Footnote 39 Ghamidi completed his formal education in Lahore, graduating with an Honours degree in English literature from Government College in 1972. Whilst there, he joined the student wing of the Jamaat-I-Islami which was gaining rapid ascendancy across Pakistani campuses in the early 1970s. His affiliation grew to the level of a close relationship with the Jamaat-I-Islami's amir and founder, Abul A'la Maudoodi. Simultaneously, however, Ghamidi was working closely with Amin Islahi, one of the founding members of Jamaat-I-Islami who had severed links with the party in protest against Maudoodi's authoritarian style and his choice to support the candidature of Fatimah Jinnah in the 1968 national elections in preference to General Ayub.Footnote 40 As an internal debate within Jamaat-I-Islami turned finally in favour of active political contest rather than of working to inculcate personal pietism and virtue, Ghamidi, as a proponent of the latter strategy of social reformism was expelled from the party in 1977.Footnote 41 Thereafter, his pupilage with Islahi deepened and he began his future course of dilating upon matters of faith and practice through weekly pamphlets and newsletters and laying the groundwork for completion of more comprehensive works in the future. As exegete, his work was completed with the publication of Burhan in 2000. However, as a religious scholar he has a far more expansive output, insofar as a continuing commentary is delivered upon matters of political and social interest both in the form of topically organized tracts published in the Urdu language journal Ishraq and the English language journal Rennaissance.
In 1991, during the lifetime of his mentor, Islahi, Ghamidi cofounded the Al-Mawrid Foundation for Religious Education and Research in Lahore. The stated intent was to foster a true understanding of Islam through study of the Quran and Sunnah and to bridge gaps that have arisen through exclusionary allegiance to schools of juristic thought and sectarian understandings amongst Muslim scholars.Footnote 42 Al-Mawrid is neither a Madrassah nor modelled on the revivalist or dawa movements which primarily engage their adherents more exclusively in projects of personal reform. Al-Mawrid functions more as a think-tank and one that is particularly savvy and adept in its use of various media for disseminating its findings.Footnote 43 Its scholarly credentials are bolstered by the range of qualifications brought by some of its associates and researchers.Footnote 44 Without much mention of this institution, Masud has suggested that Ghamidi is in fact leading a movement of like-minded persons who look up to him as their role-model. Masud characterizes such a movement as somewhat similar to the ‘non-radical Wasatiya in Egypt’, which grew out of a productive and continued interaction between the Muslim Brotherhood and its break-away elements.Footnote 45 The term ‘Wasatiya’ has been used recently also to describe ‘Islamo-liberals’ in Saudi Arabia, connoting both its religiously significant meaning of ‘moderation’ as well as a political one of ‘balancing the liberal “left” and the Islamist “right”’.Footnote 46 However, in contrast, Ghamidi has not sought to organize his adherents as a political party as per the former, nor does the discourse of liberal reform find explicit mention within his interpretive schema, in contrast with the latter.Footnote 47
Certain vestiges of a shagirdi (pupilage), or traditional relationship of disciple and mentor, are certainly apparent in speaking to junior members of the organization who pay near daily visits to Ghamidi and refer to him with the respectful title of ‘ustad’ (mentor). The term connotes not just a teacher but one who has developed deep expertise in a particular domain. As exegetes, commentators and religious philosophers, the members of al-Mawrid address a diverse set of issues in their contributions to the output of the institute while retaining a marked conformity with Ghamidi's method.
The popular perception of variance between Ghamidi's list of prohibitions and allowances as he reads them in the Quranic tradition from traditionalist scholars has been the basis for making the claim or accusation that Ghamidi's method can be subsumed within a rationalist ‘school’; in other words, one wherein the spirit and not the letter of the Quran needs to be abided. In fact he has been lauded in the liberal English language press for denying fixity of meaning within the Quran.Footnote 48 However, a detailed exposition of his method shows the word of the Quran and its system of laws and prohibitions continue to be given a centrality of place within Ghamidi's schematic. It is a method for finding consistent and verifiable meaning from within the Quranic text. Prior juristic methods are faulted on several counts. Most importantly, in not appreciating that the Quran was revealed in the ‘high Arabic language of the Quraysh’ and in not undertaking associated linguistic study of classical poetry and contemporaneous texts, Ghamidi contends that too much space is accorded for debate on the possibly variant meanings.Footnote 49
Instead, Ghamidi seeks to find certain intentions and generalizable laws from within the text. In affirming the divine and revealed character of the Quran an impossibility of inconsistency and contradiction in it is also avowed. For purposes of constructive interpretation thematically similar verses must be grouped and then contradictions reconciled on the basis of both the historical context in which the verses were revealed and through an identification of the intended audience for the revelation.Footnote 50 Such contextualization thus enables discernment amongst actionable wrongs, divine threat and promised reward for a cast of possible addressees including non-believers, the prophet's contemporaries or even more specific addressees, including the Prophet himself or his family members. It is in discerning between general and specific injunction that Ghamidi's conclusions about verifiable law from within the text often runs afoul of the more conservative interpretations and challenges conclusions such as the impermissibility of women leading congregational prayers, or in carrying on public roles and entering the public sphere free from the requirements of purdah or hijab.
More important, however, within a political landscape in which ‘extremism’ and ‘talibanization’ seem to define the range of Muslim experience, is Ghamidi's often repeated rejection of a private right to perform or undertake Jihad.Footnote 51 This in turn is deeply linked to the positive duty he expounds for citizens as one of loyalty to established authority.Footnote 52 By invocation of the aphorism that the rightly-guided are here not to betray the law but to fulfil it, he suggests that a structure of legal and political authority must first be constituted which can implant the shariat in its truer forms.
Ghamidi importantly does not suggest that the failings of the political authority to provide justice or to implant religious law creates a natural right to rebel in such a state. In particular, the duty of fidelity extends in all circumstances other than where the state makes a demand which is prohibited in the Quran and Sunnah. Even there, he counsels exile rather than rebellion. The rights that the state wields in terms of positive obligations it can impose upon citizens even where the state and citizenry are both avowedly Muslim are those that are Quranically mandated and include only the establishment of prayer and the payment of Zakat (obligatory Islamic charity).Footnote 53 Altogether, these duties of citizen fidelity, read in line with a vacating of the state of independent juristic authority as would be the case through recognition of multiple fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), consolidates state power with only limited duties imposed upon it. Where only the Quran and Sunnah, and a broadly defined reason, are the tools for rightful guidance, the exercise of the judgement of the managerial class can yield valid law spontaneously and repeatedly on a variety of issues without having to manage alternate nodes of sovereign law-making and enforcement as would be the case through the recognition of fiqh.Footnote 54 It is particularly pertinent that in establishing rights and duties which fulfil the minimal condition of establishing state authority, that domain in which his determinations are most usefully aligned to the states objectives through Enlightened Moderation, it is a strict fidelity to a textual exposition rather than a loosely defined ‘reason’ which is the basis for such claims.
Clearing the space for legal reform
Ghamidi's place in the Pakistani public sphere is important not just for repositioning classical sovereignty but also for helping create debate that could go some way towards creating a semblance of popular sovereignty as embedded in international rights regimes. Ghamidi's special place lies in engaging the Pakistani citizen/subject who in conditions of bureaucratic rationalization, having traversed episodes of nationalism and living in circuits of commodification, must also encounter Islam in the form of an official law. While this represents an instance wherein the state itself engineered a public sphere to cut through the presumed polarities between liberal and Islamic orders, a far more nuanced outcome was the actual product.
Since their enactment, the fate of Islamic laws in Pakistan—their subsistence or revocation—has been a litmus test amongst a divergent set of social groups for governmental legitimacy, either on the register of rights-affirming politics or of fidelity to Islam. While the specialist constituency demanding their repeal had been activated in the early 1980s, the laws had their defenders amongst a grouping that has, at least in part, enjoyed the ‘advantage of incumbency’ in the Pakistani political sphere.Footnote 55 The presumed ‘Islamic’ credentials of these laws, whilst debated throughout to the extent of whether the association is one of inspiration or of divine mandate has nonetheless been avowed through widespread support for their retention by the Ulema and other religious parties, after Musharraf's declaration of support for reform.
A domestic coalition of actors organized through NGOs and civil society organizations which had grown up primarily in reaction against Zia's Islamization measures, famously including the Hudood Ordinance,Footnote 56 the Qanoon-E-Shahadat,Footnote 57 as well as the Blasphemy laws,Footnote 58 by vociferously denouncing these as violating universal rights guarantees, was itself a constituency to which Musharraf was responsive.Footnote 59 In his initial forward advance at secularization, Musharraf spoke about the need for repeal of these laws but soon gave in to a deferred stagism enacted through, amongst other means, public debate and the management of appointments to the Council of Islamic Ideology.Footnote 60 In early 2006 Ghamidi was chosen amongst the new appointees to this constitutionally mandated body to advise the government on the ‘ways and means of enabling and encouraging the Muslims of Pakistan to order their lives individually and collectively in all respects in accordance with the principles and concepts of Islam as enunciated in the Holy Quran and Sunna’.Footnote 61 Simultaneously, by venturing into the terrain of law reform the Musharraf regime was enjoined in a further set of practices to abide, cajole and negotiate with existing Islamist forces which at times circumvented the ends of reform. In the interplay between these two, Ghamidi's particular advice became a casualty to the government's reliance upon political bartering. Nonetheless, Ghamidi's role as a spokesperson for religious minimalism continued to unofficially support the deeper imperatives of political reformation in line with the needs of a reconfigured state sovereignty.
In its initial articulation, Enlightened Moderation had heavy-handedly circumvented the rhetorical alignment of democracy, human rights and their spontaneous enactment as necessary criteria for achieving sovereign recognition. As a quintessential weak state,Footnote 62 the infirmities of Pakistan's position within a putative community of nations were simultaneously made more apparent in its extraversion so that the promise of a reformed polity, aiming for the progressive and incremental realization of the corpus of liberal democratic rights guarantees, was also axiomatically embedded in this reaffirmation of sovereign status. Enlightened Moderation in service of legal reform thus suggests a more diffuse project evocative of the broader conspectus of the Muslim World Outreach project in its approach to Islamic law in particular. In a fractured social imaginary which suggested on one pole their transhistorical and transcendent veracity, Islamic legal norms could not be readily assimilated within the historical lineage of ‘lost glory’ or be made equivalent to the broader syncretic and seemingly liberal culture of sufi Islam as uncontested parts of a shared heritage.
While the trajectories of occidental secularization are invariably related to the strengthening bonds of national identity, they also point to the necessity of a disciplined subject living in relation to such a totality. The individual subject must be a responsive social unit open to broader social forces and also capable of combining in reference to shared elements of a civic character sufficient to form the social.Footnote 63 In Pakistan, Enlightened Moderation was the latest in a historical succession of attempts to link Islam to the originary myth of nation. It is, however, the use of an Islamic idiom for the purposes of advancing a project of individualization that is novel in this instance. For the state, it could meet its obligations to the corpus of liberal democratic rights through an opening into the public sphere by these debates on legal reform and thereby at least minimally recognize the entitlements to active agency and consent on the part of the governed. Thus, although the apprehension was shared equally amongst secularists and Islamists that the programme represented a vision of civic culture of denuded expectations for both, Enlightened Moderation did more markedly betray a deeper set of affinities that perceptibly put forth a vision of Islam informed by ‘past and present Orientalisms’.Footnote 64
Amongst the tropes of Orientalist thought about Islamic law is that it prescribes a system of collective and essential ends. Thus, the procedural conditions of aggregating a unitary social good from amongst competing individual conceptions will have been obviated where certain Islamically derived norms can be agreed upon.Footnote 65 Although itself an essentializing characterization, even amongst sympathetic commentators those groups that were supportive of currently existing Islamic laws in Pakistan were described as being more concerned with norms rather than with process. This fact, presumed or actual, suggests particular encumbrances to practices of enacting legal reform.Footnote 66 Whereas a liberal political order presupposes alteration in law with either changing circumstances or with an expression of an aggregate public good based upon social effects, it is the defence of an allegedly transhistorical Islamic normativity which was sought to be fissured through public debate on the genesis or veracity of these same norms.Footnote 67
Points of traction between formal models of liberal and Islamic legality are not settled without further institutional mediation. In a formal sense the fracturing of a liberal democratic conspectus into procedural rights and substantive goals does not displace the ultimate primacy of the state in the way that Islamic legality is suspected of doing. In venturing into the terrain of legal reform the authoritative sources of formal legality, constitution, statute and common law are reflexively always the progenitors of state legitimacy.Footnote 68 By refracting time and again the proceduralism underlying their genesis, the state claims itself as the embodiment of a general will, and sovereignty is reinscribed. In contrast, an Islamic legal structure is presupposed not to require a political realm of rule formation.Footnote 69 The primacy of the textual origins of Islamic laws circumvents a social distribution of that sort. It thus becomes imperative to situate compliant religious authority where ‘epistemological freedom in general’ is just one of the competing impulses in an age in which ‘identity, cultural authenticity and religious authority resonate widely’.Footnote 70
As dispensed through televised debates and other media the political engagement enacted through Musharraf's reign brought forcefully into the public eye ‘those religious disagreements that might have been only scholarly debates in the first instance’.Footnote 71 As against the assumed collective and essential features of an Islamic normativity wedded to prior juristic determination, such staged debates also enjoined a particular constituency in a set of practices aimed towards their exercise of choice amongst multiple positions within the spectrum of faith. Oriented as they were to the processes of law reform, these debates seemed also to be oriented to demonstrating a broader public capacity for choosing ‘as Muslims, a strategy of engagement (or non-engagement) with those very liberal orders that wish to recognize the relevance of Islamic authority’Footnote 72 for the political and socio-legal organization of the national community.Footnote 73
The most extensive debate took place through the ‘Zara Sochiye’ (reflection) series dedicated to the question of whether the Hudood Ordinances were based upon divine sources and therefore whether they were alterable or not. Importantly, although it was being aired by a private network, Geo, it was popularly perceived as an outgrowth of official sponsorship. Ghamidi was amongst the regular panellists. The debate resulted in some agreement on the need for reform.Footnote 74 These points of ‘consensus’ elicted were hinged variably to either the overwhelming evidence of injustice perpetrated in their enforcement or of flouting other Islamic precepts and injunctions in reference to aspects of the law that were not derived from divine sources, for example, the Quran and Sunnah.
Although this was perhaps not the first instance in which the distinct qualities associated with Muslim public sphere deliberation have been apparent in the sub-continent, it nonetheless signalled a broader merging of multiple media in the promotion of scholars and spokespersons as both the subject of, and active participants in, contests played out in service of an official law. While these debates will not be extensively discussed here, it is imperative to point out that the nature of participation intersecting various media replicated the insight that broader Muslim publics have demonstrably imbibed the modes of reasoning and knowledge of sources to which religious experts themselves make recourse.
In this harkening for a particular reformism Ghamidi's practice was useful to the state on several registers. While Ghamidi also lacks a consequentialist analysis where laws verifiably defined within the Quran are concerned, the diminution of the place of fiqh and Hadith renders these to be far less in number and of a narrower regulatory expanse than in alternate understandings associated with traditionalist scholars and Islamists. Whereas traditionalist schools have tended to view the efforts of previous generations of scholars as cumulatively affirming the veracity of laws through a measure of probability, Ghamidi seemingly displaces the inherent fallibilism of such a reliance in favour of current reasoning.Footnote 75 Thus, the suggestion is also made by Iftikhar that the ‘medieval concepts of ijmā‘, ijtihād, and taqlīd—originally the products of the discourse of power and authority’ need to be set aside in favour of debate that engages contemporary scholars of even a ‘reasonable degree of competence’ for affirming the specific meaning of the Quran and Sunnah.Footnote 76
The allusion to a ‘reasonable degree of competence’ seems somewhat like disingenuous humility when compared with the stringency of the conditions imposed by the methodological innovations of Islahi's own mentor Farahi to which Ghamidi's exegesis is indebted. In fact, the space of tension that arises between ‘epistemological freedom in general’ and the philological formality of the framework that Ghamidi is in fact employing, yields interesting insights into the manner in which Ghamidi's discourse is reflective of the necessary protocols for the establishment of religious authority in the public sphere. In his television appearances, and even where the discussion is headlined by a topic of contemporary relevance, Ghamidi's navigation into such an issue will inevitably follow a familiar pattern of rhetorically posing the question of where to search for guidance and also where to find proscriptions and in what circumstances. Even in shows and episodes where he is not having to define his epistemological grounds against the claims of alternate schools of thought, a restatement is offered for the ends of affirming a shared ontological basis in the singularity of Quranic truth. There is an embedded assumption that Muslims presuppose the deontological truth of injunctions and prohibitions culled from within an Islamic corpus and that therefore it is the epistemological and interpretative tradition that is contested.Footnote 77 The legitimacy of ends thus purveyed is furthermore sought to be established by the selectivity of the Islamic precepts and principles to which Ghamidi's exertions in verification lead him. In spite of a steadfast defence of his own methodological grounds, Ghamidi has increasingly vacillated between an earlier unqualified denunciation of the ossifications inherent in a traditionalist method, which have bred the societal consequences of division and competition between adherents and a more recent accomodationist stance that seeks legitimacy for determinations that seem to run afoul more orthodox positions through alignment with the thought of ‘mainstream ulema’.Footnote 78
The textual minimalism that Ghamidi demonstrates in defining individual rights and state duties is matched by a corresponding enlargement of what can be termed an ‘ethical administrative’ domain as one which rightly occupies parallel political space within a state structure. Within this sphere, the notion of fitrat, or a human nature that encapsulates both reason and intuition, is enthroned for the ends of making laws in service of legitimate social objectives. For Ghamidi, ethics arise through both formal reasoning oriented towards the teleological ends of survival, family and political community as well as through the more affective dimensions of Hadith abidance.Footnote 79 The particular demarcation that Ghamidi makes is not between a privatized domain of ‘belief’ and a political one of voice and norm creation. Even as he mirrors somewhat the Kantian restraintsFootnote 80 to free and full criticism as the correlative duty of citizens living within a state, he is also engaged in merging a moral community onto a political community so as to vitalize majority judgement.Footnote 81
The subject that reasons is divided insofar as personal virtue and its attainment is driven solely by eschatology and a belief in the hereafter, whereas membership in a moral community is hinged to the positive self-identification of its members as Muslims.Footnote 82 This of course is part of what appeals to the liberal commentators who have suggested that for Ghamidi notions of jazza or sazza as possible ends should be the measure of a persons actions in such a community.Footnote 83 The deeper import of this is that there is no prior juridification marking the political from the social so that other than in the limited ways instances of infallible Quranic guidance suggested above, there are no exemptions from publicness granted for religious regulation as outside the state. In fact, because Islamic precepts to bind social action must themselves be discovered by reason, they themselves are subject to filtration through active debate and consent.
In describing his broader official role as member of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Ghamidi suggested that his was one of advising minimalism insofar as a threshold of religious relevance needed to be demonstrated before a referral for advice would be acted upon.Footnote 84 In an act of fidelity to the bounds of a lawfully established authority, he tendered his resignation from the Council in late 2006 when his authority was circumvented by the government seeking the cooperation of religious parties in the passage of the Women's Protection Act, a law intended to reform the Hudood Ordinances. Altogether, while the project of legal reform was haltingly started by the Musharraf regime, the alliance with Ghamidi suggested ways in which the protocols of establishing authority as well as the necessary conditions for activating popular consent in service of politics within the state are set in train.
Importantly, the nature of these developments are broadly revelatory about the Musharraf regime's aspirations to represent stateness through an operationalization of the twin pillars of liberal normativity, the building of individual autonomy and the ‘achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. Although set in train against alternate articulations of Islam that seemed to pose a secessionist threat to the project of sovereign consolidation, the necessity of a mediated delivery, one not fully in abidance of the broader dimensions of secular reformation in the manner of marking and juridifying the realms of private belief and public deliberation that the broader ascription suggests, highlights the need for an opening to further dimensions of investigation. Although merely hinted at here, the working through of fundamental mergers such as of ethnic with majoritarian identities within religiously framed discourses can only add greater insight into this project. For the more limited aims of this particular project, in locating Ghamidi as an exponent of reason and as a religious spokesperson unaffiliated with either seminary or an Islamist political project it is important to recognize that singular features of complex social orders cannot be read exclusive of context and without equal critical perspective being brought to bear upon all embodied carriers of power and authority.
Ghamidi beyond Enlightened Moderation
In aligning so determinately the work of internal reforms with a global project for secularization, Saba Mahmood not only undoes the very critique of essentialism that she herself has crafted in other places but also privileges a site for Islamic traditionalism as existing somehow outside the disciplinary practices of global and statist regulatory structures. For Mahmood, the immunization of ‘traditionalism’ is not simply redressal of a situation wherein Islamic sociality has been accorded a place lower down on the rung of evolutionary notions of development. Rather, in making this claim within an exchange oriented to the question of whether all ‘critique’ is secular, she is in fact more concerned with framing a challenge to the practitioners of critical reason to both accept its embedded parochialism, and in doing so, to disavow the constant resignification of religious commitment as critical reasoning's ‘other’.Footnote 85 Nonetheless, the attempt has also yielded a melding of ‘modernisms’, as embodied in the imperialistic ambitions of the foreign policy enterprise as well as in the work of particular religious reformers, a set of alignments that can only be drawn through the filter of a conceptual critique which accepts the veracity of claims that sever the temporality, historicity and internal debates of Islamic thought from her characterization of a singular traditionalism that is impervious to these influences.Footnote 86 In fact, Mahmood is unclear in defining the bounds of such a traditionalism: she conflates both the practices of everyday Muslims and the exegetical and interpretive practice of the Ulema as defining a ‘lifeworld’ that was first upset by the broader conditions of modernity, primarily colonial intervention, and is now being assaulted by, amongst other factors, the specific innovations of reformist Islamic scholars so as to render religion capable of being ‘read for its symbolic significance’ alone.Footnote 87 Mahmood acknowledges a debt to the work of Charles Hirschkind who has concerned himself, in a particularly troubling piece, with upholding the Egyptian Ulema's attempt to castigate Nasser Abu Zayd, one of the scholars whose method Mahmood pays particular attention to, as a heretic. In defining the bounds of an Islamic tradition, Hirschkind enumerates the criteria of a ‘collective subject, one that seeks to preserve and enhance its own exemplary past’Footnote 88 as the necessary embodiment of such a traditionalism.
Together however, what these commentators on religious authority and promoters of Islamic authenticity accomplish is the promotion of a historically victorious strain of theological practice to the status of transcendental authority within Islamic sociality. That such a set of criteria is more didactic in identifying features of authentic practice than those identified by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, almost uniformly credited with having ensured the victory of Asharite over Mutazilite theology, is illustrated by comparing to the conditions which he poses as integral to the establishment of an Islamic orthodoxy.Footnote 89 Writing in a period rife with religious contention, wherein the project of defending belief against unbelief could not rely upon the simple divison between reason and tradition, Ghazali endeavoured to provide conditions to separate the heretical from acceptable modes of interpretation. By establishing such a line around the adage that those who imply or assert that ‘the prophet brought a lie’ into the world should be cast as outside such an orthodoxy, Ghazali also posits five levels of knowledge varying in levels of literalness for apprehension, cognition and intuition to reconcile revelation with interpretation.Footnote 90 The conditions which Mahmood and Hirschkind identify as coterminous with the acceptable hermeneutic position of an authentic Islam are more readily aligned with the forms of totalizing practice which signify a monopolization of scripture over other forms of life.
The univocity suggested for traditionalism is also untenable in the light of available histories of South Asian Islam and state development. While there is a steady displacement of non-state institutions of adjudication and their replacement by syncretic forms of authority by the colonial and then the independent Pakistani state, it is not the singular appropriative logic of state-making which is solely revealed. In trying to enable Muslims of the subcontinent to ‘cope with colonial rule’ the Ulema also helped to ‘destroy their monopoly over religious knowledge’ by choosing to translate key Islamic texts into vernacular languages.Footnote 91 Furthermore, they were often in the official service of the state for translation services required for the administration of faith-based, private law regimes, often motivated by a desire to re-inscribe Islamic authority at a national scale when local sites were permeated by alternate, customary forms of law. Recognizing also that it is the ‘bureaucratization of traditional religious institutions that has made them affective in the modern world’Footnote 92 leads some to further conclude that popular support basis for the Ulema in contemporary times is activated by the very displacements of modernity which Mahmood cites alternately to explain the popularity of religious reformers.Footnote 93
Such a contextualization should not, however, be read as solely an advocacy for a return to the ‘real’ wherein the assertions about state, the public and the institutional configurations of religious authority be empirically tested rather than be conceptually delineated. However, the notion of an Islamic life-world as the counter to modernity imports far more pernicious effects of liberal myth-making than might be intended in simply marking a place from which insurrectionary challenges to liberal statehood can putatively be launched. While some illustrative points of Ghamidi's alignment to statist objectives have been highlighted, he is more interesting studied within processes through which authority is constantly being remade through a dual engagement with political practices as bounded within the modern nation state and in debate over the rightful sources for Islamic normativity. Ghamidi, as well as other religious reformers, can be interpolated between competing forces, structures and modes of discourse, but not categorized within available schematics, either on the imperialist register of good Muslim/bad Muslim or on the critical post-colonial register of authentic/inauthentic Islamic spokesperson.
