Secularism beyond the State: the ‘state’ and the ‘market’ in Islamist imagination

‘I am proposing only that we should abandon the state as a material object of study . . . while continuing to take the idea of the state extremely seriously.’Footnote ²

Islamists are defined as those among Muslim revivalists who focus on taking over the state—they certainly seem to take the state, both as an idea and as a material object, very seriously.Footnote ³ However, even as taking over the state remains the proclaimed aim- prompting, in response, an alarmist discourse about the imminent dangers of an Islamist coup, actual strategies pursued over the last two decades have involved a subtle move away from the state as the locus for mobilizations. It is argued here that in rough alignment with the shift in global political imagination where the state is no longer the dominant mobilizer of political energies and projects, Islamist strategies belie a move towards using the market as an alternative engine for defining and facilitating moral and political change. This shift does not imply a complete break with the past and certainly at the rhetorical level the focus on the state continues. However, as shown below, increasingly marginalizing Maududi's vision of the state as the central agent of change in the modern world, contemporary Jamaat-e-Islami activists are grappling with the many contradictions in their relationship with the market as an engine for the formation and transformation of the moral community.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, the idea of the market remains infused with conflicting sentiments. On the one hand, the market is seen as an arena of suspect and selfish desires, on the other, as a place of autonomous moral choice and assertion. This shift in strategies flows from the space that the state has had to concede to the market within global political imagination and is important to analyse critically to build a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Islamism and the political landscape within which it operates.

Initial recognition of a serious change in Islamism is beginning in academic writings, and some attempts at grappling with the nature and extent of these alterations within Islamism are already underway. The most cogent of these by far is Asef Bayat's nuanced description of the phenomenon that he calls ‘Post-Islamism’.Footnote ⁵ His contention is that Islamism has lost much of its initial energy, and is in the process of reconciling itself to notions and practices of democracy and pluralism. The debate about the validity of the term ‘Post-Islamism’ is linked intrinsically to the idea that Islamism has failed. Roy has proposed that Islamism has indeed failed; Kepel and Ahmad sidestep the question of failure by emphasizing that Islamism has now morphed into Post-Islamism with a decentring of the focus on state, and greater acceptance of plurality within and outside the movement.Footnote ⁶ In responding to the widespread use of the term ‘Post-Islamism’, Bayat points out his understanding of the term as representing ‘both a condition and a project’. As a condition, it refers to the draining of energy from the initial sources of legitimacy of Islamism. As a project, Post-Islamism refers to a more explicit negotiation with democracy and liberalism. Bayat's arguments are compelling, and certainly the case is clearer for Egypt and Iran (the two countries that Bayat deals with) than for Pakistan. In part this is because in Pakistan, unlike Egypt, there is still some hope for Islamists’ electoral ambitions, and unlike Iran, Islamism has not yet exhausted its potential because it has not been directly in power, or for long enough. Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the key Islamist parties in Pakistan, and indeed an influential one internationally, continues to be closely engaged in the electoral process, in claiming its continued ambition to influence and control the state. Yet, there are important echoes of the changes that Bayat describes: a subtle shift has taken place in the strategies of the Islamists, linked to a shift in political imagination, even though their rhetoric has remained relatively unchanged.

These modifications in Islamism are too often studied only in terms of changes within the territorial bounds of nation-states and without reference to a global political imagination.Footnote ⁷ The term ‘political imagination’ is capacious enough to accommodate both intellectual history and popular political discourse. This capaciousness is useful because it allows conversations about some general trends, which are valuable in their contributions to our understanding of politics, and would otherwise be impossible to conduct. Historians of political thought/intellectual history have employed it to discuss the rise and use of political concepts such as democracy, empire, secularization or Europe.Footnote ⁸ Whether interrogating the path of particular political concepts from the works of canonical writers to broad public appeal, or contextualizing their writings by placing them in the concerns of the period, these works have provided an insight into how, when, and why, certain ideas have inspired political action. Building on such usage, I distinguish it slightly from the concept of social imaginary as used by Charles Taylor by which he means, as do I, ‘something broader and deeper’ than social theories.Footnote ⁹ However, rather than taking as given the distinction between theory and imagination, as Taylor does, this paper explores the ways in which both are implicated together in broader political changes.

Islamism and the State: from Lenin to Gramsci

To understand this shift one must first grasp the nature of Jamaat-e-Islami's focus on the state. Irfan Ahmad and I have both argued that the importance of the state in Jamaat-e-Islami discourse is not the result of a theological compulsion within Islam, but a result of the context in which it was founded.Footnote ¹⁰ A key feature of this context is the increased reach and importance of the modern state—a general name for particular arrangements of power—in colonial India. I contend that it is not just the increased intrusion of the state, but also the specific kind of secularism that the colonial state practiced which has shaped and defined Islamism's focus. Thus, the relationship between Islamism and secularism is not one of negation alone, but of creation and suggestion. This paper will focus on two key components of colonial secularism that were critical in supporting the rise of Islamism, itself an innovation in Islamic thought and practice. The first is the structural vehicle of this secularism: the modern state that was much more intrusive than the Mughal state had been. More importantly this state engaged in an ontological remapping of individuals as part of the practice of modern state-craft. The second component relates to the substantive aspects of this policy that allowed only particularistic attachment to Muslim practices, attaching universalism to those modes of belief and behaviour that seemed secular to the colonial administrators, but particularly Christian to the colonized. Islamism, like many other movements that originated in a period that was particularly thick with debate and alternatives, cannot escape engaging with the state, but it inverts the substantive elements of colonial secularism by attributing universalism to Islam and claiming its compatibility with modernity.Footnote ¹¹ In a sense, it is a mirrored reversal of colonial secularism. Of the various responses possible and produced, Islamism replicates the structure and concerns of colonial secularism most closely by inverting them in an Islamic idiom through its focus on the state, its conception of Islam as a cohesive system that is central to political life and its aspirations to universal application.

Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, was a journalist and activist who was sympathetic to Indian nationalism initially, but then began to distrust nationalism for its propensity to divide Muslims. During his years in Delhi he interacted with a wide range of intellectuals and activists including the socialist Khairi brothers.Footnote ¹² Many such influences on his thinking go unacknowledged by him and by key commentators on his work,Footnote ¹³ but it is possible to discern the definite imprint of his exposure to Leftist debates and strategies.Footnote ¹⁴ Jamaat-e-Islami is organized as a Leninist cadre-based party; Maududi's focus on ideology, ideological training and structured organizational management belies the modernist aspirations of this so-called turn towards tradition. More than the structure of the organization though, it is the content of his writing that speaks of his modernist influences: his historicist reading of Islam, his insistence on the ‘rationality’ of religion and his attempts at purging Islam of ‘irrational’ and ‘superstitious’ practices such as saint worship. Maududi's message found some resonance among those who were educated—if not always very highly—urban, and committed to an idea of the Islamic route to modernity. However, it remains important to reiterate that there was a range of other ideological options also available to educated, urban Muslims of different regions and across classes at this historical juncture. In addition, Maududi's insistence on a cadre-based system and his desire to control the organization meant that while his writings influenced many and found avid readers across North India, the Jamaat-e-Islami remained a small, relatively tight-knit group for many decades after its inception. Indeed, the Jamaat-e-Islami can be seen as the best Leninist party in Pakistan in terms of its organizational structure and modus operandi.

After partition Maududi chose to come to Pakistan, and brought a faction of the Jama'at-e-Islami to Pakistan. Maududi had opposed the formation of Pakistan and his decision to live there was motivated in part by his political ambition: he calculated that it would be easier to form a Muslim state in a country that was formed on the basis of religious nationalism, than in India.Footnote ¹⁵ From the beginning, Maududi managed to create an effective lobby and pressure group through his Radio Pakistan lectures and mobilizations around the issue of the Objectives Resolution for the constitution of the newly formed country. At the same time, and again in contradiction to Maududi's 1930s argument against democracy, the Jamaat fielded candidates in provincial elections in the 1950s. Since then it has engaged continuously with the electoral process in Pakistan.

The 1960s and 1970s was a period during which socialism was a major influence in the global south, including in Pakistan. Socialism's focus on the state was, at that time, matched by Islamism's insistence on controlling it. Both were products of a context in which the idea of the state dominated political imagination. This is not to imply that there were no competing ideas at that time, and I shall take this up again later, but that the state was the dominant political idea of the period. More significantly, the shared focus on the state did not override fundamental differences in what the socialist and the Islamists wanted to do once they controlled the state. It is useful to remember that at that particular historical juncture, the Jamaat-e-Islami supported private landholding against the socialist programme even as it continued to focus on the state as the engine of all social and political change. Here I want to emphasize here is on the converging tactical and strategic focus of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the leftist groups on the state as the vehicle for transforming society. It is in part because of this focus that they came in direct conflict with each other. I have argued elsewhere, that while there has been significant study of the impact of Islamism on the left, there is little study of the impact of the left on Islamism.Footnote ¹⁶ A detailed look at the interaction between the leftist groups in Pakistan and Jamaat-e-Islami during the late 1960s shows that this contentious engagement forced the Jamaat-e-Islami to expand its activities, modify its strategies and engage with constituencies it had hitherto ignored. For instance, Jamaat-e-Islami was almost forced into more visible student activism by the threat of leftist control over institutions of higher education in the countryFootnote ¹⁷; prior to this, Jamaat-e-Islami's student wing had operated as a kind of study circle. This threat of leftist influence was a particularly potent one for the Jamaat-e-Islami because, with its modernist tendencies, and unlike the various ulema organizations, it did not at that time have its own madrassa network and relied heavily on universities and professional colleges for recruitment into the vanguard party that would take over the state.

The end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s saw the actual takeover of a state by the Islamists in Pakistan's neighbour, Iran. In Pakistan, too, the Islamists gained relatively sudden and unexpected access to the state through General Zia's military coup—an access that they had not adequately prepared for nor anticipated, given the Jamaat-e-Islami's disastrous electoral results in the 1971 elections. General Zia-ul-Haq, whose coup against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was approved of and supported by the US administration, became a key ally in the war against communism in Afghanistan. Zia did not hide his admiration for the ideas propounded by Maududi, who had died in 1979. Maududi's successor, Mian Tufayl, a compromise candidate and a long-term Maududi aide, did not hide how flattered he felt by Zia's attention and admiration for Jamaat-e-Islami. Key Jamaat-e-Islami ideologues and leaders had unprecedented access to influence policy decisions in both official and unofficial roles. In universities and colleges, the actual battlegrounds of the competition between the Jamaat-e-Islami and the leftists, Jamaat-e-Islami administrators, lecturers and students were handed positions of authority. In public sector enterprises where union activity had become quite strong during the Bhutto years,Footnote ¹⁸ Islamists unions were supported to break their strength.Footnote ¹⁹ In state departments and the army, pressure for public piety was slowly increased. Praying in public view, keeping a beard, not drinking alcohol, all became important for an ambitious career in the army and increasingly in the civil bureaucracy. More than the actual role of Jamaat-e-Islami members in shaping policy, it was Zia's use of Islamist vocabulary that accorded the Jamaat-e-Islami a public role much beyond its actual membership base.

Nasr has argued that Zia had used the Islamists and Islam to legitimize his rule.Footnote ²⁰ Whether the Jamaat-e-Islami was used or was trying to use Zia, there is little doubt that the the Jamaat-e-Islami gained significantly in public exposure and political influence during Zia's regime. At the same time it is clear, through interviews and conversations, that the Jamaat-e-Islami was also an organization under great strain during the Zia years. There was real tension between those who used the Jamaat-e-Islami for personal gains and those who were committed to the ideological programme of the organization and the movement. Quite apart from fears about corruption of ideology, Zia's policy of supporting the ethnically motivated Muhajir Qaumi Movement in Karachi brought the Jamaat-e-Islami in Karachi in direct political conflict with the regime. In Karachi, the commercial heartland of Pakistan and the city that absorbed the largest number of migrants from India at the time of partition, the Jamaat-e-Islami's strength lay among these very groups. During the first two decades of Pakistan's formation Karachi provided the most dedicated Jamaat-e-Islami workers, its largest constituency and several key ideologues apart from Maududi (such as Khurram Ja Murad). Zia's decision to support the MQM created a real schism in this key constituency of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

During the 1990s, the period beyond which the most authoritative English language study of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan does not extend, the Jamaat-e-Islami underwent significant transformations that have remained largely below the threshold of academic attention.Footnote ²¹ One serious limitation within the vast majority of academic studies of Islamism, and in this particular case of the Jamaat-e-Islami, has been their focus on the proclamations and writings of the founding ideologues.Footnote ²² What the current leaders say or do, how the ordinary member of the organization makes sense of the original writings and the newer pronouncements has not been studied in detail. For too long the Jamaat-e-Islami has been studied only in terms of the writings of Maududi. However, Maududi died in 1979 and his imprint on the organization has grown faint with each passing year. Under Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the third amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami (1987–2009), the Jamaat-e-Islami changed into a national political party, entering into alliances with other national and regional political parties. One such important alliance was the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (Islamic Democratic Alliance), with the precursor of the contemporary Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz Sharif group, as its other major partner. More critically, since the late 1980s but particularly during the period 1997–2009, the Jamaat-e-Islami has undergone a subtle but important shift in the range and nature of its mobilization strategies and tactics, on the kinds of issues that are raised and some of the solutions that are suggested.

Through schools and colleges, dispensaries and hospitals, dowry funds and neighbourhood clean-up operations, micro-enterprises and skill-training in low income areas, the Jamaat-e-Islami's activists spend much more time in engaging with the ‘society’Footnote ²³ within the framework of the market than with preparing the vanguard party for an imminent takeover of the state. Taking one important example of this extended reach: the Jamaat-e-Islami's humanitarian/NGO face, the Al-Khidmat Foundation claims to be the biggest network of humanitarian services in Pakistan.Footnote ²⁴ The Foundation has subsumed an earlier initiative started during the 1960s by a Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizer, currently called the Al-Khidmat Trust, which is managed and run by women affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami. However, it was only incorporated formally within the Jamaat-e-Islami organizational structure during the mid-1990s. Maududi was very reluctant to officially affiliate the Al-Khidmat Trust with the Jamaat-e-Islami even though the founder was keen on such a relationship.Footnote ²⁵ Since the 1990s though, there has been an exponential growth in the scope and scale of the Trust's activities. Although it is difficult to assess its claims as the largest humanitarian service provider in Pakistan, the diversity of its services does provide a glimpse into a well-established network. The Foundation and the Trust administer a new school system started by the Jamaat-e-Islami, called baithak Schools, women's vocational centres, adult literacy programmes, hospitals and mobile dispensaries, refugee care programmes, prisoner welfare programmes, orphan sponsor projects, drinking water projects, subsidized vaccination against Hepatitis B, emergency relief, Ramadan and dowry gifts, Eid gift packages, and qurbani (sacrifice—typically refers to animal sacrifice for Eid) programmes. These are all precisely the activities that Maududi had resisted during his lifetime and the Jamaat-e-Islami had avoided engaging in as an organization for more than a decade after his death, preferring to focus instead on political analysis and state-focused mobilization.

The emphasis away from controlling the ‘state’ and more clearly towards building a Muslim ‘society’ through other means can be seen, in particular, by the Jamaat-e-Islami's increasing involvement in funding, building and running schools in different parts of the country,Footnote ²⁶ their legacy about a decade old. Despite the great importance that Maududi attached to education he had resisted moves to open schools as a part of the Jamaat's activities choosing instead to focus on public institutions of higher education as recruiting grounds for attracting the vanguard, Islamic elite that he hoped to induct into the party. During fieldwork in 2005 I visited newly opened ‘baithak schools’ in the working class neighbourhoods of Lahore with Jamaat-e-Islami activists. These schools were part of a new initiative, led by the Women's Wing within the Jamaat-e-Islami, to reach out to the poorer segments of society.Footnote ²⁷ While the political goal of creating a vote bank within these previously ignored segments was a factor, of equal importance was the language of demand and supply, incentives and individual choice which were used to support the programme of creating a better ‘Muslim society’ that would be ready for the Muslim state that the Jamaat-e-Islami would help establish. In conversations with activists, leaders and Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizers, I was struck by this inversion of Maududi's original formulation.

The Gramscian turn within the Jamaat-e-Islami is part of the process in which this Leninist party has been socialized. But it is also part of the larger process in which the state has been socialized in both academic theories and popular political imagination. At the theoretical level this socialization has meant viewing the state increasingly as a social actor enmeshed in specific institutions and path dependencies. At a popular level it has meant a mounting questioning of the notion of a state as an independent actor standing above and outside society. This questioning may be generated as much through patronage scandals involving politicians or bureaucrats acting out of a socially embedded expectation to support their family or biradari, as through the circulation of academic theories and ideas about state(s) through a globalized media.Footnote ²⁸ From the late 1980s and particularly during the 1990s, the idea of the state started losing some of its dominance over global political imagination. As the Soviet state began to unravel, so too did the argument for the state as an engine of social transformation. Thatcher's TINA (There is No Alternative) and Reagan's Reaganomics, supported by corporate mass media, put immense pressure on the idea of the state as the creative engine for individual or collective development. Within academia too, by the 1980s the focus of research began to wander elsewhere. The related notion of nationalism came under immense critique during the 1990s converging with the slogans of promoters of corporate globalization who highlighted its promise, through common markets and free flows of ideas and people, to draw together populations artificially divided by the nation-state.Footnote ²⁹ In this context, a question that many Jamaat-e-Islami activists raised when I spoke to them about this shift in their strategies is an important one for theorizing about the state generally: how useful is it to think in terms of a strict division between the state and society?

The State in international political imagination

Theorizing about the state has gone through a fairly erratic career. As a new wave of enthusiasm about socialism gripped the global south in the 1950s and 1960s, American academia in particular debated the value of thinking about the state separately from society.Footnote ³⁰ In the late 1970s and early 1980s the debate was rejuvenated in an attempt to ‘bring the state back in’.Footnote ³¹ But at a fundamental level the debate remained mired in the attempt at delineating the state from society. From the 1980s onwards the state has been increasingly socialized in academic writings: it has been defined increasingly as a social network, or as an institutional actor. These attempts were abandoned partly because of the criticism that this fuzziness obscured analysis, that this socialized state was hard to place in an analytical framework. David Held, representative of many writings of the period, declares, ‘nothing is more central to political and social theory than the nature of the state, and nothing more contested’.Footnote ³² However, despite the continued confusion, the state remains ‘the master noun’ of modern political science.Footnote ³³

The curious disjuncture between the pervasiveness of the state in political analysis, with an equally widespread confusion about its precise meanings is bridged creatively by Timothy Mitchell.Footnote ³⁴ He argues for taking the boundary between the state and society seriously, not in search of a clear demarcation between the two, but for interrogating the actual processes that create the effect of the state as a separate entity standing outside and independent of the society. Mitchell has concretized Philip Abrams’ critique of theorizing about the state by showing exactly how the ‘state’ is created in a particular context—in this case, in Egypt—by parsing out the precise relationships between business and political projects, local rulers and colonial administration, landlords and international companies that constitute the state.Footnote ³⁵ He details the particular nodes of power that remain unacknowledged and subsumed within the idea of the state. We see the state as a work in continuous progress rather than a fully realized entity at any point. Most importantly his meticulous attention to the precise modalities of power and negotiation gives a concrete understanding of the power that the idea of the ‘state’ lends to these interests, and that they would otherwise lack. The state then emerges as a particularly useful idea, a coming together of interests that cannot in reality be analysed by attempting to separate the political from the social and economic, or in other words ‘society’ from the ‘state’. To fall into the trap of trying to theorize the limits of the state vis-à-vis the society is to lose sight of the very real power the idea of the state exerts on those who find it expedient for furthering their own interests but also those who resist precisely this imposition of interests. Abrams had rightly pointed out that even though elements of Marxist theory recognize the illusionary nature of the state, ‘. . . Marxist practice needs the state as a real-concrete object, the immediate object of political struggle’.Footnote ³⁶

To highlight Mitchell's critique is not to suggest that it also directly informs popular understanding of the ‘state’. In fact the acceptance of his ideas within the discipline of political science seems to be relatively limited because although the term state is used ubiquitously there is a kind of moratorium on direct interrogation of the concept.Footnote ³⁷ In recent years, the only concentrated critical academic attention that the state has received has been grounded primarily in the discipline of anthropology. Much of this literature focuses on the precise ways in which the state is experienced by different segments of society.Footnote ³⁸ In an illuminating inversion of this view, James Scott shows how a state—any state, capitalist or communist—tends to look at populations under its control.Footnote ³⁹ Mitchell's formulation may appear orthogonal to this stream of literature at first glance, but it seems to me that it actually clarifies many of the questions left unanswered by the anthropological interrogations of how the state may be experienced or exercised. One important question here would be why are these quite particular arrangements of power in Ecuador, or Indonesia, or India or The Netherlands called the state? The answer would have to go some way towards acknowledging that importance of the idea of the state: the state as an idea legitimizing the exercise of power in modern polities. Considering in particular Islamist mobilizations, Mitchell's work is very useful for two reasons. One, that it forces us to acknowledge the seriousness and importance of the ‘idea’ of the state, both in facilitating oppressive arrangements and in inspiring liberatory projects. Two, combining Mitchell's insights with the reality of a changed political imagination where the idea of the state has lost some of its previous dominance as an inspiration for projects and movements, raises important questions about the new arrangements and ideas, and the disciplinary forces accompanying them. What, then, is the idea that has emerged as a serious contender to the idea of the state for the Islamists?

At a popular level, it is commonplace that across the globe the state declined in importance from the 1980s onwards, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union. The failure of the Soviet state was held to be emblematic of the larger failure of ‘the state’ to be a sustainable engine for individual and collective development. If looked at closely though, it is possible to discern not a decline in the actual role of the state but a shift in the domains that were previously considered to be under the state's purvey and that went hand in hand with changes in the idea of the state. The notion of the ‘developmental’ state gave way to the ‘regulatory’ state.Footnote ⁴⁰ Neo-liberal economic globalization and the associated WTO, IMF and World Bank injunctions popularized the notion of ‘rolling back the state’. The rhetoric of rolling back the state hides the fact that while there has been shrinkage in one aspect of the state's role—its welfare and service provision role—there has been a great expansion of another one—policing and enforcement mechanisms. Even as service provision was increasingly constructed as beyond the responsibility of a state, regulatory mechanisms for supporting intellectual property right protection, private property, and paradoxically, ‘unregulated’ financial services were added to its core activities, particularly from the 1990s onwards. These regulatory mechanisms required greater policing strength and sophistication behind them and the relevant institutions within the state were strengthened through a redirection of resources from developmental projects.Footnote ⁴¹

The more fundamental shift then was not in the ‘strength’ of the actual state but in its place in political imagination. The state did not fail, as neo-liberal reformers claimed, but the idea of the state was challenged seriously. The state as a project, as an inspiration to projects was no longer dominant whether in Britain, Argentina, Ghana or Pakistan. This fall from grace cannot be seen in absolute terms but has to be judged relatively: both by its own past importance and by its relationship with other competing ideas. The idea that emerged as the most potent challenge to the state as a mobilizer of ideas, political energies and imaginaries is the idea of the market.Footnote ⁴² No doubt the idea of the market suffers from the same kind of theoretical problems as the idea of the state: how to distinguish the market from society. Is it a set of institutional arrangements or a product of a regulatory framework? Does it stand above, below or alongside the society? Yet over the last two decades the idea of the ‘market’ has exerted enough pressure to at least de-centre the focus on the state within the global political imagination.Footnote ⁴³

This shift in political imagination and its implications for activism within the Jamaat-e-Islami has not yet been sharply articulated but has been significant enough to merit reflection and comment by many middle-level activists with whom I interacted. I found the middle-level activists to be particularly perceptive towards changes within the organization. These middle-level activists are often long-term Jamaat members or sympathizers, they are embedded in their particular social contexts and act as a bridge between the national Jamaat leadership and particular localities. The notion of a bridge, though, is too static to bring out the transformations they are able to facilitate in the process of the movement of ideas, issues and debates across the two groups that they have access to. In the process of communicating, these middle-level activists also infuse the conversation with their own preoccupations and concerns. Their location allows them a view across policy making as well as policy implementation within the Jamaat-e-Islami.

One such long-time activist, Naeem,Footnote ⁴⁴ in his forties when I met him, belonged to a ‘Jamaat-e-Islami family’. This meant that his father was also a Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizer and activist in a medium sized Punjabi city, Sargodha. His father's involvement meant that as young adults Naeem and his siblings were exposed to Jamaat-e-Islami literature and study circles. Since the late 1950s, and particularly during the 1960s, Naeem's family had also been involved in door-to-door campaigns in Sargodha for Jamaat-e-Islami electoral or issue-based mobilizations. In the early 1970s, Naeem moved to Lahore and became active in student politics through the Jamaat-e-Islami. He continued his engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami whilst serving in a government institution, and over the years became a locally influential organizer.

As he reflected on his years of engagement with the Jamaat-e-Islami, he spoke about the increasing difficulty in actually persuading Jamaat-e-Islami activists as well as members of the wider public to attend a jalsa or a meeting. Initially, he blamed it on the city of Lahore. Lahore was, he said, ‘too big’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The size of the city was a deterrent to people actually getting to know each other but also on a practical level it meant that commuting calculations played a big role in people's decisions. Having kept his ties with Sargodha alive through frequent visits to his siblings, who still live and mobilize for the Jamaat-e-Islami there, he was struck by the difference between the two cities. In Sargodha there was a greater cohesion—people knew each other—but more critically, there was ‘more time’ (ziada waqt). ‘In Lahore people are in a state of frenzy. They are working two jobs, ferrying their children to tuitions, going shopping. And it takes so long now to get from one place to the next’. Initially he stated that people were almost forced into (majboor hain) this state of frenzy by the size of the city, but later he also ruminated that ultimately this was linked to the desire to consume new goods, gadgets and products that instead consumed human time and energies.

How indeed, does one compete with the subtle layers of disillusionment and despair that political action directed towards the state carries within it now? At a pre-election meeting in Mansoorah Women's College at the headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore in August 2005, many speakers warned against the lure of the market as an alternative to politics. One speaker addressed this gathering of key local activists from within Lahore district by declaring, ‘you will have to struggle against the shopping trips . . . both in yourself and with others. How can we buy these things? I don't understand—who has the money to buy these things when the country is being bled dry by the MNCs (international companiyan) and the IMF?’ She then pointed towards the audience to say, ‘Can you afford [she used the word in English] that TV? Can we [as a country] afford these cars and these fridges? Do you know how much we owe the IMF? And how did we end up with this loan? Were you asked about this? Is this government [hakumat] capable of fulfilling the obligations of the state [riyasat] towards the people?’

This disenchantment in the state and frustration at its takeover by the market is also shared by others outside the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the course of my fieldwork, political activists and leaders from the Jamaat, and also from other political parties such as the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz Sharif group, emphasized repeatedly to me that the state has, in effect been taken over by the market. One way to understand this assertion is that the idea of the state is subservient to the idea of the market as officials and politicians justify actions and policies within the market paradigm. This argument is not about the extent of liberalization and privatization within Pakistan—that has varied even over the last three decades, although the general trend has been towards increased privatization—but about the emergence of an official discourse that recognized the primacy of the market in setting its agenda, what the philosopher Michael Sandel has called the state's ‘market mimicking assumptions’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ‘market mimicking assumption’ about the state refers to the fact that not only is the paradigm of the market used for making state decisions but the main aim of the state is then defined as correcting for market failure. The conceptual ascendancy of the market is not without its impact on political options and spaces. During the course of my research, politicians, some of them former or current ministers, commented on the very slim margins that they had to play with as state officials. One long time politician represented the general feeling when he said:

The Jamaat-e-Islami's own relationship to the market is ambivalent: on the one hand, as seen above, Jamaat-e-Islami activists and leaders speak against consumerism as well as the free market rhetoric that pervades Pakistan's public sphere and government decisions—an increasing criticism of the IMF/World Bank conditionalities within Jamaat-e-Islami official discourse is a discernable trendFootnote ⁴⁹—and on the other hand they are not immune to the allure of the market as a mechanism for bringing about societal and individual transformation.

Islamism, middle class and the market

Contemporary Jamaat-e-Islami activists and leaders talk of the welfare/developmental state as the ideal they are striving towards. The idea of the developmental state in the immediately post-colonial years of Pakistan was not a complete break from the past. Indeed there was an important element of continuity, and post-colonial notions of the developmental state were a nationalist reworking of British ideas about the colonial state. The post-colonial state was seen as an engine of social and political transformation in ways similar to the British imagining of the colonial state. The state was seen to stand above and outside of society, yet at the same time it had the power to transform society. The role that science played in this imaginary was significant. The ‘scientific empire’ depended heavily on science for legitimizing and enabling structures of power.Footnote ⁵⁰ The idea of science being harnessed by the colonial state both for its own effective management and the fulfilment of developmental goals was an important hallmark of the late colonial period. This reliance on scientific knowledge and expertise, due to its intrinsic superiority to local knowledge, was central also to the notion of the developmental state of the 1950s through to the 1970s not just in South Asia but within a global context.Footnote ⁵¹ Much of this emphasis on scientific knowledge and technology is reflected among contemporary Islamists.Footnote ⁵²

However, even at the peak of its hold on political imagination, the idea of the developmental state was not without challenges. A pronounced tension between the ideas of the ‘state’ and the ‘market’ has been a defining feature of twentieth-century politics. The relationship between the two has elicited a range of responses centred around the concern about a qualitative change in politics due to the increasing encroachment of consumerism. Interestingly, the most prominent twentieth-century critics of consumerism—which can be seen as the engagement at the level of an individual with the ‘market’—Marxists and Marxians, from Karl Mannheim, Theodore Adorno to Pierre Bourdieu, have shifted the focus, even if at times unintentionally, away from the state as the locus of mobilizations and political energies.

These tensions are often seen to play out most prominently within the middle class. The middle class in South Asia, as elsewhere, is a group particularly defined by its attempts at self-fashioning,Footnote ⁵³ willing to use both the state and the market for realizing its aspirations as well as defining the substance of them. In an interesting analysis of fascistic movements within the Urdu middle class milieu in interwar North India, Daechsel highlights the particular susceptibility of the Urdu-speaking North Indian middle class to consumerism as a means to self-fashioning.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet, for others within the same middle class, the state too has been of considerable attraction for similar reasons of self-definition.Footnote ⁵⁵ The vast majority of Jamaat-e-Islami members in Pakistan today are part of the aspiring middle class and bring to their politics their conflict-ridden relationship with both the market and the state, their interest in using both or either for self-fashioning and self-expression. Their previous experience supports a continued focus on the state but alternatives are increasingly being tested. The current leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami comprises predominantly first generation university and college graduates who have, over the last 30 years, moved up the social ladder. Their route into this social mobility has been mostly through state sponsored schools, colleges and universities. It is therefore no coincidence that the threats to Jamaat-e-Islami membership through privatization of public universities under General Musharaf's regime were taken very seriously. The Board of Governors scheme, initiated in 2002, was widely seen as a move to privatize the education sector and open it up for international institutions.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Jamaat-e-Islami's critique of privatization of national education was couched in terms of the principle of equal access to health and education, but no doubt shaped by the Jamaat-e-Islami's continued dependence upon public universities for recruitment. The Jamaat-e-Islami moved quickly through the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, its student wing, to organize mass protests throughout the years 2002 to 2005. Waqas Anjum, Islami Jami'yat Tulaba national Nazim from 1995–1998 and now a Jamaat-e-Islami rukn,Footnote ⁵⁷ was involved with these protests and explained:

While the state remains the rhetorical focus of Jamaat-e-Islami mobilizations, the move beyond the state has been routed through the market. The use of market as a facilitator of middle class activism is an option at a time when the state is seen as ineffective as well as inaccessible. A response to the kinds of problems that Waqas Anjum raised are the private schools run by Jamaat-e-Islami affiliates, even as they continue to agitate in support of state provision of education. Over the last two decades Jamaat-e-Islami activists’ engagement with a market that allows them space for politico-entrepreneurial activity as well as consumer activism has increased significantly. The two are related precisely because consumption of veils in different colours with laces and embroidery,Footnote ⁵⁹ Islamic CDs and DVDs, Islamic schools,Footnote ⁶⁰ books, pamphlets and children's stories, catering companies that hire women to serve in the women's section at weddings and parties,Footnote ⁶¹ interest-free banking systems, taxi services that provide adequate purdah facilities, decoration pieces that involve calligraphy rather than human and animal forms, television and radio channels that provide Islamic content, entail both a political stance and public consumption. More fundamental than the actual goods and services bought and sold is a reworked conception of politics as a place of transactions, the need for incentives to structure action, the logic of demand and supply to situate mobilizations, the importance of efficiency and individual choice in locating the role of religion—the many facets of the language and paradigm of the market.

Unthinkable two decades ago, political action for many of the Jamaat-e-Islami activists I interacted with is infused by this new conception of politics. As I accompanied some upper-middle class Jamaat-e-Islami women from the suburbs of Lahore, to their weekly visits to inner city sewing schools and income-generation projects, it became apparent that the line between entrepreneurship and political mobilization—one that had been sharply delineated by Maududi for the Jamaat-e-Islami—had become a blurred one today. When I asked them how their work here was relevant to the work of the larger organization the Jamaat-e-Islami women responded that they were facilitating the work of the organization in two ways. First, through creating a relationship with the underprivileged in an area of the city previously closed to Jamaat-e-Islami influence they were opening the channels for a ‘longer-term relationship’ a euphemistic reference to electoral mobilizations.Footnote ⁶² Second, and more importantly through the exposure to Jamaat-e-Islami literature and proselytizing messages these women in the sewing schools and income-generating projects were being told about ‘the right kind of Islam’ (sahih islam) and being made into a ‘suitable citizen for an Islamic state’ (islami riyast kay liyay mozoon shehri); citizens who were pious, efficient, economically independent and ‘tuned to the laws of demand and supply’. Coming back to the futility of separating society from the state, and in a neat inversion of Maududi's formulation, they would ask rhetorically what is a state without the right kind of society and citizenry to support it?

Quite apart from the ready stratification as consumers and producers, it is the use of market mechanisms as facilitators of moral and political projects that signals an important shift in Islamist imagination. This shift, manifested through the changes in their mobilization strategies and focus, are linked inextricably to the changes in the wider political imagination and the place of the state in it. However, there are slippages in the relationship between global political imagination, academic theory and local political imagination. This paper has attempted to show that even when the state idea has been seriously challenged in international political imagination, and even when the Islamists have accommodated these changes through shifts in their mobilization strategies, they cannot abandon the state idea completely, there are local imperatives for a continued Islamist engagement with the notion of the state including the past experience of the vast majority of its members and other path dependencies.Footnote ⁶³

Secularism beyond the State

Secularism is invariably conceived in relation to the state—whether in terms of a separation from or management of religion. However, if we recognize the state as an idea that allows particular configurations of power to function, it is important to recognize the competing, but also paradoxically complementary, place of the market in this equation. The role of the market—in regulating the ‘conduct of conduct’—has received less direct attention than the role of the state, particularly with reference to religious practices. In his alternative reading of secularism as state management of religion, rather than a separation of religion and the state, Asad recognizes that the modes of governance he refers to are tied to the emergence of capitalism and the nation state; secularization led to the release of ecclesiastical property into private hands and market circulation in the European context.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the focus of Asad's argument remains the state and his understanding of secularism is tied closely to the notion of governmentality. In the South Asian context, the implications of governmentality during colonial rule have been explored in significant detail over the last three decades.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, the changes in it in post-colonial contexts have remained relatively under explored.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is critical to nuance our understanding by a deeper look not just across localities but also through temporal variations. Otherwise, rendering inconsequential the differences in governmentality across time and space, we run the risk of attributing too much or too little to certain modes of power.Footnote ⁶⁷ The idea of the state engendered certain particular forms of governmentality. As the idea of the state weakens its hold on popular imagination so does, potentially, the ability of particular institutions associated with the state in managing and directing individual behaviour. The kind of scepticism that defines the relationship of the citizen with the state in Pakistan precludes any easy conclusions about the ability of state to regulate ‘the conduct of conduct’.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the very least we can easily establish that it is nowhere close to the kind of control that the Foucauldian French state exerted. The rise of the idea of market in this context bears further scrutiny. Its implications for regulation and management of religious belief and practice appear important but remain relatively under-explored.

One important implication of framing political activity within the market paradigm is the increasing pull of individualization. The co-imbrication of market and piety in producing a particular kind of self has been perceptively articulated by Rudnyckyj through his investigations into ‘market Islam’Footnote ⁶⁹ which ‘simultaneously draws on immersion in an Islamic discursive tradition, calculating economic rationality, and instilling principles and practices of self-management’.Footnote ⁷⁰ He finds in his study of an Islamic management company at a state steel-producing plant in Indonesia that market Islam involves, ‘designing a form of Muslim practice commensurate with the goals of eliminating corruption, promoting privatization, and enhancing productivity in an increasingly global market’—goals that Rudnyckyj identifies with neoliberal reforms in Malaysia. Similarly, Bryan Turner has identified an increased and specific kind of consumption as a means of religious fulfillment. Turner points out that ‘life on earth is no longer merely a prelude to the consumption of happiness in the next world: the promise of consumerism is to have one's desires satisfied now’.Footnote ⁷¹ Not only does consumerism support a different theology—from ‘prosperity religions’ to ‘spiritual economies’ and ‘occult capitalism’Footnote ⁷²—but also allows in some instances a fluid commitment and identity.Footnote ⁷³ At the same time as consumption becomes a route to practising citizenship and identity, the decisions around what and where to eat, buying clothes or choosing a drink cannot avoid becoming invested with political and religious significance.Footnote ⁷⁴ Both as consumers, workers and producers Islamists, like others, operating at the nexus of religious inspiration and the market, operate at the dawn of new normativities and subjectivities. Activism structured around the idea of the market has the potential to transform investments in meanings of the success or failure of the Islamist project itself.

The shift in the place of the state in Islamist political imagination presents an interesting opportunity to explore some of the complexities generated at the interface of an international political imagination and local political dynamics. The Jamaat-e-Islami's focus on the state is in part a legacy of a period when the idea of the state played a dominant role in global political imagination. The precise relationship between the state and the Jamaat-e-Islami that Maududi articulated at that time was the result of local political configurations infused by a global imagination. As the idea of the state has changed over the last decades of the twentieth century in the larger political imagination, so has the Jamaat-e-Islami articulated subtle shifts in its mobilizational strategies. In the case of Pakistan, this link with the global remains curiously under-studied and over-used at the same time. On the one hand analysis of Pakistani politics, and particularly of Islamism, is almost never carried out without reference to an international political orderFootnote ⁷⁵ and on the other hand, specific developments within Pakistan have not been looked at in depth by linking them with an international political imaginary. This paper has looked at why and how ideas about the state have changed within the Islamist imagination and has briefly alluded to the implications of these changes. The Jamaat-e-Islami's shifts in activism and struggles with moral ambiguities that the ascendancy of the market in political imagination has catalyzed, force us to recalibrate the emphasis on the state as the source of governmentality in terms of an active moulding of religious thought and practice.Footnote ⁷⁶ That these struggles are tied to shifts in a global political imagination also compels us to re-adjust the emphasis from theology to context, the local to the global, and from the particular to the general. Interrogating global capitalist structures, with an eye to local developments, remains a challenging project. Debates and discussions about secularism in Pakistan cannot be meaningful without recognizing the particular configuration of the idea of the state informed as it is by an imaginary beyond the nation and the ummah.