Making Sense of Pakistan

Posted on : February 19, 2025
Author : AGA Admin

---

Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan-born scholar on South Asian political history, in her “Making Sense of Pakistan” (2018) ^[[1]]  locates the essentialized Pakistani national identity as neither  socially homogenous, nor a political monolith.

 

Shaikh begins by providing the raison d’etre for “Why Pakistani?”^[[2]] Chapter one locates the colonial origins of the two-state theory and the birth of the Pakistani nation in 1947, following the partition of British-India. The essentialization of an Islamic identity by the Muslim league, and Pakistan as the political realization of a religious identity is well documented and written on. But Shaikh goes into a penetrating analysis of the ways in which Islam was the call to unification and mobilization of the Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent. Chapter one elaborates the different philosophical definitions of Pakistan, with dominate discourses over the Pakistani identity imagine an exclusivist Islamic identity.

 

Political Islam is the credo of the Pakistani state, which needs not constitutionalism but Islamic forces to legitimize its governance. The vacuum of power and the rise of the mullah-military nexus in Pakistan brought up the prominence of two critical institutions, the Pakistani military and the orthodox clergy, in Pakistan under whose influence the liberal democratic (in letter) conception of Pakistan came into jeopardy after the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

 

Shaikh evaluates the alliance “Between Crescent and Sword,”^[[3]] – what she bluntly calls the “jihadis” and “juntas” in chapter five as a sustained feature of the Pakistani polity. Shaikh goes into detail about how military regimes, especially that of General Zia ul-Haq utilized Islam to sustain a “junta” government, iterating national security as well as identity in terms of religion. The Pakistani national destiny is a simultaneous processes of Islamization of the Pakistani state and society, militarization of the government with a lack of any continuous or stable civilian leadership, as well as a lop-sided domination of the Pathans in socio-political and economic decision making.

 

This Shaikh calls the “overdeveloped state” wherein the state apparatus has coopted traditional socio-religious institutions. Parallelly, Shaikh recalls that state ambiguity and lack of ideological pivot has left the state-society vulnerable to Islamic forces, primarily the Ulama, with Islamists propagating failures of state capacity to be a moral rather than political outcome of lackluster commitment to Islam.

 

The centrality of Islam in the Pakistani identity cannot be overstated. The undesirable “shariatization” of the socio-political space has been an outcome of the Pakistani state attempting to create a unified-uniform identity under “The mirage of a citizenship,” that is, to homogenize a national destiny rather than attempting to create an amalgamous identity (Pathans, Sindhi, Muhajirs, Baloch, etc.). Shaik calls this out as the “Burden of Islam”^[[4]] in chapter four. The political capital of Islam has come to be utilized both by secular and religious contesters for power, with Islam being the final sanction over the public life and legitimacy of authority, of both military and civilian governments, spilling over to become causes of growing sectarianism, nepotism, corruption, violence against minorities and orthodox intolerance, as well as gross disparity in the beneficiaries of development –  all “In the name of Islam.” Islam as an in-group identifier has been used as a tool to manufacture divides rather than “unification,” creating institutional discrimination against minority groups.

 

She locates the emergence of the Kashmir issue, as well as the separation of Bangladesh in 1971 as fallouts of the conspicuous nature of this identity. In “Demons from abroad,”^[[5]] chapter six ushers light on the role of global powers and that of India. Shaikh contends that the “problematic” and “contested” relationship between the Pakistan and Islam creates uncertainties over “Who is a Pakistani?”^[[6]] Chapter 2 centers around the role of religion in preventing the creation of a cohesive identity, advising  a turn towards the historic and more rational interpretations of Islam, which places a premium on the universal Ummah brotherhood while at the same time being tolerant to religious minorities, embracing what for long had been subcontinental Islam, moving pat the dysfunctional nature of an essentialized domestic and foreign policy.

 

Adding to the discourse on the essential disjuncture between socio-cultural South Asia and political South Asia, Dr. Shaikh devotes a great deal of attention to analyzing the continued search for the Pakistani national identity, highlighting the critical heterogeneity in the ‘makings’ of a Pakistan that cannot be simplified into a holistic or even a unified mold just in terms of a political entity – not simply an Islamic republic. The often Indo-centric analysis of South Asia fails to view Pakistan as anything more that “whatever India is not,” however, this book reiterates the complexities of South Asia and its eclectic stakeholders and syncretic experiences.

 

Shaikh also identifies an upsurge in certain areas of democratic rights, including increased dissent, vocalization by mass media, entrenching of a civil society as well as a network of human rights and legal activists, etc. – these, to her mind, projects a breath of optimism in futurity of the country.^[[7]]

 

Yet, at the same time, Shaikh is guilty of ‘uni’-casualizing the entire domestic and foreign policy of Pakistan in terms of the contentious scope of its national identity. However, she accepts the elusive nature what Pakistan’s ‘Islam’ constitutes, with no apparent consensus over what the politics of Islam would be, whether in terms of culture or ideology.  Moreover, there has been an oversimplification of policy decisions in Pakistan solely in terms of a perceived Indian insecurity or simply a ‘protector of Islam.’ Chapter six in its discussion over Pakistan-Afghanistan relations solely focuses on Pakistan’s desire to outdo India, rather than a wider/regional perspective of geopolitics.^[[8]]

 

While scholars have for long debated about the hardy perennials of the Pakistani nation-state, Shaikh delivers, and elaborates with substantiated evidence and cause, a framework in studying Pakistani agent in the international structure as well affairs internal to it. The book is not historic but interpretive, providing a compelling argument  in terms of the exclusively Islamic identity that underscores the Pakistani policy, bearing social, strategic, and sustained fallouts. While there is no dearth of literature on Pakistan, Shaikh’s nuanced treatment of the subject makes it a handbook for area studies to not only locate identities in the broader meta-region, but also to find these identities in their local politics and policies of ingroup-outgroup cooperation, competition, and conflict, providing a clear set of priorities, making it an essential read to South Asian studies.

 

Making Sense of Pakistan,

Farzana Shaikh.

288 pages.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

ISBN 9780190929114.

INR 3,900.

 

 

Endnotes

[1] Shaikh, F. (2018). Making sense of Pakistan. Oxford University Press.

[2] Shaikh, F. (2018). Why Pakistan? History and ideology. In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 14-40). Oxford University Press.

[3] Shaikh, F. (2018). Between Crescent and Sword: Professionalizing Jihad. In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 147-170). Oxford University Press.

[4] Shaikh, F. (2018). Burden of Islam: Sacralization of Politics . In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 81-107). Oxford University Press.

[5] Shaikh, F. (2018). Demons from Abroad: Enemies and Allies. In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 180-200). Oxford University Press.

[6] Shaikh, F. (2018). Who is a Pakistani? Culture and Identity. In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 46-68). Oxford University Press.

[7] Shaikh, F. (2018). The Dilemmas of Development: The Uncertainties of Change. In Making sense of Pakistan (pp. 46-68). Oxford University Press.

References

Blood, P. R. (1995). Pakistan: A country study. Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/item/95017247/

Chakma, B. (2020). The idea of South Asia as a region. In South Asian regionalism: The limits of cooperation (pp. 39–56). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529205169.ch002

Cohen, S. P. (2004). The idea of Pakistan. Brookings Institution Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt1287b4c

Haroon, S. (2007). Frontier of faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan borderland. Hurst.

Rafiq, S. (2020). Linear borders, partition and identity in postcolonial South Asia. Geopolitics, 27(2), 478–500. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1757652

Shaikh, F. (2018). Making sense of Pakistan. Oxford University Press.

Singh, B. (2006). Politics of identities: Global, South Asian and Indian perspective. The Indian Journal of Political Science, 67(2), 205–220. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856209

 

 

Allen David Simon

Intern, Asia in Global Affairs

 

The views and opinions expressed in this book review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Asia in Global Affairs. The review is intended for academic and informational purposes only. It is not an endorsement of any particular viewpoint, nor is it intended to malign any individual, group, organization, company, or government.