ABSTRACT
Pakistan, a country approximately twice the size of California with over 165 million people and currently the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons has become a favorite site for a doomsday scenario for the press. The ongoing insurgency by Islamists (Pakistani Taliban) – who aim to take over the border regions of Pakistan by enforcing an extremist version of an Islamic system that has propelled them to blow up girls’ schools, organize the brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto and undertake dozens of lethal suicide attacks against civilian and military targets – has raised questions about the possibility of extremists challenging the viability of the Pakistani state itself. The turmoil in Pakistani politics has many sources – the most important being the dominance of the military and an arrogant but woefully incompetent federal government that has been unable to address the grievances of most of the non-Punjabi ethnic groups – but to the outside world, the
most important source of turmoil appears to be the role of Islam in politics. Three issues are central in understanding the relationship between religion and politics in Pakistan. The first issue is the conflict over the identity of the Pakistani state: can it ever be a secular, democratic state if, as Islamists have often asserted, it is an ideological state that must be committed to the creation of an Islamic state? The second issue is the inability of the Islamist political parties to win elections and take power via the democratic process. The third issue is the impact of Pakistan’s foreign policy on the dynamic of religion and domestic politics. Here the key issues are: the India-Pakistan military rivalry which has resulted in three wars, an ongoing struggle over who should control Kashmir, and the decision of the Pakistani state in the late 1970s to nurture a “jihadi [holy war] culture” as a way to achieve its foreign policy objectives.
