ABSTRACT
This essay examines how messianism shaped the practice and conception of sovereignty in Pakistan. It focuses on the minority Ahmadi community, which was initially protected by the state against discrimination but was then excommunicated as non-Muslim by constitutional decree and, subsequently, persecuted and criminalised by law. As such, the Ahmadi community gradually but steadily became central to the constitution of Pakistan as a state that saw itself duty bound to demarcate and defend the boundaries of Islam. I explore how messianism played a role in this dynamic in two interlocking ways, as an explicit religious doctrine of the expected arrival of a savior and as a sociological phenomenon of a leader who implicitly assumes the charismatic role of a savior in a moment of cataclysmic crisis. The politician who fit this latter schema was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who, after the violent civil war of 1971 in which East Pakistan broke away as Bangladesh, amended the constitution to define the Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Overall, this essay attempts to shed new light on how overlapping religious, sociological, and political processes transformed Pakistan constitutionally into an Islamic state.
