ABSTRACT
Pakistan provides many examples of interaction of religious and local customary traditions and extremely instructive debates about the role of the modern state visa-vis the scope and problems of Islamic legal reform. Islam is the foundation of state legitimacy in Pakistan and the state law is used as an instrument by the state to serve the purposes of Islamic modern nation-state ideology. Modern Pakistani law, despite its constitutional commitrnent to observe the injunctions of Islam, operates on the basis that the state law is the only legal authority. In other words, it follows the Western model of political ideology which is characterized by the paradigm of legal modernity in the normative realm but tries to match this model with Islamic concepts.
