Religious sectarianism has been responsible for a significant share of Pakistan’s violent crime, and the roots of that violence trace back further than most people realize – well before independence, into decisions made by religious parties about how to position themselves in a country that hadn’t been created yet.
A Complicated Relationship With Pakistan Itself
Students graduating from religious seminaries before independence generally emerged with little exposure to modern political thought, and many religious parties, including the Deobandi movement, opposed the idea of Pakistan outright, aligning instead with the Indian National Congress’s vision of undivided nationalism. That opposition held right up to Partition itself – when the 1947 referendum was held in Sylhet, the Deobandi scholar Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madani traveled there specifically to campaign against joining Pakistan.
Once Pakistan existed regardless, and once the Congress no longer needed religious parties as allies in a newly secular-minded independent India, those parties found themselves with a single option: migrate to the country they had spent years opposing. Iqbal’s old line about the mullah’s religion being nothing but strife proved apt – these parties, once in Pakistan, wasted no time finding a new cause to organize around.
1953: The First Martial Law
The Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam took up a campaign against the Ahmadiyya community almost as soon as it arrived in Pakistan. Inflamed by that campaign, some individuals killed Ahmadis and set fire to their mosques. The result was the 1953 riots in Punjab: people killed, homes burned, transportation in Lahore paralyzed, and civil administration rendered helpless enough that Pakistan’s first martial law was imposed to restore order. The full record of what happened is preserved in the government’s own Munir Commission report.
How the Demand Kept Finding New Political Champions
Martial law brought a period of relative quiet, but the underlying movement against Ayub Khan’s government in 1969 gave religious parties a renewed opening, and they joined it in force. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, seeking to keep those parties satisfied, had the Ahmadiyya community formally declared a non-Muslim minority through a constitutional amendment – a decision that, rather than settling the matter, opened the door for religious parties to become permanent players in mainstream politics.
When the movement against Bhutto’s own government gathered momentum, it took on an explicitly religious character under the banner of Nizam-e-Mustafa. Bhutto, whose own background was aristocratic and largely secular in outlook, tried to appease the same forces by moving the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday and banning horse racing, gambling, and alcohol. It didn’t save him – and General Zia-ul-Haq, who deposed him, adopted the identical strategy of keeping religious parties satisfied: giving them seats in the Majlis-e-Shura, enacting Zakat and Ushr laws, passing blasphemy legislation, and establishing the Bait-ul-Mal welfare fund. Even with all of that, the demand for full, formal Islamic law was never fully satisfied, and kept resurfacing in new forms.
Malakand, 1994
That demand took its most violent turn in 1994, when it was put into direct practice in Malakand Division. A campaign led by Maulana Sufi Muhammad targeted district administration, killing a sitting National Assembly member and a provincial assembly member on the spot for resisting, and blockading every transportation route in the area. Police and other law enforcement institutions were left helpless. Roughly forty people were killed in the resulting uprising, with many more injured, before the provincial government gave in and formally enforced Islamic Shariah in Malakand Division. Sufi Muhammad tried to repeat the uprising the following year; this time he was arrested before it could take hold, and the attempt was put down.
From the Ahmadiyya Community to Sunni-Shia Violence
Having already targeted the Ahmadiyya community, religious parties opened a second front against the Shia community once the Zakat law was enacted. Shia Muslims, who follow Jafari jurisprudence, declined to accept the law as applied to them and sought recognition of that distinction. Soon afterward, a new organization, Sipah-e-Sahaba, emerged and began carrying out violent attacks against Shia targets – in one documented incident, 32 people were killed while at prayer; in another, at Mominpura, five people were killed and several more wounded. In response, Shia organizers formed their own group, Sipah-e-Muhammad, which likewise became involved in illegal, violent activity.
Every part of this history – the anti-Ahmadi campaigns, the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement, the Malakand uprising, the Sunni-Shia violence that followed – is specific to Pakistan in a way that has no real parallel in any other country’s crime record.
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