Religious Minorities and the Anxieties of an Islamic Identity in Pakistan
This chapter focuses on contemporary Pakistan, now entangled in sectarian strife, though this was not always so. There were religious minorities: the Ahmadis and Shiʻites. The former were heterodox many times over: they did not believe in jihad, and they did believe in a post-Muhammad prophet, Ghulam Ahmad. They were also a successful minority, self-styled modernizers who had carved out for themselves an outsized place in public life in the early postcolonial years. The Shiʻites too had enjoyed success as great landlords in the Punjab and as senior officers in the military. They were, moreover, a minority that did not hesitate to stand up for themselves, protesting when the state treated members as second-class citizens and proudly proclaiming their difference at Muharram festival processions. Ahmadis and Shiʻites may have been resented in certain quarters, but overall, they remained a significant and self-assured public presence in the postcolonial order. It was the Iranian revolution and General Zia's Islamization campaign of 1979 that turned this situation around. Once tolerated minorities were now stigmatized and targeted by blasphemy laws, comparative tolerance giving way to the politics of sectarianism. So, there it is again, the state—this time not colonial but postcolonial—converting difference into discrimination, if not outright persecution.