Over 98% of the people of Pakistan are Muslims. There is a small minority of non-Muslims including: Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Bahais, Ahmadis and Parsis.

Islam in Pakistani Society

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Islam arrived in the area now known as Pakistan in 713 CE, when the Umayyad dynasty sent an Muslim Arab army led by Muhammad bin Qasim against the ruler of Sindh Raja Dahir, who's pirates attacked arab ships. The army conquered the northwestern part of ancient India from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea. The the arrival of the Arab Muslims to the provinces of Sindh and Punjab, along with subsequent Muslim dynasties, set the stage for the religious boundaries of South Asia that would lead to the development of the modern state of Pakistan as well as forming the foundation for Islamic rule which quickly spread across much of South Asia. Following the rule of various Islamic empires, including the Ghaznavid Empire, the Ghorid kingdom, and the Delhi Sultanate, the region was controlled by the Mughals from 1526 until 1739. The Muslim technocrats, bureaucrats, soldiers, traders, scientists, architects, teachers, theologians and sufis flocked from the rest of the Muslim world to Islamic Sultanate in South Asia. The Muslim Sufi missionaries played a pivotal role in converting the millions of native people to Islam. As in other areas where it was introduced by Sufis, Islam to some extent syncretized with pre-Islamic influences, resulting in a religion traditionally more flexible than in the Arab world. Two Sufis whose shrines receive much national attention are Data Ganj Baksh (Ali Hajweri) in Lahore (ca. eleventh century) and Shahbaz Qalander in Sehwan, Sindh (ca. twelfth century). (Although the concept of shrines is unislamic)

The Muslim poet-philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal first proposed the idea of a Muslim state in the South Asia in his address to the Muslim League at Allahabad in 1930. His proposal referred to the four provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the NorthWest Frontier--essentially what would became the post-1971 boundary of Pakistan. Iqbal's idea gave concrete form to the "Two Nations Theory" of two distinct nations in the South Asia based on religion (Islam and Hinduism) and with different historical backgrounds, social customs, cultures, and social mores.

Islam was thus the basis for the creation and the unification of a separate state, but it was not expected to serve as the model of government. Mohammad Ali Jinnah made his

Schools of Thought

Over 98% of the people of Pakistan are Muslims (adherents of Islam). An estimated 75% of the Muslims are Sunni, some (25%) are Shi'a, making it the second largest Sunni population after Indonesia and the second largest Shi'a population after Iran. Nearly all Pakistani Sunnis belong to Hanafi school of jurisprudence and nearly all Pakistani Shi'as belong to Ithna 'ashariyah school of jurisprudence. Smaller but influential Muslim sects include Shi'a Nizari Ismailis and Shi'a Dawoodi Bohras.

The followers of Sunni Hanafi school can be categorised into Deobandi and Barelwi school of thoughts.

Barelwi school was formed by theologian Raza Ahmad Khan of Bareilly in 1890. The Barelwis follow the Qadiri sufi practices and also strictly adhere to the Hanafi school of thought. They are predominant in the rural areas of the Punjab and Sindh. Nevertheless, prominent Barelwi institutions also exist in Lahore and Karachi where wealthy businessmen support their activities. Tahir-ul-Qadri's Minhaj-ul-Quran-movement represents a modernised version of Barelwi Islam.

The Deobandis represent a more puritan form of Sunni Hanafi Islam. This school came into being after 1867 when the religious seminary Darul Uloom was set up in Deoband 100 km to the north of Delhi. They follow the Hanafi school of thought. The Deobandis are particularly strong among the Pashtuns in the NorthWest Frontier, Balochistan and Karachi. Their educational centers are the Akora Khattak Madrasa near Peshawar and the Jamia-i Binoria in Karachi. An important subgroup of the Deobandis is the Tablighi Jamaat, i.e missionary movement, which is committed to Muslim missionary acrivities both in Pakistan and around the world. Its annual conferences in November draws over 1 million faithfulls to their center in Raiwind, Punjab, Pakistan.

The Ahl-i Hadith are the most puritan but also the smallest of the Sunni schools of thought. They reject both Sufism and the four schools of thought. They were founded by scholars who have studied under the Yemeni scholar al-Shawkani in the 1830's. Their strongholds in Pakistan are the central Punjab

Ithna 'ashariyah Shi'as are esimated to form 20-25% of Pakistan's Muslim population. They are strong in the Northern Areas, Karachi and parts of the Punjab (especially Sialkot and Jhang). Violent clashes between Shi'as on the one side and Deobandis and Ahl-i Hadith are frequent, particularly in the Shi'a holy month of Muharram. Pakistan also hosts two communities of Shi'a Nizari Ismailis. The Dawoodi Bohras are concentrated in Karachi, and smaller congregations exist in other big cities. They follow their Dai al-Mutlaq based in Mumbai, and mainly businessmen. The followers of the Agha Khan, the Nizari Ismailis, consist of a group of Gujarati origin concentrated in Karachi and mainly consisiting of businessmen and professionals, and several rural communities in Chitral and the Northern Areas.

Politicized Islam

From the outset, politics and religion have been intertwined both conceptually and practically in Islam. Because the Prophet established a government in Medina, precedents of governance and taxation exist. Through the history of Islam, from the Ummayyad (661-750) and Abbasid empires (750-1258) to the Mughals (1526- 1858) and the Ottomans (1300-1923), religion and statehood have been treated as one. Indeed, one of the beliefs of Islam is that the purpose of the state is to provide an environment where Muslims can properly practice their religion. If a leader fails in this, the people have a right to depose him.

In 1977, the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto outlawed alcohol and changed the weekend from Sunday to Friday, but no substantive Islamic reform program was implemented prior to General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization program. Starting in February 1979, new penal measures based on Islamic principles of justice went into effect. These carried considerably greater implications for women than for men. A welfare and taxation system based on Zakat and a profit-and-loss banking system were also established in accordance with Islamic prohibitions against usury.

Zia's Islamization program was pursued within a rather complicated ideological framework. His stance was in contrast of the popular culture, in which most people are "personally" very religious but not "publicly" religious. An unexpected outcome was that by relying on a policy grounded in Islam, the state fomented factionalism: by legislating what is Islamic and what is not, Islam itself could no longer provide unity because it was then being defined to exclude previously included groups. Disputes between Sunnis and Shias, ethnic disturbances in Karachi between Pakhtuns and Muhajir, increased animosity toward heretical Ahmadis, and the revival of Punjab-Sindh tensions--can all be traced to the loss of Islam as a common vocabulary of public morality. More profoundly, in a move that reached into every home, the state had attempted to dictate a specific ideal image of women in Islamic society, an ideal that was largely antithetical to that existing in popular sentiment and in everyday life.

A major component in the Islamization program, the Shariat Bill, was passed in May 1991. This bill required that all laws in the country conform with Islam. Women's groups in particular were concerned that the reforms in the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961 could be jeopardized by the new bill.

A controversial law, Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, drew a great deal of attention from critics associated with the Human Rights Commission in 1993-1994. Introduced in 1986 by Zia, the law, referred to as "the blasphemy trap," states that "whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Prophet Muhammad shall be punished with death or imprisoned for life and shall be liable to fine." The law extends to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. According to Amnesty International, several dozen people had been charged under Pakistan's blasphemy laws by early 1994. In all cases, it is alleged that these charges appear to have been arbitrarily brought and to have been based on an individual's minority religious beliefs or on malicious accusations. The government of Benazir Bhutto, sensitive to Pakistan's image in the world community, attempted to approve changes in the blasphemy law in order to "curb abuses of the law"--especially those involving false accusations and fabricated cases. Critics claim, however, that Benazir, constantly under attack for being too liberal by the religious right, had been overly cautious and slow to introduce amendments to the law.

See also

• Islam by country

References

• This article incorporates public domain text from the Library of Congress Country Studies.