Source/Credit: Secular Pakistan | Blog
By Sadia Saeed | August 11, 2007
Posted at Secular Pakistan by Awais | October 17, 2010
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The relationship between state formation and nation building has been addressed from multiple perspectives in the social sciences.
In the literature on the nation and nationalism, however, the relationship between state formation and nation building is often ignored, with the implicit assumption made that processes of nation building occur independently of the construction of state institutions. Many works have shown the pitfalls of this neglect by demonstrating that the articulation of an official nationalist ideology, and the processes which take place in the national community as a result of this official nationalism, are both aided by, and in turn aid, the formation of state institutions and practices of social closure (Brubaker 1992; Balibar 2004; Omi and Winant 1994). More empirical research must be done to clarify the theoretical relationship between nationalism and state formation.
The modern religious state of Pakistan is a particularly illuminating case for investigating this relationship because of its historical complexity. The interaction between religion, nationalism, and the state, despite the myth of an eternally Islamic Pakistan, is far less transparent and monolithic than is assumed in popular and even academic discourses.
In this paper, I revisit the debate on the relationship between nationalism and state-formation from an empirical focus on the Pakistani state’s historically varying relationship with its Islamic politico-religious identity, as I will demonstrate using the example of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan. A minority sect of Islam with roughly four million adherents in Pakistan, the Ahmadiyya community was declared a ‘non-Muslim minority’ by the Pakistani state in 1974, despite the insistence of the Ahmadiyyas that they were Muslim, and therefore not a minority.
The specific question guiding my paper is: why did the Pakistani state shift from self- identifying as a liberal-constitutional state, committed to including all sects of Islam within the boundaries of the imagined community of the nation, to an Islamic state that forcibly evicted the Ahmadiyya sect from the community of Islam, and hence from the Pakistani nation? I suggest that the genealogy of nationalism in Pakistan is key for understanding the politics of exclusion of religious minorities. In this paper, I show how the shifting bases of Pakistani nationalism from 1947 to 1988 led to changes in the constitution and formation of the Pakistani state, which in turn caused, at least in the instance of the religious community of Ahmadiyyas, the social construction of an entirely new minority by the state. [more]
Read complete original post here: Hailing the ‘Muslim Citizen’: State Nationalism and the Social Construction of the “Heretic” in Pakistan
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