A Matter of Policy, Not Law”: How Public Debates Made Pakistan an Islamic Republic, 1949–1973

Abstract

Three constitutions, written under three utterly different regimes, converged on a single formula: between 1956 and 1973 a parliamentary coalition, a military president, and a populist civilian each named Pakistan an Islamic Republic while vesting legislative supremacy in an elected parliament. The dominant scholarship explains Pakistan’s constitutional outcomes through the autonomy of the state apparatus, the military, bureaucracy, and judiciary that twice abrogated the documents. This article argues the opposite case: the framers were registering pressure from the public arenas of the Punjab, and the constitutional provisions can be paired, one by one, with the arena campaigns that produced them, the state’s name with the ulema’s rallies, the definition of a Muslim with two decades of Khatm-e-Nabuwwat agitation, the fundamental rights and federal provisions of 1973 with the left’s press and street, the Auqaf clauses with the state’s reach for the shrines. Comparing Pakistan’s settlement with the guardian models of Iran and Turkey, and taking the state-autonomy objection seriously, the article concludes that the constitutions are best read as the precipitate of a thirty-year public argument: the minutes, written in law, of the arenas in which the idea of Pakistan was debated.

Keywords: constitution of Pakistan; Islamic Republic; Objectives Resolution; fundamental rights; Council of Islamic Ideology; public arenas; constitutional history