The Jamaat-e-Islami Through the Years:
The Beginnings:
The creation of the Jamaat-e-Islami can be tied to the social movement theories of relative deprivation and resource mobilization. When the Jamaat was created in 1941, the Muslims compared to the Hindu populace were impoverished, less educated and less powerful. This is because, unlike the Hindus, the Muslims had never come to terms with the idea of acquiring British education and of recognizing British authority. Since the War of Independence of 1857, the British saw Muslims as trouble makers and mutineers. Hence, the Muslims did not have either the British education or the British favor and were neither able to acquire power nor prosperity. Mawdudi’s biographer, Syed Vali Reza Nasr, reports an incident in 1937 in which Mawdudi shared a compartment with the then Chief Minister of Bombay B.G. Kher, after which he became convinced to launch a movement against Hindu high-handedness. The Jamaat began as a movement with thepremise that the Hindu and British influence and power had led the Muslims of the sub-continent astray from the path of Islam, which he held synonymous with material and spiritual prosperity.
If we were to see the Jamaat’s beginning it in terms of resources, Mawdudi had gathered the ideological basis to commence a spiritual movement. His masterframe was in place through his writing and his magazine,Tarjuman-ul-Quran
, had become increasingly popular. Hence, when Mawdudi initiated the Jamaat, his vision was instant success as a few young scholars from all the mainstream sects of Islam joined Mawdudi’s movement. “
Prominent ‘ulema’ or scholars joined the Jamaat including six from Madrasat-ul-Islah, four from Deoband, four Nadwis and two from the Ahl-i-Hadith. By 1945, the Jamaat boasted a membership of some two hundred and twenty four ulema, sixty of whom continued to teach at variousdar- ul-ulooms
(religious seminaries)” (Khurshid 1980, 60). It is important to note here that the number of two hundred and twenty four might not seem much given the size of the Muslim population in the subcontinent. But this was a actually sizeable number for the beginnings of a movement, given that around sixty of them controlled mosques and the rest of the scholars would have had a large number of followers. The inclusion of the ‘ulema’ from the various sects also showed that the Jamaat was recognized by some of the most learned people amongst the mainstream sects. It may also be relevant to note here that becoming an Islamic took eight years of institutional educational in the Islamic sciences and there were only a few Muslims who ventured for such a feat. By 1945, ulema constituted about 40% of its total membership.
The Pakistan Movement and the Jamaat (1941-47):
Intent on “reconstruct ing the religious thought of Islam”, Maulana Mawdudi “had from the outset opposed the movement for Pakistan” by the Muslim League (Khurshid Ahmad 1980, 112). Mawdudi was opposed to the creation of the new State less on account of an opposition but because it was clear to him that Jinnah had no intention of making Pakistan an Islamic state. From the onset the Jamaat faced a competing “master frame”, one of “Muslim Nationalism” which the Muslim League represented. The Muslim League argued that the new homeland for the Muslims of India would be a Muslim country, where the state religion would be Islam, but there was no harm in keeping a Western style democracy, parliament and law. Furthermore, they held that there was nothing terrible in adopting Western ideas, knowledge, culture and philosophy.
On the other hand, Mawdudi held that a national government based on secular or Muslim nationalism would not be different from the imperial government of India. He viewed Nationalism as an alien concept imported by colonialism to break up the Muslim world. Similarly he argued that the colonizers injected Western currencies, influence, thought and all sorts of heresies into the Islamic way of life. Being a divisive phenomenon, a nation state could not be helpful in bringing about the Islamic socio-political system. Mawdudi, therefore, rejected the existence of Muslim nationalism as incompatible with Islam. Interestingly, Mawdudi and Allama Iqbal had a great affect on Jinnah and made him realize the potential of using the religious card in politics. When the Muslim League started using religion in politics with great success and ended up scoring a remarkable victory in the elections of 1945-46, Mawdudi became convinced that “that Islam constituted the ultimate source of power and legitimacy among the Muslim community” (Mawdudi 15, 1947). When Pakistan finally got independence Mawdudi realized this was the chance to create his utopian Islamic state. A state which would not only legitimize the all encompassing nature of Islam in the eyes of the people of the sub-continent but one which would serve as an example for other states to pursue and lead to a worldwide Islamic revolution. It was only for this reason that he finally recognized Pakistan.
The Early Years of the Building of the Nation’s Ideology and Constitution 1947-58:
During the early years, the founder of the nation Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan, had no doubt about the Islamic identity of Pakistan. Jinnah spoke of the idea of Pakistan as a state “where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play” (Moten 2002, 24). He emphasized that “We must work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice” (Moten 2002, 26). He talked of marching to the “renaissance of Islamic culture”, to “secure liberty, fraternity and equality as enjoined upon us by Islam”, to “take our inspirations and guidance from the Holy Quran” and to ‘stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy and Islamic social justice” (Moten 2002, 25). He categorically stated that the future constitution of Pakistan would be “of democratic type embodying the essential principles of Islam” (Moten 2002, 24). It will be made “on the basis of Shariat” (Moten 2002, 25). Even his presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, in which he seemed to have struck a secular note, he was very much in line with Islam. In it his emphasis was on universal Islamic principles of justice, equality, morality, piety and human tolerance irrespective of color, caste or creed. Yet, it must be pointed out that Jinnah categorically asserted that “Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission” (Grare 4, 2001).
Like Jinnah, Liaquat emphasized repeatedly the Islamic basis of Pakistan and successfully piloted the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on March 7, 1949. Moving the Resolution, the Prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, declared that Pakistan wanted to “demonstrate to the world that Islam provides a panacea to the many diseases which have crept into the life of humanity today” (Murad 1984, 28). Hence, he stated that the State will play a positive part in creating “such conditions as are conducive to the building up of a truly Islamic society... .” (Murad 1984, 29) Similarly, a senior leader of the Muslim League, Sardar Abdur Rab Khan Nishtar declared that they were trying to “put forward an alternative social system” based on Islam as opposed to “capitalism as represented by certain countries of the West and communism as represented by Russia” (Rahman 1999, 34).
The leaders from the Muslim League wanted to apply Islamic principles but did not want a theo-democracy like Mawdudi advocated. Again, it’s important to re-iterate that Mawdudi’s “masterframe” was being challenged by Muslim League’s ideological stance and it seemed as though with the popular support of the League had at the time, the Muslim League was winning the battle.
However, they were only two major instances where the Jamaat came at loggerheads with Muslim League; otherwise the Mawdudi was mostly satisfied with its performance. First, on the Kashmir issue, Mawdudi maintained that Pakistan should support an insurgency there and respect its treaty with India. This stance made him unpopular with the Pakistani population, most of who saw the Kashmir war as a “Jihad” or “Islamic Struggle”. He eventually changed his stance to support the Kashmiri movement sighting inconsistencies on the Indian side with the negotiated settlement of 1948. Second, on the question of the oath of allegiance to the state, Mawdudi held that it was to God alone that a Muslim owed allegiance till Pakistan became an Islamic state, governed solely by the rules of the Sharia. He therefore refrained from taking an oath of allegiance, and even more from serving in a non-Islamic entity, the Pakistan Army. The government reacted by immediately “banning the publications of the Jamaat, particularly theTarjuman ul-Koran,
while twenty-five members or sympathizers of the party were dismissed from the administration. Mawdudi was arrested and imprisoned in October 1948” (Gilani 1984, 273).
Even after all the confrontations the Muslim League was serving the purpose of Mawdudi’s movement. The first concrete step that the League took in building the ideological consensus of Islam in Pakistan was the Objectives Resolution introduced in the Constituent Assembly in 1949. The Jamaat was satisfied with the Resolution, considered it a milestone in that it had turned Pakistan into an Islamic state and perceived it to be a huge victory for the movement. This Resolution with some modifications was to become the preamble to the 1956 constitution of Pakistan and eventually was made a substantive part of the constitution.
The Objectives Resolution affirmed that “sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone” which He has delegated to the state of Pakistan through its people to be exercised within the limits prescribed by Him (Objectives Resolution, 1949). This delegation of authority was in consonance with principles of representative democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice as enunciated by Islam.
It also affirmed that “Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in accordance with the Quran and the Sunnah” (Objectives Resolution, 1949). The Resolution thus set the pattern for a compromise between the concepts of divine sovereignty and popular sovereignty.
When all was going well, an incident changed the Islamic direction that Pakistan was following and the 1956 constitution was not Islamic as the Jamaat expected; this was the Anti-Ahmadi agitation of 1953. This confrontation was aimed at forcing the government to declare the Ahmadis (known also as Qadianis) a non-Muslim minority, and to dismiss Sir Zafrullah Khan from the Foreign Ministry since he was an Ahmadi. The Ahmadis are the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi arousing strong opposition among Muslim theologians. Since the government had not acceded to the demands of the ‘ulema’, they demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin. This led to widespread violence in Punjab such that the army was called in and Lahore was placed under martial law on March 6, 1953.
The Jamaat-e-Islami did neither initiate nor join the anti-Ahmadi agitation until its representatives were invited to the Muslim Parties Convention held on January 16, 1953. The Jamaat, as a matter of fact, was not so much interested in the agitation as it was in framing an Islamic Constitution for Pakistan. But since the Jamaat also did not recognize the Ahmadis to be Muslims and it was present in the Muslim Parties Convention, this was taken as a pretext by the civil military-bureaucratic complex to accuse the Jamaat of fomenting the trouble. The Court of Inquiry, established to look into the causes of the agitation, concluded that the anti-Ahmadi agitation was the natural consequence of the Islamic constitution controversy created by Mawdudi and the Jamaat.
The agitation, according to the Report, was “a corollary from the Objectives Resolution passed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on March 12, 1949, from the religio-political system, which they call Islam” (Khurshid 284, 1980).
The result of the incident was that the Prime Minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, who was sympathetic to the ‘ulema’, was dismissed by the governor general Ghulam Muhalmnnad on April 17, 1953. The governor general, a seasoned Bureaucrat, was a secularist as was the new Prime Minister, Muhammad Ali Bogra, both of whom advocated the abolition of the board of ulema. The new East Pakistan governor, Chaudhri Khaliquzzaman, considered the ‘ulema’ as the chief threat to Pakistan and advocated the subordination of religion to the state. Similarly, the chief minister of Punjab and other central ministers expressed themselves against the views of the ‘ulema’. Though the Ahmadi sect was a very small sect in terms of its members, the Ahmadi incident at the time gave rise to an anti-Jamaat-e-Islami movement that arose from the establishment of the time, to push a secular agenda.
The government of the time in the words of Mawdudi failed to “generate an interpretation of Islam that could serve as an effective, realistic, meaningful ideology” that “could fit a valid substance to the Islamic form of socio-political aspiration” (Mawdudi 1974, 189). This failure was largely due to the fact that the institutionalization of Islam in Pakistan would have jeopardized the vested interests of the feudal and capitalist forces as well as the civil-military bureaucracy. The members of the landowning elite held the key to politics in Pakistan and they acted in concert with the administrative, military, and industrial elite and resisted giving Islam a role in the politics of Pakistan. Yet “they continued to pay lip service to the ideal of an Islamic society, given the fervent zeal for Islam expressed by the population” (Murad 1980, 311). Mawdudi’s problem with the feudals and capitalists was that he blamed them for keeping the majority of the population illiterate and unIslamic so that they could control their minds and actions. The establishment of true Islam would result in a push towards economic and social equality, which Mawdudi believed that the landed classes gravely feared.
The secular ruling elite on their part were impressed by the remarkable show of strength displayed by the ‘ulema’ during the anti-Ahmadi agitation, and hence adopted an Islamic formalism to assuage what they saw as potentially disruptive forces in society. They made it quite clear that they were willing to concede a role for Islamic forces in national politics but not surrender the power of legislation or decision-making, not even the power to interpret as to what was Islamic and what was not. They would endorse, as they did in the constitution of 1956, the concept of an Islamic state and Pakistan as an Islamic republic but not at the cost of secularism, modernization and development.
Consequently, the 1956 constitution envisioned the law and administration of the state as “modern, even broadly secular” (Moten 198, 2002). Its Islamic provisions were no more than high-sounding phrases having no correspondence with the country's socio-political and legal set-up. The constitution made provision for the setting up of “an organization for Islamic research and instruction” to assist in the reconstruction of Muslim society on a truly Islamic basis (1956 Constitution). It also provided that a commission would be set up for recommending measures for bringing the existing laws into conformity with the injunctions of Islam. It, however, provided that the recommendations would have to be laid before the national assembly which alone had the power to enact laws in respect thereof. Thus, the ultimate responsibility for the interpretation of Islam was given to the representatives of the people. The constitution stipulated that no laws could be enacted by the legislature which were repugnant to the injunctions of Islam; but it denied judicial intervention in case the legislature did enact such laws. At the same time, attempts were made for a more institutionalized response to counter religious influences, particularly that of Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami. For instance, the Institute of Islamic Culture was set up in 1954, a year after the anti-Ahmadi agitation. It was headed by Khalifah Abdul Hakim who considered Islam as “spirit and not body; it is aspiration and not any temporal or rigid fulfillment” (Khurshid 1984, 300). This was against the very the essence of the Jamaat-e-Islami.
By the end of 1957, Mawdudi contended that the Jamaat had no choice but to capture the state authority for without it, in his opinion, the pious order which Islam envisages could never be established. This is because at that time although in theory Pakistan was an Islamic Republic but in reality it was a sham; if the Jamaat had control over the government it could implement its Islamic agenda. Mawdudi proved his point by theorizing “the struggle for obtaining control over the organs of the state, for the sole purpose of establishing Islam, is not only desirable but in the light of the Quranic verse XVII:80, obligatory” (Mawdudi 1974, 123) However, Mawdudi declared that the capturing of the state power must be accomplished through constitutional means i.e., elections, since shariah forbids resorting to unconstitutional means for the transformation of the political system. Mawdudi, at the time, was of the opinion that the Jamaat would win any national election, if ever held. He was thus in the process bypassing his own masterplan which entailed educating the population first. His decision led to a split in the party which saw the influential Mawlana Islahi and the later founder of the Tanzeem-e-Islami, Dr. Israr, leave the party because they felt taking part in electoral politics limited the scope of the party and being part of the system was against Mawdudi’s original “masterframe”.
Ayub and Yahya 1958-71 and the Elections of 1970:
The Jamaat was not able to participate in the election which it was confident to win and which was due to held to be after the promulgation of the 1956 constitution, because the government was taken over in a military coup by Field Marshall Gen. Ayub Khan. Martial law meant that Jamaat-e-Islami was outlawed, as were other political institutions. Religious parties felt they were being specially targeted by the strike of the Pakistani generals. The members of the Jamaat interpreted Ayub Khan's coup as an attempt to eliminate any possibility of an electoral victory by Islamic parties by suppressing the 1956 constitution. The link between the Jamaat and the state once again became weak and was close to breaking point, but the Jamaat was able to resist the temptation of withdrawing from the electoral scene completely. This is because it felt it enjoyed the support of the majority of the Pakistanis and would win any general election, if ever held. The Jamaat continued to function under cover of its social, educational and religious activities and thus stayed away from direct confrontation.
The coup affected the Jamaat more ideologically than physically as it had indeed moved the political debate away from the ideological field towards issues of development. Ayub Khan’s major demands of “was the elevation of national character, progress of the country and prosperity of the masses” (Moten 2002, 148). He, therefore, undertook a massive program of modernization and the institutional reorgani zation of the state and the economy. The government displayed a firm will to reform, modernize and above all depoliticize Islam. Two important institutions were set up to achieve this. These were the Institute for Islamic Culture in Lahore, and the Institute for Islamic Research in Karachi. Both were entrusted with formulating, developing and spreading a modernistic synthesis of Islam.
Under the terms of the new constitution promulgated in 1962, Pakistan became the “Republic of Pakistan” from being the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan”. The Jamaat attacked the government on its secular and pro-Western orientations, as well as the lifestyle it promoted, particularly its deliberate disregard of the Islamic mode of life. These arguments, however, carried little weight when compared with the economic factors which worked in Ayub's favor. The Jamaat’s inability to take into account socioeconomic factors weakened the position of the Jamaat. Ayub’s economic reform plan presented another competing “masterframe” for the Jamaat. Mawdudi’s argument that an implementation of the Shariah would be able to deal with the economic woes of the population was far less convincing compared to the practical steps taken by Ayub to improve the economy. When Presidential elections were held in 1965 the Jamaat supported Jinnah’s sister, Fatima Jinnah, contrary to the prevailing consensus of the religious parties of the time. It is widely own that Ayub Khan won the Presidential due to massive rigging in the polls.
Religious issues remained on the fringe, even at the height of the challenge to Ayub Khan's regime when it was confronted with a veritable urban uprising on account of rising social inequalities and on the matter of salaries and prices. The Jamaat was marginalized on its left by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto while the issue of regional autonomy raised by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan placed regionalist parties at the forefront of the political scene.
After the resignation of Ayub Khan the Jamaat decided to collaborate with Ayub's successor, Gen. Yahya Khan, to save the country from socialism. It, therefore, entered into a coalition with centrist and rightist parties. In 1968 it launched a vigorous campaign against socialism and called for the unity of the Muslim peoples. However, the first ever national and fair, 1970 election, proved to be the turning point in the history of the Jamaat. During the campaign it seemed to be ahead of the other political forces but the results revealed that it had, in fact, suffered big reversals. On the eve of the general election, Sayyid Mawdudi expressed the confidence that the Jamaat nominees would sweep the polls while the socialists and regionalists would be defeated. But the national assembly elections resulted in a near total victory for the Awami League in East Pakistan which captured 160 of its 162 National Assembly seats. In West Pakistan, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) captured 82 of the 138 seats allocated to West Pakistan. The Jamaat-e-Islami won only 4 national assembly seats in West Pakistan and 4 provincial assembly seats, one each in East Pakistan, Punjab, Sindh, and the Northwest Frontier Province. The election results dealt a severe blow to the morale and confidence of the rank and file of the Jamaat. The Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won an absolute majority while the Pakistan People's Party became the most important political force in West Pakistan. The Jamaat had lost on both fronts. Ahmad Mumtaz writes, “for twenty years, the Jamaat had been calling for democratic elections on the assumption that given a free choice, the overwhelming majority of the people of Pakistan would vote for Islam. And now that a fair election had been held, their expectations were shattered” (Moten 121, 2002).
The Bhutto Socialist Years 1971-77:
Under Bhutto, the Jamaat was equally unsuccessful. The loss of East Pakistan, in 1971, became the cause of a grave crisis of identity and brought the ideological problem, namely the problem of the “reason for the existence” of Pakistan, back to the centre of the political debate (Khurshid 276, 1980). The creation of Bangladesh was seen as a failure to apply Islamic principles in governance. The deposed dictator Yahya Khan, whom the Jamaat supported initially, was strongly condemned for his non-Islamic behavior. Even the growing unpopularity of the Bhutto government could not benefit the Jamaat due to it being weakened by its defeat in the 1970 legislative elections and its huge mistake of collaborating with Yahya Khan during the lost war in East Pakistan. In September 1972, Mawdudi met Bhutto in Lahore. He convinced the Prime Minister of the need to evict leftist elements from the PPP and promised, in exchange, to support Bhutto's draft constitution.
Mawdudi demanded that the Bhutto’s 1973 document should rename Pakistan as the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, to stipulate in the constitution that the Prime Minister and the President had to be Muslims and for Islam be the state religion. All these stipulations were included by Bhutto in the 1973 constitution. From 1973, the Jamaat-e-Islami began systematically to oppose the government. A quarrel between a member of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba (IJT), the student branch of the party, and a member of the Ahmadi community at the Rabwa railway station in Punjab resulted in a new national anti-Ahmadi campaign. The Jamaat took the leadership of the movement fully upon its shoulders by organizing rallies, meetings, processions and agitations throughout the country. The government gave in and through a constitutional amendment declared the Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. In 1976, when the Jamaat began forcefully to demand the implementation of the Sharia, it found its membership “increasing by around 150,000 new entrants” (Khurshid 1990, 89). The last episode in the struggle between the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bhutto government took place during the March 1977 elections. The politico-religious opposition against Bhutto had consolidated under the leadership of the Jamaat and a grand alliance of rightist parties had been formed. This was the
Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) which demanded the implementation of the “Nizam-e-Mustafa” (the system of the Prophet). The Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba had earlier won the
university elections of 1976 and thus demonstrated that it constituted an important force within the universities. Consequently, when the PNA launched its campaign for the inception of the “Nizam-e-Mustafa,” the IJT was able to mobilize the resources of the educational institutions against Bhutto. It played an important role in mobilizing students and in organizing political agitations through strikes and other types of demonstrations.
The 1977 victory of the PPP was due only to the manipulation of the elections and Bhutto's denials simply inflamed the opposition further. With the rise in civil disobedience, the main leaders of the PNA were arrested. The confrontation with religious parties slowly converted the demand for civil and democraticrights into a social, Islamic movement.Bhutto contacted Mawdudi once again in an effort to end the stalemate but their meeting this time, on 16 April 1977 in Lahore, was fruitless. Bhutto then tried to counter the demand for the ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ by banning casinos and night clubs but this feeble attempt at re-Islamization was again criticized as being guided by opportunism and was rejected by the religious parties. Unable to put an end to the agitation by the PNA, the authorities were tempted to take recourse to more repressive measures and tried to arrest Mawdudi. The PNA let in be known in no uncertain terms that the arrest of Mawdudi would lead to rebellion by his sympathizers, Mediation by Saudi Arabia, however, enabled the deadlock to be broken. Bhutto tried to rally the Pakistanis together under a nationalist and anti-imperialist program, accusing the PNA and more particularly the Jamaat, of being supported by Americans. All this came to an end when on 5 July 1977 Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq, on the alibi of making Pakistan truly Islamic.
The Zia Years 1977-88:
The years during which the Gen. Zia-ul-Haq presided over of the country constituted a crucial period in the political history of the Jamaat-e-Islami. It was for the first time a part of the authority in power. In the perception of the world, its participation in government, though ephemeral, indelibly associated the Jamaat with military dictatorship. The cooperation between the Jamaat and the military regime which, in the long run, was detrimental to the basic political interests of the former, was to prove to be a total failure. The relations between Zia and the Jamaat were marked by ambiguity right from the start. To justify his coup and to widen his political base, Zia-ul-Haq appropriated to himself the demand for the “Nizam-e-Mustafa” which had been the rallying point of the PNA during the electoral campaign. He thus, hoped to restore the authority of the state and to take control of Islamic parties by their demands about the ideology of the state. In his first speech to the nation he asserted, “I must say that the spirit of Islam, demonstrated during the recent (PNA) movement, was commendable. It proves that Pakistan, which was created in the name of Islam, will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam. That is why I consider the introduction of an Islamic system as an essential prerequisite for the country” (Moten 260, 2002).
For the Jamaat, the decision to support the military regime was not an easy one. It disapproved of the coup and after having launched a campaign for Islam with democracy, it found itself in the position of having to choose between Islam and democracy. Though he had promised to erect an Islamic political and socio-economic order in the country, there was no denying that Zia was anything but democratic.
The Jamaat, for its part, hoped to head a coalition government and put pressure on Zia to organize elections. It was on promises of Islamization and restoration of democracy through the fresh polls that the Jamaat finally rallied round the regime. The Amir, Mian Tufail, after Mawdudi’s resignation in 1972, chose for his part, to concentrate exclusively on the implementation of the Sharia. For Mawdudi, the important thing was that power should be in the hands of pious persons and Zia-ul-Haq met this criterion. On 21 August 1978, an agreement was concluded between Zia and the Pakistan National Alliance for the formation of a government. The Jamaat-e-Islami was given the ministries of Production and Industry, Information, Oil and Minerals, Water and Electricity and Planning. For the first time in their history, it appeared to Islamic parties that they could not only work in a favorable environment but also enjoy state patronage.
Mawdudi died in April 1979, in the USA, after months of illness, and the party could never enjoy the religious credibility of Mawdudi’s writings. On 21 June 1979, a month after Bhutto's execution, Zia dissolved the government. Officially, members of the Jamaat resigned because of the perpetual postponement of the general elections scheduled initially for November 1979. From this date the Jamaat no longer refrained from criticizing the government for its delay in the process of Islamization but refused, to begin with, to rejoin the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). It did also, refrain from opposing Zia-ul-Haq too directly, being former members of his government and since, it was still playing a huge role in the ongoing Afghan conflict.
Zia also began to distance himself from the Jamaat. This change of attitude could be seen in various measures the government took and which revealed the growing rivalry between the regime and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The strength of the Jamaat and its political visibility depended largely on the activism of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba (IJT), which at this point was quite militant. In 1984, the government decided to outlaw all student unions. Since the IJT was the most powerful among them and had won the university elections, the Jamaat was directly affected. In addition to the loss of visibility that it brought, the ban directly affected its recruitment, the IJT being the breeding ground from which the party drew its future members and office bearers. The few attempts at resistance by the more active members of the IJT were crushed, sometimes with utmost savagery. This turnaround was all the more distressing as the authorities in power had, till then, looked on the IJT in a relatively benign manner. Between 1977 and 1982, they had encouraged its activities on campuses in order to counter the influence of Bhutto’s Peoples Students Federation.
The Afghan conflict and the support of the United States conferred on Zia-ul-Haq the international legitimacy that he had lacked. He also felt more confident on the home front where he found new allies among the apoliticalulemas.
He therefore felt less dependent on a Jamaat-e-Islami which was likely in the long run to undermine his authority. From 1984, Zia-ul-Haq decided to systematically promote, the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Karachi, which had traditionally been a bastion of the Jamaat. It had won the municipal elections there with a wide margin and had installed one of its own people in the post of Mayor when, in 1986, Zia-ul-Haq decided to get rid of the elected municipality for the benefit of the MQM. The government had earlier dissolved several workers unions in state enterprises where the National Labor Federation, controlled by the Jamaat, had won the union elections. The Jamaat was also banned from undertaking any activity within the three largest employing units of the public sector, the Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Steel Mills. These two decisions constituted a serious setback to the party and had a permanent effect on its influence in the province of Sindh.
Despite the reciprocal relationship between Zia-ul-Haq and the Jamaat-e-Islami between 1977 and 1988, with each using the other as an instrument for furthering its own policy, and despite their contradictory interests and their respective strategies, their conflict is a pointer to the gulf and even opposition between their ideologies. It is necessary to return to the policies of Islamization actually followed by Zia-ul-Haq. Zia did, indeed, begin by trying to transform the socioeconomic and political structure of the country in keeping with the principles of Islam. He thus reconstituted “the Council for Islamic Ideology”, a consultative body which had been set up for the sole purpose of giving advice on the measures to be taken to introduce a more Islamic system of government. He also introduced, in December 1978, a system of Sharia courts entrusted with ensuring that the existing laws were in conformity with Islam. However, he began to place his own ideology above that of the Sharia. In spite of the revival of the Council
for Islamic Ideology, he exempted the decrees of martial law, as well as the tax system and the overall banking system from conformity with the Sharia, declaring, moreover, that the decisions of the Sharia Courts could not by themselves eliminate, nor even change an existing. law. One such decision was made by the then Chief Justice of the Federal Shariat Court Mufti Taqi Uthmani outlawing interest in Pakistan’s economy and preparing for a non-interest based economy. The provisions regarding the competence of the Sharia Federal Court were changed twenty-eight times between 1980 and 1985. It is also significant, that the eight judges that comprised the Court were directly appointed by the President. For the Jamaat, a Muslim society would not come into being simply because a majority of its members were Muslims. It believed that only an Islamic state, which worked towards the systematic Islamization of all fields of public or private life could bring it about. Zia-ul-Haq always had a “Muslim Nationalist” of the relation between politics and religion. His policy of Islamization did not seek any change in the nature of the state. While the legislation had to draw its inspiration from the Sharia it was, nevertheless, by itself autonomous. Zia tried to use Islamization to keep himself in power, which the Jamaat eventually understood only a few years in to his regime.
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Author: Mujtaba Isani
