Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan (Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics)

Over time the Pakistani state has moved from accommodating the Ahmadiyya community as full citizens of the state to forcibly declaring them non-Muslim and eventually criminalizing them for their religious beliefs. Politics of Desecularization deploys the 'Ahmadi question' to theorize a core feature of modern public Islam - its contested and unsettled relationship with the nation-state form. It posits that our current understandings of modern religious change have been shaped by a highly limited number of national cases in which states have been successful at arriving at stable ideologies about religion. Pakistan, however, epitomizes polities that are undergoing protracted political and cultural struggles over religion's proper place in the state. The book's gripping account shows that these struggles are carried out in social sites as diverse as courts, legislative assemblies, and newspapers. The result in Pakistan has been the emergence of a trajectory of desecularization characterized by official religious nationalism.