Why Islamists impose their will on Pakistan?

In this conservative nation of 207 million people with a Muslim majority, Islamists have great influence thanks to the identity of a country founded in the name of Islam, their power in the streets and the instability of governments, which has allowed them to exert strong pressure since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, after independence from the British Empire. The most recent shows of power to the government of the prime minister, Imran Khan, were the halting of the construction of the first Hindu temple in Islamabad, supported by the executive and parliament, and the pressure to reopen the mosques in the midst of the pandemic while the country was confined. All this with a 342-member Parliament in which Islamist parties are represented by only 15 MPs.

Power in the streets
How then did they manage to stop the construction of the temple and reopen the mosques? "They have power in the streets. What they don't get in the elections they get in the streets with protests, violence, the blocking of cities," human rights activist Tahira Abdullah tells Efe.

In protests of all kinds in Pakistan, the number of participants is often small, except in religious protests where the protesters are often counted in their thousands. "They have a captive audience: the students of madrasas (or Koranic schools). It's like an infantry. With them they can get thousands of people out on the streets," he adds.

Identity
But beyond the students of the madrasas, the Islamists have a great influence on the population. Scholar Ayesha Siddiqa explains that this influence is due to the country's identity as an Islamic nation, founded as a refuge for Muslims from the Indian subcontinent and defined as an Islamic Republic after a constitutional amendment in 1973. "Pakistan has no alternative to the Islamic identity. There is no ethnic identity in Pakistan. The formula is religion," says Siddiqa, a research associate at the South Asia Institute of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

She points out that Pakistan is a hybrid theocracy, unlike Iran or Saudi Arabia, where religious people do have formal power in the state. "The informal power of clerics to selectively apply Shariah or Islamic law is tremendous. For the analyst, the fact that Islamists do not have weight at the ballot box is irrelevant, since electoral power and ideological/religious power are different, the latter having great emotional power that connects with the people. Add to that the sum of violence and religion: "The discussion of religion immediately invokes violence," says Siddiqa.

In addition, the constant instability of the governments gives power to the clergy, a weakness promoted at times by the Army, which has governed the country for half its history and in democratic periods exercises a great influence on security and foreign policy. "One of the tactics used by the army to destabilize the government is religion," according to Siddiqa.

The academic gives as an example the Islamist protests that in 2017 blocked the main entrance to Islamabad for 21 days and ended with the resignation of the then Minister of Justice, due to a change in the oath of public office that they considered blasphemous. According to Siddiqa, in these protests the army used the Islamists to destabilize the government of then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

For Abdullah and Siddiqa, the sum of the Islamists' social influence, political instability and the role of the army prevent governments from trying to impose themselves on the religious. "No government in Pakistan, whether central or provincial, has the courage to stand up to religious leaders," Abdullah said. Siddiqa goes further: "The state has voluntarily capitulated on its right to define itself in any way other than by religious parameters.

The last resort and perhaps the most powerful of the Islamists is the use of the laws of blasphemy, which impose the death penalty for insults to Islam, although no one has been executed for this. It is precisely the politician from the opposition Muslim League of Pakistan and former Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif who has been accused of blasphemy for defending the construction of the Hindu temple in Parliament on the grounds that no religion is superior' to another.

The Islamists stress in their arguments against the temple that Pakistan was founded by and for Muslims, and other religions have no place in the country. But Pakistan's father Mohamed Ali Jinnah did not envision an extremist Pakistan - quite the contrary. "You are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosque or any other place of prayer in the state of Pakistan. You can belong to any religion, caste or creed," Jinnah said. But as columnist Sheema Mehkar recently wrote in the Daily Times, "Pakistanis seem to have heard only 'you are free to go to your mosques.