Secular power,law and the politics of religious sentiments

Introduction

Postcolonial theorists of religion have convincingly argued that modern secular states cannot be neutral with respect to questions of religious difference (e.g. Asad, 2003; Chakrabarty, 2000; Mahmood, 2009). Through critically analysing ‘the impossibility of religious freedom' across societies, ¹ this line of inquiry has shown that all modern states, and not just those wedded to religious nationalisms, necessarily privilege certain religious sensibilities over others. At the same time, these analyses have theoretically overlooked (although this routinely crops up in empirical discussions) that the modern state’s determination of legitimate religious practices almost always conforms to religious sensibilities of particular groups or individuals in society. The elision of multiple and competing religious actors that the modern state must contend with unwittingly situates the state as a distinct entity that stands above society and uses its autonomous reason and power to deem certain religious sensibilities more legitimate than others. ² This has the effect of displacing the realm of politics constituted by conflicts, passions and interests that crucially shape how states make, perpetuate and change their determinations about legitimate religious practices and sensibilities.

This paper brings this political sphere to the fore. It focuses on colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan, two illuminating and interconnected historical contexts in which states have routinely adjudicated among competing religious sensibilities articulated by distinct religious groups. Specifically, this paper discusses how the idea that the state ought to protect the ‘religious sentiments of Muslims', which is deployed to make claims about the (supposed) religious emotions, affects and passions of the Muslim collectivity, has become central to the cultural politics of state formation in Pakistan. This issue is probed through tracing the politicization of the unorthodox religious views of the Ahmadiyya movement, a Muslim reform movement that emerged in colonial India towards the end of the 19th century.

Not unlike the controversies surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, those around the Ahmadiyya movement are entangled with the person of Prophet Muhammad. Traditionally, Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad is the last prophet to be sent on Earth by Allah. While a number of religious tenets held by the Ahmadiyya community sets them apart from mainstream Muslims, the most critical point of difference concerns the status of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement. Ghulam Ahmad made a series of theological claims that culminated in his controversial reinterpretation of the doctrinal issue of khatam-e-nabuwwat, or the Finality of Prophethood, to make room for his own claim to prophecy (Friedmann, 1989). These reinterpretations have aroused the ire of orthodox ulema ³ since the very inception of the movement (Lavan, 1974).

The issue of religious sentiments of Muslims in relation to Ahmadiyya religious thought has repeatedly arisen in colonial India and Pakistan, suggesting the following questions: Why do social actors make normative claims centered on religious sentiments to the state? What assumptions underpin the politics of religious sentiments? How do modern states make the question of religious sentiments and affects legible within their structures of governance? In trying to answer these questions, this paper draws attention to both the importance of political rhetoric about religious sentiments and the modern state’s adjudication among competing claims about religious sentiments. In so doing, it problematizes the notion that private religious sentiments originate straightforwardly from authoritative discursive traditions of Islam away from the domain of public politics.

For example, in an essay analyzing the aftermath of the publication of the infamous Danish cartoons, Saba Mahmood questions whether the public discourse that positioned this controversy as ‘a clash between the principles of blasphemy and freedom of speech' was capable of comprehending the precise ‘sense of injury' experienced and expressed by ‘millions of Muslims around the world' (Mahmood, 2009: 66–68, 70). This sense of injury, she argues, emanates from a personal ‘relationship of intimacy with the Prophet' constituted by a set of ‘affective and embodied practices' geared towards emulating the Prophet’s behavior and habits. When devout Muslims encounter objects such as the Danish cartoons, their being is shaken and a wound is inflicted.

Mahmood justifiably questions the notion that religion can be analytically reduced to an abstract system of beliefs organized around notions such as blasphemy (also see Asad, 1986). Furthermore, she fruitfully draws attention to the importance of considering religious affects and emotional attachments of Muslims. At the same time, Mahmood’s arguments rest on a number of assumptions that can be probed to further historicize the religious sentiments of Muslims. First, Mahmood’s account posits a seamless transition from a Muslim’s personal relationship of intimacy with Prophet Muhammad to a sense of moral injury upon confronting objects such as the Danish cartoons. Second, it assumes that the millions of Muslims who protested the Danish cartoons were driven to do so because of this sense of moral injury. These assumptions obscure why some objects, images and discourses, but not others, cause a sense of moral injury for some, but not other, Muslims. By not considering how private religious sentiments associated with reverence for Prophet Muhammad get connected with distinct public issues, Mahmood unwittingly posits an ahistorical understanding of what a Muslim’s ‘relationship of intimacy with the Prophet' emotively entails upon encountering objects such as the Danish cartoons.

For Islamists and their followers in Pakistan, Ahmadiyya religious thought is as morally injurious as the Danish and Charlie Hebdo cartoons. For example, as discussed below, a Pakistani state law enacted at the behest of Islamist political parties in 1984 by military ruler Zia-ul-Haq prohibits Ahmadis from publicly practicing Islam on the grounds that this ‘outrages the religious feelings of Muslims'. Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law four years after military rule ended. Furthermore, no popular movement has thus far questioned either the anti-Ahmadiyya or the anti-Blasphemy laws that disproportionately target religious minorities in Pakistan. ⁴ On the other hand, in the aftermath of the publication of the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons in 2015, protests organized by major political parties (both Islamist and non-Islamist), erupted across Pakistan. In a show of solidarity with these protests, the Pakistani Parliament issued a statement that ‘Freedom of expression should not be misused as a means to attack or hurt public sentiments and religious beliefs' (Zia ur-Rehman and Masood, 2015). These episodes clearly indicate that religious sentiments and beliefs, although analytically distinct, are deeply interlinked in the public political sphere. Furthermore, the endemic issue of protection of ‘public sentiments and religious beliefs' of Muslims is suggestive of a particular conception of religion that simultaneously extols the idea of religious sentiments of Muslims and depicts beliefs as a dimension of religion that requires state protection.

This paper historicizes this conception of religion by examining both how social actors make claims about religious sentiments and beliefs and how the state deploys law to respond to these claims. In deeming certain religious sensibilities and sentiments more authoritative than others, state officials may certainly be driven by their own religious understandings and commitments. In such cases, actions and policies of these actors cannot be reduced to or explained by arguments that posit rational–calculative use of religion by shrewd political elites. ⁵ At other times, political elites may indeed be engaged in generating and linking ‘political emotions' with other cherished domains of social life, such as the family or religion (Berezin, 1999). However, none of these scenarios can explain sociopolitical contestations centered on which religious sentiments, emotions and affects ought to be recognized as legitimate by the state, enshrined in its laws, and drawn upon for future policy interventions.

A historical approach to the relationship between law and religious sentiments also poses questions about Mahmood’s related argument that the modern nation-state is unable to comprehend the sense of moral injury that religious minorities feel. She argues that modern states everywhere deploy legal arguments calling for public order to accommodate the religious sensibilities of the majority. Mahmood (2009: 86) states, ‘regardless of the social context when this legal reasoning is used, it tends to privilege the cultural and religious beliefs of the majority population'. Thus, since the ‘cultural practices of secular-liberal law' privilege ‘the Judeo-Christian population' in Europe, law will only protect the sensibilities of this population.

However, how do we account for laws and public order jurisprudence that privilege the religious sentiments of minorities over majorities? How do we theorize those instances in which much contentious political activity precedes the modern state’s articulation of religious sentiments of majorities? More specifically, and in relation to the present empirical issue, how should we analytically approach the salience of contentious politics, characterized by vociferous state–society interactions, through which social actors have consolidated the authority of the Pakistani state to adjudicate among religious sentiments of Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis with varying outcomes?

In taking up the above lines of inquiry, this paper draws on sociological approaches to emotions that conceptually locate ‘emotion' itself as a concept that has a social history (McCarthy, 1989). In this perspective, emotions – and by extension religious sentiments – are not timeless and ahistorical realities but concepts that have crystallized in language through human experiences and evaluations at particular historical moments (Elias, 2000). Second, a sociological approach holds that emotions have a strong social component. Although inherently biological, emotions are characterized by an amalgam of expressions, feelings and mentalities that are socially negotiated. Emotions are intersubjective, communicative, and constitutive of a social and relational space through which interpretations and evaluations of common topics of interest and socially resonant issues are shared, contested and negotiated (Parkinson, 1996). Finally, and in a related vein, scholars have theorized the ways in which the polity itself arouses emotions in citizen-subjects such that it can become an object of either emotional attachment or distaste. This affective dimension suggests that inclusion in a polity involves much more than a formal relationship with the state (Berezin, 2002). Consequently, social actors and movements who make claims on the state are often engaged in kindling and cultivating emotions about the polity itself, through linking it to the concrete social issue at hand (Jasper, 2006; also see collected essays in Goodwin et al., 2009).

Taking cue from these theoretical orientations, this paper questions the analytical bifurcation between the logic of lived Islam (wherein religious sentiments and affects take shape through Islamic discursive traditions) and that of secular–rational structures of modern state governance (Hallaq, 2013; Mahmood, 2009). First, it demonstrates that social actors routinely seek to make their religious sentiments legible and authoritative within the institutional apparatus of the modern state, most often although not exclusively through the domain of law, in a bid to universalize them. As Ann Laura Stoler (2007: 9) argues, colonial states were actively engaged in ‘shaping appropriate and reasoned affect, by directing affective judgments, by severing some affective bonds and establishing others, by adjudicating what constituted moral sentiments'. The Ahmadi question suggests that this dimension of arguably all modern states is intertwined with the realm of agonistic politics (Bourdieu, 1999; Mouffe, 2000). Social actors routinely engage in contestations over what a given religious tradition demands emotively, and how the state ought to deem certain religious sentiments more legitimate and worthy of state protection than others. A central dimension of modern politics thus consists of struggles over defining and authorizing hegemonic and commonsense private religious sentiments through the medium of the state.

Second, this paper argues that the modern state is highly elastic with respect to accommodating various religious sensibilities and affects. The states in colonial India and Pakistan have varied with respect to how they have addressed claims centered on religious sentiments of Muslims vis-à-vis Ahmadiyya religious difference. Both these states have sometimes accommodated the religious sentiments of Ahmadis and at other times of non-Ahmadi Muslims. This suggests that modern states engage with claims centered on religious sentiments in historically contingent ways, depending on the broader socio-religious and political contexts, and through drawing upon both its institutional resources (e.g. positive law) and discursive repertoires (e.g. public order jurisprudence, official utterances).

In what follows, this paper first examines how various social actors, both Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis, engaged the British colonial state in India in order to inscribe their religious sentiments into the language of state governance. The second section turns to postcolonial Pakistan and examines how the idea that Ahmadis offend the ‘religious sentiments of Muslims' has become entrenched in Pakistani politics and state formation. The third section demonstrates that legal justifications centered on public order arguments have differentially functioned to both accommodate and criminalize religious sensibilities of Ahmadis across time.

Colonial State and the Politics of Religious Sentiments

The politics of religious sentiments is undertaken through a range of means, and for a variety of ends that must be historically specified. Some social actors demand that the state should equally protect the religious sentiments of all of its citizen-subjects. Others make claims on the basis of religious majoritarianism and in defense of religious orthodoxies. In general, claims are contingent on broader political contexts and entail expenditure of efforts to make religious sensibilities legible within the institutions of the modern state. Furthermore, religious claimants engage the state as if it were an ethical entity with duties and obligations towards its citizen-subjects. This was as true for the British colonial state in India as it is for the postcolonial Pakistani state that followed.

The Ahmadiyya movement emerged in the post-1857 rebellion period, at which time the British colonial state in India explicitly claimed religious non-interference as an orienting policy (Jones, 1989; van der Veer, 2001). However, the colonial state routinely intruded into religious matters such as abolition of sati or widow-burning (Mani, 1998). Such measures were designed to interfere with Indian religion and society through a language of reform deeply informed by notions of Indian depravity and Christian moral superiority (Cohn, 1996). Colonial subjects were active participants in both instituting and resisting these trends, in the process developing their own distinct vocabularies and idioms for making sense of these changes. The colonial state’s stated norms of religious non-interference and equality also generated a set of claims by Muslims that sought to shape the colonial state’s sensibilities about its imperatives and ethical commitments towards its Muslim subjects. This section examines two such instances pertaining to Ahmadiyya religious difference.

In 1927, an Ahmadi missionary Jalal-ud-Din Shams was stabbed in Damascus by an orthodox Muslim and subsequently expelled by French authorities. Ahmadiyya leaders in India requested a formal investigation of the expulsion, claiming that:

The Local Government there has done so only because the Muslim priests there differ from us in certain religious doctrines such as Jehad etc. and therefore I request your favour of communicating with the Foreign Government urging them to give a religious independence to our missionaries like they have given to the Christian Missionaries and the Missionaries of other denomination. ⁶

The Ahmadiyya movement was cognizant that the colonial state had the authority to appraise public emotionally laden situations involving religious matters, and to authorize certain emotional responses as more lawful than others. Furthermore, its claim was premised on the notion that colonial authorities were under obligation to protect Ahmadiyya religious sentiments over those of the non-Ahmadi Muslim. The invocation that ‘the Local Government there has done so only because the Muslim priests there differ from us in certain religious doctrines' demonstrates the centrality of doctrinal issues in this matter.

For Ahmadis, their Muslimness and love for Prophet Muhammad was beyond reproach. Consequently, when non-Ahmadi Muslims attacked Ahamdis and the state did not intervene, it lent legitimacy to misplaced sentiments of anti-Ahmadi Muslims. However, British authorities responded with the argument that the French decision was based on the ‘consideration of public order'. They invoked a distinction between missionaries in Syria who were engaged in providing for ‘the spiritual welfare of an established community' and those like Jalal-ud-Din Shams who were engaged in ‘creating a new one'. ⁷ It was maintained that Ahmadi missionaries ‘differed from those of other missionaries in Damascus in that they were a dissemination of a new religion rather than a mainstream to adherents of established religions'. ⁸ In other words, colonial state authorities qualified their (supposed) normative commitment to religious equality by making a distinction between ‘established' and ‘new' religious communities.

In general, arguments for public order function to authorize the state’s sensibilities about what constitutes the boundaries between public and private domains to which religious practice must conform (Agrama, 2010: 505). Public order arguments, although couched in a religiously neutral language, are deeply political, especially in the context of conflicts among religious groups. In these instances, they serve to uphold certain religious subjectivities over others. For example, in the present case, Ahmadis were implicitly marked as public nuisances by virtue of being religious innovators. The supposed religious sensibilities of the orthodox majority were privileged over, and deemed more legitimate than, those of Ahmadis.

With their claim, Ahmadis had sought to subvert an emerging majoritarian Sunni religious sensibility that deems it illegitimate to bring innovations into interpretation of doctrine of the Finality of Prophethood. By rejecting the Ahmadiyya claim, the colonial state essentially lent legitimacy to an emotive response that balks at the sight of Ahmadiyya religious difference. From the colonial state’s perspective at that moment, because Ahmadis disturbed ‘established' religious norms, the perpetration of physical violence on Ahmadis was wholly understandable (although it is questionable whether such stabbing would have been condoned by authorities in colonial India itself).

Another crucial moment in this religious conflict arose, this time inside British India, when the philosopher, poet and politician Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) called upon the colonial state, unsuccessfully, to lawfully declare Ahmadis separate from the rest of the Indian Muslim community. Iqbal, dubbed Pakistan’s ‘national poet' and credited with inspiring the movement for Pakistan, argued that the Ahmadiyya movement presented ‘a serious danger to the solidarity of Islam' (Iqbal, 1976: 59). The integrity of a Muslim society was ‘secured by the Idea of the Finality of Prophethood alone' (Iqbal, 1976: 17). By claiming to be a prophet, Ghulam Ahmad had violated one of the only two core tenets of Islamic faith, the other being belief in oneness of God.

Iqbal’s demand did not emanate from an engagement with traditional Islamic jurisprudence on heresy. It instead rested upon a particular religious sentiment that was increasingly becoming publicly salient among urban, politically engaged Muslims at this time: the protection of the doctrinal notion of the Finality of Prophethood. With his demand, Iqbal sought to universalize and consolidate this religious sentiment through the authority of the colonial state. At the same time, his demand was premised on a critique of the colonial state’s policy of religious non-interference that allowed religious deviants such as Ahmadis to emerge and thrive in India:

Any religious adventurer in India can set up any claim and carve out a new community for his own exploitation. This liberal state of ours does not care a fig for the integrity of a parent community, provided the adventurer assures it of his loyalty and his followers are regular in the payment of taxes due to the State. (Iqbal, 1976: 63)

Iqbal argued that the colonial state’s ‘liberal' policy provided ‘encouragement' to ‘religious adventurers on the ground of modern liberalism' (Iqbal, 1976: 60, 64).These adventurers, he argued, take ‘advantage of the modern Press' and become ‘forces of disintegration, masquerading as Reformist movements' (Iqbal, 1976: 10). At a time when ‘the integrity of [the] parent community' was a political imperative, a recurring theme with Iqbal, colonial state’s policy of non-interference allowed the emergence of reformist movements that pulled away from building a political community and forging consensus. Clearly, Iqbal did not perceive this ‘liberal state' to be neutral vis-à-vis normative questions pertaining to the negotiation of religious differences. Yet, this did not stop him from making demands on the state.

Iqbal maintained that the issue at hand was not merely political. There was a ‘real cultural significance of the idea of Finality in Islam' (Iqbal, 1976: 62). By thus linking the political and the cultural, he rendered the issue of Finality of Prophethood not only central to the Islamic religious tradition but also in need of state protection. In seeking to gain institutional support for this religious tenet, he implicitly sought to graft onto the state’s classificatory schema a particular religious affect associated with veneration of Prophet Muhammad. He also brought dynamics internal to a contentious Muslim politico-religious field to the colonial state for adjudication. ⁹

On the whole, colonial subjects were pivotal in enhancing the authority of the colonial state to regulate religious matters and arbitrate among divergent religious sensibilities. Here a crucial element of the practical meanings of secular power of the state for these religious actors is witnessed. On the one hand, the colonial state was deeply suspect and lacked hegemony (Guha, 1998). On the other hand, the authority of the state could be potentially deployed by religious actors to adjudicate among salient and pressing issues in the religious field, through calling forth the state as if it was an ethical entity. It is this tension between the coercive powers of the colonial state and its claim to being a neutral entity that animated the political sphere in which religious actors engaged the colonial state with respect to religious sentiments.

The above episodes also draw attention to contentious politics aimed at drawing on the authority of the colonial state to legitimize and institutionalize particular religious sentiments. In a sense, both the Ahmadis and Iqbal perceived the structural ‘impossibility of religious freedom' (Sullivan, 2005). Sullivan argues that law necessarily privileges certain religious sensibilities over others, and that some religious lives are always freer than others, even within secular–liberal legal frameworks. It is precisely because, first, everyone’s religious sentiments (or sentiments about religion) cannot be accommodated simultaneously by the modern state and, second, because the state possesses extraordinary powers to influence how religion is practiced publicly that it emerges as a crucial entity in the politics of religious sentiments. Social actors seek to act upon the state in order to gain legitimacy for their religious sentiments, enfold them into formal policies, and direct the duties of the state towards its citizen-subjects. The next section examines this political arena in the changed context of the nation-state of Pakistan.

Nation-State and Religious Sentiments

Ahmadis are a numerically small religious group in Pakistan but have exerted a huge symbolic presence by virtue of raising the question ‘Who is a Muslim?' ¹⁰ As noted above, visual and literary depictions of Muhammad found in cultural products such as the Danish cartoons and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses produce distress among many Muslims. In a similar vein, the Ahmadiyya community’s belief that religious guides and reformers can appear after Prophet Muhammad disturbs a conservative Sunni Muslim sensibility invoked by Deobandi ulema, and strongly centered on the singular veneration of Prophet Muhammad. ¹¹

Religious groups such as the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami have concentrated much effort into getting the Pakistani state to officially declare Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority (Saeed, 2012). The result of these efforts is that Ahmadis were declared a non-Muslim minority by the state in 1974. The Second Constitutional Amendment (SCA), unanimously approved by Pakistan’s first democratically elected National Assembly, forcibly declares Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority by constitutionally defining a non-Muslim as:

A person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of The Prophethood of Muhammad (Peace be upon him), the last of the Prophets or claims to be a Prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad (Peace be upon him), or recognizes such a claimant as a Prophet or religious reformer. ¹²

The SCA was inserted into a constitution that upholds liberal rights to religious freedom and equality while nominally declaring Islam the ‘state religion' of Pakistan. ¹³ It purports to protect religious sentiments associated with reverence for Prophet Muhammad.

It may be argued that the the SCA refers to doctrinal and cognitive dimensions of religious belief. Consequently, its definition of a non-Muslim pertains to abstract matters and not to lived religious practices through which affective and emotional bonds with Prophet Muhammad are formed. However, the SCA was premised on the highly emotionally resonant ideology of Pakistani religious nationalism, which holds that Pakistan was formed for the Muslims of South Asia. An organized religious movement led by prominent Islamist political parties demanded that the state consider the religious feelings of these Muslims who were injured by Ahmadiyya religious beliefs. Furthermore, these Islamists sought a democratic and constitutional, and not a theological, framework to ascertain the nature of Ahmadiyya religious beliefs, in particular the question whether they are Muslim or not (Saeed, 2012). These social processes were not shaped through Islamic discursive traditions. Instead, they unfolded in a sociopolitical context in which ‘Islam' has acquired cultural and political meanings that transcended this tradition. Seen in this broader context, the SCA emerges as a particularly significant moment not in terms of reflecting the religious sentiments of Muslims but as one of deeming legitimate a very specific religious affect in relation to what constitutes respect for Prophet Muhammad.

Essentially, the SCA gave legitimacy to the idea that Muslims ought to feel affronted by ‘deviants' such as Ahmadis, and that constitutional law is a crucial means for protecting Islam. The state acceded to deploying law to give expression to what was posited by the religious establishment as being a necessary step for the creation of a Muslim nation-state. In this context, consider the justification that the state, in the person of the Attorney-General of Pakistan Yahya Bakhtiar, offered for a legislative inquiry into the religious status of the Ahmadiyya community:

It [religion] is just not a matter of heart and conscience. It remains a matter of heart and conscience only if you think, if you believe, if you have a faith; but the moment you give an expression to that faith, that belief, you are likely to hurt somebody, you are likely to affect somebody, you are likely to favour somebody? (National Assembly of Pakistan, 1974: 24)

From the perspective of the state, allied at this moment with the orthodox religious establishment in Pakistan, religious beliefs are deeply public because they provoke emotional responses in others. For example, religious beliefs may either ‘favor' or ‘hurt' those who come in contact with these beliefs. For the state, these personal emotional responses – of feeling ‘favored’ or ‘hurt’ – are not private matters but have a deep political significance in a Muslim state in which the Muslim majority’s religious sentiments must be protected.

This reasoning also became the justification for the promulgation of an executive ordinance by the authoritarian military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq in 1984. Titled Anti-Islamic Activities of the Qadiani group, Lahore group and Ahmadis (Prohibition and Punishment) Ordinance, 1984, this ordinance stipulates that the use of ‘epithets, descriptions and titles, etc., reserved for certain holy personages or places' such as azaan and masjid is reserved for Muslims, and ‘misuse' by Ahmadis is liable to punishment by fines and imprisonment. Another section criminalizes any Ahmadi who refers to herself/himself as Muslim, who preaches or propagates her/his faith or ‘in any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims'. ¹⁴ The 1984 Ordinance is not justified through arguments about ‘public order', a legal instrument that is in fact present in Pakistan’s constitutional law. ¹⁵ It also does not base its authority in any sharia injunction. ¹⁶ It is, instead, anchored in the norm of protection of ‘the religious feelings of Muslims'.

The 1984 Ordinance, which was undertaken by Zia-ul-Haq at the behest of the conservative religious establishment that he had allied himself to, met with more public criticism than the SCA. It is impossible to gauge how accurately it represented the ‘religious feelings' of Pakistani Muslims at that time. In the present context, its significance lies in the ways in which it attempts to constitute what Pakistani Muslims’ religious feelings ought to be vis-à-vis Ahmadiyya religious difference. By elevating the sentiments and ‘religious feelings' of the Pakistani Muslim, this ordinance defers to those religious actors who claim to know the sentiments of Pakistani Muslims. By its presence within law, the Ordinance becomes pivotal in shaping religious sensibilities about what the Islamic tradition demands by way of law in the context of the modern nation-state (Saeed, 2013).

The criminalization of Ahmadis through the 1984 Ordinance is discursively positioned by the state as an ‘Islamic' law although its authority is neither based on, nor derives from, the Quran or Hadith. In implicitly couching itself as an ‘Islamic' law by virtue of claiming to strike at the ‘anti-Islamic activities' of Ahmadis, the 1984 Ordinance seeks to establish and enact understandings about what the Quran and Hadith demand from the Muslim nation-state’s law. Thus, rather than representing the ‘religious sentiments' of Muslims, this Ordinance is a moment in an ongoing social struggle to establish certain religious sentiments as more authoritative and legitimate than others.

Law, Public Order and Religious Sentiments

The discussion above has demonstrated that irrespective of the state structure in place, social actors in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan have been pivotal in rendering and consolidating religious sentiments as an object of political contestation and state intervention. Essentially, these actors made claims about which religious sentiments are legitimate, ought to be cultivated, and are worthy of being recognized and sanctioned by the state.

This section returns to Saba Mahmood’s argument that the structure of modern secular governance in the context of the nation-state is inherently disposed towards protecting majorities. This, Mahmood argues, is done through the legal notion of ‘public order' which can only function to protect the sentiments of the majority. This argument can indeed be supported by noting that when Ahmadis challenged the 1984 Ordinance in Pakistan’s Supreme Court, the court upheld its constitutionality on a number of grounds, including the protection of religious feelings of Muslims and the ‘public order' argument. ¹⁷

Upon further historical scrutiny, however, it can be seen that this argument is not tenable. Public order arguments have previously aided Pakistani judges in their attempts to marginalize the religious sentiments of anti-Ahmadi groups and not Ahmadis. This came to fore in the aftermath of a large-scale anti-Ahmadiyya movement that unfolded in the 1950s. During the course of a judicial inquiry into the ensuing riots, two prominent judges maintained that:

Provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense. (Lahore High Court, 1954: 231)

This disdain of ‘the masses' and their supposed latent potential for disrupting public order was articulated alongside the principle that ‘faith is a matter for the individual', and with the recognition that attack on Ahmadiyya religious leaders must ‘have deeply wounded the religious susceptibilities of the Ahmadis' (Lahore High Court, 1954: 279). The judges’ assertion that the ‘religious susceptibilities' of Ahmadis must have been ‘deeply wounded' explicitly recognizes that Ahmadis must feel a sense of injury when their sincerely held beliefs were continually questioned by non-Ahmadis. During the anti-Ahmadiyya agitation, one state official noted:

The orthodoxy of the Ahmadis is heterodoxy of the non-Ahmadis and if the latter class are allowed to inveigh against the Ahmadis, will they also be given the right to declaim from pulpit and platform that what they believe is the truth and the rest all blasphemy? If we concede this right to one section of the public, are we prepared to allow the Christians to preach what they piously believe regarding our Prophet (peace be on him) and shall we be prepared to risk public demonstrations by the Shias of their sentiments towards some of the most illustrious of the sahaba [companions of Prophet Muhammad]? Is it the intention to make this country a battlefield for warring groups and religions with the ultimate object that the vanquished will either perish or will be converted? … We should, therefore, know whether considerations of law and order should be given paramount importance or whether we should give priority and precedence to the religious beliefs and the susceptibilities of the majority of our people. (Lahore High Court, 1954: 71–72)

For this state official, considerations of public order were markedly at odds with accommodating ‘the religious beliefs and the susceptibilities of the majority of our people'. Clearly, ‘public order' arguments are not structurally disposed towards protecting the (supposed) religious sentiments of majorities. They do, however, function to marginalize groups that the state considers problematic.

For example in 1968, Punjab provincial authorities banned an Urdu weekly journal from publishing any material ‘touching on the origin, prophecies, revelation or beliefs of any sect of Islam or on their comparative merits of status'. ¹⁸ This ban was undertaken to stop the publication of the anti-Ahmadiyya content of the journal on the grounds that such materials ‘tend to seriously affect amity and harmony among various sects of the Muslim community and is, therefore, prejudicial to the maintenance of public order'. In response, the journal’s editor petitioned the Lahore High Court to rescind the ban on a number of grounds, including the constitutionally guaranteed right to profess and propagate religion. This petition was declined.

The court noted that the Pakistani constitution made the exercise of religious rights ‘subject to law, public order and morality'. It denied the petition on the basis of both ‘requirements of maintenance of law and order and morality' and ‘the expression subject to law'. It argued that the latter – that is the expression ‘subject to law' – implied ‘a recognition of similar freedom of every other citizen of Pakistan'. Thus, the petitioner’s argument that the right to religious expression meant freedom to proclaim that Ahmadis were non-Muslim ‘overlooks the fact that Ahmadis as citizens of Pakistan are also guaranteed by the Constitution the same freedom to profess and proclaim that they are within the fold of Islam'. Although the court did not bring up the issue of religious sentiments, it essentially drew on the limiting expression ‘subject to law, public order and morality' to privilege the religious sensibilities of Ahmadis over those of non-Ahmadis.

Constitutional jurisprudence in Pakistan has also explicitly protected the religious sensibilities of Ahmadis. For example, after the enactment of the SCA but before the promulgation of the 1984 Ordinance, some ulema petitioned the court to prohibit Ahmadis from constructing their places of worship in the shape of mosques or referring to them as mosques, giving the Islamic call for prayers, or praying in a manner in which Muslims pray. The basis of these complaints was that ‘the religious sentiments of…Muslims are wounded by these activities…which have created a law and order situation'. ¹⁹ The Lahore High Court, where the case ultimately landed upon appeal, struck down these arguments on a number of grounds. In the course of enumerating these, the court attempted to situate Ahmadis as Muslims, even though law deems them non-Muslim, so as to accommodate their religious sentiments. Specifically, it maintained, ‘except for some…minor differences the Qadianis do believe in the mission of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and the Holy Qur’an and traditions'. The judges in this case did not accept the petitioners’ claims pertaining to the ‘religious sentiments of Muslims'. Law and public order arguments, in short, can function to accommodate or exclude religious minorities, depending on existing legal norms about whose religious sentiments ought to be cultivated and protected by the state.

Conclusions

This paper has examined a number of illuminating historical episodes in which social actors in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan have sought to define legitimate religious sentiments pertaining to one specific issue – the nature of Ahmadiyya religious difference – through the legal apparatus of the modern state. It has advanced a historical and political approach that builds on postcolonial and post-secular interventions that take religious lives, sentiments and affects seriously. At the same time, it has been attentive to critiques of ahistoricism, cultural relativism and apoliticism that have been justifiably levied against these interventions (Butler, 2009; Cooper, 2005; Mufti, 2013).

Specifically, this paper argues that religious sentiments cannot be fully explained through either religious discursive traditions or disciplinary powers of the modern nation-state. They are deeply political because they are entangled with public struggles over meanings and evaluations of socially resonant religious issues. Oftentimes, social actors have acute investments in translating their religious sensibilities into a language that the modern state can comprehend. Their aims are to gain state protection for their religious sentiments, and to legitimize and institutionalize their own understandings of what the religious tradition demands emotively.

Under colonial rule, Ahmadis made claims on the state in order to position themselves as equal to other religious communities, and to manage social hostilities directed towards them. The Muslim poet Iqbal drew on the authority of the colonial state when he demanded that the state ought to declare Ahamdis separate from the rest of the Indian Muslim community. In so doing, he made an argument about the Islamic discursive tradition and the threat it faced from ‘adventurers’ like Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya community. In independent Pakistan, anti-Ahmadiyya religious groups have continuously made claims on the state to protect the ‘religious sentiments of Muslims', in an attempt to regulate what the religious sentiments of Pakistanis ought to be when confronted with Ahmadiyya religious difference. The state, on its part, has shifted from accommodating to criminalizing Ahmadis, first defending the ‘religious susceptibilities' of Ahmadis and then the ‘religious feelings' of Pakistani Muslims. These processes have led to the entrenchment of a particular conception of religion that reifies the very idea of religious sentiments of Muslims, and depicts Islam as an arena of social life requiring state protection.

This paper neither positions law (or the state) as a neutral and transcendental social spaces for facilitating religious lives and freedoms, nor seeks to displace them from scholars' normative conversations because of ‘the impossibility of religious freedom' (Sullivan, 2005). It instead seeks to draw attention to the multiple ways in which concrete social actors themselves put stakes in shaping and transforming public religious sentiments through the state. Social actors oftentimes demand that the state act authoritatively about which dimensions of religion ought to be legally protected and which deemed impermissible. In general, it is safe to posit that when members of Muslim majorities make these demands, they are also engaged in, or can have the effect of, excluding and criminalizing religious ‘deviants' who have supposedly veered from established religious conventions. When, on the other hand, such claims are made by Muslim minorities, as for example by European Muslims in response to offensive cartoons, they are entangled with existing economic, social and cultural hierarchies. This is not to suggest that all of these demands are divorced from a sense of moral injury that emanates from lived religious traditions and affective relationships constituted by them. It is merely to point out that this moral injury cannot be disentangled from non-religious aspects of lived realities that pertain to citizenship, nationalism and belonging. Consequently, privileging either ‘state' or ‘society' as sites of emancipation (or exclusion) vis-à-vis the question of religious difference overlooks the ways in which both can function to enhance or retard the potential and possibilities for peaceful co-existence. The insights advanced in this paper seek to open lines of inquiry that can historicize these various configurations.