256 No god but God
and the resulting cycle of violence, the warring ethnic factions in Iraq,
and the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis at the hands of the Hutus in
Rwanda, to name but a handful of cases, have all been in considerable
measure a result of the decolonization process.
When Britain abandoned India with an overwhelming Hindu
majority holding most of the economic, social, and political power in
the country, the Muslim minority, educated by the British in the per-
suasive rhetoric of democracy, came to the conclusion that the only
possible means of achieving autonomy was through Muslim self-
determination. Hence, the birth of the Islamic state.
Yet beyond the call for self-determination, there was little else
that India’s Muslim community agreed upon with regard to the role of
Islam in the state. For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s reluctant
founder, Islam was merely the common heritage that could unite
India’s diverse Muslim population into a united state. Jinnah regarded
Islam in the same way that Gandhi regarded Hinduism—as a unifying
cultural symbol, not as a religio-political ideology. For Mawlana
Mawdudi, Pakistan’s ideological instigator, the state was merely the
vehicle for the realization of Islamic law. Mawdudi regarded Islam
as the antithesis to secular nationalism and believed Pakistan would
be the first step toward the establishment of a Muslim world-state.
While the Muslim League, Pakistan’s largest political party, argued
that the Islamic state must receive its mandate from its citizens, the
Islamic Association, Pakistan’s largest Islamist organization, coun-
tered that the state could be considered Islamic only if sovereignty
rested solely in the hands of God.
In the wake of the chaos and bloodshed that followed the partition
of India, as some seventeen million people—the largest human migra-
tion in history—fled across fractured borders in both directions, nei-
ther Jinnah’s nor Mawdudi’s vision of the Islamic state was realized.
Despite the drafting of a constitution that envisioned a parliament
elected to write the laws and a judiciary appointed to decide whether
those laws were in accord with Islamic principles, Pakistan quickly
gave way to military dictatorship at the hands of Ayub Khan. Khan’s
régime lasted until 1977, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s platform of
Islamic socialism made him Pakistan’s first freely elected civilian ruler
since partition. But Bhutto’s socialist reforms, though popular with