The role of Islam in governance

Several historians of Pakistani origin — those living in the country or keeping a watch from the outside — have maintained that the country was founded to save Islam from being overwhelmed by the Hindu majority. The ratio between the people belonging to the two religions was four to one in favour of those who followed the Hindu faith. There was a danger that that would have happen once the British had withdrawn from the sub-continent. In my writings I have suggested that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, was planning to establish an Islamic state. He had campaigned to create a state in which those of the Muslim faith would be in majority and would thus be able to follow the Islamic way of life. He was saving the Islamic culture and practices rather than using religion to define governance. However, after his death in less than thirteen months after being sworn in as Pakistan’s first Governor General, the debate about the role of Islam in the country’s constitution became a central subject. A number of Islamic parties pushed hard for giving Pakistan a form of government that followed what they saw as the governing principles of Islam.

There was some irony in the fact that the foremost among those parties who wanted an Islamic state in Pakistan was Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) which, under the leadership of Maulana Syed Maududi, had been vigorous in opposing Jinnah’s campaign for creating the Muslim nation of Pakistan. He was against the concept of Muslim nationalism, favouring instead what he called the ummah, a super state entity that covered the entire Muslim world. He believed that by creating an Islamic nation, Muslims would be deflected from the objective of establishing the ummah. When Muhammad, in the seventh century as the Prophet of Islam, brought God’s word to the inhabitants of Arabia, he was not preaching for establishing a Muslim nation or nations. As Lesley Hazelton points out in her book, The First Muslim: The Story of Muhmmad, Muhammad was not preaching for establishing a Muslim nation. His emphasis when he went to Mecca was to have the city’s citizens live lives according to God’s will. It was only when his followers were chased out of Mecca and migrated to the northern city that was multiethnic in its make up that he turned his attention to matters of governance.

The debate about the role of Islam in politics has continued in Pakistan a quarter century after the adoption of the constitution in 1973. After the Taliban took over the control of Afghanistan in August 2022, they adopted a strict version of Islam as the principle of governance. There were a significant number of people on the Pakistan side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border who were impressed as well as sympathetic to the moves of the Taliban in Kabul. Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, included Prophet Muhammad’s approach in Medina as the model Pakistan should follow.

The recent election in Turkey has focused the attention of the world on the role of Islam in governance. After two elections — the original on May 14, 2023 and the run-off two weeks later involving the two largest vote receivers in the first election — the Election Board declared Recep Tayyip Erdogan the winner, with 52 per cent of the votes cast in his favour. According to Louisa Lovelock writing for The Washington Post in the issue of May 30, “in the eyes of the voters , many of them conservative Muslims, Erdogan is the country’s great modernizer — a man who has launched major infrastructure projects and overseen the growth of the defense industry, while bringing Islam back into public life after it was banned by the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.”

The country today is deeply divided along numerous religious and ethnic fault lines. Even though Erdogan launched his career as a national politician from Istanbul, the country’s most cosmopolitan city, the bulk of his political backing is located in Anatolia, Turkey’s mainland. This part of the country is considerably conservative, setting itself in a different political groove compared to Istanbul and some of the city’s on the Mediterranean coast.

The most telling symbol of the reorientation of Turkey’s belief system is Hagia Sophia which, for nearly a millennium, had been the epicenter of Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the city was named Istanbul. Hagia Sophia became one of the Islamic world’s finest mosques. The mosque went through another change after the secularisation of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal. In the 1930s, the new Turkish republic founded by Kemal Ataturk proclaimed it a museum and for nearly a hundred years it exhibited symbols of the country’s Christian and Muslim pasts. In 2020, Erdogan converted the building back to a mosque. Erdogan went to the building to offer prayers and thank God for his victory in the contested election. According to the analyst Edhem Eldem, professor of history at Bogazici University in Istanbul, “Hagia Sophia is the crowning of that neo Ottaminst dream. It is basically a transposition of political and ideological fights, debates, polemical views, into the realm of very primitive understanding of history and the past.”

This theme of cultural and religious transformation is picked up by the analyst Jason Farago according to whom “if the mark of 21^st century politics is the ascendancy of culture and identity, it could be said to have been born here in Turkey, home to one of the largest-running cultural wars of them all. And for the past 20 years, in grand monuments and on schlocky soap operas, at restored archaeological sites and retro new mosques, Mr. Erdogan has reoriented Turkey’s national culture, promoting a nostalgic revival of the Ottoman past — sometimes in grans style, sometimes as pure kitsch.”

Turkey’ transformation and move towards the glorification of its Islamic past under the rule of the Ottomans will have influence that would go beyond its borders. One way this influence is being felt is by generating a feeling of nostalgia about the Islamic past. This was airing by a highly popular multi-series television dramas watched all over the world, in particular in the countries with large Muslim populations. One example is Resurrection: Ertugrul, an international hit about the 13^th-century Turkic chieftain whose resistance to the penetration of Christian forces in the land of the Turks ultimately led to the establishment of the Ottomans.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 5^th, 2023.

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