Islam in Pakistan

In its brief write up as an independent state since 1947 up until the early 1990s, Pakistan has seen a succession of numerous semipolitical privateities and yet not a genuine transformation. As Professor Lawrence Ziring underlines in his article "The instant Stage of Pakistani Politics": "A definite humdrum prevailed; the call always has been for democracy, both in institutions and procedure, but the naturalism seldom reflected such aspirations" (Ziring, 1993, p. 1175). The political process was in circumstance often dominated by military rule and coherent heads of martial law. Despite the considerable amount of lip usefulness given to the rule of law, the judiciary proved, on the whole, to be subordinate to executive authority.

A new era of Pakistani politics seems to have begun after the crisis of the 1980s and thanks to the policies pursued by military ruler Mohammed Zia ul-Hag. He consciously set cardinal forces in motion: Islam and political democracy. Ziring notices, "No one forrader Zia sought to seriously structure the interface between these two major claimants for the attention of the Pakistani masses. His predecessors either made attribute reference to one side or the other, and it was Zia who forced Pakistani society to come to grips with its fundamental contradictions" (Ziring, 1993, p. 1176).

After more than 40 years characterized by a political sys

Regardless of his decl atomic number 18d attachment to more traditional Islamic values, and in a way exactly because of them, Nawaz Sharif, homogeneous Bhutto, found himself at odds with the power centers inherited by dint of the Western colonial experience.

And, in fact, one of the criticisms of Bhutto's second condition in office has been exactly how her government has harassed and frighten members of the opposition (Kempster and Dahlburg, 1995, p. A8). Quite a few people are shocked at seeing how Bhutto, too, a traditional mavin of democracy against dictatorship, can play the rough-and-tumble politics traditionally practiced in Pakistan.

Kempster, Norman, and John-Thor Dahlburg. (1995, April 11). U.S. turned its back, Bhutto says. Los Angeles Times., pp. Al-A8.

According to one theory, Islam itself, whether fundamentalistic or not, is incompatible with liberal, human-rights oriented Western-style representative democracy (Perlmutter, 1992, p. A1). Islam is seen by some as intrinsically fundamentalist for three unified reasons: the Qur'an being the word of God dictated and recited by the prophet Muhammad can only be read literally; the truly word Islam means "submission" and the ultimate goal of the truster is to submit all aspects of life to Allah's will, as expressed by means of the Qur'an, the Sunna (examples of the prophet) and their codification in Islamic law; finally, to those consider Islam with fundamentalism, the only Muslim society which has successfully enforced the separation of religion and state is Turkey, thanks to the coming to power of a committed secularist such as Kemal Ataturk. Hence, fundamentalism is also sometimes called "political Islam" because it seeks to bring about an Islamic state (Marty and Appleby, 1992, p. 139).

A personal clash between Nawaz Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq ensued, the conclusion of which, after a period in which the country's economy suffered profound dislocation, was their simultaneous resignations in the pass of 1993.

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