Pakistan, like Los Angeles, is built on a fault line. LA simply sprawls across the meeting point of two tectonic plates; Pakistan has a fissure running right through its highest state institutions, through its polity, and through the minds of its people. Such has been our nation’s genius.
Islam and liberal democracy. Their meeting is up-front, in the name of The Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The ‘Republic’ came to us from the French revolution, its qualifier, ‘Islamic’, from Arabia. Both were brought by the sword, but both are now undeniably ours.
And just as the San Andreas fault reminded Los Angeles of its destructive potential last year, so this year we have been warned of the tremendous pressures building up between the two ideologies upon which our nation is built. The Senate’s Shariat bill was no tremour. If passed by the National Assembly, it would signal a major realignment of forces.
No longer will the Constitution be the arbiter of our laws, but it will lie as handmaiden to a small coterie of ‘interpreters’ and ‘explainers’ of texts. For, under Section three of the bill, “the Shariat shall be the supreme law in Pakistan.”
No longer will the people, through their elected representatives, hold the responsibility of judging their legislation as consonant with Islam, for, under Section four of the bill, the courts shall now decide what is “repugnant to Islam.”
Through the haze and fog which always descends at the mention of Islamic jurisprudence, the vague outlines of a new state structure are just visible in the text of the Shariat bill. It envisions a new balance between the demands of democracy and the dictates of Islam. Its supporters would argue that this realignment will release the pressure building up between the two. Will it?
Sadly, it will serve only to exacerbate the friction. For the bill strikes at two of the pillars of the democratic state: the rule of law and the priority of the will of the people.
The rule of law is predicated on the citizen’s ability to know whether any action will fall foul of the law or not. When law becomes arbitrary, and prediction impossible, the rule of law breaks down. The tragic consequences of this can be seen in Sindh, where the distinction between murder and political action has become so blurred that assassination and ‘sniper firing’ have become everyday events.
On the introduction of Shariat, as envisaged by the Senate’s bill, the carefully codified statutes of our traditional law will be judged on the basis of Islamic jurisprudences that have, for hundreds of years, been gathering dust in the heads of academics. Their unfettered application would release a dust storm that would cover the law with a blanket of obscurity that few, and certainly no ordinary citizen, will be able to penetrate.
The Senate was canny not to raise a dust storm within its own august chamber by refraining to give any indication of which of the country’s many Fiqh is to be applied. It has chosen to let that storm play across the country. The Senate clearly has some sense of self-preservation.
But it is a sense of self-preservation that was sadly lacking when it passed to the courts the duty to decide whether the laws passed by parliament, and hence our elected representatives, are, or are not, “repugnant to Islam”. The religious dogmatists who have repeatedly been rejected at the polls will be inducted onto courts of law to sit in judgement on those who beat them at the hustings.
So has the Senate signed away the rights of a people under a democratic system in the name of an Islamic jurisprudence that it dare not name.
If this bill is passed, and it remains with the National Assembly for 90 days before the Senate can call a joint sitting, our state will be struck with a force as destructive as an earthquake. The obscurity of the bill makes it impossible to imagine what the ruins might look like. But they will be ruins all the same.