Negotiating Pakistan: A Genealogy of a Post-colonial Islamic Stat

This dissertation explores the possibilities of Islamic statehood in post-colonial Pakistan through the works of three figures involved in framing the idea of the Islamic state: W.C. Smith, Muhammad Asad, and Muhammad Munir. Each of these three thinkers owes their position and prestige to the dynamics of colonialism, either as one employed in colonial educational institutions and the western academic study of Islam (Smith), or one involved in the critique of empire (Asad), or one tasked with adjudicating the new post-colonial state and its relationship to Islam (Munir). Although their projects embraced to some extent an extension of the colonial state's hegemonic practices of domination and control, the state was seen by these thinkers as a space in which liberal values could be impregnated with Islamic authenticity. Each of them would find ready opponents amongst the 'ulama and the Jama'at, who imagined the creation of Pakistan as an opportunity to return to a precolonial past. In exploring these stories, I aim to complicate the genealogy of the Islamic state idea as it was conceived in Pakistan and to provide a perspective from which to understand the ongoing struggles of the Pakistani state to come to terms with both its religious and secular heritage.