The Legislative history of the shariah act by Christine Amjad-Ali and Charles Amjad-Ali / Christian Study Centre Rawalpindi 1992

Paperback 1992

PAGES: 98

PUBLISHER: Christian Study Centre

LANGUAGE: English

English Summary:

The Legislative History of The Shariah Act - English Edition

Pakistan was the first contemporary nation-state which defined itself in terms of religion as it came out of the colonial period. (Israel was the second country to follow this policy). In this context Pakistan has struggled to find the right combination between Islam and modern political structures. So it has tried to define itself as an ideological state which works out of established western political institutional structures.

The arena of this struggle has been the Constitution. Over the last almost 45 years constitutional debates have tried to maintain a workable dialectic between Islam as an ideology and the functioning of modern political structures. However, the dialectic has been distorted in the political tug of war between the state machinery (the status quo) and the people’s politics. In this tug of war, the status quo has not hesitated to use religion whenever convenient in order to keep the political parties and the people’s politics at bay. The present attempt in Pakistan to enforce the juridical dictates of Islamic law (shariah), which came about some eleven hundred years ago, is basically of this character.