Print, Publish, Punish: The Qur’an and the Law from Colonial India to Contemporary Pakistan

Abstract

Abstract This paper contributes a legal and a South Asian perspective to the emerging scholarship on the materiality of the Qur’an, exploring and analysing the development of the laws and regulations that protect the Qur’an as a sacred object against the risk desecration, defilement as well as heretical translations and interpretations. Starting with the enactment of Indian Penal Code, 1860 in colonial India and ending with amendments to the Punjab Holy Quran (Printing and Recording) Act, 2011 in 2022, this paper identifies multiple layers of statutes and regulations that accompany the life-cycle of the Qur’an from ‘cradle to grave’. In analysing the legal developments that have fused the object and the text of the Qurʾan into a legal entity that demands particular interpretations of Islam, this paper identifies an Islamic state doctrine that asks and expects the Pakistani state to protect and promote Islamic law and religion in an increasing number of contexts and occasions, the protection of the Qurʾan being only one of them.