Territorial Nationalism, Confessional Islam and the Conundrum of State-Making in Early Postcolonial Pakistan

Abstract

The interplay of the question regarding the nature of postcolonial citizenship and the limits of religious belief considerably moulded the processes of the structuring of the political community in the early years of Pakistan’s history. Such an interplay manifested in the form of a normative contest between two distinct conceptualisations of nationalism. One was based on the notion of fixity of political territoriality that was defined in terms of the cartographic identity of Pakistan, and the other was premised upon the phenomenon of confessional Islam which tended to interpret the political identity of the Pakistani state in terms of the religion of Islam as a faith. This article is an attempt at mapping as to how such a contest strongly underpinned the competing public discourse on the modes of structuring of the political community in early postcolonial Pakistan. By doing this, the article discusses how this kind of a public discourse factored deeply in shaping the circuitous course of the processes of state-making in the initial years of the country’s creation.