In 2010, an acquaintance of mine (an anthropologist) conducted a survey to find out how Pakistanis described themselves in nationalistic terms. He was piloting a research for a book. Knowing that he had collected a lot of data in this respect, I met him last month in New York.

He and his team of assistants had approached over 200 Pakistanis and asked them a simple question: how do you explain yourself: a) Pakistani first; b) Muslim first; or c) If you are a non-Muslim, then explain how you see yourself in this context.

According to his findings, almost 70 percent of the Muslim respondents ticked the ‘Muslim first’ option; whereas over 90 percent non-Muslim respondents ticked the ‘Pakistani first’ box.

Do we identify with a state or religious ideology when we call ourselves Pakistani?

During one interaction with a 19-year-old college student in Lahore, he asked the student an additional question: “If you consider yourself Muslim first, does that mean you are a Pakistani second?”

The student first looked surprised by the enquiry but instinctively replied, “Muslims do not have boundaries.” The anthropologist then asked him, “In that case, do you think that you, a Muslim, can enter any other Muslim country without a passport and visa and automatically become a citizen there just because you are Muslim?” The student did not answer.

According to the more extensive May 4, 2011 Gallup poll, 59 percent Pakistanis chose to identify themselves as Muslims first. Twenty two percent described themselves as Pakistanis first.

Last year, when government officials were going door-to-door to gather data for the 2018 census, I jokingly groused when one of them asked me what my religion was. I smiled: “It’s obvious that I am a Muslim just as over 95 percent Pakistanis are.”

To this, the official responded in Urdu: “Sir jee, you don’t know what we have to go through. When we ask people about their faith, many say Muslim but then ask us to also add the sect [or sub-sect] that they belong to.”

Today, many young Pakistanis are not quite sure what it means to be a Pakistani. Does it mean being a resident of a Muslim-majority country which came into being in 1947 but has a cultural connect with the region’s 5,000-year-old history? Or does it mean being a citizen of an imminent universal religious utopia for which Pakistan was to become a launching-pad?

I believe such confusion was fortified by the deterioration of the original idea of Pakistani nationalism, and the consequent surge of a rather ambitious concept of a divergent narrative that replaced it.

The Pakistani state now seems to have accepted the fact that much of the sectarian and religious strife of the past many decades has been nurtured by a rather complicated version of Pakistan’s nationalist narrative which began to develop from the mid-1970s onward.

The idea of having a Muslim-majority country in South Asia was conceived by political leaders largely galvanised by the thoughts of scholars and ideologues called ‘Jadeed Mussalman’, or modernist Muslims.

Pakistan was thus a project of Muslim Modernism. To modernists such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal and Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a progressive mindset was inherent in ‘the spirit of Islam’ and so was the allowance to exercise pragmatism so that Islam itself could be adjusted to the changing times and not become stagnant.

Had Pakistan been a theological project, its founders would never have been criticised and even demonised the way they were by many ulema.

At Washington D.C.’s mammoth Library of Congress, where I managed to discover many government reports of Pakistan of the 1950s and 1960s, I noticed that till the late 1960s, the state was thoroughly instilling the modernist Muslim narrative. It was trying to construct a cohesive Pakistani nationalism which was to integrate Muslims of all sects and sub-sects — and Pakistanis belonging to other religions — into a unified idea of a modern Muslim-majority nation.

Nevertheless, even though this integration exercise did largely manage to keep at bay religious and sectarian conflicts, it unfortunately ignored some blatant ethnic fissures. Thus, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the modernist narrative was discarded and a more myopic idea of Pakistani nationalism was adopted.

But this didn’t quite manage to build a more robust Pakistani nationalism. Instead, it has created confusion, and worse, militant and mob violence.

There is now uncertainty about what could replace such an innate narrative. One can suggest that the solution in this context is already present in the lapsed elements of early Pakistani nationalism. A reinvigorated strand of the original notion of Pakistani nationalism just might help future generations feel more assured of being citizens who are defined by their shared historical heritage of an ancient region — a part of which was bordered in 1947 by coherent nationalist notions of statehood and not as some launching pad for a theological Shangri-La.

But how is one to transform this realisation into a new state narrative? The National Action Plan, authored in 2015, was an attempt to do just that. But one major reason why the NAP has been so tough to implement is the fact that a number of post-1970s laws in Pakistan can be used to nullify many of the reforms suggested by the NAP. These laws can only deliver what is called an “illiberal democracy.”

The opposite of an illiberal democracy is not necessarily a liberal democracy in the European sense of the term. Political scientists now agree that every democracy, to perform well, needs to adopt the distinct characteristics of the society it is to regulate and empower.

But all democracies need to have a strong civic-nationalist tenor for them to not become a system inclined to only facilitate a particular segment of the society. When Iqbal spoke of an “Islamic democracy”, or, in case of Jinnah, a “Muslim democracy”, they were envisaging a political system of a Muslim-majority country in which Islamic concepts such as ijtihad (interpretation) and ijma (consensus) would become modern interpretations of democratic ideals such as rational debate and integrated parliamentary consensus.

Thus, Muslim modernists concluded that an Islamic democracy or an Islamic constitution cannot be illiberal. What makes them illiberal is not that, due to a country’s cultural ethos, they avoid incorporating certain political and social aspects found in Western democracies. Rather it is because they adopt overtly politicised dimensions of a religion which become weapons in the hands of those who want to wield them to gain amoral political influence and power.

They legislate these dimensions through ordinances, providing their attempt to use religion as a political tool, a legal cover. Such is the state of Pakistan’s statehood, nationhood and democracy. No wonder the college student felt uncertain calling himself a Pakistani first.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 1st, 2018