Philip Delves Broughton’s review of Partisans of Allah, a book by Ayesha Jalal
In 1953, a group of Muslim leaders in the Punjab agitated to have a rival group de- classified as Muslims by the still young state of Pakistan. The government’s response came in the Munir Report, an eloquent expression of the state’s position on religion. Its author had asked a number of Pakistan’s Muslim scholars — known as ulama — to define what it meant to be a Muslim and found none of them agreed.
“If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others,” the report declared, “we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim [scholar] but kafirs [infidels] according to the definition of everyone else.” With no agreement on what it meant to be a Muslim, how on earth could Pakistan legislate as if it were an Islamic state?