Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

These are not Islamic priorities. They are Prussian ones. What has emerged among the men who keep Pakistan going is a finely tuned, military-bureaucratic nationalism, disciplined and unsentimental, for which Islam is the flag and not the engine.

Prussia describes the temper of this elite.

For the fate of the faith itself, the better analogy is France. A revolutionary creed, once it triumphs completely, turns ceremonial. No one in the Fifth Republic argues about Robespierre over breakfast, not because the Revolution failed but because it won so totally that the nation absorbed it and stopped debating it. The principle became the backbone.

A French republican today need not be a Jacobin, need not want the Terror back, to hold 1789 sacred; the founding is revered precisely because it is finished, no longer a live programme anyone is required to enact.

Islam in Pakistan is travelling that road. It won its argument in 1947. It produced the state, and having produced it, it no longer needs to function as a working programme. It becomes instead the national myth: sacred, unexamined, saluted on every occasion and enacted on almost none. A Pakistani patriot can revere the idea that made Pakistan without wanting an Islamic state, in just the way a French one reveres the Revolution without wanting another. This is why the secularisation is so hard to see. The reverence is genuine and loud; it simply no longer governs. The founding faith has been elevated into myth and quietly retired from the business of running anything.

It is thus worth dwelling on the Crescentiate.

Among the loudest defenders of Pakistan, the most theologically committed voice is almost always the one not born in Pakistan. The diaspora keeps the faith as identity; the Pakistan-formed elite keeps the state. That asymmetry is instrumental. It tells you where belief has migrated, and which of our three meanings of Islam each camp is actually holding.

China conducts cold realist diplomacy and stays militantly atheist; Saudi Arabia conducts it and stays Muslim. Just about.

But look at the content of Pakistan’s realism, not merely its existence, and a state for which Islam was the terminal value would let creed shape its alliances.

Pakistan does the reverse.

In the year since the brief war with India, Islamabad has bound itself, at once and without visible discomfort, to atheist China, to Shia Iran across an old sectarian divide, to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and to a secular and nominally Christian Washington. It made its army chief a field marshal, secured a private White House lunch and the warmest American hearing in two decades, signed a mutual defence pact with Riyadh, deepened the all-weather tie with Beijing, and turned itself into the broker shuttling between Washington and Tehran. The creed of the partner is simply not an input to the calculation.

This is the point the diplomatic noise obscures. A devout society sits at the base; at the summit sits a class that will take any table and collect from each guest, indifferent to the religion of the man across it. Such indifference is ordinary in a secular state. In a state that names Islam as its reason for existing, it nothing less than extraordinary. The secularisation is invisible only because nobody troubled to change the language.

Set India beside it, and the asymmetry sharpens.

India bet on admission. The whole architecture of its recent foreign policy assumed it would be the lynchpin of a respectable Western order, the natural partner of the United States, the anchor of the Indo-Pacific. On precisely that axis it was challenged: tariffed at fifty per cent, called a dead economy, told it was interchangeable with Pakistan, made to watch its rival courted in the Oval Office. India did not collapse.

It adapted, with a trade agreement with the European Union, another with the United Kingdom, a wary thaw with China, and an eventual tariff truce with Washington. But the adaptation is the point. India fell back on strategic autonomy and a scramble of bilateral deals because the club it had courted declined to grant it tenure. Two states, two objective functions. Pakistan played for leverage and took leverage; India played for belonging and learned that belonging was not on offer.

Data is not Destiny

Which brings us to BB, and to the data. BB loves a number and quotes them tirelessly: GDP, fertility, the human development index, the metrics on which Pakistan plainly trails. Every one of those numbers is correct.

The error is not in the data but in the assumption beneath it, that prosperity is the thing the state is playing for. GDP matters. It does not. BB reads the masses and the macro-aggregates as the players; they are not.

The players are the Prussian elite, running a different game. The honest question is not whether Pakistan is poorer, which it is, but what it has been willing to trade prosperity for, and the answer, shown again this past year, is sovereignty and leverage, which Elitestanis will buy at almost any price.

Kashmir is Sui Generis

The same misreading feeds the Saffroniate’s favourite fantasy, that Balochistan or Afghanistan can be turned into Pakistan’s Kashmir, a running wound that bleeds the state. It will not happen, and the reason is structural. Insurgencies are not bought; they are lit. They begin with the sub-gentry and the disaffected elite, not with the poor as such.

Balochistan rages only where its own leaders sustain the infrastructure of resistance, and you cannot wire money to a grievance and expect a nation to rise. A broad-based nationalism appears only once an entire population has been activated to an ideology, the way sustained dispossession forged a mass Palestinian nationalism that now commands the sympathy of much of the world.

That threshold has not been crossed in Balochistan, and it will not be crossed from a spreadsheet in Delhi. Meanwhile Pakistan has persuaded Washington to brand the Baloch insurgency terrorist: the very lever the Saffroniate dreams of pulling is being pulled the other way. The Saffroniate is cloaked to it because it keeps fighting an imagined theocracy the Pakistani elite quietly stopped being.

What BP teaches us

We learned a version of all this from our own house. Brown Pundits ran a reader survey, and thirty people filled it in. The masses, here as everywhere, are silent. Even the sub-elite readership is mostly inert; the few who could mount a real counter-current, by starting a rival shop of their own, will not trouble to. Neglect Brown Pundits for years and it roars back regardless, because the quarrel between the Saffroniate and the Crescentiate is the most interesting argument in this corner of the internet, and it has nowhere else to go.

And in the comments, the discovery. Across all the Crescentiate energy, almost no one argues theology. No one is building the Caliphate. No one is much exercised about an Islamic state. Yet every one of them comes alive the instant Pakistan, the nation, is touched. That is not an Islamic attachment. It is a national one.

We are We

Sitting between the two camps, neutral by temperament, we see what each cannot see about itself. And the revealed preference of the Crescentiate, watched over years, is the sharpest evidence we have. On the whole they do not want a seat at the Western table; they are content to be the exotic token, the interesting outsider, and they reach for absurd lectures on the West’s misogyny and patriarchy partly to keep that distance.

The Saffroniate’s commenters want the opposite: the nod of recognition from respectable opinion. We are describing a commentariat, not a census. But the asymmetry on the page is consistent, and it rhymes with the statecraft. The Indian instinct is to be let in; the Pakistani instinct is to be left alone, intact and exotic. That single difference is why Indian commentary keeps reaching for the Western template, instrumentally and without quite saying why, while the Pakistani feels no such pull.

The Saffroniate is still arguing with yesterday’s Pakistan, the Islamic project the elite abandoned years ago, while today’s Pakistan, secular at the summit and Prussian to the bone, slips past unnoticed.

Jinnah, in the end, got the state he wanted. Nehru got an argument, and he is still having it with a Pakistan that no longer exists.