SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter examines the political circumstances that transformed the meaning of constitutional provisions protecting a right to religious freedom (“subject to . . . public order”) as they migrated from anti-colonial Ireland, via postcolonial India, to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Even as constitutional texts guaranteeing a fundamental right to peaceful religious practice were imported, almost verbatim, into Pakistan, political, legal, and conceptual modulations ensured that certain forms of peaceful religious practice were recast as a source of religious “provocation” posing a threat to “public order.” This chapter shows how, far from protecting religious freedom, a refashioning of imported constitutional clauses via references to public order underpinned the formal restriction of an otherwise explicit right.