SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Building on research concerning constitutional migration, I show how constitutional provisions regarding religious freedom (‘subject to public order’) arrived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, not via colonial British or traditional Islamic sources—both explicitly rejected—but via deliberate borrowing from ‘anti-colonial’ constitutionalists in Ireland and, especially, India. Building on Ernesto Laclau’s (1996) notion of ‘empty signifiers’, however, I also unpack the shifting political circumstances that transformed the meaning of Pakistan’s borrowed constitutional provisions over time. Even as core texts guaranteeing an individual’s right to peaceful religious practice were imported, I trace the political, legal, and conceptual modulations through which certain forms of peaceful religious practice were refashioned as a source of religious provocation and, therein, public disorder. Far from protecting religious freedom, I show how the re-purposing of imported constitutional clauses tied to ‘the politics of public order’ underpinned the legal derogation of an otherwise explicit right.