Pakistan: Bastion and Battlefield of Islamic Modernism

In the decades either side of 1900, a series of influential Muslim thinkers tried to reconcile Islam with the modern world. As their ideas gained prominence in late colonial India, the doctrines of Islamic modernism formed an informal religious charter for the founding of Pakistan in 1947. But over the subsequent seventy years, Pakistan’s ruling elite found their modernist ideals questioned from many corners, not least as they failed to live up to their democratic promises. In this podcast, we’ll follow the travails of Islamic modernism as rival religious authorities promoted competing visions of the place of Islam in the constitution, law and daily life of the world’s first ‘Islamic republic.’ Nile Green talks to Muhammad Qasim Zaman, the author of Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton University Press, 2018).