The violent escalation of religious and ethnic conflict in Pakistan has directed considerable academic and journalistic attention towards the country’s legal framework and, more broadly, its politics, constituted by different identity groups.

A vast majority of the written work on these subjects has emerged from the strategic studies paradigm and remains fixated broadly on the geopolitics of South Asia and Central Asia. At a narrow level, it is mostly concerned with the impact of Islamic terrorist networks beyond their ‘home base’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the same vein, extant work that focuses on domestic politics within Pakistan has normally used broad sweeps in attempts to ‘explain’ a complex polity to less informed audiences.

Under such formulations, religious conflict remains one of the many problems found in what is now conventionally categorised as a violence-prone country.

What is apparent from a review of the available literature on Pakistan is that there have been few attempts to understand and historicise religious conflict within the larger ambit of state-society relations in the country. In this regard, Moonis Ahmar’s Conflict Management and Vision for a Secular Pakistan breaks from what can be roughly classified as the industrial norm. The book is historical in its approach, and goes a considerable way in documenting the escalation of religious conflict and the ‘non-secular’ role of successive regimes in politicising religious/communal subjectivities.

Ahmar’s theoretical starting point, and a fairly reasonable one at that, is that conflict (religious or ethnic) is inevitable in heterogeneous societies. This intellectual premise is borrowed from the realist school within International Relations which also takes conflict management as a core tenet of interstate behaviour in a largely anarchical international system. Flowing from this, the empirical starting point for his volume is a documentation of how the state deviated from Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s original secular vision for a multi-ethnic, multisect society, and became a biased arbiter in conflict management. Compounded by geo-strategic events and due to the complicity of successive regimes, violence eventually became the preferred option in conflict resolution that we see now.

Ahmar’s book, however, is not a regurgitation of simple liberal historiography about religious extremism and intolerance in Pakistan. In an era of unbridled violence – most of it often against minorities and defenseless communities – the need to move beyond descriptive accounts and ‘do something’ is felt by nearly every local writer currently commenting on Pakistan. It is under this political compulsion that this book goes one step forward and takes a consciously prescriptive position to suggest a framework for resolving the question of violence.

Ahmar points out that the prevention of conflict from escalating into fully fledged violence is contingent on the ability of the state to take a ‘neutral’ or ‘secular’ approach towards conflict management. This, he argues, does not only mean creating laws that treat all citizens equally but also enforcing such laws through ‘fair’ and ‘just’ governance. If the state were to reorient itself into a secular understanding of governance and public administration, it would be in a much better position to prevent the kind of everyday violence witnessed in contemporary Pakistan.

At the core of this particular prescription is an understanding of secularism as a particular form of governance, one that is most suited for conflict management in societies with multiple fractures. Ahmar correctly recognises that the term carries negative connotations in a country like Pakistan where it has been associated with a rejection of religion, and cannot be imported directly from the Western European context where it first arose. He, subsequently, takes several pages in explaining how various scholars have shown that the basic tenets of secularism as a mode of governance are perfectly aligned with the values and aspirations of moderate Muslim practices. This is to drive home the point that secularism as a concept requires strategic rebranding before it can become a viable state project in Pakistan.

Ahmar concludes by providing the case studies of three countries – Turkey, India and Indonesia – as a learning instrument for Pakistan. Using the experience of minority religious communities and ethnic groups in each country, Ahmar posits that the varying degrees of success of state-led secularism highlight its viability as a mode of governance and, more importantly, its applicability in Muslim societies such as Turkey and Indonesia.

Methodologically, Ahmar is similar to other Pakistani social scientists in taking a binary approach to state-society relations. The state remains a coherent, rule-making, and enforcing institution – very much within the Weberian framework – while society is understood as a contractually obligated collective, existing ‘below’ the state. This particular understanding is proof of not just the academic training received by a particular generation of scholars in Pakistan but also the inability of local academics to stay abreast of the evolution of social sciences in other parts of the world. Terms such as ‘the state’ have been dissected and revised multiple times over the past two decades, to the point that institutional coherence of the state apparatus is only considered a theoretical ideal type, and its relationship with society now understood as one of considerable volatility and contestation.

Because of this inability to understand the state as a historical construct in Pakistan, the prescriptive part of this volume appears to flow from the top-down institutional paradigm championed by strong-state theorists like Samuel Huntington in the 1960s and the 1970s. The argument ignores the fluid nature of state-society relations, and the many ways in which secularism as a top-down project is struggling even in the countries highlighted as case studies. India, for example, has witnessed periodic communal rioting, especially during times of election, and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey has spent the last year flexing its Islamist muscles, curbing dissent and introducing legislation aimed at reshaping the legal framework. What dichotomous state-society lenses fail to capture is that these constitutionally secular states are experiencing governance ‘failures’ primarily because state institutions and actors in reality remain embroiled in the very conflict that is hypothetically supposed to be managed from above.

Another oversight here is the inability to sufficiently problematise and engage with the secularism versus secularisation debate put forth by Saba Mahmood, Humeira Iqtidar and others working on Islamic politics in South Asia. In the context of contemporary Pakistan, any project that seeks to eradicate or minimise inter-group violence would have to understand that legal sanction or reliance on complicit state institutions is unlikely to result in any desirable outcome. Instead, anthropology and sociology now talk about secularisation as the process through which societal actors engage in the construction of new, mutually cooperative roles through political engagement and mobilisation. Ahmar himself talks about the need to recreate a more welcoming understanding of secularism but fails to engage with the literature that talks about constructing regimes and cultures of tolerance and peaceful coexistence at the societal level.

Underscoring a considerable amount of the discussion in his book is a fetishism of the Enlightenment revolution in Europe and the role of church-state separation in inducing scientific progress. It may be of certain historical value to consider the impact of secularism on Western Europe, however, it has little prescriptive relevance – the stated purpose of the book – when considering how deeply capitalistic relations have penetrated the global South, and how processes of modernisation and inter-group violence appear to coexist quite comfortably.

Ahmar’s volume is structured rather oddly, with a host of questions marking each chapter in a style reminiscent of high school textbooks. Many of these questions, (roughly 50 in total) remain unaddressed in the accompanying text, leaving the reader wondering about their relevance in the first place. There is also a considerable amount of repetition, especially of phrases reciting the virtues of a secular state, without going into too much theoretical depth.

In conclusion, the twofold value of Ahmar’s book lies firstly in documenting the theoretical coexistence of Islam and secular modes of governance and, secondly, in providing a useful summary of state complicity in conflict escalation in Pakistan. To an uninitiated audience, this may appear to be a good starting point. As an academic text, however, it fails to grapple with contemporary debates on state behaviour, and on the larger issue of secularism’s fate in the 21st century.