Explaining Support for Sectarian Terrorism in Pakistan: Piety, Maslak and Sharia

C Fair

doi:10.3390/rel6041137

Abstract

In the discourse around sectarian violence in Pakistan, two concerns are prominent. The first is the contention that piety, or the intensity of Muslim religious practice, predicts support for sectarian and other forms of Islamist violence. The second is the belief that personal preferences for some forms of sharia also explain such support. As I describe herein, scholars first articulated these concerns in the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Subsequent researchers developed them further in the scholarly and policy analytical literatures that explored these linkages through qualitative and quantitative methodologies. I revisit these claims in the particular context of sectarian violence in Pakistan. To do so, I use several questions included in a recent and large national survey of Pakistanis to create indices of both piety and support for three dimensions of sharia. I use these indices as explanatory variables, along with other explanatory and control variables, in a regression analysis of support for sectarian violence, the dependent variable. I find that the piety index and dimensions of sharia support are significant only when district fixed effects are excluded; however, personal characteristics (i.e., the particular school of Islam respondents espouse, ethnicity, several demographics) most consistently predict support for sectarian violence.

Highlights

Pakistan concentrates the attention of policy-makers and scholars for numerous reasons
The SSP commits sectarian attacks, it is involved in communal violence, and it is an important collaborator in violence perpetrated by the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, and even al-Qaeda
While analysts and scholars of security studies typically view Pakistan as a perpetrator and exporter of Islamist terrorism; this analysis shows that Pakistanis are perhaps the largest group of victims of these

Summary

Introduction

Pakistan concentrates the attention of policy-makers and scholars for numerous reasons. With over 196 million Muslims, Pakistan’s population is larger than the populations of Iran (80.8 million), Egypt (86.9 million) and Saudi Arabia (27.3 million) combined [1,2,3,4]. Of madrasah, religious schools) and institutions of higher Islamic studies attract scholars from the world over and Pakistan is an important leader in Islamic thought and scholarship across the Muslim world. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with the fastest growing arsenal in the world, inclusive of battlefield nuclear weapons [5,6]. As the revisionist state in the security competition with India, Pakistan has long sought to alter maps in Kashmir. Pakistan has started several wars with India in

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Discussion

Conclusion