Pakistan’s latest constitutional amendment, which transfers the Supreme Court’s authority over constitutional questions to a new Federal Constitutional Court and elevates the army chief to a constitutionally entrenched post with lifetime legal immunity, is widely described as the final blow to an already fragile democracy. The familiar storyline is straightforward: a besieged liberal judiciary is being strangled by an overmighty military. There is an important truth in that account. But it also omits a more awkward dimension. For roughly four decades, Pakistan’s higher courts have operated within an Islamized constitutional framework they did not design but have repeatedly enforced, elaborated, and legitimized.
The question, therefore, is not whether judges are personally “Islamists,” but whether the architecture of judicial review has, in practice, served Islamist objectives in ways that have made governing harder and, at times, contributed to radicalization and security problems. Read against the constitutional text, key judgments, and their political effects, there is a strong case that it has.
The 1973 Constitution declared Islam the state religion, created the Council of Islamic Ideology as an advisory body, and gave Islam a prominent symbolic place. Under General Zia-ul-Haq, those gestures were converted into an institutional program designed to reshape the hierarchy of constitutional authority. The Objectives Resolution—originally a preamble declaring that sovereignty belongs to God and that laws must reflect Islamic principles—was elevated into the operative text of the Constitution as Article 2A. Article 227, which requires all existing laws to conform to “the injunctions of Islam,” was activated as a substantive constraint. And in 1980 Zia created the Federal Shariat Court (FSC), with authority under Article 203D to examine and strike down any law deemed “repugnant to the injunctions of Islam,” with appeals to a Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court.
This did more than Islamize statutes. It created a parallel review structure in which religious reasoning enjoyed constitutional standing alongside, and sometimes above, ordinary constitutional rights. Governments could legislate; the FSC could override them. Judges sworn to uphold the Constitution could not ignore this architecture; applying it was part of their institutional role.
Within that framework, the Hudood Ordinances of 1979 and the strengthened blasphemy provisions of the Penal Code became central objects of judicial work. The Hudood laws—governing offenses like zina and theft—were repeatedly adjusted by the FSC and, on appeal, by the Supreme Court. Section 295-C, introduced in 1986, made derogatory remarks about the Prophet a capital offense with an alternative of life imprisonment. In 1990, responding to petitions by Islamization advocates, the Federal Shariat Court held that the option of life imprisonment was contrary to Islamic injunctions and that only death was permissible, giving the government a deadline to amend the law. No government appeal was pursued to conclusion, and the FSC’s interpretation has since been treated as binding across the courts: for a proven 295-C offense, the sentence is death.
The legal mechanics here matter. Parliament had left room for sentencing discretion. It was the courts that closed that space. In many districts, trial judges, operating under social pressure and the shadow of this FSC ruling, have treated the death penalty as effectively mandatory once guilt is found, even where evidence is weak or tainted by local vendettas. Human rights monitoring over several decades has documented both the severity of sentencing and the reluctance to punish false accusers, despite clear abuses of the law. In functional terms, the judiciary converted a politically controversial statute into a doctrine of uncompromising sacred inviolability.
The treatment of Ahmadis makes the dynamic even clearer. Parliament’s Second Amendment in 1974 had already defined Ahmadis as non-Muslims. But in Zaheeruddin v. State (1993), the Supreme Court went much further, upholding criminal prohibitions that barred Ahmadis from “posing as Muslims,” using Islamic terms and symbols, or calling their places of worship mosques. To justify this, the Court accepted analogies offered by government counsel drawn from trademark law: Islamic terms were treated as if they were proprietary marks of the Muslim majority, and Ahmadis’ use of them was likened to deceptive passing off.
This was jurisprudentially radical. It transformed majority sentiment into a constitutional principle, recasting religious identity not as an individual right but as a collective asset of the majority community. The Court’s reasoning authorized the state to police religious self-presentation with a degree of intrusiveness that no standard public-order rationale would have supported. Hostility to Ahmadis did not originate in the courtroom, but Zaheeruddin translated that hostility into a durable, rights-limiting constitutional doctrine.
Blasphemy jurisprudence more broadly has developed in a similar register. Trial courts, especially in rural or politically charged settings, have frequently imposed death sentences on the basis of contested or weak evidence. Higher courts have sometimes intervened, as in the Supreme Court’s 2018 acquittal of Asia Bibi after years on death row, where the Court highlighted contradictions in witness testimony and the dangers of misuse. Yet monitoring by legal and human-rights organizations shows a broader pattern: appellate courts routinely frame blasphemy not just as an offense against individuals but as a threat to public order and to the Islamic character of the state, and they rarely insist on systematic punishment of false accusers even when abuse is evident. The 1990 FSC ruling making death the only permissible penalty has become settled doctrine; even modest proposals for procedural reform—such as requiring senior police approval before registration of a blasphemy complaint—can be challenged as diluting constitutionally entrenched protection of Islam.
This doctrinal environment has fed directly into street-level radicalization. Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a party organized around the defense of the blasphemy laws and the finality of prophethood, has grown from a protest movement into a significant political actor, consistently emphasizing the sanctity of the blasphemy provisions and the obligation to punish perceived insults to the Prophet. It is not merely a creature of the street; it is also a litigant, invoking constitutional language about the protection of Islam and hurt religious sentiments to challenge government measures and demand administrative reversals. Its mass protests—most visibly after the Asia Bibi acquittal and during the 2017 Faizabad sit-in—have unfolded in a political ecosystem shaped by decades of judicial entrenchment of blasphemy doctrine. When, in 2019, the Supreme Court’s Faizabad dharna judgment criticized not only TLP’s leaders but also elements of the security apparatus for political meddling, it was confronting actors who had learned to operate inside a religious-legal space that the courts had helped normalize.
Islamization has also shaped the judiciary’s role in economic governance. Litigation over riba—interest in the banking system—is a clear example. In 1992, the Federal Shariat Court declared key provisions of Pakistan’s interest-based banking laws repugnant to Islam and ordered their replacement. That ruling was largely upheld by the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court in 1999, with instructions to eliminate interest from the economy within a defined period. The case was later reopened, and in 2002 the matter was remanded to the FSC for fresh consideration. Two decades on, in April 2022, the FSC again declared the prevailing interest-based banking system un-Islamic and ordered the federal and provincial governments to transition to an interest-free system by December 2027.
Whatever one’s substantive view of interest-free banking, shifting judicial commands of this kind have repeatedly destabilized the legal foundations of Pakistan’s financial system. Sovereign debt issuance, domestic credit markets, and IMF arrangements are all affected by the threat that core instruments may be declared invalid or subject to abrupt timelines for replacement. Technocrats in the finance ministry and central bank are forced to navigate between binding constitutional language on riba, the FSC’s deadlines, and external financial obligations. The result is not simply “Islamization of law” in the abstract, but chronic uncertainty in economic management.
At the level of political structure, judicial enforcement of Articles 62 and 63 has reinforced an Islamized conception of personal eligibility for office. These provisions, tightened under Zia, require legislators to be sadiq and ameen—truthful and trustworthy—and to possess Islamic “good character.” For decades they were largely dormant as serious disqualification tools. But during periods of heightened judicial activism, returning officers and courts have invoked them aggressively. Candidates in 2013 and 2018 were questioned about Quranic knowledge or religious propriety as part of eligibility reviews.
In 2017, the Supreme Court disqualified Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over undeclared assets revealed in the Panama Papers investigation, grounding its ruling in Article 62(1)(f) and Sharif’s failure to meet the standard of sadiq and ameen. A subsequent decision held that disqualification under this clause is for life. The doctrinal message was clear: political authority in Pakistan is not merely a matter of electoral mandate or statutory compliance, but of judicially assessed moral probity in Islamic terms—criteria broad enough to unsettle elected governments without criminal convictions and to keep disqualified politicians permanently sidelined.
Across these domains—Hudood adjudication, blasphemy and Ahmadi jurisprudence, riba litigation, and virtue-based disqualification—the cumulative effect has been to make governing more difficult in concrete, not abstract, ways. Ministries contemplating curriculum reform or minority protections know that their decisions can be challenged not only on administrative or rights grounds but as violations of Islam, given Article 227 and its interpretation. Debates over madrassa oversight routinely invoke religious autonomy and Islamic constitutional provisions, with religious parties and seminaries using courts and constitutional arguments to resist registration requirements or standardized syllabi. Finance officials must plan under the continuing shadow of Shariat Court rulings that periodically re-open the question of which financial instruments are lawful. Security planners confronting sectarian or Islamist groups face adversaries who can appeal to constitutional texts and judicial doctrines that the state itself has spent decades elaborating. The judiciary is not the sole cause of these constraints, but its rulings have converted social and ideological pressures into hard legal veto points.
None of this means that Pakistan’s judges function as disciplined agents of Islamist parties. The record is mixed. The Supreme Court’s 2018 acquittal of Asia Bibi, despite intense threats, and its Faizabad dharna judgment criticizing both TLP and elements of the security apparatus, show that the higher judiciary can restrain militant actors and segments of the state. Yet these decisions sit atop a legal landscape whose basic contours were set by Islamization from above and then stabilized by judicial reasoning from within. Judges can sometimes check the most visible excesses of radicalism while still operating inside a constitutional order that structurally privileges Islamist claims.
In that light, the new constitutional amendment—which moves constitutional cases to a new Federal Constitutional Court appointed through an executive-dominated process and elevates the army chief to a new post of Chief of Defence Forces with lifetime legal immunity—does not dismantle a liberal, secular judiciary and replace it with an authoritarian one. It tightens political and military control over a judiciary that is already structurally Islamized. The occasional liberal or rights-protective impulses that surfaced in the existing Supreme Court are being constrained, but the dense web of Islamization—Article 227, Shariat case law on blasphemy and riba, jurisprudence on Ahmadis, and moralized eligibility standards—remains intact. The terrain on which the new Federal Constitutional Court will operate is not neutral; it is the product of exactly this history.
Carlo J.V. Caro is a strategic analyst trained in international security at Columbia University. He previously served as Vice President of a real estate and sustainability firm, overseeing blockchain-enabled investment systems, green housing finance, and cross-regional procurements across Asia and Latin America.
