In early 2011, the prominent Pakistani politician Salman Taseer was assassinated by a gunman who believed he had insulted Islam by expressing politically moderate views and defending the rights of women and religious minorities. At the time of his death Taseer was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and had been a well-known figure in Pakista for decades. He was a founding member of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), a supporter of President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s democratization campaign in the 1960s, and a trusted adviser to the president’s daughter, Benazir Bhutto, during her terms as prime minister. Taseer...

There are few nations where the rise of extremist political groups is of greater international significance than Pakistan. Poised with a fully loaded nuclear arsenal at the crossroads of religious extremists, nationalist fervor, and the war on terrorism, Pakistan’s importance to global geopolitical stability and international peace is inescapable. While Pakistan’s Islamic parties still depend on military patronage, its current democratic transition will depend on how Islamic parties contribute to civilian rule and mobilize support for political reform.

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas has defined “confessional” political parties as organizations that leverage aspects of religious ideology and culture to mobilize, recruit,...

It may seem natural, even obvious, that an overwhelmingly Muslim country such as Pakistan should be home to confessional Muslim political parties. But the existence and persistence of Islamic political parties in Pakistan were not givens. Although the Islamic parties of what is now Pakistan predate the existence of the republic itself, Pakistan’s political system is not a particularly hospitable place. Cheating and manipulation routinely taint elections, and the parliamentary assemblies and executive offices to which political candidates aspire are often merely rubber stamps or puppets of powerful private interests. The puzzle of party persistence is compounded by the fact...

Conventional wisdom holds that political parties in democracies will grow more moderate over time by participating in the electoral and governing processes. As noted previously, this assumption is largely based on observations of socialist parties in nineteenth-century Europe, but it does not apply to Islamic parties in developing Muslim states. Today’s Muslim democratic parties are not simply yesterday’s Islamist parties that have moderated over time, and in Pakistan’s current political climate, some modern Islamist parties have an incentive to become more, rather than less, extreme. In Pakistan, the moderate confessional parties were actually the first to appear on the scene...

As a definitional matter, all Islamist parties support state enforcement of religious law and practice.¹ Beyond that fundamental point of agreement, however, there is significant ideological diversity among Pakistan’s Islamist parties, which vary in their interpretations of Islamic texts and views of how sharia should functionally operate in Pakistan. Yet differences over more practical matters, such as organizational structure, are actually more predictive of political behavior and electoral success. The organizational model an Islamist political party adopts has much less to do with religious ideology than with the socioeconomic background and class affiliation of party leaders. In this chapter I...

In chapters 4 and 5 I describe the historical catalysts, ideological underpinnings, organizational models, and historical growth of the three main Islamic parties in Pakistan, each of which represents one of the three key party types. Clearly ideology—whether it is religious, as in the case of Islamists, or economic, as in the case of Muslim democrats—drives party emergence and development among Islamic confessional parties. However, ideology alone does not guide voting behavior. In chapter 7 I show how each of these parties and party types become more instrumental and more guided by pragmatic political considerations over time. That...

Building on evidence presented in previous chapters about the ideological roots and political histories of Islamic parties in Pakistan, and the calculations and biases of Pakistani voters, this chapter discusses the complex political courtship between parties and voters. I focus particularly on the macro-level strategies Islamist and Muslim democratic parties use to try to maximize vote share. By pairing basic political theory with historical and contemporary qualitative findings, I show how these strategies, above all else, are driven by the parties’ analyses of voters’ likely responses and may sometimes be at odds with the parties’ stated ideological positions. Of particular...

While much of the discussion in the previous chapters is specific to the Pakistani context, the underlying research could have broader relevance in understanding political behavior in other Muslim-majority nations. Some of the core findings of this study are potentially transferrable to other countries: Islamic confessional groups fit into a three-part typology, certain types of Islamic parties focus on certain levels of electoral aggregation, voters are motivated by social group identification and self-interest, and Islamic parties are fundamentally vote-getting operations rather than vehicles for promoting absolutist ideologies. These concepts would have real salience in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Morocco, each...

Awareness of the broader context, history, and motivations underlying the behavior of Islamic confessional parties in Pakistan could vastly improve the ability of foreign policymakers to successfully navigate the ever-changing and often bewildering political terrain there. Oversimplified and uninformed depictions of party politics, and in particular misperceptions of Islamist parties, in Pakistan have affected international policy in negative ways, resulting in clumsy mismanagement or total neglect of potentially vital relationships. Understanding that both pragmatic political and religious considerations motivate Islamic political parties will impact how the US government deals with Islamic political actors, both allies and antagonists. More specifically, understanding...