Public Debates on Sharīʿa and the “Savages-Victims-Saviors” Metaphor of Human Rights The Case of the Hudood Ordinances and Their Reform in Pakistan, 1979–2010

Abstract

While Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinances decreed by General Zia have been analyzed from a legal, socio-economic, and feminist perspective, this article contributes to emerging scholarship that examines the problem from the perspective of secular rights and law, as well as traditional Islamic scholarship. I ask why it took 27 years and the intervention of another military dictator, General Musharraf, to reform the Zina Ordinance through the Protection of Women Act, 2006, and why the Deobandi ʿulamāʾ declared this reform un-Islamic. I argue that the core problem was the absence of “authentic deliberation” on fiqh-based laws in public debates, exacerbated by what has been called the “savages-victims-saviors” metaphor of human rights discourse. Over this period, Pakistan’s judiciary, however, had integrated madrasa-educated fuqahāʾ, in a limited capacity, and learned how to communicate with them in terms of the scholarship they deemed authoritative, contributing to the emergence of what has been termed an “overlapping consensus” between fiqh and liberal citizenship as well as to the ideal of a “public reason” for sharīʿa.

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