BEYOND DHIMMA: MAQĀṢID AL-SHARĪʿAH, ḤIFẒ AL-KARĀMAH,AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF INCLUSIVE CITIZENSHIP FORRELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution simultaneously guarantees religious freedom and equal citizenship (Articles 20, 25, 36) and reserves the highest offices of state for Muslims (Articles 41(2), 91(3)), producing a constitutional order in which non-Muslim citizens are formally included and structurally subordinated. The scholarship documenting this contradiction is now substantial, but it is analytically stalled: liberal-rights critique diagnoses the problem in a normative vocabulary that carries limited persuasive authority inside Pakistan’s religious public sphere, while Islamiclaw scholarship on minority protection continues to work within a dhimma framework designed for a pre-national, non-citizenship polity. This article addresses that impasse. Its objective is to reconstruct minority protection in Pakistan on maqāṣidī rather than status-based foundations. Methodologically, it employs normative-doctrinal legal research combined with a documented conceptual review of 112 sources (2019–2026 peer-reviewed literature, classical uṣūlī and tafsīr texts, constitutional provisions, reported judgments, and treaty-body documentation), analysed through a maqāṣidī-comparative protocol. Three findings emerge. First, the dhimma contract is properly classified as a wasīlah (instrument) rather than a maqṣad (objective); its protective purposes are discharged more completely under constitutional citizenship than under differentiated status. Second, ḥifẓ al-dīn has been construed in Pakistani practice as majoritarian religious preference, whereas its classical formulation is distributive, it protects the religious commitment of every person under the state’s ḍimān. Third, Pakistan’s deficit is interpretive and institutional rather than textual: the constitutional text already contains the resources it fails to deliver. The article’s originality lies in the Maqāṣidī Citizenship Framework (MCF), a three-tier model that adds ḥifẓ al-karāmah as an operative objective and maps the ḍarūriyyāt onto four citizenship domains. Implications extend to constitutional interpretation, procedural reform of Sections 295–298 of the Pakistan Penal Code, curriculum policy, and the internal legitimation of minority rights within Muslim-majority constitutional states.