Accounting for little more than 1.5 per cent of Pakistan's overall population (of whom 96 per cent are Muslim) the Christian community has experienced multiple forms of marginalization and victimization. Most Christians are from very low caste backgrounds and, despite the ostensible repudiation of caste in Islam, continue to suffer on this account. Many are domestic servants, particularly in the capital city of Islamabad, or occupy a low status in the landed economy of the Punjabi village. The community is a relatively recent one, with large-scale conversions dating back no further than the late nineteenth century, or indeed to the time of the foundation of Pakistan itself, though for ideological reasons this is sometimes disputed by the Christian leadership. Many untouchables (with hindsight mistakenly) thought it safer to relate to the new Muslim state as monotheistic Christians, rather than as vilified Hindus. For the most part, however, and despite attempts to “indigenize” over the last couple of decades, Pakistani Christians have been closely associated with the activities of missionaries and, by extension, with the old colonial regime or the Republican Right in the USA. This heritage has made it easy for the majority community to single out Christians as surrogate targets of victimization where the unequal power relationship between the West and a besieged Muslim umma can be temporarily reversed. Churches have been attacked and worshippers killed, and vocal members of the community threatened with prosecution under infamous blasphemy laws. No section of Pakistani political society seems currently willing or able to reverse the creeping denigration of Christians from full citizens to legal scapegoats and subordinates.
Writing about this bleak experience from a perspective of constructive involvement is a journey through a political and analytical minefield. Any fruitful discussion of the Pakistani Christian experience has to capture the problem of double persecution; that the social and political forces most eager to vent their frustrations against a Christian scapegoat in Pakistan are often also disadvantaged and excluded themselves. Theodore Gabriel's short and hastily written monograph makes some gestures in this direction, but ultimately sacrifices analytical insight and academic rigour to a rehash of well-worn arguments. What could have been most interesting about this book – to learn more about the ways in which Pakistani Christians themselves make sense of their experience, what ways they see out of their malaise – has unfortunately been buried in a generous helping of potted history.
In his politically charged attempt to portray Pakistani Christians as better Pakistani citizens than the Muslim Pakistani majority themselves, Gabriel's account presents us with a story of “Islamization”: in the beginning, “Pakistan” had been a secular vision – embodied in Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the highly revered father of the nation – in which Christians could find their proper place. Later on, this vision was undermined and perverted by Islamic ideologues who achieved a first breakthrough under the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. Later still, the Saudi and CIA-funded rise of violent Wahabi-ism and the general tensions of Bush's War on Terror gave religious obscurantism further momentum. This is the very same story that Pakistan's liberal elite has constructed to explain religious opposition to its increasingly fragile position of social and political dominance. The coincidence is unsurprising, as Gabriel's account draws almost exclusively on secondary literature or personal interviews with members of the Anglophone elite.
Apart from being highly questionable as an accurate historical account of Pakistan's history since its foundation, the story of Islamization fails to come to grips with a crucial point: the persecution of Christians in Pakistan has never been a narrowly religious issue in the Western sense, and hence does not require a religious solution in the form of Muslim–Christian dialogue, to which Gabriel dedicates much attention. Violent acts of subordination against minority communities – which often occur in symbolically charged episodes separated by periods of relatively peaceful coexistence – are part of a political culture inherited from colonialism. As Gabriel notes, but does not elaborate, campaigns for the prosecution of blasphemous texts and instances of lynch justice have a long and unbroken history in South Asia. They are not an invention of Islamic fundamentalists and have not become more frequent as a result of a process of Islamization. All that has changed in Pakistan since 1947 is that Hindus or Sikhs as primary targets have been replaced by Christians and members of the Ahmadiyya sect (while in neighbouring Hindu India, Christians and Muslims continue to bear the brunt of this kind of politics). The point of these agitations is to force the state to acknowledge the power of a self-styled majority community by demonstratively engaging in some form of symbolic one-sidedness against a minority. The designation of Christians as dhimmis in Islamic law, rather than as full citizens, has less to do with the injunctions of the Holy Quran than with this desire to make Pakistan truly a country “where Muslims are boss”. This aspiration is exactly what Jinnah's Muslim League had in mind when they voiced their demand for Pakistan in the first place. Subsequent history has not been a perversion of a secular ideal. Rather, the new Pakistani state has failed to be accepted by a majority of the population as being legitimately “theirs”. This, and not the growth of fundamentalism, has fed a continuing hunger for surrogate moments of empowerment of the kind described in Gabriel's book. Pakistani Christians, in short, are the victims of the same problems of democratic deficit and massive social inequality that drive the transgressions against them.
