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Almost all of the people of Pakistan are Muslims or at least follow Islamic traditions, and Islamic ideals and practices suffuse virtually all parts of Pakistani life. Most Pakistanis belong to the Sunni sect, the major branch of Islam. There are also significant numbers of Shiʿi Muslims. Among Sunnis, Sufism is extremely popular and influential. In addition to the two main groups there is a very small sect called the Aḥmadiyyah, which is also sometimes called the Qadiani (for Qadian, India, where the sect originated).
The role of religion in Pakistani society and politics finds its most visible expression in the Islamic Assembly (Jamāʿat-i Islāmī) party. Founded in 1941 by Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (Maududi), one of the world’s foremost thinkers in Sunni revivalism, the party has long played a role in Pakistan’s political life and has continually advocated refashioning Pakistan as a chaste Islamic or theocratic state.
The majority of Pakistani Sunnis belong to the Ḥanafiyyah (Hanafite) school, which is one of four major schools (madhhabs) or subsects of Islamic jurisprudence; it is perhaps the most liberal of the four but nevertheless is still demanding in its instructions to the faithful. Two popular reform movements founded in northern India—the Deoband and Barelwi schools—are likewise widespread in Pakistan. Differences between the two movements over a variety of theological issues are significant to the point that violence often has erupted between them. Another group, Tablīghī Jamāʿat (founded 1926), headquartered in Raiwind, near Lahore, is a lay ministry group whose annual conference attracts hundreds of thousands of members from throughout the world. It is perhaps the largest grassroots Muslim organization in the world.
The Wahhābī movement, founded in Arabia, has made inroads in Pakistan, most notably among the tribal Pashtuns in the Afghan border areas. Moreover, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Saudi Arabia assisted Pakistan in caring for vast numbers of Afghan refugees in the border areas and in the construction and staffing of thousands of traditional Sunni madrasahs (religious schools). Those schools generally provided instruction along Wahhābī lines, and they subsequently became vehicles for the spreading influence of extremist groups (particularly al-Qaeda and the Taliban of Afghanistan) in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and elsewhere throughout the country. Although extremism in the name of Islam has become more pronounced in Pakistan since 2000, more-moderate Sunni Muslims are found in the country’s business community, especially among Gujarati Memons and Chiniotis from Punjab who follow less-conservative Islamic traditions.
Among the Shiʿah there are several subsects; notable are the Ismāʿīlīs (or Seveners)—including the Nizārīs (followers of the Aga Khans, among whom are the Khojas and the Bohrās), who are prominent in commerce and industry—and the Ithnā ʿAshariyyah (or Twelvers), who are more austere in their practices and more closely resemble the Shiʿi tradition found in Iran. Shiʿis have long been the target of Sunni radicals, and violent encounters between followers of the two sects are common.
With the exception of some sects, such as Dawoodi Bohrās, there is no concept of an ordained priesthood among Pakistan’s Muslims. Anyone who leads prayers in mosques may be appointed imam. Those who are formally trained in religion are accorded the honorific mullah or mawlānā. Collectively, the community of Muslim scholars is known as the ʿulamāʾ (“scholars”), but among the practitioners of a more popular sect of Islam (generally associated with Sufism) there are powerful hereditary networks of holy men called pīrs, who receive great reverence (as well as gifts in cash or kind) from a multitude of followers. An established pīr may pass on his spiritual powers and sanctified authority to one or more of his murīds (“disciples”), who may then operate as pīrs in their own right. There are also many self-appointed pīrs who practice locally without being properly inducted into one of the major Sufi orders. Pīrs who occupy high positions in the pīr hierarchy wield great power and play an influential role in public affairs.
Among the basic tenets of the Aḥmadiyyah is the belief that other prophets came after Muhammad and that their leader, the 19th century’s Mīrzā Ghulām Aḥmad, was called to accept a divine mission. The Aḥmadiyyah therefore appear to question Muhammad’s role as the last of God’s prophets. More conservative Muslims find this seeming revision of traditional belief blasphemous, and in 1974 a constitutional amendment declared the Aḥmadiyyah community to be non-Muslims. The community became the focal point of riots in the Punjab in 1953, instigated by the Islamic Assembly but also including a broad representation of religious groups. Since then the Aḥmadiyyah have experienced considerable persecution, particularly during the administration (1977–88) of Gen. Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq—when they were denied all semblance of Islamic character—and they have been denied positions in the civil service and the military and often have been forced to conceal their identity.
At the time of partition, most Hindus left newly formed West Pakistan for India. In the east, wealthier Hindus also fled newly formed East Pakistan, but a sizeable minority of Hindus (nearly 10 million) stayed behind. The vast majority remained there until the civil war of 1971 (which led to the creation of Bangladesh) compelled them to seek refuge in India.
There is also a small but fairly significant population of Christians in the country. There are adherents to a variety of denominations, Roman Catholicism being the largest. Violent attacks against Christians became increasingly common during the Zia-ul-Haq regime, a trend that continued afterward with the increase of religious strife.
Settlement patterns
Geographically, the population of Pakistan is distributed rather unevenly. More than half of the population is in Punjab; on the other hand, Balochistan, the largest province in terms of area, has significant areas with virtually no settled population. Likewise, within each province, the population further pools in various areas. Much of the population of Balochistan, for instance, is concentrated in the area of Quetta. The region around Karachi and the inhabited strip along the Indus River are the most densely settled areas in Sindh province. Within Punjab the population density generally decreases from northeast to southwest. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the plain around Peshawar and Mardan is a high-density area. Broadly speaking, population density is greatest in fertile agricultural areas. Nomadism and transhumance, once common lifestyles in Pakistan, are practiced by relatively few people in the 21st century.
Traditional regions
The traditional regions of Pakistan, shaped by ecological factors and historical evolution, are reflected in the administrative division of the country into the four provinces of Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan, each of which is ethnically and linguistically distinct.
In the Punjab, until the advent of irrigation, most of the population was restricted to those areas receiving more than 20 inches (500 mm) of precipitation annually—namely, the Potwar Plateau and the upper Indus plain. Such areas where dry farming is practiced are referred to as barani. Later, large areas of uncultivated land in the Indus River plain of the southern Punjab were irrigated by canals and populated by colonists drawn from other parts of the province. Referred to as the Canal Colony, that area now forms the richest agricultural region of the country.
Agricultural wealth is concentrated in those barani areas around Lahore that have benefited from irrigation, together with the Canal Colony areas and Sindh province. Those regions contain most of the rural population of Pakistan and produce more than half of the country’s wheat and virtually all of its cotton and rice. Landholdings are larger in the Canal Colony areas of the Punjab and in Sindh.
Elsewhere, in the overpopulated and poor districts of the barani region that do not benefit from irrigation, holdings are exceedingly small and fragmented. In those districts, there is great pressure to migrate from the villages in order to find employment in towns, to enlist in the armed forces, or to seek work abroad, particularly in the Persian Gulf states of the Middle East.
Rural settlement
About two-thirds of the rural population of Pakistan lives in nucleated villages or hamlets (i.e., in compact groups of dwellings). Sometimes, as is generally the case in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the houses are placed in a ring with windowless outer walls, so that each complex resembles a protected fortress with a few guarded entrances. Dispersed habitation patterns in the form of isolated single homesteads are rare, occurring only in a few mountainous areas. But it is not uncommon to find numerous satellite hamlets of varying sizes near larger villages; such hamlets are occupied either by a landlord (along with his family, servants, and sharecroppers) or else by members of an extended family group living together in adjoining houses. The spread of tube wells (driven wells) in the Punjab has increased the tendency for such dispersal, for people often prefer to live near their tube wells in order to guard the valuable machinery. The concept of village, therefore, often tends to be equivalent to that of the mawzaʿ (an area of land that, together with a village and its satellite hamlets, forms a unit in land-revenue records). It is difficult to speak of an average size of village, for patterns of habitation are complex. Most groups of dwellings have a minimum of a dozen or a score of houses, and there are usually a few hundred dwellings in each “village.” Large villages rarely have populations exceeding 2,500 persons.
Three basic types of village layout are to be found. Most of the older settlements are of the “spiderweb” form, having at least one focal point, such as the village mosque, some shops, or a well from which lanes radiate. A few villages follow the contours of hill slopes and other natural features. In the Canal Colony areas, villages are of a regular rectangular pattern, with a well, a mosque, and a school, as well as the house of the village headman, at the center and with the houses being arranged in a series of concentric rectangles. Houses are built from available local materials; the vast majority are of adobe, a material that is not only cheap and reasonably durable in the dry climate but also provides better insulation from extremes of heat and cold than brick or stone. Houses usually have walled courtyards where animals are tethered and where people sleep in the open in the hot summer.
