Politics of Constitutional Rightism and Musharraf’s Enlightened Moderation: An Estimate of JUP’s Endeavors on MMA’s Platform

Abstract

The Jamm’iyyat Ulama-i-Pakistan (abbreviated hereafter as JUP), in 1990s onwards was headed by dynamic reliogio-political echelon Moulana Shah Ahmad Nurani who believed in ‘constitutional rightism’ and didn’t believe in extra-constitutional maneuvers in order to with the game of power politics. He ran his political affairs under some set principles and abided by with them throughout his political career. His religio-political dynamism during Musharraf regime was the last but ever-glorious episode of his political strife for the enforcement of Islamic socio-economic system to which he termed as Nizam-e-Mustafa. Under his dynamic leadership the religio-political alliance, Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal, popularly called as the ‘MMA’ showed one of the unprecedented performances the religio-political right ever showed. Up till his death in 2003, The MMA showed no compromise on the set principles, but later things went different. Among other measures of General Musharraf, his policy of so-called moderation of the society on allegedly US command was taken by the religious right of the country as ‘Command Enlightened Moderation’, hence reaction was inevitable. It flocked under the banner of MMA and tried its level best to cope with it. The research in hand highlights this interesting epoch of the history of Pakistan..

Keywords

• Constitutional
• Rightism
• JUP
• MMA
• Enlightened
• Moderation