Pakistan Pakistan is the only country in the world which was founded explicitly as an Islamic state . It used to form part of British but was broken off at independence to become a country separate from India. This was as a result of fierce campaigning by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and in the teeth of opposition from Gandhi, Nehru and the other Indian nationalists. Up to a million people died in fighting between Muslims and Hindus at partition in 1947. Even so, Islam has remained a card of the opposition as well as the government.
Parties often tend to play the 'more Islamic than thou' card.
President Zia ul-Haqq in the 1970s, for example, introduced an Islamisation programme to appease Islamist sentiment. There are sectarian quarrels between the country's Sunni Muslim majority and Shi'ite minority . In the major southern city of Karachi extremists from the two sides virtually carry on gang warfare with frequent bombs and assassinations. There is also persecution of the minority Ahmadiyya sect, who consider themselves to be a branch of Islam but are branded as heretics by most mainstream Muslim schools of thought.