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94 CHAPTER 4ciples of the Islamic state are to be prohibited, however; and finally, nointerpretation of the Constitution that is opposed to the Qur’an and thesunna is to be valid. 18Again and again the ‘ulama have invoked this declaration in elaboratingon their conception of an Islamic state, and the principles enunciatedhere have been reiterated in various formulations. 19 That these principlesare all quite vague is not a fatal objection from their viewpoint, for asMawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani writes:When we say that Islam has provided us with directions for all spheres oflife, we do not mean to suggest that the Qur’an, or the sunna, or Islamic lawhas a ruling on every single particular of life. We mean, rather, that, in allspheres of life, Islam has provided basic principles in whose light all the particularscan be determined. The same is true of the Constitution. Islam hasprovided us with some basic directives in this regard. No human being hasthe right to alter these directives; even if the whole nation agrees on somethingthat contravenes these directives, it cannot contravene them. However,once these directives are followed, other subsidiary matters can be settledaccording to the Muslim community’s collective consultation. 20The ‘ulama’s rhetoric takes it as self-evident that the only reason theMuslims of South Asia wanted a separate homeland was to have an ‘Islamicstate;’ there simply is no other rationale for this state. An Islamicstate is not one in which Muslims are simply a numerical majority, as theyare in Pakistan, but one in which the law of God is implemented. Thequestion of whether this law, the shari‘a, ought to be implemented canhardly arise, for a Muslim, by definition, cannot want it any other way;nor can a state be Islamic except in this way. 21 What merits consideration,then is not whether but how to implement the shari‘a. This way of formulatingthe question is not a small measure of the extent to which the‘ulama have been able to hold the modernists accountable for the ambiguitiesof their own rhetoric.In what follows I focus primarily on the work of Mawlana Taqi ‘Uthmani,whom I have already mentioned in earlier chapters, to illustratehow the question of implementing Islamic law has been treated by thecontemporary ‘ulama. He has served as a judge of the Federal Shari‘atCourt, established as part of Zia al-Haqq’s Islamization campaign, andhe is the vice-president of the Dar al-‘Ulum madrasa of Karachi. 22 Hisfather, Mufti Muhammad Shafi‘, who founded this madrasa, had formany years been the chief jurisconsult at the parent seminary in Deoband.The family moved to Pakistan in 1949, and Shafi‘, one of the most ardentof the Deobandi ‘ulama supporting the demand for Pakistan, played anactive role in the debates over an Islamic constitution for the new state. 23Taqi ‘Uthmani has continued that work, combining extensive writings on