Collision and Collusion: Colonial Laws and Postcolonial Ecclesiastical Reasoning in Pakistan

ABSTRACT: Seventy-five years after independence, Pakistan’s family laws of 1961 remain the primary source of religio-patriarchal reasoning, largely immune to further reform—not because they are imagined as divinely ordained but are contested by the right-wing conservatives for not being Islamic enough. This article argues that these laws, in conjunction with colonial criminal law legacies, sustain judicial impunity for violence against women and girls by policing their sexual autonomy. The argument unfolds in two parts. The first half examines how colonial courts embedded gendered hierarchies into criminal law through the doctrine of “grave and sudden provocation,” normalizing male violence against women as a “reasonable” response to perceived sexual transgression. It then traces how, from the 1970s onward, Islamization did not replace these colonial logics but moralized and fortified them: Shariat court rulings fused British legal sympathy for male “honor” with Islamic concepts such as ghairat (honor) and zina (adultery/fornication) as capital offense, creating dual avenues of impunity for feminicide. The second half turns to contemporary underage marriage cases, showing how family law cases fortify the patriarchal privilege of Muslim men as walis (guardians) and function to tame female sexuality. Here, the judiciary routinely refuses to annul such marriages or to punish “husbands” for statutory rape, invoking the Islamic allowance for marriage upon puberty. Across both domains, the analysis reveals how colonial–Islamic legal collusion continues to entrench a juridical order that legitimizes gender-based violence and colludes in the project to tame female sexual autonomy in Pakistan.