In recent years, Barelvi [a] clerics associated with the Islamist political party, Tehrik-E-Labbaik Pakistan, have been demonstrating their enormous street power and causing consternation within and outside the country. Yet such political activism by a section of Pakistan’s Barelvi community is neither sudden nor surprising; rather, it is an outcome of the security policies of the Pakistani ‘deep state’ and military-dominated establishment over nearly the past four decades. It is also the result of the dialectics of sectarian fault-lines that exist in Islam.
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