It started with an offhand comment over tea. A female family friend had just returned from Dubai and told me, almost in relief, how safe she had felt walking alone at night, even in quiet streets. “I could keep my handbag open,” she said, “and no one would dare touch it.” Her words stuck with me. They were not just a tourist’s impression but the voice of a Pakistani woman for whom public space at home feels fraught with risk. That conversation set me thinking about why certain Muslim societies have been able to translate Shariah-based rules into real security, while Pakistan, despite grand claims of Islamisation, failed so spectacularly to protect its own women.
Last year I worked with Professor Zubair Abbasi on a paper examining conviction rates in sexual-violence cases during the Islamisation drive of General Zia-ul-Haq. Our findings were sobering. Despite the passage of the Hudood Ordinances in 1979, which were meant to introduce Islamic criminal penalties, convictions under the hudud standards were essentially non-existent.
As scholars have documented, thousands of cases were filed but not a single conviction met the stringent evidentiary requirements during Zia’s tenure. The system instead became a trap for victims: a woman who failed to prove rape according to the impossible standard of four adult male witnesses risked being charged with zina herself. Far from protecting women, the law created a climate of fear that silenced them.
My friend’s comment about Dubai was not a romanticization of the Gulf but a reminder of what ordinary Muslims expect from their states: safety, dignity, and justice. Pakistanis deserve the same. Whether or not Shariah law is the chosen framework, its supposed Islamisation must no longer be a slogan for repression. The lesson from Saudi Arabia and the UAE is that deterrence works when coupled with fairness and moral credibility. The lesson from Pakistan’s Hudood era is that without those, “Islamic” laws can become their own kind of injustice
We saw this dynamic most clearly in the rise of accusations under the Zina Ordinance. Between 2001 and 2004 charges increased from 3,291 to 3,817, with the overwhelming majority ending in acquittal. Rather than deterring crime, the law became a tool of oppression, frequently used by vengeful husbands and fathers against wives and daughters. Historian
Ayesha Jalal has argued that Zia, “a shrewd social tactician,” focused on women’s issues to solidify his regime’s legitimacy rather than to restore moral purity. Islamisation was never about implementing Shariah in its true essence; it was about political survival, regional power plays in Afghanistan, and pleasing foreign patrons during the Cold War. The result was a body of laws that carried the name of Shariah but none of its justice.
Contrast this with the experience of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two most visible examples of Shariah-based criminal justice today. Saudi Arabia reports a murder rate of about 0.9 per 100,000 people and a robbery rate of 2.9 per 100,000, among the lowest in the world. Dubai and the UAE post similarly low murder rates, around 0.92 per 100,000.
Research found that Saudi Arabia’s crime rate was significantly lower than that of six neighbouring Muslim countries that do not apply Shariah law. Judges, police officials, and laypeople all pointed to the same moral climate: the combination of religious socialization and the certainty of swift, visible punishment created an environment where serious crime was rare.
This is not just about severity. Islamic criminal law, properly understood, is as much about procedure and restraint as about penalties. Scholars have argued that the human-rights critiques of hudud should focus less on the harshness of the punishments and more on the procedural safeguards that classical Islamic law provides for the accused. These include high evidentiary standards, opportunities for repentance before proceedings begin, and strict judicial oversight.
The Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) Himself encouraged offenders to repent before the case was brought to court, emphasizing reform over retribution. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whether one agrees with every aspect of their systems or not, the state has generally coupled deterrence with predictable enforcement and a pervasive moral culture, something Pakistan never attempted.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, by contrast, the use of Shariah-branded laws was largely instrumental. Patriarchy and political interests aligned to use religion as a means of reinforcing each other, eroding women’s rights in the process. The Hudood Ordinances became part of a broader Cold War strategy: justify training the Afghan mujahideen, consolidate military rule, and suppress dissent. Women’s safety was collateral damage.
The Motorway Rape Case of 2020, where a stranded mother was assaulted in front of her children, showed how little progress had been made decades after Zia. Even as courts handed down death sentences in high-profile cases, the deeper culture of victim-blaming persisted, epitomized by a police chief’s remark that the victim should not have been traveling alone at night.
This raises an uncomfortable but necessary point for Pakistani policymakers. If the example of the UAE and Saudi Arabia is any guide, there may be no criminal-law framework with a greater deterrent effect than Shariah law implemented in its true essence. But “true essence” here does not mean symbolic ordinances or gender-biased prosecutions. It means a legal order where punishments are rare precisely because evidentiary standards are strict, repentance is encouraged, and the state applies the law without political manipulation. In other words, Shariah law’s effectiveness abroad stems from the very safeguards that were ignored in Pakistan.
Of course, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are not utopias. They have their own human-rights controversies and debates over freedom of expression. Yet in terms of everyday security, the ability of a woman to walk alone at night, to leave her handbag open without fear, they demonstrate what a society looks like when laws are enforced predictably and when moral norms are internalized. Pakistan’s experiment with Hudood, by contrast, achieved neither deterrence nor justice. It produced almost no convictions of actual criminals while ensnaring thousands of women in spurious charges.
The question of whether Pakistan should implement Shariah law again is therefore misleading. The problem was never simply that the laws were Islamic but that they were implemented with ill intent. Any future reform must begin by acknowledging that Islamisation was used to silence victims, not protect them. A genuine application of Shariah principles would focus on safeguarding the maqasid, the higher objectives of Islamic law, which include the protection of life, dignity, and property, rather than on scoring political points.
This means three things. First, procedural safeguards must be non-negotiable. No woman should ever risk prosecution for reporting sexual violence. Second, the state must resist the temptation to use religion as a cover for authoritarianism. And third, public education and moral socialization, the soft power of religion, are as essential as the criminal code itself. Without these, any attempt to revive Hudood-style laws will only repeat the injustices of the past.
My friend’s comment about Dubai was not a romanticization of the Gulf but a reminder of what ordinary Muslims expect from their states: safety, dignity, and justice. Pakistanis deserve the same. Whether or not Shariah law is the chosen framework, its supposed Islamisation must no longer be a slogan for repression. The lesson from Saudi Arabia and the UAE is that deterrence works when coupled with fairness and moral credibility. The lesson from Pakistan’s Hudood era is that without those, “Islamic” laws can become their own kind of injustice.
