A university lawn can change character very quickly in Pakistan.
One moment, students are setting up stalls. Music is playing somewhere. A group rehearses a dance, another hangs a banner, and most students walk past because they have classes, assignments or tea waiting for them. Then a video reaches social media.
The event is no longer just an event.
Within hours, people who were never on the campus may be debating Islam, Pakistani culture and the ideological purpose of the state. Students become representatives of competing identities. A university administrator who thought he was approving an extracurricular activity suddenly finds himself managing a national controversy.
I have watched this pattern often enough to think we ask the wrong question about it.
The question is not whether Pakistani universities should become secular spaces detached from religion. Nor is it whether religiously conservative students should remain silent when something genuinely troubles them.
The harder question is institutional: who decides what is acceptable on a Pakistani university campus, under which published rules, and what happens when ideological pressure becomes more powerful than those rules?
A Cultural Festival That Ended With Tear Gas
Consider what happened at Punjab University in March 2017.
Students were holding a Pakhtun cultural festival. According to contemporary reporting by Dawn, a confrontation broke out between students associated with the cultural event and activists of Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba, or IJT. At least 10 students were injured. Police eventually used tear gas.
Even the basic story was contested. Punjab’s then law minister blamed IJT for trying to stop the cultural show. The Punjab University vice chancellor also said IJT students had attacked first. IJT disputed that account and accused the other students of attacking its activities.
That distinction matters. I do not want to turn a disputed campus clash into a morality tale in which one group represents intolerance and another represents freedom.
Something more important happened afterwards. Punjab University restricted the activities of student organisations. Students wishing to organise programmes would have to submit proposals to the administration, which could approve them and arrange security.
There, almost hidden beneath the ideological argument, sits the real institutional problem. A university should know who may organise an event. It should know where it can be held. The same rules should apply when the organisers are religious, ethnic, cultural or political groups.
Then Came Holi
Quaid-i-Azam University provides an even clearer example of how quickly campus administration can become a national argument about identity.
Students celebrated Holi there in 2023. Videos circulated widely. The Higher Education Commission then sent universities a letter advising higher education institutions to distance themselves from activities it described as incompatible with Pakistan’s identity and societal values. The letter referred to the country’s Islamic identity.
The reaction was immediate. HEC subsequently withdrew the communication. The federal education minister told the National Assembly that HEC should not have issued it. HEC, for its part, said it respected religions, faiths and their associated festivals and that its earlier communication had been misinterpreted.
Yet the story did not end with HEC’s retreat. QAU later issued show-cause notices to students. The university’s stated issue was more specific: students had allegedly organised the celebration without prior approval and continued playing loud music despite instructions from security personnel.
Those are two quite different questions: should Hindu students be able to celebrate Holi, and can students hold an event without following university procedures?
Pakistan gets into trouble when it mixes the two. A university can reasonably regulate time, location, sound, security and prior approval. Such regulations can apply to a Holi celebration as they apply to a concert, an Islamic conference or a cultural night. Once administrators instead start deciding whether a particular culture is sufficiently Pakistani, the argument moves from administration into ideology.
What the Constitution Actually Says
Pakistan’s Constitution does not settle every campus dispute. It does, however, establish boundaries that are often simplified in public debate.
Article 19 protects freedom of speech and expression. The protection is not absolute. The Constitution expressly allows reasonable restrictions imposed by law on specified grounds, including the glory of Islam, public order, decency and morality.
That qualification matters. People who argue for unrestricted expression cannot simply quote the first half of Article 19 and ignore the rest.
But the Constitution contains other protections too. Article 20 protects citizens’ right to profess, practise and propagate their religion, subject to law, public order and morality. Article 22 contains protections concerning religious instruction and participation in religious ceremonies in educational institutions.
Pakistan therefore does not have to choose between being an Islamic republic and recognising religious diversity. The constitutional structure contains both elements. The difficult work lies in administering them.
What About Islam?
This is where I would revise an argument I have sometimes seen made too casually.
It is tempting to respond to every controversy by saying Islam has nothing to fear from music, dance or cultural festivals. That sounds confident. It solves very little.
Muslims themselves disagree over some forms of music, dancing, gender interaction and public celebration. Those disagreements have long histories in Islamic jurisprudence and social practice. A university administration is hardly the institution that should settle centuries of fiqh before approving a student programme.
Religious students should therefore be able to argue that an activity conflicts with their understanding of Islam. They should be heard. But being heard is different from possessing a veto.
A university cannot function if whichever group can mobilise the strongest pressure acquires the power to decide what everyone else may do. The same principle must work in the other direction. Administrators should not dismiss religious students as backward merely because they object to an event. Their beliefs are part of the university community too.
Pluralism is not agreement. It is the institutional management of disagreement.
The Abdus Salam Case Shows How Far the Problem Can Travel
The controversy becomes more uncomfortable when the event is not primarily cultural.
In May 2024, QAU postponed an Abdus Salam Science Festival that had been planned by the university’s science society in collaboration with the Pakistan Academy of Sciences and the National Centre for Physics.
The proposed programme concerned science and education. Reporting at the time said a religious group had expressed objections connected with Abdus Salam’s faith.
The vice chancellor rejected the claim that the university had cancelled the festival under pressure. He cited the academic calendar and approaching examinations as the reason for postponement, although he acknowledged that people and groups had expressed reservations. That qualification must remain in any fair account.
Still, the episode illustrates the institutional dilemma. If a science festival honouring Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate becomes entangled in a dispute about religious identity, university administrators need transparent rules more than ever. Otherwise nobody outside the administration can distinguish an academic scheduling decision from capitulation to pressure.
Yet Not Every Cultural Event Causes a Crisis
There is another fact that complicates my original argument.
In January 2026, QAU hosted what organisers called a Grand Night and Peace Mela. It included traditional Attan, music, food stalls and cultural displays. A Pashto singer performed. The event was presented as a celebration of cultural diversity and social harmony.
No comparable national ideological crisis followed. That matters because it destroys the lazy claim that every Pakistani university cultural event becomes a religious battle.
It does not.
So we should ask a better question. Why do some events become symbolic confrontations while others remain ordinary campus life?
The answer appears to depend partly on what an event comes to represent. Religion may be involved. Ethnic politics can matter. Rival student organisations and administrative weakness can turn relatively small disputes into larger confrontations.
Social media adds another layer. A short video removes an event from its institutional setting. Thousands of viewers then judge it without knowing whether permission was granted, what happened before filming began or what university regulations actually say.
The physical event ends. The symbolic event begins.
HEC Itself Recognises Campus Life Beyond the Classroom
There is also a misconception that universities exist only for lectures and examinations. HEC’s own programmes recognise a broader institutional role.
Its Youth Development Centers initiative discusses student clubs, societies, sports and extracurricular activities. This does not mean every proposed event must receive approval. It means extracurricular life is not an accidental corruption of higher education. Properly governed student activity is part of university life.
The key phrase is properly governed.
Universities need published event rules. Approval procedures should be predictable. Security assessments should address actual risks rather than ideological popularity. Decisions should state reasons.
If loud music violates a rule, enforce that rule consistently. If an event creates a genuine security problem, document it. If students organise something without required permission, use the disciplinary procedure already available.
But do not transform an administrative disagreement into a referendum on who is a proper Muslim or a proper Pakistani.
Universities Cannot Escape Pakistan’s Arguments
I do not expect Pakistani campuses to become ideologically neutral islands. They cannot.
Students arrive carrying the arguments of their families, mosques, neighbourhoods and political histories. Pakistan itself continues to debate the relationship between religion and citizenship. Universities inevitably inherit those tensions.
Perhaps they should.
A university that contains no disagreement is not necessarily peaceful. It may simply have taught one side to remain silent.
The test is what happens after disagreement begins. Does the university apply a rule? Does it explain the decision? Can students object without intimidation?
Those questions sound bureaucratic beside the grand language of Islam, ideology and national identity. Yet bureaucracy, when it works properly, protects people from having every disagreement decided by whoever can generate the most pressure.
I keep returning to that university lawn.
The music is not really the most important part of the scene. Neither is the dance, the banner or the angry social-media post that may appear later.
The important thing is the institution standing around them.
If its rules are clear and consistently enforced, students can disagree sharply and still share a campus.
When those rules collapse, almost anything can become an ideological threat.
Sometimes even a festival.