When Muhammad Ali Jinnah envisioned the creation of Pakistan as a secular state for Muslims in the 1940s, he had little idea of what it would become.

His dream country has been turned into an Islamist republic that imposes religion on its citizens, a hunting ground in which liberal Muslims are killed, and a safe haven for the world’s most wanted terrorists. What went so wrong with Jinnah’s vision?

Pakistan is instructive in this regard. The country is currently facing a messy state of affairs. This includes such episodes as the assassination of liberal Muslim politicians, above all the governor of Punjab province Salman Taseer, who was killed for opposing the persecution of Christians (as any good Muslim should do); but also the chilling discovery that Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, near Islamabad. These realities are a product of a process of Islamization that started in the 1970s under Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, many in Washington thought at the time, and Zia happened to agree, that injecting religion into the fabric of Muslim-majority societies lying on the southern flank of the Soviet empire, namely in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, would stave off the risk of these countries embracing communism. This, in turn, would serve the larger strategic Cold War goal of blocking Moscow’s access to warmer seas.

Known as the “Green Belt Theory,” the strategy had unintended consequences when religion became the moral compass of these societies, long outlasting communism. Today, political Islam has penetrated each of the four countries in ways that are unique to each: Pakistan is effectively an Islamist republic; Afghanistan was Talibanized, and in some respects still is; Iran fell prey to an Islamist revolution; and Turkey, although it is a democracy, is falling under the ever-more-permanent rule of the authoritarian Islamist-inspired Justice and Development Party.

Among the four countries, Pakistan provides the most chilling case of what can go wrong in Muslim-majority societies if religion becomes politicized within the context of global politics. Pakistan’s process of Islamization began after Zia ousted the country’s leftist leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. To fight off Bhutto’s popular ideology, Zia used religion as the antidote. Compulsory religious instruction became part of the national curriculum. Courts, media, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and charities guided by and promoting conservative Islam were promoted by the regime. The government expected its citizens to observe religion in a narrowly defined way as stipulated by Zia, and religion, in turn, defined the modus operandi of Pakistan’s foreign policy, including its support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and in Kashmir. Jinnah must have turned in his grave.

Though nothing is wrong with conservative values, transforming religion into a guiding principle in any society means that religious purity becomes an ideological beauty competition. In homogenous societies this can produce further unexpected results, as the Pakistani experience demonstrates. Islam often emphasizes orthopraxy – meaning defining practice in its orthodox form as the right of passage toward being a good Muslim. As a consequence, demographically homogenous Muslim societies loose their secular ethos while divergent forms of Muslimness wither away as a single and often restrictive form of political Islam dominates.

As the recent assassination of Salman Taseer confirmed, it has become virtually impossible in Pakistan to be a Muslim in any way that is different than that imagined by the jihadists – until now the winners of the country’s ideological beauty competition.

Pakistan’s Islamization has produced further unexpected results in the post-9/11 era. The singular role ascribed to religion in politics is now a combustible process, triggering radicalization along the lines of Al-Qaeda’s rhetoric of a clash of civilizations and a war between Islam and the rest of the world.

Mixing religion with politics is an irreversible process which can bring about harmful and unexpected consequences. What is more, assigning a key role to Islam in politics can unleash violent dynamics in Muslim-majority societies. Religion and politics are like fire and gunpowder. It is always better to keep them apart, as Jinnah well understood in the case of Pakistan.

Soner Cagaptay is director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he is also a senior fellow. He is the author of “Turkish Foreign Policy Under the AKP: The Rift with Washington” (2011). This article is reprinted by permission from the author.