Most constitutions that touch religion do so by protecting it, guaranteeing a right to believe, worship or convert. Pakistan's Second Amendment did something rarer: it wrote a legal definition of who belongs to a religion into the constitution itself. Passed unanimously by the National Assembly on 7 September 1974 under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the amendment inserted a new clause, Article 260(3), stating that a Muslim, for every purpose of Pakistani constitutional and statutory law, is a person who believes in the absolute and unqualified finality of the Prophet Muhammad and makes no claim, direct or indirect, to prophethood after him. Anyone who does not meet that test is defined as non-Muslim, a classification the same clause applied by name to members of the Ahmadiyya movement and the smaller Lahori Ahmadi group.
The vote followed months of pressure the Assembly could not set aside: anti-Ahmadi riots in May and June 1974 had already put the question of Ahmadi status at the center of national politics, and Ahmadi leaders were called before parliamentary committees to answer questions about their own theology before the amendment reached a final vote. What had been, for decades, a doctrinal dispute within and around the Muslim community became, in a single clause, a matter the state itself would define and enforce.