On 5 January 2002, the Concerned Citizens Forum held a seminar in Lahore’s Al-Hamra hall on the topic What kind of Pakistan do we want? The main speaker was ex-foreign secretary Mr Iqbal Akhund. One thought that the subject was not open for discussion, unless you take the title of the seminar to mean improvements in the running of the various state institutions. What kind of state do we want? can be answered by: ideological; and what kind of ideology? can be answered by Islamic; and what kind of Islamic state do we want? can be answered by: that which enforces the shariah.

I thought all these answers were in the Constitution and no one demanded anything else in Pakistan. Nor could anyone want it because there is a section in the Penal Code punishing anyone who speaks against the ideology of Pakistan with a long sentence behind the bars. That’s probably why at least one Urdu newspaper condemned what was said at the seminar.

Can you improve upon ideology? Yes, but not by watering it down, but by making it more hard–line and stringent. When Gorbachev wanted to make communism ‘loose’ (glasnost) and ‘reconstructed’ (perestroika), there was a coup against him. The communist state had to collapse and make way for Yeltsin’s capitalist order. Ideology brooks no revisionism.

In Pakistan too, every time it is felt that the ideology is not delivering there are prescriptions for further strengthening of the shariah. Therefore, it is no use recommending that we want a Pakistan where the ideology is either not there or is watered down.

Needless to say, anyone recommending that the ideological state be undone is committing heresy and could be punished under law. On the other hand, there are many institutions and personalities in Pakistan who answer the question What kind Pakistan do we want? by putting forth concrete steps to harden the ideology.

Hardening as answer to demands of reform:

The clergy is constantly demanding the enforcement of the shariah in answer to the question that the seminar asked. The Council for Islamic Ideology (CII) is busy on a daily basis to put forth its proposals for the conversion of the Pakistani state into a utopia of Islamic dreams.

Can we want a Pakistan different from the one we have? The answer is no.

The Ministry for Religious Affairs has already sent to the cabinet of General Musharraf a full–fledged programme for converting Pakistan into an ideal state. (The proposal has been shelved by a scared government). We have reached this stage in a gradual fashion, where these state institutions have become directly responsible for encouraging extremism even as President Musharraf takes steps to rein in the extremists.

In 1947, just before Pakistan came into being, the founder of the state, the Quaid–e–Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, made a formal statement which answered the question What kind of Pakistan do we want? He told his countrymen that he wanted a secular state. If earlier he had made ambivalent Islamic statements to woo the Muslim community, he now wanted to put them on notice that Pakistan would not be religious state.

(As the seminar of the Concerned Citizens opened, Pakistan’s well-known nationalist historian Safdar Mahmood had finished his four–part journalistic assault on those who thought that Jinnah was secular.)

In 1948, Pakistan signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after joining the United Nations. The Declaration contains articles ensuring freedom of religious worship. Therefore in 1949 when Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and his cabinet decided to table the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly, they were self–conscious about not infringing the rights of the non-Muslims in Pakistan.

This was Pakistan’s second answer to the question What kind of Pakistan do we want? It said that Pakistan would be an Islamic state where sovereignty will belong to God Almighty (later changed to Allah) but that all non–Muslims would be allowed to practise their religion freely.

The Hindu members of the Constituent Assembly from East Pakistan (25 percent of the delegation) objected because they did not want the kind of Pakistan envisaged in the Objectives Resolution. They were told by Muslim clerics outside the Assembly that an Islamic state treated its non–Muslims as zimmis and did not give them equal rights.

Inside the Assembly, Liaquat Ali Khan swore that non–Muslims would be treated equally, and Zafrullah Khan (sic!) told them what an excellent and progressive thing the Objectives Resolution was while Nishtar explained to them in a threatening tone the real meaning of jihad. (It is unclear why he should have spoken of jihad when trying to answer the question What kind of Pakistan do we want?)

Objectives Resolution as answer: To make sure that the ‘objective’ is not forgotten, the Objectives Resolution was appended to the Constitution as its Preamble. But then on a couple of occasions the Supreme Court had to accept the argument that a Preamble was not the actual body of the Constitution.

It was therefore taken upon himself by General Zia to insert the Preamble into the Constitution through an amendment. But, conscious of the fact that shariah ordained zimmi-hood, he removed the word freely from the text where the non–Muslims were promised freedom of worship in consonance with the Universal Declaration. The sneaky thing he did was that he did not notify the deletion of the word, freely.

That brought in the unspoken zimmi concept, in line with the fulfilment of the condition implied in What kind of Pakistan do we want? This ideal was reached by General Zia when he added separate electorates to the Constitution through his 8th Amendment. No non–Muslims could vote together with Muslims and were to be treated like a zimmi although the Constitution still did not contain the word.

General Zia asked the question very directly and answered it in great detail. His answer is now the grundnorm of our consciousness. If you deviate an iota from his shibboleths the orthodoxy of Pakistan, both political and religious, will have you by the throat. Zia asked Maulana Zafar Ahmad Ansari to report on what kind of state Pakistan should be in the light of the Islamic practice. The Ansari Report said an Islamic state cannot have political parties and cannot have a parliament with an opposition sitting in it. Hence the 1985 ‘partyless’ elections.

Iran got there first under the Ayatollahs by having a parliament without an opposition and no political parties. Afghanistan was even ‘purer’, it had an amirul momineen on the Medinate model, which caused many visiting Pakistani ulema, including Dr Israr Ahmad, to exclaim that he had created an ambience in Kandahar ‘just like the Prophet PBUH’.

General Zia’s answer was therefore not complete. His Federal Shariat Court was based on the ‘inclusive’ principle, meaning that anything not repugnant to Islam would be considered Islamic. While the democrats in Pakistan thought the Federal Shariat Court was incorrectly legislating instead of parliament, the ulema thought it fell far short of recreating the utopia of Madina. Major–General Abbasi, who staged his unsuccessful Islamic coup in the army in 1995, was to declare himself an amirul momineen according to the text of the speech that was found in his office.

No revisionism under ideology: Zakat and ushr were the first to be enforced to make Pakistan the kind of state we liked. Zakat, since its inception, has been regularly embezzled. Because of the malpractice in its distribution, it has not been distributed for a number of years. Its collection was always a problem because the Shia community never accepted and was allowed exemption.

The welfare state envisaged in this collection was never realised. After the Sunni community began ducking zakat by declaring themselves Shia, the Supreme Court granted the Sunnis the same exemption as to the Shias. Now as our religion minister Dr. Ghazi wants to provide loans to the unemployed out of the Zakat collection, he is supposed to have violated the law which says it can only be given as alms, and a notice to this effect has been issued by the CII.

American researcher Grace Clark, in Pakistan 2000 (Lexington Books, 2000) discloses that a federal officer had absconded to London with a billion rupees of Zakat money! On the other hand, ushr, not mentioned in the Quran, has been levied without reinterpretation: 10 percent taxation on rain–fed farms while the irrigated ones pay only 5 percent! The state we want cannot revise out–dated provisions even if the laws are not Quranic! Needless to say, the collection of ushr in Pakistan has failed.

About reinterpretation, the state we want has a clear stand. General Zia rejected Allama Iqbal when he was told in 1986 by Justice Javid Iqbal that his father did not think that hudood could be imposed in modern times and had said so in his famous Sixth Lecture. Today, we have the cutting of hands in the statute book but have not cut any hands so far.

One argument is that in ancient times hands were cut for theft because there were no prisons in Arabia. As if to answer this rationalisation, the CII has recently declared that Islam disallows prisons and therefore all prisons in Pakistan (the one we really want) should be dismantled! Another law relating to diyat (blood money) is often abused and has not been enforced with regard to a murder where the killer has not been found and the locality where the body is found has to collectively pay the blood money.

Needless to say, in the state we want, no one can reinterpret ancient jurisprudence when it doesn’t work. Banking has to be abolished because the money–lender’s riba has been equated with interest, just as rape has been equated with fornication and the raped woman is in fact punished if she cannot produce eye-witnesses who saw her being raped.

Can we want a Pakistan different from the one we have? The answer is no. The difficulty lies in the inability of the Muslims to mould their original revealed message to modern times by applying logic and rationality to the ancient case law. There was a time when this was done but the era of taqleed (imitation) has been upon us since the medieval period. Under colonial rule, many Muslims thought of introducing reason in the science of understanding the Holy Writ, but today no one in the Islamic world tolerates any deviation from taqleed even when this taqleed varies in practice from state to state.

All Muslim states are unstable either because they have enforced the shariah and are unhappy with it, like Pakistan, or have not enforced it and are unhappy that it has not been enforced. For Muslims the question What kind of state do we want? is a rhetorical one because for them it has already been answered.                     

(Courtesy: The Friday Times, Pakistan)

Archived from Communalism Combat, January-February 2002 Year 8  No. 75-76, Cover Story 4

The post Muslim double-bind appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In Pakistan, the Afghan policy has often been considered as one with few or no options, particularly be cause the Kandahar government of Mullah Umar was not always amenable to ‘advice’ from Islamabad. The Taliban are all Pakhtun linked by their ethnicity and Deobandi faith to the majority Pakhtuns living in the NWFP and Balochistan. The rapid spread of the Deobandi militias and seminaries in Punjab during the Afghan jehad against the Soviets, and the utilisation of Deobandi militias in Kashmir as a low–cost option, has made it even more difficult to effect changes in an increasingly untenable Afghan policy. Pakistan has had to sacrifice a great deal internally since the 1980s when it began its Saudi and American–funded jehad in Afghanistan.

In 1986, General Zia allowed the Afghan mujahideen to attack the Shiite Turi tribe in the Kurram Agency of its Tribal Areas abutting Afghanistan, and a large number of Turis suspected of non–cooperation with the mujahideen and of having an alliance with the government in Kabul were killed. In response to this action, a Shiite party, Tehreek–e–Nifaz–e–Fiqh–e–Jaafaria, was created with a Turi cleric, Ariful Hussaini, as its chief.

Hussaini was murdered in Peshawar in 1989, which the Shiite community thought was the handiwork of General Zia, who was in turn killed in an air crash within a fortnight of the assassination. This began a series of killings of Shiite Pakistanis and Iranian diplomats and officials in Pakistan. The Deobandi parties, especially Sipah–e–Sihaba, spread their influence to the Northern Areas where the Shiites and the Ismailis were made to submit to their puritanical aggression.

The rise of the sectarian sentiment in Pakistan, and the increased support of the Pakistani army to the anti–Shiite Taliban, stiffened the Afghan policy and subliminally made it a policy of national consensus. As the year 2000 began, General Musharraf was hard put to make changes in it now probably demanded by his own advisers. In any case, the Afghan policy remains marginally more flexible than the policy on Kashmir.

The fact that India is not willing to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan has removed for the time being the pressure to change it in light of the pro–India international opinion.

The civil war in Afghanistan and the jehad in Kashmir have gradually replaced the modernist–Islamic mujahideen fighters with more conservative ones: the Jamaat–e–Islami consensus among the Pakhtun fighters has veered to a Deobandi consensus. The dominant Hizb–e–lslami

of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a flag-bearer of modernist–lslamist thinking, lost favour with the Pakistani establishment. In its place, the Taliban of Mullah Umar, trained in the traditional Deobandi jurisprudence, enjoy growing popularity in Pakistan. In Kashmir, Jamaat–e–Islami’s Hizbul Mujahideen has been eclipsed by Harkat ul–Ansar (now Harkat ul–Mujahideen after being declared a terrorist organisation by Washington) of Deobandi persuasion.

In a parallel development, the Wahabi or Ahle Hadis warriors have gained strength. The most effective jehadi outfit based in Lahore is Lashkar–e–Toeba, functioning as a sub–ordinate branch of Dawat al-Irshad, an organisation with contacts in the Arab world which collects jehad funds from the expatriate Muslim communities in the West. The Lashkar has training camps in Afghanistan and ‘Azaad’ Kashmir and is arguably the most resourceful militia fighting in Kashmir. In Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden has strengthened the old Wahabi connection with the Deobandi Taliban rulers. Some American sources claim that the Taliban Amirul Momineen, Mullah Umar, has married Bin Laden’s daughter.

The third strand of the fundamentalist movement which joins the Wahabi–Deobandi combine in Afghanistan is the Naqshbandiya from Central Asia. Uzbek Islamist leaders Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev have staged a fundamentalist revolt against Uzbekistan’s president Karimov and have sought shelter with the Taliban government after being accused by Karimov of trying to assassinate him in Tashkent. In Afghanistan, the Naqshbandiya faith was already strongly represented by Sibghat-ullah Mujadiddi, Afghanistan’s first president chosen by the mujahideen in Peshawar in 1989. Mujadiddi is in direct line of descent from Sheikh Ahmad of Sirhind, also called Mujaddid Aife Sani, who led a mystical movement of purification under Emperor Jehangir and was greatly admired by Islamic revivalist movements in India.

All three movements, the Deobandi, the Ahle Hadis–Wahabi, and Naqshbandi, are against bidaa (innovation) in Islamic rituals. They opposed the eclecticism that developed among Muslims under the Mughals and wished to separate local accretions from the pure Islamic faith. The founder of the Naqsh-bandiya order compelled the Mughal king Jehangir to persecute the Sikhs and the Muslim mystical orders which had developed a spiritual consensus with the Hindus.

The other preoccupation of the Naqshbandiya in India was opposition to the Shiite faith developing in the south of India and in the northern province of Oudh. Shaikh Ahmad had decreed that the Shiites were apostates and had to be put to the sword.

In Pakistan, only one Naqshbandi militant religious outfit called Tanzeem al–Ikhwan is active under the aggressive leadership of Maulana Akram Awan. Based on the mystical teachings of Shaikh Ahmad, the madrassa run by him in Chakwal has close links with the army. Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari, after his ouster from presidentship by Nawaz Sharif, paid secret visits to the seminary in Chakwal in affirmation of his close contacts with the Pakistani Army. In the investigations that followed the 1995 unsuccessful military coup in Pakistan, led by Islamist officers, Maulana Akram Awan’s name had cropped up in the list of the accused but was removed from the findings because of his close army connections. This gives evidence of the militarisation of the Central Asia mystical order.

The Pakhtun population of Balochistan is entirely Deobandi and traditionally anti–Shiite. The Pakistan army chief after Ayub Khan, Gen. Musa Khan, a Shiite Hazara, had himself buried in Iran through his will because of the Deobandi dominance in his province. In his book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, John K. Cooley reveals that Mullah Umar and Osama Bin Laden first met in 1989 in a Deobandi mosque, Masjid Binuri, in Karachi, and, under the tutelage of Pakistan’s most powerful cleric, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, presumably formed an alliance based on the traditional closeness of the Deobandis, who follow the Hanafi school, with the Wahabis, who accept only hadith under Abdul Wahab.

Thus the protection offered to Bin Laden by the Taliban, and the threats delivered by Pakistan’s Jamaat leaders to American citizens in support of Bin Laden, seem to spring from an historical interface between the two schools of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence).

The non–Pakhtun population of Pakistan is predominantly Barelvi, following the Hanafi fiqh of Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi (1856–1931) who led a successful revolt in India against the stringent teachings of the Deobandi–Wahabi school of thought. The stronghold of Barelvism remains Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan in terms of population, but increasingly the state–controlled mosques are being given to Deobandi khateebs (sermon–readers). Because of the rise of the Deobandi militias, and their funding by the Arabs for their anti–Shiite and anti–Iran doctrine, the province is rapidly losing its Barelvi temperament. The Tablighi Jamaat which holds its annual congregation in Lahore has become a powerful influence favouring a Deobandi point of view. It gathers two million people in its annual congregation but it is important to note that over ninety per cent of its attendants are Pakhtun from Peshawar and the Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The Pakistan president, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, is a Punjabi Deobandi.

The Afghan war pushed over three million Afghan refugees into Pakistan, which accommodated them in the Pakhtun–dominated areas of the NWFP and Balochistan. The Afghan youth, trained in the Deobandi seminaries in these two provinces for over ten years, later became the Taliban warriors of Mullah Umar. In their war with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban armies are constantly ‘replenished’ by fresh Taliban from Pakistan, many of them now Punjabi. According to Ahmed Rashid in Foreign Affairs (November–December 1999), over 80,000 Taliban have gone to Afghanistan to fight the Deobandi war against the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Recognition of the Taliban government by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan can be seen also in light of the ‘confluence’of historically anti–Shiite Deobandi–Wahabi spiritual coalition.

This has pitted a Shiite Iran against them. After the Naqshbandi addition to this equation, the Central Asian states too have joined the anti–Taliban reaction, with Russia at their back, and America inclining in favour of this formation because of Osama Bin Laden.

The fear of ‘Talibanisation’ in Pakistan springs from the circumstantial evidence of ‘stiffening’ in its ideology. Most of the 26,000 religious seminaries have undergone a sea change. For instance, in the case of the Barelvi organisation, Dawat-e-Islami, which holds an impressive 200,000–strong congregation in Multan in Punjab annually, the prohibition of human image is a change in the direction of Wahabi–Deobandi opposition to television and photographs.

In their obiter dicta, the judges of the lower and higher judiciary have inclined to a more fundamentalist view of Islam. The lower courts have been handing out death sentences to non–Muslims (including Ahmadis who were forcibly declared non–Muslims in 1974) under the Draconian Gustakh–e–Rasul or blasphemy law. Christians have been particularly targeted by Muslim clergy in the rural areas often led by the jehadi militias.

In 1997, a Christian settlement in Punjab, Shantinagar, was razed to the ground by militias using incendiary bombs normally a part of the arsenal of the mujahideen in Kashmir.

In 1998, Bishop John Joseph of Faisalabad, Punjab, committed suicide in front of a court trying a Christian for blasphemy, and unleashed reaction from the European Union and the US, the latter passing a law mandating sanctions against states relying on blasphemy to violate human rights.

In Lahore, the high court handed down a verdict in 1996 against girls marrying without the permission of their fathers; it went against the Hanafi jurisprudence in force in Pakistan. Before the verdict was struck down by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a controversy developed on the issue in which the clerics generally upheld the more stringent Wahabi law applied by the high court.

Encouraged by the growing conservative outlook in the judiciary, Islamist scholars went to court in 1998 to undo some of the reforms initiated in 1961 in respect of Muslim Family Law. Petitioners, including some professors teaching Islamic courses in the universities, asked the court to strike down the provision of registering the nikaah (marriage deed) with the local councils and remove the limit placed on the marriageable age of girls.

The Supreme Court began hearing a 1992 government appeal against an old Shariat court verdict that bank interest be abolished in Pakistan. The Nawaz Sharif government, already having tabled its own 15th Amendment Shariat Bill under pressure from the fundamentalist forces in society, indicated its willingness to accept the ban on bank interest. The Supreme Court, judging from the highly publicised remarks of the judges in the course of hearings, was about to deliver a verdict against bank interest or riba before the 12 October coup took place. It shocked most Pakistanis when it finally delivered its verdict against bank interest on 23 December, knowing full well that it would create insurmountable difficulties for the Musharraf government. The judge who headed the Supreme Court bench had headed the Lahore high court when it handed down the verdict that women could not marry without the permission of their fathers. Encouraged by all this, the Council of Islamic Ideology declared that jails were against Islam and should be abolished. Leaders of the Deobandi parties have been calling for the introduction of a stringent Taliban–like system in Pakistan. On a trip to the Frontier Province in 1998, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif actually promised the enforcement of such a system, which he later denied.

The Talibanisation of the state dates back to the days when Pakistan began handling the Afghan jehad against the Soviets. That the army was the first party affected by this process is proved by the reverse indoctrination experienced by the officers of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). At least two former heads of ISI, Gen. Hamid Gul and Gen. Javed Nasir, today stand at the head of the Islamic movement in Pakistan and enjoy leverage over governments by reason of their contacts with the militias on the one hand and the army on the other. Both favour an Islamic revolution which will wean Pakistan away from its perceived cultural and political alignment with the West in general and the US in particular. They represent also the intense anti-Indian orientation of the army and the common people.

Of the two, General Gul is the more outspoken. His most recent sally against Musharraf was delivered after the government was seen to trim its political sails to become eligible for fresh assistance from the IMF and rescheduling of old loans with the London and Paris clubs of creditors. He warned in a newspaper statement that ‘this government too’ was treading the old pro-American path and was preparing to sign the CTBT and ‘embrace Vajpayee’. Another former ISI chief. General Durrani, although inclined to be secular in outlook, writes often to consolidate the old foreign policy paradigm favoured in the past by the armed forces. It is noteworthy that General Gul, General Durrani as well as Gen. Javed Nasir were removed as ISI chiefs under the shadow of suspicion. At the time of writing, the last chief of the ISI, General Ziauddin, along with two other former ISI officers, were in custody and may be subjected to court martial for anti–state activities.

The return to Pakistan of Maulana Masood Azhar after his release from India following the deal made with the hijackers in Kandahar brought to the fore the importance of the Binuri Masjid seminary in Karachi as Asia’s biggest centre of Deobandi–Taliban power. Maulana Azhar headed for Karachi after entering Pakistan and embarrassed Islamabad by making his usual anti–India and anti-US speeches at the mosque in Binuri Town. Washington, which was to judge whether India was correct in accusing Pakistan of being a terrorist state, lodged a strong protest against his outpourings.

The chief of the Binuri Town madrassa is Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a Pakhtun Deobandi cleric who counts Afghanistan’s Mulla Umar among his disciples. He is said to be the most powerful man in Pakistan — he sits at the top of the Deobandi consensus — and is the author of a fatwa of death against Americans. After the Kandahar hijacking, jehad funds were collected all over Pakistan in his name. In Lahore, for instance, the Masjid-e-Shuhada, a government–controlled mosque given under a Deobandi khateeb (sermon–reader), collected donations under banners carrying the Mufti’s name as guarantor. The Binuri mosque madrassa was set up in 1947 by another Pakhtun cleric, Mufti Yusuf Binuri, who had inherited the ‘militant’ branch of Deoband’s Dar al–Ulum, while Peshawar remained the centre of the ‘monastic’ branch headed by Mufti Mahmood, father of the present Jamaat chief, Maulana Fazlur Rehman.

The Deobandi cleric who led the funeral prayer of Jinnah in 1948 in Karachi, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, was also in the ‘monastic’ tradition, but some saw irony in the fact that a Shia–hating cleric performed the last rites of a leader whom his sister, Fatima Jinnah, was to declare Shiite in an affidavit to the Sindh high court a few days later. The fear of Talibanisation spread in Pakistan in 1997 after the Binuri-Taliban seminarians virtually took over the city of Karachi for a day during a protest. It was realised for the first time that the Taliban power was now centred in Karachi, heretofore seen as a business city with a ‘secular’ character, and not in the NWFP and Balochistan.

The biggest persuader in Pakistan is the economy. It can’t be imagined how the military rulers can blackball suggestions coming from their civilian Cabinet to realign Pakistan’s foreign policy behind a global consensus for peace in the region. India may be in a better position to defy this consensus because of its good economic indicators and the international goodwill it has reaped from the Kargil operation, but Pakistan has no options left. Musharraf and his colleagues may be struggling with the single–option direction being dictated by the country’s economy, but will most probably adjust to it as time passes, unless, of course, there is an interruption of rule.

Musharraf’s replacement can come in two ways. Finding the going too tough, Musharraf can curtail his rule and hold elections, or he can be replaced through a ‘revolution’ against his perceived ‘secular’ and pro–American posture. In the first instance, the new elected government will quickly fall into the old groove of a cautious approach to regional and world affairs without the ability to make the radical changes to stem Pakistan’s economic retrogression. It will not be able to ignore the agenda of the Pakistani army to keep the Kashmir pot boiling, nor will it be equal to the task of taking Pakistan out of international isolation in Afghanistan. Fundamentalism in Pakistan will intensify — and challenge the elected government on such measures as the complete Islamisation of society and the national economy. The Pakistani public, already disenchanted with politicians, will incline more and more in favour of the clergy and thus render the state vulnerable to a take–over by Islamists through a ‘revolution’.

The second mode of possible transition is a coup by another general on behalf of the Islamists. Fundamentalism in Pakistan is kept at bay by democracy: the electorate repeatedly votes in favour of the ‘secular’ parties, leaving the religious parties marginalised in parliament. For this reason, most religious leaders have been talking of ‘revolution’ instead of victory through elections. The ‘revolution’, if it happens, will bring the Sunni clergy to power, which will somehow have to paper over their doctrinal differences to be able to rule. The fundamentalist government will immediately adopt an aggressive posture towards India in particular and the US and the West in general, seeing a Jewish–Hindu collusion in their attitude towards Pakistan.

A fundamentalist regime will also turn on the economy with a determination to impose statist reforms, nationalising and centralising a number of sectors in order to realise the ideal of Islamic falahi (welfare) state. An economic collapse is sure to follow this policy since Pakistan does not enjoy the isolationist cushion of Iran’s oil wealth, and disorder will envelop the country, including a civil war–like situation in Sindh and Balochistan. It is this fear that compels most secularists in Pakistan to see Musharraf’s government as Pakistan’s last defence against its Talibanisation.

(Excerpted from the article Fundamental Flaws, contributed by the writer to the recently published collection of contemporary essays, On the Abyss: Pakistan After the Coup)

Archived from Communalism Combat, August 2000, Anniversary Issue (7th) Year 8  No. 61, Cover Story 5

The post Fundamental flaws appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Who is alienated in the State of Pakistan? If reconciliation is needed, between whom is it needed? The apparent great rift is between the Pakistan Muslim League and Pakistan Peoples Party. They form the two political poles in Pakistan and since 1988 they have formed factions that revenge themselves regularly on each other. Will it be enough to reconcile the two? Will that remove the national alienation? The other alienated party is the MQM which needs to be reconciled to the State. Will this reconciliation bind the wounds of the State?

Most of the political actors in Pakistan are of the same category. Their alienation in fact does not affect the State. Pakistani people are indifferent to their fate. The real alienation exists elsewhere. In the federation the alienation is between the majority province Punjab and the smaller provinces. It has been formalised by democracy through the parliament where Punjab forms a ready–made two–thirds majority. Whatever Punjab thinks becomes the doctrine of the State. All institutions of the State are dominated by Punjabis, including the armed forces, including even the navy, where the coastal population should have dominated.

Beyond the inter–provincial alienation, a deeper alienation has been caused by the ideology of the State itself. This goes back to the crucial ideological decisions taken at the beginning. An Islamic state has been moving steadily towards its theocratic destination, making the politicians progressively irrelevant. A very large section of the population follows the clerical leadership which wants a revolution as a means of establishing theocracy in Pakistan. The corruption of the political parties has deepened the estrangement of the common man in Pakistan. Erosion of State institutions has forced him to seek protection from the clerical organisations.

Reconciliation is needed between the political parties and their voters. They want good governance from them which the parties simply cannot provide. Can there be a reconciliation between the masses and the leaders who get voted into power repeatedly? The very nature of leadership in Pakistan is an obstacle to this reconciliation. The politician relies on the very rhetoric the clergy uses against them.  If the clergy wants Shariat, the politician, too, wants it. Only, after the politician has enforced Shariat, the morality of the State sinks even further. This convinces the common man that Shariat can be properly implemented only by the clergy.

That Shariat is the monopoly of the clergy is a historical fact. The Quran can be interpreted only by the ulema, not by the parliament. The ijma (consensus) demanded by Islamic jurisprudence is not the ijma of the parliament but the ijma of the ulema. Why should the ulema surrender this historical right to the politician when the politician doesn’t even claim this right? After the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian ulema agreed to an Islamic constitution under the government of politicians. The Bazargan government accepted the constitution in 1979 on the assumption that the people of Iran would be represented through an elected sovereign government. But in 1978, the dominant clergy realised that Iran could only have a theocracy, not an elected government.

In Pakistan the clergy is deeply divided. It cannot form itself into a single party or an alliance of parties supported by the people. Unlike the people of Iran, the people of Pakistan prefer to award political mandate only to political parties. Divided along confessional fissures, they seek a unified electorate through support to political parties. But they remain alienated because the textbook prescribes the Shariat and the political parties are not ‘qualified’ to enforce it. When they enforce it, problems of reconciliation of the Quranic law to modern times fore–ordain its failure. Alienation is built into this situation.

The State leans in favour of Islamic governance, a utopian construct on which it can’t deliver. The State is sensitive to the growing power of the religious organisations. Civil society and the armed forces are under their influence. Armed religious organisations are a factor to reckon with. Political parties, no longer able to rally people, now lean on them to gather people for a show of strength. Many opportunists now pin their hope on the ultimate handing over of the State to an imaginary ‘confederacy’ of armed religious organisations. A ‘national’ reconciliation between them and the elected government is not possible. One is the ‘alternative’ of the other, not a democratic choice.

All Islamic states find themselves unable to reconcile to the minorities. The idea of the zimmi is so deeply embedded in the Islamic mind that it barely tolerates the presence of a population not of the religion represented by the State. You only have to look at the evolution of the idea of the rights of the minorities protected in the Objectives Resolution in 1949 and the version of it inserted into the Constitution by General Zia to realise how impossible it is for an evolving Islamic state to reconcile with its religious minorities.

The alienation between the sunni majority population and the minority shia population has been caused by the armed religious organisations tacitly supported by the ulema. The objective of the ulema is to convert the shia Muslim population into a non–Muslim minority, after which the State can start treating them as it treats the other non–Muslim minorities or zimmis.

Can there be a reconciliation between the shia and sunni communities? Once again the doctrine of the State that only the ulema can interpret the Islamic law hamstrings it. If the ulema are responsible for the alienation, how can they remove it?

The shia–sunni alienation is embedded in Islamic history. History is interpreted by the two communities separately. Historical events are known and understood by the two in a manner that the two versions cannot be reconciled. Pakistan is an Islamic state, but if you look closely at its law–making processes, it is in fact a sunni state. Laws emanate as much from the Quran as from hadith, but hadith is differently compiled and understood by the two communities. No shia–sunni reconciliation within the Islamic state is possible unless the historical documents are re–examined.

No one in Pakistan will agree to examine these documents. But in a State that the Quaid had envisaged this reconciliation was possible; indeed this alienation would not have taken place at all. The Arab–Iranian stand–off epitomises this difficulty. Because of the dominance of a fundamentalist mind–set on both sides of the divide, no reconciliation has so far been possible. Had there been a secular state in Iran, the pragmatist kingdoms of the Gulf would have made a deal with it, ignoring the militant Islamic storm arising in a partially democratic Egypt. 

Historically, the rise of the Islamic state has immediately been engulfed by the sectarian problem.
No reconciliation is more difficult than the one meant to bind the ethnic alienation. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the ethnic problem is alive and kicking in Sindh and Balochistan. In both the provinces, large injections of external populations have been made. This is not to say that provinces have to be ethnically pure. Balochistan has been traditionally an admixture of the Baloch and the Pakhtun. Indeed the two ethnic–linguistic communities have a record of political co–operation in the face of Punjabi dominance in the federation.

Sindhi cities have been traditionally more cosmopolitan than those in Punjab. Its Sindhi population has been predominantly rural, living under a very tough feudal system which has prevented it from graduating to an urban identity. The large repeated injections of alien populations from within Pakistan and from Bangladesh after the 1971 war have been far beyond the economic capacity of the province to absorb them. The same kind of thing has happened with Balochistan during and after the Afghan war. Good governance, a rather stringent observance of the rule of law, and steady economic development can resolve the ethnic divisions over the long term.

But these very elements are missing in Pakistan.
The State wants to convince the people that the real alienation is external, that it is India which is the real threat to their security of life. As internal threats increase and intensify, the State turns more determinedly to the raising of the external threat. It also tells the people that it wants to reconcile with India as the enemy country next door, but India will not allow it, or will allow it in a way that is dishonourable. If the threat is external and cannot be removed through reconciliation, what are the people to do? The expectation of the State is that external threat will unite them and make them forget the internal threat.

The real threat comes from internal alienation. This has to be recognised. It comes from the erosion of the institutions of the State no longer able to ensure the rights of the citizen. The citizen is alienated from the State and considers it his enemy. This is true of all populations but more true of people living in the smaller provinces because they see the majority province Punjab presiding over the State institutions. The most crucially defective aspect of the State is the provision of law and order and justice.

Can the State reconcile the citizen to itself when its real expectation is that external threat alone should reconcile them? Instead of producing an effective structure of law and order, it produces nuclear devices and test–fires missiles over the head of the people. Its budgets no longer serve the people. It makes budgets to pay off debts, spend on defence, and buy more weapons. The ideology of the State and its doctrines of defence are too inflexible to provide the conditions needed for national reconciliation. That which is inflexible withstands pressure for some time, but it breaks when the pressure passes a certain point. After that, solutions become possible.

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 1999, Year 6  No. 54, Cover Story 3

The post What ails Pakistan? appeared first on SabrangIndia.