Most secularists in Pakistan see General Musharraf’s government as the country’s last defence against its Talibanisation
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