Author: Pamela Constable
Publication: International
Herald Tribune
Date: June 23, 2000
AKORA KHATTAK, Pakistan
- Far from the gleaming office buildings and manicured army compounds where
official power rests in Pakistan, Sami ul-Haq has quietly built an empire
of soft-voiced, sandal-wearing followers that makes generals and bureaucrats
quake in their boots.
Graduates of his Islamic
academy in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province, Darul Uloom Haqqania,
have fanned out through the region for years. Many joined the Taleban militia
in Afghanistan, and some now number among its top leaders. Thousands more
have taken up posts as religious teachers across Pakistan, spreading the
word of Allah and preparing for the day their nation will become a true
Islamic state.
''We don't need political
parties or offices with signposts; every mosque and madrassah religious
school is our office,'' said Mr. ul-Haq, 62. ''My students are scattered
everywhere, and whenever we need them they can influence and gather the
people.''
The country's secular
leaders, he boasted, ''cannot dare to touch us.''
He may be right. While
Pakistan's Westernized elite has long repeated the comforting mantra that
conservative Islamic groups cannot command more than a fraction of the
popular vote, such groups have gained wide informal sway among the uneducated,
marginalized majority of poor and lower-income Pakistanis.
Today, followers of Mr.
ul-Haq and a half-dozen other leading Islamic clerics number in the millions,
with religious power bases in such cities as Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.
None of these leaders claims to seek a violent imposition of Islamic rule,
as happened in Iran in 1979 and Afghanistan in 1996. In fact, their movement
has been splintered by personal and liturgical differences.
But while they have not
succeeded in replacing Pakistan's moderate, parliamentary version of Islam
with their vision of a stricter religious state, Pakistan's maulanas, or
religious scholars, exercise a formidable de facto veto over issues of
Muslim law, culture and policy that not even the country's military ruler,
General Pervez Musharraf, has felt strong enough to challenge.
In part, their power
is based on religious emotion: the ability to draw excited Muslim masses
into the streets. It also is based on the threat of violence. Some mosques
and madrassahs have served as launching pads for armed sectarian assaults,
and many also trained devotees who joined the Afghan jihad against Soviet
troops in the 1980s.
For General Musharraf,
who espouses a moderate vision of Islam, the first test of wills came in
May, when he announced plans to modify Pakistan's law against blasphemy,
which regards an insult to the Prophet Mohammed as a serious crime.
General Musharraf proposed
a minor change that would require blasphemy cases to be filed with higher
police authorities to reduce frivolous or false charges. But even such
a modest alteration so infuriated Islamic leaders that they threatened
mass strikes and ''agitation.'' General Musharraf quickly backed down,
announcing that no change in the law was needed.
''We have so many other
problems to deal with, especially the economy, that we felt it was not
the right time to get involved,'' said the religious affairs minister,
Abdul Malik Kasi. In the past month, Mr. Kasi has been visiting important
mosques and madrassahs on General Musharraf's behalf, seeking to reassure
Islamic leaders that the military government will not attack them.
''The religious groups
are not a threat to this regime,'' Mr. Kasi asserted. ''Most of them want
to cooperate with us because we are trying to get rid of corruption.''
At the same time, however, he acknowledged that the government could not
afford to antagonize the religious right. ''If we hit them with a stick,
they will hit us with a gun,'' he said. ''We need to have a dialogue.''
Some secular critics
say the army itself is more in tune with a strict version of Islam than
General Musharraf. They suggest he cannot afford to override the religious
views of his more conservative aides, many of whom rose through the ranks
under the dictatorship of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, a rigid Muslim who
held power in the 1980s.
Moreover, the major mission
unifying Pakistan's army is its rivalry with India, the Hindu-dominated
neighbor from which Pakistan was split in 1947 at the end of British colonial
rule in the subcontinent. The army strongly backs the ''liberation'' by
armed guerrillas of Indian-ruled Kashmir - the only Muslim-majority region
in India. But despite the religious overtones of their cause, military
officials say there is no place for Islamic fanaticism in the security
forces.
-
WHILE General Musharraf
may have the armed forces under control, his aides use battlefield terms
to define his wary relations with the religious right. His reversal on
the blasphemy law was a ''tactical retreat,'' they say, and he will bide
his time before ''opening another front'' in the struggle to build a modern,
stable and democratic state.
But some religious groups
are already opening fronts of their own. Mr. ul-Haq said that most Islamic
leaders supported General Musharraf when he seized power in October, largely
because he pledged to curb corruption and install a true democracy.
But recently, he said,
''vested interests'' in Pakistan and the West have been pushing General
Musharraf ''in a secular direction,'' while Muslim groups are trying to
pull him back.
One battle looms over
who will control the vast network of madrassahs that sprang up across Pakistan
in the 1980s. These cloistered academies, which teach mostly Koranic studies
and charge no fees for poor students, have replaced public schooling for
hundreds of thousands of Pakistani youths.
The Musharraf government
would like to broaden the madrassahs' curricula and provide the academies
with computers to help train students for the modern working world. Some
Muslim educators say they already are making these changes, but all insist
they will fight any effort by the state to intervene in their private activities.
A second area of controversy
is the role of nongovernmental organizations, mostly Western-funded aid
groups, that operate in Pakistan. Conservative clerics say many of these
groups have a hidden agenda to woo Muslim women away from their traditions
and into a libertine lifestyle, threatening the authority of Islam by promoting
divorce and careers for women.
''We have proof that
these organizations are promoting specific causes,'' said Maulana Fazlur
Rahman Khalil, an Islamic leader, in a recent interview with a Pakistani
newspaper. If women are allowed to work and travel, he said, ''it destroys
our system, our families.'' In Europe, he asserted, women are ''ruined
in the name of freedom'' and ''change husbands every night.''
Mr. Rahman said also
that he opposed the proliferation of satellite dishes in Pakistan, because
they spread ''obscenity and dirt, which is being promoted by the Western
world.'' In some areas of Pakistan, Islamic activists have destroyed satellite
dishes and cable TV operations.
Not all Islamic leaders
take such extreme views, and some moderate clerics suggest the reactionary
rhetoric is aimed mostly at whipping up political support through religious
emotion. Tahir ul-Khadri, an Islamic scholar who runs a chain of madrassahs,
says religious fanaticism in Pakistan is a reflection of its society and
politics - not of Islam itself. ''Our problem is not religion; it is poverty
and illiteracy and political intolerance,'' he said. ''In 53 years, democratic
culture has never been promoted here. Our leaders have been dictatorial,
our behavior has been violent, our people have not learned to settle disputes
peacefully and respect each others' rights. This gets reflected in our
religious life, and this is what must change.''
