Author: Mahmood Faroooqui
Publication: Mid-Day
Date: June 11, 2004
URL: http://web.mid-day.com/columns/mahmood_farooqui/2004/june/85377.htm
The apocalypse came, liked what
it saw and has chosen to stay it out permanently.
For over 40 years, Pakistan has
been trying to wrest its 'stability' back from the apocalypse, but each
passing year paints the previous one with a rosier brush. So we get from
bad to worse to worst and it hangs there.
You ask Pakistanis why they are
in a state of permanent convulsion and they will tell you that God especially
loves them, sanctifies their formation even by throwing constant signs
of perdition their way.
Perdition, it appears, would not
come down in one fell swoop, instead Qayamat will gradually extend outwards
from the port city of Karachi and engulf us one by one, bit by bit.
Prices never fall after rising and
morals never rise after falling, goes an Urdu maxim. One may add a new
one to that, religious laws, once implemented, can never be rolled back.
For, either they are true or they are not, but once their enactment ordains
their truth-ness as it were.
Ask Pervez Musharraf. He has called
for making Islamic laws more flexible and modern. He has called for sincerity,
flexibility and boldness to find a 'viable, genuine and lasting' settlement
of the Kashmir dispute. Alas, his exhortations to the civil society to
condemn religious extremism have become so repetitive and frequent that
the number of aye-sayers is now negligible.
You ask a Pakistani Islamicist what
he thinks about Jehadis killing innocent Muslims and he will tell you anybody
killing Muslims is not a Muslim. You ask him why the killing of innocent
westerners is justified when it is their governments who are the enemy,
and he will respond that this is not real Jehad; the Jehad-e-Akbar against
one's baser self is a more exalted form of Jehad. You ask the liberal Muslims
what they think of all this and they will say it is the ignorant Mullahs
who preach this kind of obscurantism.
You ask the Mullahs why and they
will tell you how and why America is evil and that the liberal/secular
intelligentsia is hand-in-glove with them.
Eventually, you ask them about sectarian
killings, as in the assassination of the Deobandi cleric in Karachi and
the reprisals that are still going on and they will tell you that all Muslim
minorities are a front of the US.
Here is Qazi Ahmed Hussain, the
head of Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami, justifying his political party MMA's
agitation against the Aga Khan Foundation, which is to take over the handling
of the country's education boards: "It has been proved beyond doubt that
recent attempts to remove chapters on holy Muslim personalities and the
teachings about jihad from the syllabi were a western conspiracy since
the people who have been condemning the Islamic values of modesty and jihad
were involved in it."
However, why are civilians being
targetted in these reprisals in Karachi or in Iraq, for sectarian or national-liberation
causes? Hussain explains why the AKF centres were targetted: "The AKF centres
were among dozens of banks, petrol stations, restaurants and vehicles set
on fire when the police prevented protestors from giving vent to their
anger by raising slogans, and used tear gas and batons to disperse them."
Petrol pumps, KFC and McDonald outlets,
anything with a western insignia can be attacked on the grounds of collaboration,
but crucially, not the weapons that the Mullah's bodyguards use, nor the
jets and the Pajeros in which they gallivant, nor the hospitals they are
treated in.
The JI is only following its founder's
example after all, after life-long anti- Americanism and dreams of a resurrected
Islamic Pakistan, Maudoodi felt no hesitation in travelling to America
to get himself treated, the better to condemn it.
After all this if you still find
some faults with the Jehadis, they can always enlist the enemy and his
tools for support: "True, the persecution of minorities and the torture
of prisoners is unIslamic, but again the writer has simply ignored the
fact that leaving aside dictatorship and monarchies, no Muslim state is
known for persecuting minorities and torturing prisoners more than the
US which calls itself the champion of civil, human, women and all kinds
of rights which it denies to the Muslims."
Since its inception, Pakistan charted
out a double course, which converged in Kashmir, down with India, on with
Islam. The method to achieve its destiny would be proxy warfare that began
in 1948 and continues to date.
Foreign policy, domestic strategy
and the ruling ideology all fitted into the same prism. It was, in fact,
not Zia, but a socialist, Bhutto, who started Pakistan's Islamisation,
like banning Qadiyanis and declaring Friday a holiday.
The state now wants to roll back
because the world is forcing it to; the nation, however, whose religious,
national passion has been progressively co-opted in favour of the state,
finds it difficult to give up that same consensus.
How is it possible to purge Waziristan
of 'foreigners' for instance, when in the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas the Pakistani army is virtually an occupying force, when they are
the very ones who served the national ideology, in Kashmir, Afghanistan,
Central Asia.
Especially when the army refuses
to disengage. The rebel leader in Waziristan, Nek Muhammed, local leaders
allege, is being protected by the army.
Anthropologists have contended that
in Islamic societies orthopraxy - the right practice is often considered
more important than orthodoxy - the right belief.
The ideological basis of Pakistan,
the little history and the great myth that its populations have successively
imbibed about their nation, their religion and their past can rarely be
openly or directly questioned, let alone reversed, because the conventions
of conduct are so important. If you criticise Jehadis, append an equally
long condemnation of the US.
If you condemn the army, damn the
politicians as well. If Islam is the truest and Muslims the best, goes
the Islamicist, show it to us in state practice, in everyday life, in state
institutions. However, if a glorious past is one's future then all answers
are already given because the past is everything we want it to be.
Once they went for the Americans,
then they went for the Shias, then they went for the Christians, then they
went for the Barelvis. Can Qazi Hussain Ahmed be far behind?
