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A possible alternative
Ashok Malik
Many Indians fear the collapse of Pakistan and the imminent takeover of the state by a rampaging army ofAllah. They worry the Pakistani elite English speaking, whisky drinking, Western and liberal in its personal lives will simply run away, leaving behind a rump civil society: Illiterate and undereducated millions who will become cannon fodder for the Islamists.
Reality may not be so black and white. It is more likely the Islamisation of Pakistans polity and society the tussle between an upper crust that is half embarrassed, half in denial and, at the back of its mind, very, very afraid, and the mullah-jihadi duumvirate will be a gradual one.
For security reasons, external powers will shore up the nominally secular or moderate elite. The debate between local traditions and mono-cultural, Arab interpretations of Islam will be long drawn, and while headed in one direction will not end in one day, perhaps not even in one century. What it will do, however, is paralyse a society and not let it achieve its potential.
How do we know this? Is there a template for Pakistan? Perhaps there is no one template but several, spread across failed states and a variety of Islamic societies caught in a wrenching struggle between the call of a supranational faith and a modernity rooted in nationalism. The author may not have intended it that way, but Sadanand Dhumes book My Friend, the Fanatic (Tranquebar), just released in India, not only interrogates Indonesias conversion, inch by inch, from a country of pluralist Muslims to one where Islamism is clearly on the ascendant, but also offers us a prism through which to understand Pakistan.
As Dhume, a Washington-based writer and cartographer of the many social Islams that inevitably seem to gravitate towards the one political Islam, puts it in a conversation, Indonesia represents the eastern edge of a historical contest between the Sanskritic and Arabist civilisations. The contest was lost centuries ago at its western end Afghanistan and has ceded ground, by miles rather than inches, in Pakistan.
In 1947, Pakistan was a Muslim homeland but still a South Asian country, very much situated in the ethos of the Indian subcontinent. Today, it looks in the direction of West Asia and the Arabian desert for a mother culture and a societal anchor. Likewise, says Dhume, the young Muslim boys and girls growing up in Java are probably the first generation in their communities who do not know who Bhima and Arjuna were. Islamist preachers have, for instance, forbidden rice farmers worshipping a local goddess of fertility, whose origins lie in a pre-Islamic veneration of agriculture.
Indeed, the evolution of Indonesian society in the period following the 2002 Bali bombings is particularly insightful. Dhume reports this in real time. Landing in Bali as a news reporter the day after the attack on the Sari nightclub killed some 150 Australian tourists, he was fascinated by the radicalism that was beginning to become more than just a fringe movement in a country he had travelled to and lived in. He quit his job and decided to become a chronicler of Indonesias new engagement with Islam.
The book is a result of those efforts. Dhume captures a period when the Islamisation debate was no more a passive, theoretical discussion. It acquired a trenchant edge and was, to use a colloquial expression, very in-your-face. It was a period that forced people to make choices, and also pushed upper class elites into denial, dissimulation, saying different things to different audiences, and pretending the problem would resolve itself. In a sense, this could describe Pakistan after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.
There are other parallels. Each time there is a Taliban-triggered bombing in, say, Peshawar, crowds gather and chant slogans against America and India. After the Bali bombings, Indonesia was subjected to numerous and fairly complicated theories arguing American and Israeli intelligence were behind the massacre.
There were comic phenomena, and then there were chilling ones. After Bali, Abu Bakar Bashir, leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, became a terrorist icon and South-East Asias Osama bin Laden. In large swathes of Indonesia, however, he was anointed a folk hero. Herry, the friend and fanatic Dhume refers to in his book title, named Bashir Man of the Year on the cover of the magazine he (Herry) edited.
Herry takes Dhume to meet Bashir in his prison cell, greeting the evil genius as ustad (a term of respect with origins in Arabic rather than Bahasa or any known Indonesian language). Bashir is blunt: Bush said if youre not with us youre against us. Im against them. Its a choice like water and fire, or between carrots and steak. Im a Muslim. Im a leader of Hezbollah (the party of God); he is the leader of the kafirs.
Bashir had made his choice. He expected everybody in Indonesia to make theirs too or face the consequences.
In the time Dhume knows them, Herry and wife have two daughters. The first is named Draupadi, as is so common with Indonesians comfortable with a Muslim religious identity and a Hindu cultural idiom. By the time the younger daughter, Ziyadilma, comes along, Herry has exorcised himself of his pre-Islamic legacy (or baggage). He is now writing pamphlets called Signs of Freemasons and Zionists in Indonesia, exploring hidden meanings in pyramids on United States dollar bills and combining economic grievance with religious prejudice holding forth on the Jewish characteristics of the Chinese.
Is it any different from street discourse in Lahore or Rawalpindi denouncing the scheming Hindu lalas? The economically successful neighbour is always a problem, in Mexico as much as in North Korea. In Islamist mythology, however, the successful neighbour is also the religious infidel, a regional variant of the grasping Shylockian Jew.
In the past half-decade, Indonesia has not surrendered to JI or to the Islamist political parties. Rather, pushed by Australia, it has busted terror cells, and its elite continue their libertine partying amid the dazzle of upmarket Jakarta. The economy too has begun to recover. Yet, even in a country blessed with enormous natural resources and rich economic and social achievement this is not going to be enough. The Islamist straitjacket can be pushed back but never broken. To think that could be Pakistans best case scenario.
- malikashok@gmail.com
The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> A possible alternative
Ashok Malik
Many Indians fear the collapse of Pakistan and the imminent takeover of the state by a rampaging army ofAllah. They worry the Pakistani elite English speaking, whisky drinking, Western and liberal in its personal lives will simply run away, leaving behind a rump civil society: Illiterate and undereducated millions who will become cannon fodder for the Islamists.
Reality may not be so black and white. It is more likely the Islamisation of Pakistans polity and society the tussle between an upper crust that is half embarrassed, half in denial and, at the back of its mind, very, very afraid, and the mullah-jihadi duumvirate will be a gradual one.
For security reasons, external powers will shore up the nominally secular or moderate elite. The debate between local traditions and mono-cultural, Arab interpretations of Islam will be long drawn, and while headed in one direction will not end in one day, perhaps not even in one century. What it will do, however, is paralyse a society and not let it achieve its potential.
How do we know this? Is there a template for Pakistan? Perhaps there is no one template but several, spread across failed states and a variety of Islamic societies caught in a wrenching struggle between the call of a supranational faith and a modernity rooted in nationalism. The author may not have intended it that way, but Sadanand Dhumes book My Friend, the Fanatic (Tranquebar), just released in India, not only interrogates Indonesias conversion, inch by inch, from a country of pluralist Muslims to one where Islamism is clearly on the ascendant, but also offers us a prism through which to understand Pakistan.
As Dhume, a Washington-based writer and cartographer of the many social Islams that inevitably seem to gravitate towards the one political Islam, puts it in a conversation, Indonesia represents the eastern edge of a historical contest between the Sanskritic and Arabist civilisations. The contest was lost centuries ago at its western end Afghanistan and has ceded ground, by miles rather than inches, in Pakistan.
In 1947, Pakistan was a Muslim homeland but still a South Asian country, very much situated in the ethos of the Indian subcontinent. Today, it looks in the direction of West Asia and the Arabian desert for a mother culture and a societal anchor. Likewise, says Dhume, the young Muslim boys and girls growing up in Java are probably the first generation in their communities who do not know who Bhima and Arjuna were. Islamist preachers have, for instance, forbidden rice farmers worshipping a local goddess of fertility, whose origins lie in a pre-Islamic veneration of agriculture.
Indeed, the evolution of Indonesian society in the period following the 2002 Bali bombings is particularly insightful. Dhume reports this in real time. Landing in Bali as a news reporter the day after the attack on the Sari nightclub killed some 150 Australian tourists, he was fascinated by the radicalism that was beginning to become more than just a fringe movement in a country he had travelled to and lived in. He quit his job and decided to become a chronicler of Indonesias new engagement with Islam.
The book is a result of those efforts. Dhume captures a period when the Islamisation debate was no more a passive, theoretical discussion. It acquired a trenchant edge and was, to use a colloquial expression, very in-your-face. It was a period that forced people to make choices, and also pushed upper class elites into denial, dissimulation, saying different things to different audiences, and pretending the problem would resolve itself. In a sense, this could describe Pakistan after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.
There are other parallels. Each time there is a Taliban-triggered bombing in, say, Peshawar, crowds gather and chant slogans against America and India. After the Bali bombings, Indonesia was subjected to numerous and fairly complicated theories arguing American and Israeli intelligence were behind the massacre.
There were comic phenomena, and then there were chilling ones. After Bali, Abu Bakar Bashir, leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, became a terrorist icon and South-East Asias Osama bin Laden. In large swathes of Indonesia, however, he was anointed a folk hero. Herry, the friend and fanatic Dhume refers to in his book title, named Bashir Man of the Year on the cover of the magazine he (Herry) edited.
Herry takes Dhume to meet Bashir in his prison cell, greeting the evil genius as ustad (a term of respect with origins in Arabic rather than Bahasa or any known Indonesian language). Bashir is blunt: Bush said if youre not with us youre against us. Im against them. Its a choice like water and fire, or between carrots and steak. Im a Muslim. Im a leader of Hezbollah (the party of God); he is the leader of the kafirs.
Bashir had made his choice. He expected everybody in Indonesia to make theirs too or face the consequences.
In the time Dhume knows them, Herry and wife have two daughters. The first is named Draupadi, as is so common with Indonesians comfortable with a Muslim religious identity and a Hindu cultural idiom. By the time the younger daughter, Ziyadilma, comes along, Herry has exorcised himself of his pre-Islamic legacy (or baggage). He is now writing pamphlets called Signs of Freemasons and Zionists in Indonesia, exploring hidden meanings in pyramids on United States dollar bills and combining economic grievance with religious prejudice holding forth on the Jewish characteristics of the Chinese.
Is it any different from street discourse in Lahore or Rawalpindi denouncing the scheming Hindu lalas? The economically successful neighbour is always a problem, in Mexico as much as in North Korea. In Islamist mythology, however, the successful neighbour is also the religious infidel, a regional variant of the grasping Shylockian Jew.
In the past half-decade, Indonesia has not surrendered to JI or to the Islamist political parties. Rather, pushed by Australia, it has busted terror cells, and its elite continue their libertine partying amid the dazzle of upmarket Jakarta. The economy too has begun to recover. Yet, even in a country blessed with enormous natural resources and rich economic and social achievement this is not going to be enough. The Islamist straitjacket can be pushed back but never broken. To think that could be Pakistans best case scenario.
- malikashok@gmail.com
The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> A possible alternative
