"More liberal an officer you are, better are the chances of your promotion. This can be seen throughout 50s, 60s and 70s. Those, who were professionally good, yet practicing Muslims, were considered backwards, and generally not promoted beyond the rank of Brigadier or retired before time..."
With respect, I'm afraid you know little but presume too much. Mixing up of religion with a profession such as the armed forces is a bad idea in itself because religiosity is subjective and cannot ever be a substitute for professional merit. It is time you have the courage to acknowledge that moral credentials won’t always be proportional to outward religious projection. It is good to be a proud Muslim, but you should refrain from mixing up the two factors. Religious belief and conviction is a personal dynamic that cannot be judged by anyone except for Allah. So if the notion that outward displays of Islamic pious-ity and conviction should be taken as an indication of professional merit or competence is introduced into the Army institutionally, it would seriously undermine the social and professional fabric the Army is based on to say the least. It will also be corrosive for the purity of Islam and practicing Muslims themselves, for you see if the officers are told that they their advancement potentials will depend on their displayed religious inclinations, then do you think that the officers or jawans will be going to the mosques in front of their superiors for the right reasons? Also what will happen to the sectarian minorities in the military such as the Shias or the Aga Khanis? All of whom have served very well and constitute an integral part of our nation. By what frame of reference will their diverging ‘pieties’ and convictions be judged by? Will the personal bias of the religious evaluators not come into this?
Ayub Khan is often regarded as the father of the modern Pakistani Army and he had an inherit dislike for ‘Mullahs’ which was shared by generations of officers that would follow. The Mullahs initial hostility to Pakistan’s creation to and many other factors played a part in this. Anyone who has read Crossed Swords will know this quote from Ayub:
The fight with the mullah is political. It started from the time of Sir Syed [Ahmad Khan, a leading Muslim Reformer in the late nineteenth century]. The mullah regards the educated Muslims as his deadliest enemy and the rival for power. That is why several of them opposed Pakistan and sided with the Congress. They felt that with the help of the Hindus they will be able to keep educated Muslims out of power. So we have got to take on all those who are political mischief-makers. This battle, though unpleasant, is unavoidable. It has to been waged sometime or the other in the interest of a strong progressive Pakistan.
This puts the mind frame and ethos of the Pakistan Army into prospective doesn’t it? Ayub is right, the Islam the Mullahs try to throw at us is political and the Army treats it as such; politics. It would be foolish to introduce the ‘moral’ dynamic into all of this. These trends are fascinating and hard to explain, but they have more to do with political inclination or distrust, and social influences play an important part here too so it’s not a matter of soldiers displaying ‘weak morals’. The Pakistan Army draws its manpower from constrained if not limited territorial and social spectrums. I don’t want to use the word ‘aristocracy’ but the Army and its officer corps was heavily insulated from the main-stream civilian population. Garrisons were far away from the cities and markets so military men generally had a very offhand view of the world outside and vice versa. This class of officers were unlikely to mix religion with their day to day duties, most like Ayub had old family military traditions and culture heavily influenced by the British martial doctrine. But after the 60s, with increased urbanization and officer demands, the Army slowly started opening up its officer ranks to middle-class urbanized families where young men entered for a variety of reasons such as financial security and social prominence. Zia was the first of this generation. This class draws its identity very heavily from cultural norms said to be associated with Islam, so Zia’s ‘Islamization’ was more than just one guy calling the shots from the top. But like I take pains to point out, not everything is in the extreme. The Army is a harmonious organization, but these simmering undercurrents are hard to read for someone who has not experienced them first hand. There is a variety of opinion over everything from technical doctrine to religious matters. However it is credit to the PA that none of this has ever spilled out in the open, there has been some nasty stuff no doubt. But all those attempted coups were crushed and unpopular and properly handled. These days the Army’s cultural recruiting base is very wide-spread and diverse, now the problem is that higher society is moving away from military service. Because a lot has changed in Pakistan since the 50s (except for the politicians maybe, they are still snakes) however the Army has pretty much moved back to professional duty being the top priority. But that is not to say that Islam does not have a big place in the hearts of almost all Pakistani servicemen but it’s the Jinnah Islam as opposed to the Maulana Mudodi’s Islam.
So to say that professional officers were not granted promotions because of their basic Islamic habits i.e. offering prayers is completely uneducated BS. This has never happened and will never happen. There were a few years in the middle when secularist tendencies were frowned upon, but that is behind us now. There is no point over-exaggerating it either on this side or that side. Great officers and soldiers exist on both this side and that side of this line. And to the Pakistan Army, it not much of a line. Just a personal decision, which is as it should be.
Just thought I'd share my thoughts here...
I simply do not want to pass a judgment on the experiences of an individual here. I respect your convictions based on Islamic injunctions, but at the same time I am not judging anyone. I am simply pointing out how things went based on what I know/have seen.
The guy who started it must be crying...
