CHANGE and STASIS

[muse]

Pakistan's intellectual and political conversation changed after Z.A Bhutto - how did a country imbued with the ethic of Jinnah end up an Islamist hole? How did a country in which every manner of idea was open for discussion and debate, a country which saw itself as a forward looking, natural leader end up allowing regressive, medieval attitudes, a public appeal:


Terms of the debate
Salman Tarik Kureshi


This newspaper’s report on the release from preventive detention of Hafiz Saeed, former head of the Lashkar-e Tayba and the current chief of the Jama’at-ud Dawa, carried an extraordinary statement. I quote, “Dogar submitted that the victims of the Marriott Hotel blast in Islamabad were bad Muslims who drank champagne.” The further bombing this week at the PC Peshawar was doubtless intended to further reduce the inventory of ‘bad Muslims’ in Pakistan; but that is beyond my present point.

Now, one does not know the context of the learned advocate’s statement nor its relevance to the detention of the former Lashkar chief. But consider it as it stands and a number of troubling questions arise.

Is it being implied that the horrific mass murder, arson and violence committed by the perpetrators of the Marriott attack (and by extension the PC bombing and numerous other attacks) was somehow justified because some proportion of the victims were ‘bad Muslims’? Is the established test of such ‘badness’ the consumption of champagne? Could someone on the outside take it upon himself to conclude that those inside (including menial staff, women and children) had all been guzzling champagne? If so, it must follow that cold-blooded murder and terrorism are hallmarks of ‘good’ Muslims who presumably do not indulge in such tippling?

It is still more baffling that a lawyer of the eminence of Mr AK Dogar should have made such a comment. In what manner is the Marriott bombing germane to the detention of Hafiz Saeed, who has never been accused of involvement therein? More, how is the issue of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Muslims relevant to such an extreme criminal act anyhow?

It seems that issues relating to Islam, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Muslims and the alleged ‘war against Islam’ around the world today represent one pole in every debate or discussion. On every issue, there is an ‘Islamic’ point of view, built upon belief in a vast Hindu-Jewish-Christian-Atheist-Marxist-Capitalist-Liberal conspiracy against Islam and Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ Bomb (as if a weapon of mass destruction could carry the label of a faith).

The other pole of debate is that of so-called ‘liberals’ and other such ungodly elements. This dichotomy, it is averred, is inevitable in a Muslim country where all arguments must be refracted through an Islamic prism that breaks them into ‘Islamist’ and ‘Western’ spectrums.

Do Muslims in Pakistan see their political and other problems in these, let us call them green-and-white, terms? Does political debate in Pakistan necessarily divide between the two poles of ‘Islamic’ and what by implication must be labelled ‘un-Islamic’?

Well, the first political statement of the new Pakistani nation, as expressed by its founder addressing the first session of the new parliament, revolved around policy statements on law and order, black-marketing, corruption and nepotism without reference to any kind of ‘religious’ perspective. The latter was dismissed by the Quaid, stating that “All these angularities of the...Hindu community and the Muslim community...will vanish...In course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

No wonder the mullahs hurled the sobriquet of ‘Kafir-e-Azam’ at him!

The decade between the Quaid’s death and the seizure of power by General Ayub Khan were years of political drift, confused legislation and weak, short-lived governments. Issues like refugee rehabilitation, land reform, economic growth, constitutional rule, human rights and — most fundamental — the rights of the federating units, were continually discussed and debated but remained unresolved.

The point worth noting is that, during that decade, no specifically ‘Islamic’ nostrum was proposed by way of a solution to these and other national problems. It seems that this kind of ‘Islamic’ thinking was simply not a part of the Pakistani frame of reference, except among a tiny minority.

On the other hand, two especially ‘secular’ establishment figures did hypocritically seek to use Islamist rhetoric and groups for their own purposes and played footsy with the mullahs. One was assassinated by a killer believed to belong to a religio-political party. The other lost control of his too clever manipulations and precipitated serious disorder in the city of Lahore. This resulted in the imposition of martial law and the loss of his own chief ministership.

This decade of disorder was brought to a close in October 1958. General Mohammed Ayub Khan now envisioned a decade of development for Pakistan. Whatever one’s view of or judgement on the Ayub years may be, it is undeniable that the great merit of Ayub’s relatively benign authoritarianism was its executive excellence and unrelenting pursuit of results on the ground. Ayub Khan was able to attract a variety of outstandingly able men into his regime. With their assistance, real economic and social development took place. Even a constitution of sorts was promulgated and elections (of a kind) held.

It is not the purpose of this article to argue the merits or demerits of Ayub Khan’s developmental autocracy. Both were numerous, the latter more so. For all its critical failings, there was grandeur and a sense of magnitude about the Ayubian vision. More, and this is the point, the lively intellectual environment of the time, with differing points of view in energetic contention, and the robust political movements that emerged therefrom, were all unmistakably secular.

The regime’s proponents and supporters argued the merits of good governance, economic growth and stable political structures. Its opponents decried the widening wealth gaps, both between classes and regions, the absence of political freedoms, the throttling of provincial autonomy and the promotion of a personality cult; whether Mujib or Bhutto or Bhashani or Wali Khan, they sought a socio-political revolution that would take Pakistan to a new levell.

I ask my readers to note that the entire political debate, one of cyclonic intensity, revolved around perfectly worldly preoccupations. The key political actors all proposed alternate paths to modernisation and propounded contemporary ideologies. No longing for medievalism here!

More important, no one accused the other of being a ‘bad’ Muslim, or even thought to suggest that any person was ‘wajib-ul qatal’. The Islamic preoccupation (that so seems to obsess us today) was simply not one of the terms of the debate — not even on the part of the religio-political parties themselves.

And so it remained through the fourteen years of Ayub and Yahya and the five years of Bhutto that followed. It was after the illegitimate overthrow of the latter that one first heard the Satanic Usurper hissing and snarling on the media about his preference for what he styled as ‘an Islamic system’. It is the frightful institutions he thereafter promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected that have irrevocably poisoned the intellectual environment of the land and given birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its polluted fallout of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder.

The true terms of the debate between stasis and change, authoritarianism and democracy, stagnation and dynamism, have been successfully — and deliberately — obscured by this obsession.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet

 

[alirulesall123]

The Mullahs in Pakistan are nothing but deceitful snakes who corrupt the image of Islam. They supported Ayub in his ascension to be power, and condemned Fatimah Jinnah because they stated "a woman cannot be president of Pakistan". But then years later , Benazir gets elected, because she bribed and sucked up to the Mullahs. These priests are nothing but power hungry snakes, they all deserve to be killed like the dogs they are.

 

[SSGPA1]

Pakistanis have been grossly misguided by our politicians, military rulers and religious leadership. They all used the name of Islam to strengthen their own positions.

The true meaning of Islam was never delivered to the masses and lack of education forced everyday Joe to depend on Maulvis who didn't understand Islam.

The honest and educated clerics were sidelined and jaali maulvis were promoted. Who is to blamed? No one but ourselves, we will spent time and money on everything but most of us don't have a copy of Sahee Hadith or Tafseer-e-Quran at our homes. If we have these then unfortunately we hardly read these great books. We recite the Quran at special ocassions instead of trying to understand the Quran by reciting it regularly along with its translation.

End result is that we consider every single rebel a Masiah and we support every single call for Jihad without trying to understand the true motives behind these calls.

 

[muse]

The savage man
Zein Khan



Religion has played great part in shaping the national character of Pakistan. The country was founded on Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s assertion that Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent, despite centuries of relative peaceful coexistence, could not live with one another. Subsequent to Partition, however, Jinnah expressed in his speech to Pakistan’s first lot of legislators his desire for a secular state in which religion was to be the business of the people and not the state. This was repudiated soon after in the Objectives Resolution where it was unambiguously stated that religion will have much to do with the state.

Islam, unlike many other religions, is not solely the personal matter of individuals, as it also defines the law of the state. Herein lies one reason for the complexity of the Pakistani identity: how much of Islam and what sort of Islam does the state enforce; do we see ourselves as the Muslim part of the subcontinent or an extension of the Muslim Umma? Are we more like Turkey, which is still regarded as a progressive state not dominated by religious precepts, or more like Iran, whose 1979 revolution propelled religion to the forefront of state-making?

The answers to these questions have been shaped by each of Pakistan’s rulers according to their perceptions of the usefulness of religion in assisting them to retain control of a largely illiterate population. The obvious example is the extent to which in the 1980s General Zia-ul Haq used the Islamist lobby to consolidate his position.

This use of religion for political objectives, combined with rising corruption, inefficient management of resources and the general disregard for the law shown by Pakistan’s ruling class, has meant that the ordinary citizen has become increasingly disillusioned. Pakistan’s emerging middle classes, whilst condemning their own leaders, also believe that their country has been used by Western powers for their geo-political objectives. They believe that, despite claims that the United States would like to see a democratic Pakistan, successive American administrations have supported dictatorships not only in Pakistan but also throughout the Muslim world. The United States’ partial role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the unnecessary war in Iraq have only added to this resentment.

These grievances against the United States, alongside the Pakistani state’s many failings, have pushed the middle class in Pakistan to a more literal interpretation of Islam. Terrorism is seen more as a consequence of US foreign policy and less as a perversion of religion. The go-ahead given to the Taliban in Swat before the current operations were launched, without much fuss being shown by either Pakistan’s most secular parties or the armed forces, was an indication of the increasing acceptability of sharia law to the Pakistani people.

Over the past few decades, relatively few Pakistanis or even Muslims have been seen to contribute significantly to science, art and other fields of human advancement. Few Muslim countries, if any, can boast a stable democracy, an established judiciary and a free and fair media. A brief look at the Times’ list of the top 200 universities reveals that none lie in the Muslim world.

Images of dishevelled, angry barbarian look-a-likes storming Western embassies, while protesting various issues, perplex average Westerners, who fear that this ideology and culture is at odds with their own and perceive it as a threat to their way of life, especially when terrorist attacks are carried out against them.

Moreover, because of the rhetoric with which a suicide bomber undertakes his mission, it is widely believed that the act of blowing oneself up is predominantly a Muslim one, that Muslims are promised a wonderful hereafter in return for killing infidels and that this is the motivation for suicide bombings. This, then, is interpreted as extremist Islam and its followers are considered a threat to world peace.

Pakistan, of course, finds itself at the epicentre of this clash. This struggle of competing ideologies is likely to extend into the next generation — albeit one that can be shortened by a concerted effort by the Western world and the Pakistani government. An investment in the schools and universities of Pakistan would represent an act of good faith and would also lead to a more progressive and tolerant Pakistan.

The Western world can also be seen to make amends by helping the people of Pakistan with health, medicine, water and other critical supplies, and make other positive contributions without moving in on the society and trying to fashion it according to western ideals. Supporting the evolution of democracy and movements, like the one for the restoration of the chief justice, that empower the Pakistani people will lead to the build-up of much needed mutual trust between the two civilisations.

Individuals that have benefited from an education in both the Muslim and Western worlds can also help bridge this gap. Such cross-cultural experiences bring about the realisation that human life must be valued above all else and that genuine bonds can be formed between people of different faiths and cultures without detracting from either.

The danger is that if we fail to clearly define a moderate identity in tune with the 21st century, provide speedy justice, education and rights to the Pakistani people, we are likely to see more of the savage man in Pakistan who lives at the bottom of the food chain, in dire poverty and without hope for the future.

In his helplessness he may well turn on his society and the rest of the world by siding with the Taliban and thus ruin the vision Jinnah’s expressed in a broadcast to the people of the United States: “In any case, Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state — to be ruled by priests with a divine mission.”

The writer is pursuing his doctorate at Oxford University

 

[muse]

The Pakistani Purpose
Salman Tarik Kureshi


Someone has sent me one of those maps again. You know the kind that purport to show the future borders of countries in Central and South Asia, but with the familiar outlines of our Pakistan entirely missing. I have been seeing such maps, or their equivalents, for at least the past half-century. Every now and then, someone jumps up with a ‘Eureka’ gleam in the eye and proof of yet another deadly conspiracy against us, ‘established’ by one or the other such cartographic exercise. Doom and national extinction are forecast.

Well, doom and political break-up are among the very real perils that the failing state of Pakistan is confronting. But, let us be clear, our membership in the excusive circle of failing states has everything to do with the inability of our military, political and economic elites to provide basic governance, some kind of economic vision, valid education or social services, justice, democracy, rule of law or simple basic law and order. It has nothing to do with the nefarious designs of external map-makers.

These latter come in two variants. On the one side are right-wing medievalists, who hold that Pakistan is a religiously unified entity (or, at least, will be once they eliminate all those untidy minorities, heterodox sects, points of view, and every kind of regional or national cultural expression) whose purpose is to embody and project a particular political ideology. This is seen as the core raison d’etre of the 170 million men, women and children who call this land their home. This ideological unity of purpose is inevitably perceived as a Big Threat by (get this!) every other nation in which the six billion members of the human race live. Therefore, the entire six billion are against us and all are conspiring to dismember and destroy Pakistan — led, of course, by our major ally and benefactor, the USA.

The psychiatric term for such ways of thinking is Paranoid Schizophrenia! But, before we become too harsh in our judgement, let us also look at the other side of this argument — the doctrinaire leftists. These Pink Warriors of yesteryear are deeply imbued with such intellectual constructs as Stalin’s Theory of Nationalities and will point to the ethnically confused borders of the Pakistan state.

Look at our western-most ethnic group, the Baloch. It is a minority of native speakers of Balochi and related languages that live in the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh. The Baloch ethnic territory stretches across the border into Iran, all the way to Bander Abbas, and even beyond, along the Gulf Coast, to Oman and Yemen. Pakhtuns are divided between Pakistan and that bizarre former Central Asian kingdom called Afghanistan, with a slight majority being in Pakistan.

Of the Sindhi-speaking people, the great majority lives in Pakistan. But those across the border in India include such prominent personages as the mega-billionaire Ambani brothers and Leader of the Opposition Lal Krishna Advani, who was moreover born in what is now Pakistan.

Urdu-speaking Pakistanis are a comparatively small fraction of their ethnic brethren who stayed behind in India. As for the largest ethnic identity in Pakistan, the Punjabi, this is the one said to be most identified with ideas of Pakistani nationhood. However, this was the most violently divided of all linguistic groups at the time of Independence. The overall population of Punjabi speakers in India is not much less than in Pakistan and includes their present and one of their previous prime ministers. More, the impact of Punjabis on popular Indian culture and sports is especially heavy.

Pakistan, then, is an ethnically multiple state entity. And this, according to many of our left-wing friends, is the source of Pakistan’s instability — an instability that is being exploited to sere the nefarious designs of (get this one!) the very same bete noir as the religious right, the USA.

The point is that India is even more of a multi-ethnic state, not to mention China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Canada, the Russian Federation and others. Are they also unstable members of the Failed States Club? And the fact that the ethnic groups within Pakistan are divided between different countries is also true of India, Iran (as we have shown earlier), Canada, Mexico and others.

So much for the left-wing assumption of Pakistan being an ‘artificial’ state and therefore inherently unstable! What is not being appreciated is that all states are, in one sense or the other, ‘artificial’ entities. Let’s face it, there are no borders marked on the ground. The earth on both sides is the same and usually the people as well. Some states have accidentally grown until someone determined to put a legal border around them and claim sovereignty within those bonds. Where, in ethnic or historic terms, does the USA end and Canada begin? Or France and Belgium? Or Germany, Switzerland and Austria? There are also states that have been consciously ‘founded’ at a moment in time. Such, for example, would include Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Lebanon, Israel, Kenya and some others.

The point is that however a state may have chanced to appear on a map or for whatever reason it may have been founded, once this has happened, its purpose thereafter is nothing more and nothing less than promoting the wellbeing of its citizens. It is meant to provide governance, promote economic activity, make available education and other social services to its citizens and ensure their freedom, their rights, justice and law and order. Once national independence was achieved, the ‘maqsad’ of Pakistan became the greater good of the greatest number of its citizens. It’s as simple as that.

This was directly articulated by Pakistan’s founder, addressing the first session of the new parliament. He spoke of policy issues regarding governance, law and order, black-marketing, corruption and nepotism. The ‘religious’ perspective was dismissed by the Quaid, stating that “all these angularities of the...Hindu community and the Muslim community...will vanish...In course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Could any message have been clearer than this?
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet