Is secularisation of Pakistan possible?

[IND151]

no i don't think that Pak can be secularized

there are many factors will will not let happen this like Muslim extremists, beneficiaries of radical islamanisation of Pakistan

 

[humanfirst]

Lies

He does.

Yawn! Once again, he does.

That's cause no country has Shariat

Under shariah what is the punishment for apostasy?

As far as i know,3 of the 4 schools of islamic jurisprusence advocate killing the apostate while the remainig one advocate imprisonment until converted back.There are several sahih hadiths supporting this.For eg:
Bukhari, volume 9, #17

"Narrated Abdullah: Allah's Messenger said, "The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Messenger, cannot be shed except in three cases: in Qisas (equality in punishment) for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (Apostate) and leaves the Muslims."

 

[Joe Shearer]

You can google that.

There is something which is an alternative to 'googling that', and that is academic study, including seminars with a peer group. Please inform me when you have gone beyond the google stage, and are fit to participate in discussing complex issues. No doubt to a brainy and well-educated person, this may take only minutes, in place of the months and years it took others, but we will wait patiently for that magic moment.

 

[Developereo]

The OP makes the classic mistake that many Pakistanis love to make. While I accept that knowledge of the past is crucial to understanding the present, I feel Pakistanis tend to obsess too much about the past.

If Pakistanis spent half as much time thinking about the next 60 years that they do navel gazing about the last 60, it would help quash much of the religious extremism. The issue of secularism or, more importantly, equal rights regardless of religion -- secularism is but one way, as Armstrong wrote -- can be tackled better if people see a roadmap for the future and the importance of religious harmony to move along that road.

 

[bindaas]

There is something which is an alternative to 'googling that', and that is academic study, including seminars with a peer group. Please inform me when you have gone beyond the google stage, and are fit to participate in discussing complex issues. No doubt to a brainy and well-educated person, this may take only minutes, in place of the months and years it took others, but we will wait patiently for that magic moment.

Your words are too complex for me to comprehend but in short I will tell you Pakistan whole national existence is based on being Muslim and Muslim only and any attempt of secularism is seen as threat to their very national foundation of showing being different to India. Congress may have have their hands but 2NT openly says that two communities can and should not live together, major burden goes to those who proposed 2NT.

It is amazing to think that a Child reading in his school textbook that Muslims and Hindus are alien to each other(mentioned in TNT) and at same time think of secularism and mingling with non-Muslims.

 

[truthseer]

"Narrated Abdullah: Allah's Messenger said, "The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Messenger, cannot be shed except in three cases: in Qisas (equality in punishment) for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (Apostate) and leaves the Muslims."

Again, you don't understand the context in this situation, it was a time of war. During times of peace, however:

Jabir ibn `Abdullah narrated that a Bedouin pledged allegiance to Muhammad for Islam (i.e. accepted Islam) and then the Bedouin got fever whereupon he said to Muhammad "cancel my pledge." But Muhammad refused. He (the Bedouin) came to him (again) saying, "Cancel my pledge." But Muhammad refused. Then he (the Bedouin) left (Medina). Muhammad said, "Madinah is like a pair of bellows (furnace): it expels its impurities and brightens and clear its good."[8]

He wasn't executed

 

[Black Widow]

Secularism is not only about religion, Secularism can be implemented to bring harmony btwn different sect of Islam.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Your words are too complex for me to comprehend but in short I will tell you Pakistan whole national existence is based on being Muslim and Muslim only and any attempt of secularism is seen as threat to their very national foundation of showing being different to India. Congress may have have their hands but 2NT openly says that two communities can and should not live together, major burden goes to those who proposed 2NT.

It is amazing to think that a Child reading in his school textbook that Muslims and Hindus are alien to each other(mentioned in TNT) and at same time think of secularism and mingling with non-Muslims.

My post was a simple one, suggesting that you should know a little more about a subject than is possible by hurriedly glancing through Wikipedia or some other on line sources discovered by a Google search. That kind of drive-by learning does not help to understand the historical context of a phrase, a slogan, a theory or an ideology. It certainly should not be the basis for making a quick and completely erroneous assumption of what something meant at the time that it was used.

In short, try to learn more before going public.

The Two Nation Theory belonged both to the Muslim and to the Hindu exclusivists; it is mistaken to quote it again and again, as both Muslims and Hindus do, very stupidly, as an example of a Muslim stand against living with Hindus - or followers of other religions. It was in fact nothing of the kind.

On the Muslim side, the first well-known person to use the phrase was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. He painted a dire picture of the fate of Muslims under majoritarian Hindu rule. What people don't read on to realize is that he was asking for protection of the culture and way of life of what was rapidly turning out to be a minority hugely outnumbered by the majority community, and also years behind them in English education then (those were days when a western education meant progress in social and economic terms, as it is today, but no regressive elements were standing around rooting for a return to the good old days, as it also is today).

The Muslim view of the Two Nation Theory was one of gloom at the bleak prospects for Muslims without significant safeguards. It was not the apocalyptic vision of a necessary slicing up of the country that it is often thought to be. There were nut-jobs whose life work it was to preach such a division; they were used by the leaders of the Muslim community to strike fear into the hearts of the British as well as the Indians, and force them to the negotiating table. Not something that either particularly wanted to do.

It was always protection of Muslim ways, never at the cost of anybody else, not even in what came to be their fully developed demand, homelands for Muslims within the Indian Union.

The idea of a physical partition came about as a threat, of what would happen unless they got a hearing. By first agreeing, then betraying that agreement, Nehru and the Congress brought about what nobody had wanted, except lunatics on either fringe.

People who ran the Muslim League were not the Mullahs, nor the landed gentry of the Punjab, but the intellectuals from the community, very small in number, who had gained government and professional success, and saw all those gains set to evaporate on the departure of the British. This may sound alarmist, but not one Congress leader tried to reassure this section. Instead, in order to match Gandhi's obsession with religion, the Congress, from 1916 onwards, supported the most backward sections of the community, and betrayed the progressives. Both YLH's excellent note and the attempt by another member of this forum contain hints about this early dichotomy.

Just to complete this account, after partition, the Muslim 'salariat', as one penetrating analyst calls the Muslim professional segment, found itself a refugee mass in the promised land of Pakistan. It was derided and rapidly outmaneuvered by the Mullahs (Maudoodi had done a somersault, and, from bitter opposition to Pakistan, now projected himself as the true creator, and Jinnah as a hideous figure of betrayal of the Islamic cause). The steps of the degeneration, as liberal Pakistanis see it, and the progressive purification, as the fundamentalist majority sees it, are well-recorded; the Objectives Resolution, the declaration of Islamic Republic status, and the introduction of Sharia courts.

That was not how it started. Secularism, in the sense that religion did not matter in the early days, but being Muslim meant that living in Pakistan was a sigh of relief, was very strongly in the air. No longer. Not unless economics liberates the masses, as YLH obviously hopes.

For those who resort to googling for their knowledge of all this, it might be of interest to know that the expulsion of alien religion, though not of partitioning the land - the land was welcome, the people were not - was the brainchild of the other well-known father of the Two Nation Theory, Savarkar.

I have no more to say to lumpish and uncouth proponents of bigotry who shelter their Islamophobia behind the Two Nation Theory that the Muslims are supposed to have held. Nor for the Muslims who have accepted the revision of their own struggle with such sheep-like calm, and believe it as much as their denigrators do.

 

[bindaas]

My post was a simple one, suggesting that you should know a little more about a subject than is possible by hurriedly glancing through Wikipedia or some other on line sources discovered by a Google search. That kind of drive-by learning does not help to understand the historical context of a phrase, a slogan, a theory or an ideology. It certainly should not be the basis for making a quick and completely erroneous assumption of what something meant at the time that it was used.

In short, try to learn more before going public.

The Two Nation Theory belonged both to the Muslim and to the Hindu exclusivists; it is mistaken to quote it again and again, as both Muslims and Hindus do, very stupidly, as an example of a Muslim stand against living with Hindus - or followers of other religions. It was in fact nothing of the kind.

On the Muslim side, the first well-known person to use the phrase was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. He painted a dire picture of the fate of Muslims under majoritarian Hindu rule. What people don't read on to realize is that he was asking for protection of the culture and way of life of what was rapidly turning out to be a minority hugely outnumbered by the majority community, and also years behind them in English education then (those were days when a western education meant progress in social and economic terms, as it is today, but no regressive elements were standing around rooting for a return to the good old days, as it also is today).

The Muslim view of the Two Nation Theory was one of gloom at the bleak prospects for Muslims without significant safeguards. It was not the apocalyptic vision of a necessary slicing up of the country that it is often thought to be. There were nut-jobs whose life work it was to preach such a division; they were used by the leaders of the Muslim community to strike fear into the hearts of the British as well as the Indians, and force them to the negotiating table. Not something that either particularly wanted to do.

It was always protection of Muslim ways, never at the cost of anybody else, not even in what came to be their fully developed demand, homelands for Muslims within the Indian Union.

The idea of a physical partition came about as a threat, of what would happen unless they got a hearing. By first agreeing, then betraying that agreement, Nehru and the Congress brought about what nobody had wanted, except lunatics on either fringe.

People who ran the Muslim League were not the Mullahs, nor the landed gentry of the Punjab, but the intellectuals from the community, very small in number, who had gained government and professional success, and saw all those gains set to evaporate on the departure of the British. This may sound alarmist, but not one Congress leader tried to reassure this section. Instead, in order to match Gandhi's obsession with religion, the Congress, from 1916 onwards, supported the most backward sections of the community, and betrayed the progressives. Both YLH's excellent note and the attempt by another member of this forum contain hints about this early dichotomy.

Just to complete this account, after partition, the Muslim 'salariat', as one penetrating analyst calls the Muslim professional segment, found itself a refugee mass in the promised land of Pakistan. It was derided and rapidly outmaneuvered by the Mullahs (Maudoodi had done a somersault, and, from bitter opposition to Pakistan, now projected himself as the true creator, and Jinnah as a hideous figure of betrayal of the Islamic cause). The steps of the degeneration, as liberal Pakistanis see it, and the progressive purification, as the fundamentalist majority sees it, are well-recorded; the Objectives Resolution, the declaration of Islamic Republic status, and the introduction of Sharia courts.

That was not how it started. Secularism, in the sense that religion did not matter in the early days, but being Muslim meant that living in Pakistan was a sigh of relief, was very strongly in the air. No longer. Not unless economics liberates the masses, as YLH obviously hopes.

For those who resort to googling for their knowledge of all this, it might be of interest to know that the expulsion of alien religion, though not of partitioning the land - the land was welcome, the people were not - was the brainchild of the other well-known father of the Two Nation Theory, Savarkar.

I have no more to say to lumpish and uncouth proponents of bigotry who shelter their Islamophobia behind the Two Nation Theory that the Muslims are supposed to have held. Nor for the Muslims who have accepted the revision of their own struggle with such sheep-like calm, and believe it as much as their denigrators do.

I have read lots of history from different sources:- Indian, Pakistani and western so I am not a Wikipedia guy I know lots of things. what was initially a feeling of being minority, changed into something else. What happened in past is past but we should look at mentality of people currently.

After lots of my observation through different sources particularly Pakistani one, I am 100% certain, it is impossible for Pakistan to embrace secularism without disowning 2 Nation Theory. The common belief about Pakistan's national identity is still based on opposition to India. Majority of Pakistan still thinks in this way,"If I am a Muslim and my own brother from same mother is a Hindu then I am a Pakistani and my brother is a foreigner to me."

 

[Manas]

The one-eyed preaching the beauty of the visual world to the blind.

And you can dance in the La La land of the beauty of hallucination.

BTW as in Sidhuism goes " if my Aunt had a moustache if she would be my Uncle ". Carry on .

 

[ashokdeiva]

its waste of band width guys, you can not convince the PAKISTANI's that being tolerant and secular will do wonders for them. its useless to talk about secularism for a nation that was founded on religious basis and especially if that religion is ISLAM.

In my own analisys the people who do not wish to see change to the max extent are MUSLIMS and its hard to make them realize that the evolved world needs new systems to adopt and be part of the system

 

[humanfirst]

Again, you don't understand the context in this situation, it was a time of war. During times of peace, however:

He wasn't executed

The 3 conditions(murder of another muslim,adultery,apostacy) which entitled for a muslim to be killed as mentioned by that hadith have no relation to war.The hadith also forms one of the bases of the other two punishments which is universally regarded by scholars as part of sharia without any allusion of being war time order.More over there are half a dozen similar authentic hadiths and incidences where prophet Mohammed and Khulafa u rashidun killed apostates.
In front of such overwhelming evidences and hadiths of direct orders,the one posted by you carries wieght only as a general act of kindness(to an illeterate and idiotic beduin who just embraced islam a day ago and wanted to revert since he catched fever!) similar to prophet muhammed's odd forgiveness of murderers.That is why all the 4 schools of islamic jurisprudence have no dispute on whether an apostate should be prosecuted.

 

[DRaisinHerald]

Cheers for your 'genuine' concern about Pakistan; S-19.
As Imran Khan puts it, the longer we stay in the WoT, the stronger the polarisation (increase in seculars and religious extremists alike)

As far as secularisation goes; doubt it can truly happen. Islam is scratched and engraved into every part of our history since birth, and a great significant part of history before partition. You simply can't take Islam out of us by making the country secular (an India number 2)

In my own analisys the people who do not wish to see change to the max extent are MUSLIMS and its hard to make them realize that the evolved world needs new systems to adopt and be part of the system

You know what, your right! We should just shoot this barbaric religion in the *** and make Pakistan and Pakistanis part of the "system".

 

[ashokdeiva]

Cheers for your 'genuine' concern about Pakistan; S-19.
As Imran Khan puts it, the longer we stay in the WoT, the stronger the polarisation (increase in seculars and religious extremists alike)

As far as secularisation goes; doubt it can truly happen. Islam is scratched and engraved into every part of our history since birth, and a great significant part of history before partition. You simply can't take Islam out of us by making the country secular (an India number 2)

you dont have to be INDIA number 2 to see your society grow tolerance but you can be USA NUMBER 2

 

[DRaisinHerald]

you dont have to be INDIA number 2 to see your society grow tolerance but you can be USA NUMBER 2

FYI, tolerance and equal rights are part of Islam and are supposed to be part of the system of governance.

Looking at it from another perspective; Secularism isn't really gonna solve any problems is it? Extremism is caused not thanks to a Muslim Pakistan, but thanks to Peace-Please America-lead Nato war on Pakistan and Afghanistan.