Reducing the Role of Political Islam

[DaRk WaVe]

Reducing the Role of Political Islam​

It is easy, to debate a taboo, once it has been shattered. The de-mystification of Islam is necessary in Pakistan and what needs to be argued; to counter the misuse of Islam in Pakistan is not to parse and quibble over interpretations, but to frame the questions. No general has ever won a war by fighting it according to the plans of the enemy and so it is, with the religious debate in Pakistan.

For too long, and with painfully hurtful results, we the so-called and rightly contemptible moderates and enlightened cowards and liberal hypocrites, and deceitful secularists, have appeased the intolerant clergy and have abdicated our responsibilities of civic participation. We have allowed the religious discourse in Pakistan to be taken over and dominated by mullahs – the washers of the dead – and have argued according to their rules. The first step to regain and reclaim the debating space for the idea of a new Pakistan, is to ask questions and make the defenders of the faith actually defend their faith.

This new, re-energized, debate needs to focus on the simplicity of its message and it needs to propagate that message with all the venom of a cobra. The message of this debate is to make the people realize the dichotomy that exists in this world and in the Hereafter, as promised in religion.

The first point which needs to be articulated is to make a case for the separation of justice; from God’s and humans. The best and the most effective manner to whittle Islam to its rightful place in Pakistan is argue, convince and make the people understand that in the Hereafter, we will all be judged by God’s laws. In this Present World (which is what the term secular actually means), we will be judged by laws made by humans.

The next logical step is to argue that if Islam, as a religion, wanted to become political and exercise control in this world, then it loses its “divine immunity” and will be judged by human laws. This should be seen as breach of a contractual agreement, because the understanding was that God’s laws will apply in the Kingdom of God, but human laws will apply in the kingdom of human beings. If Islam wants to have influence in “our world”, then it will be judged according to “our” laws and it will be responsible and accountable to our laws just as we will be responsible to God’s laws once we enter His kingdom. This will happen, and it will happen not without a cost, but Islam and religion as an idea in Pakistan will stand disabused.

Religious intolerance, and when a religion becomes political, pushes people into a sense of alienation because the main functionality of a religion and its legitimacy is to offer a sense of spirituality to the people and act as anchor in times of need and uncertainties. When religion itself, instead of standing aloof from the secular concerns, becomes a partisan in the secular debates of the day, it loses its spirituality. People become alienated from religion, when instead of offering them a promise of certainty and hope; religion becomes the very cause of their hopeless and loss of certainty and of increasing doubts. When people start to question the very foundations of their belief systems and religion cannot provide them with convincing answers, the end is apparent.

The power of a religion, over its people, lies in the absolutism of its dogma, but the vulnerability of dogma is that it is supreme as long as believed and not questioned. When religion is questioned and its answers prove inadequate, or its actions are seen in violation with its professed teachings, questions ferment in the mind and once the mind acquires the confidence to think rationally and independently, religion loses the fear of its dread over a person.

Pakistanis are questioning their religion. They are questioning their religion, because it does not make sense; from what they were taught , and what is being practiced in the name of the religion itself. The next evolutionary step will be increasing self-doubts as people start to make independent personal decisions about their acts of devotion and if organized religion does not provide them with the answers they are searching from; they will move away from organized religion itself.

This does not and should not be taken as step towards atheism, because it is not. All religions are political constructs of behavior control and the purpose of every organized religion is to control the lives of its followers and it controls the lives of its faithful by decreeing an existence for them and a code by which that existence is rationalized and makes sense.

When people lose faith in their religion and start to question it; it does not mean they have become non-believers. All it means they do not follow the precepts of an organized religion and instead of searching for answers within an organized religion, they start to search for it outside the hierarchical organization of the religion and instead, follow their religion outside of the organized manner or the established code of conduct.

They become independent of a religious control over their lives and become free to think on their own and break the shackles of mind control and in the words of Bob Marley, emancipate themselves from mental slavery. Devotion in this sense then becomes very personalized and individualistic and in the process, religion loses it ability to control the lives of the person and furthermore, becomes gradually less significant.

The insignificance of a religion and its importance in the daily lives of its adherents becomes pronounced as people start to search for answers, to the issues which plight them, outside of the religious experience and based on their own experiences in the present (secular) world. Once, it becomes self-evident that religion is not capable of providing all the answers and what it says does not mesh with the reality of the experience, and then the thoughts of the people become more pre-occupied by the present (secular) world and how to live in it.

When this happens, something else also happens. Once people start to question an experience outside of a religious explanation, they realize by their own experience and awareness the subjectivity of a religion and its place in their lives. Religion then becomes a part of the diversity and the plurality of a person’s experience instead of being the centrality of their existence.

This is the threat, which politically enforced and manipulated Islam will face in Pakistan. As it becomes more intolerant towards Pakistanis, and forces them into submission and not to question it, Pakistanis will move away from the practice of organized religion and will practice more varied and individual forms of devotion. They will still be Muslims and they will still read the Quran, and they will still pray but they will do it on the basis of their own experiences and not on the basis of what someone tells them their experiences should be!

Once this happens, organized religion or political Islam will lose its hold over the average Pakistani and in time, will find its own niche in the lives of the people and once this balance is attained, Pakistanis will be better positioned to exist in this world (secular) and will stop living their lives in the present world as they were living in the Hereafter. Once, Pakistanis realize this and start to understand the role of religion in the proper perspective of life and its experience as one of many, they will start to think outside of the organized religious thought and that will be the beginning of the end of political Islam in Pakistan and first step towards the idea of secularism!

Reducing the Role of Political Islam Pak Tea House

 

[DaRk WaVe]

A fallacious binary​

The word secularism seems to be the most contentious one in the Pakistani political culture. Anything that is anti-religion or non-religious is dubbed secular; it is understood as a Western concept with no direct connection with Islam; for example, some people might find some Christian or Judaic values or practices secular. The word is used in its smallest possible definition to the widest and wildest interpretations. But in all kinds of debates, one thing is common — anti-secular groups use religion to justify non-democratic disposition of the state.

Although when we normally talk about secularism, it means governance that should stand separately from religion or religious beliefs, in the context of the Pakistani state, and indeed Pakistani society, the concept of secularism is widely, and perhaps deliberately, misconstrued.

It must be clearly understood right from the very beginning that religion, or in this case Islam, is not the only source to justify non-democratic governance. It depends on the peculiar circumstances of a nation and which forces are trying to use religion or secularism to support its non-democratic concepts of governance. Among Muslim states for instance, Turkey’s army uses secularism to support its non-democratic role, so did Pakistan’s Army in the 1960s. Currently, the Algerian government and Palestinian Authority are using secularism to strengthen their non-democratic role in their own systems of governance.

In Pakistan’s case, the dominant argument for the non-democratic actors to influence the country’s politics and governance is religion. This is not a suitable place to go into the details of how religion’s narration replaced the secular narration in Pakistani politics, or whether there was ever a secular narration at all in the history of the people of South Asia. But the fact is that currently seculars are supporting democratic forces, while the religious forces are bent upon undermining the democratic disposition of the state, constitution and society.Take the role of Pakistan Army; it is now known as a ‘Jihadi’ institution, its official motto is “Jihad Fi Sabil Lillah” (Jihad for the cause of Allah). Pakistan’s Supreme Court’s recent verdict on the NRO amply and loudly speaks that it wants to re-write the constitution where democracy should be subordinate to the injunctions of Quran and Sunnah. Few people have realised that it’s a step to advance General Zia-ul-Haq’s doctrine in a much bolder manner. General Zia made the “amended” Objective Resolution an operational part of the constitution through undemocratic means.

How did that happen to the extent that today we are constrained to believe that everything here in this land of pure is Islamic is not the subject of this article. Right now, the issue is not how the idea of Pakistan was conceived or what Quaid-e-Azam had actually thought about what Pakistan was meant to be. Currently, the issue is what we have been led to believe and by what means. This is not an occasion to analyse how the history has been constructed. Some great writers and historians have already done some tremendously impressive work, which, unfortunately, is rarely read by our discussants and young writers.

This is the time to suggest that the binary construction of secularism versus Islam itself is a flawed one. Relying on a very common concept of secularism — according to which the government should exist separately from religion or religious beliefs — Kosmin, Barry A writes in “Contemporary Secularity and Secularism”: “In one sense, secularism may assert the right to be free from religious rule and teachings, and the right to freedom from governmental imposition of religion upon the people within a state that is neutral on matters of belief. In another sense, it refers to the view that human activities and decisions, especially political ones, should be based on evidence and fact unbiased by religious influence.”

If we look at the practice of the first state of the Muslims, we would starkly notice that this sort of binary construction on secularism and Islam did not exist, though both, apparently opposite, concepts were the basis of the State of Medina founded by the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). The state was founded by Muhammad, not as a man but as a prophet; his dominant authority as an arbiter was established because he was a prophet, but at the same time non-Muslims were given equal rights. If we take the state that existed during the days of the prophet then the Charter of Medina should be the guiding document for the Muslims. This document, however, is very rarely quoted by our religious scholars as it could possibly be termed the first secular document of Muslims’ history.

The issue of secularism entered our parlance when we encountered modern Western discourses where church’s political power was constrained to the church only and it was made to accept the limited power of the monarch; not to rule the state with his divine rights. Instead of this, the West took up a clear concept of reasoning to govern the issues of the state. Hence, the emergence of secularism in Western politics was a victory of reasoning, and that changed the whole power structure across the world. However, the oriental societies remained anchored with their traditional wisdom; the direct consequence of this anti-secularism was their backward in all sciences.

Now the choice for the Pakistani state and diaspora is not whether Islam is our identity or raison d’être. It’s a decision about whether Pakistan needs to progress or not. The choice is between facing the world or a dead-end. One can keep Muslim identity while choosing a secular system of governance, because this would ensure the society to open ways of reasoning and progress in all fields including sciences, technology, politics, economics and the modern day challenges of futuristic technology.

With a dictatorship, even if it’s Islamic, we cannot progress, because with dictatorship the power of reasoning is doomed. In Pakistan’s context, dictatorship and reasoning cannot go together.

Some Muslims believe that by accepting the dominance of reasoning over their plethora of knowledge of Islam, they would be accepting the defeat of the Quran! It’s one of the fundamental fallacies which cropped up as a result of the fallacious binary construction (secularism vs. religion). The Quran itself asks on more than one occasion to think, apply mind and reason out. So the Quran doesn’t cap a Muslim’s mind; it’s the dictatorial undercurrents in Muslim societies which project reason and secularism as antithetical to Islam or religion. Turkey’s change towards secularism was not a revolt against Islam; it was rather against the anti-reasoning of the Ottoman Empire in the previous decades which made Ataturk and his fellows to remove the Islamic identity that had become a synonym to anti-reasoning.

Now is the time for Pakistan to make a choice, not between secularism and Islam, but between progress which comes with reasoning and secularism, and religion which is anchored in anti-reasoning concepts and dictatorial concepts of governance. Pakistanis will not discard Islam or their Muslim identity when they choose secularism; instead they would discard dictatorial undercurrents once they are secular. Their religion, Islam, will never be in danger. The decision for secularism will be made by Muslim Pakistanis, so there would be a new kind of secularism, not the one which is practiced in the West.

A hostile approach to secularism has reduced Islam to rituals and hard core system of beliefs in which reasoning and free thinking are considered anathemas. This has also placed Islam as an equivalent of several irrational systems of beliefs where human being, who is considered “Ashrafal Makhluqat” (best of the creations) in Islam, is sacrificed at the altar of the church of Islam, an institution that does not exist in the Islam of Muhammad (PBUH). However, if a friendly approach is made towards secularism, Islam can discover its potentials hidden in its practices. For instance, Hajj, currently a big ritual where millions of Muslims get together every year ends up with no concrete results for humanity!

One wonders if Muslims could hold seminars, debates and speeches on the real issues confronting them on the occasion of Hajj at Mecca, this would open up the power of reasoning and will also help Muslims across the world to contribute positively in the affairs of the world. This would not only be a fusion of secularism and religion, a logical evolution, but will also help abridge the gaps between different faiths, communities and sects at the same time. But since that fusion of secularism and Islam can possibly deprive the non-democratic forces in the Muslim societies of the power to suppress free thinking and reasoning, therefore, they would never allow it.

So if anyone wants to fight for the progress of Muslim societies, he or she will have no choice but to fight against dictators and discard the binary concept of the secularism versus religion in order to ensure the victory of reasoning.

Dialogue, NOS, The News International

 

[WAQAS119]

Great article! I do not totally agree with that but the agree with its main message i.e., questioning. Our society is too much illiterate and thus start to believe anything mullah tell them. Who is Mullah? Nobody asks! To what extent he knows about world? No body thinks!

 

[DaRk WaVe]

mullah-cracy has destroyed the progressive society of Pakistan, all income by means by preaching & teaching religion must be declared illegal.No party must be allowed to use religion for politics

 

[kugga]

Religion is a way of life... it contains set of rules for leading a life, it contains laws ,which you may agree or disagree but, religion claims them to be best for humanity....

Just eliminating religion is not a solution... there is nothing like kingdom of humans... all kingdoms belong to GOD... whether you agree or not but it's a fact.... There can be a debate on what to follow and what not... but in my opinion the set of rules given by religion (i.e Islam) are best...

Secularism is a religion itself (in my opinion).. There are somethings in secularism that you cannot make debate on them... like Secularism does not allow any GOD to take part in politics or law making and you cannot argue to bring in one...

I think educating the people is a best way of resolving issues.. Educate the mullahs... bring reforms in madrassa systems... raise up salaries of molvis.... Mullahs are very important part of our society and you cannot just ignore them and abuse them just because they are mullahs... if you want them changed bring the change..

 

[greatsequence]

convince and make the people understand that in the Hereafter, we will all be judged by God’s laws. In this Present World (which is what the term secular actually means), we will be judged by laws made by humans.

True but again the basic and the core laws will come from Quran and Sunnah, which is all what Sharia asks for. We will be judged by God's law in this world and By God himself in the hereafer.

 

[DaRk WaVe]

Religion is a way of life... it contains set of rules for leading a life, it contains laws ,which you may agree or disagree but, religion claims them to be best for humanity....

Every religion claims that

Just eliminating religion is not a solution...

no one's talking about eliminating religion

there is nothing like kingdom of humans... all kingdoms belong to GOD... whether you agree or not but it's a fact.... There can be a debate on what to follow and what not... but in my opinion the set of rules given by religion (i.e Islam) are best...

you can in no way prove that as a fact, writer wanted to say in a way that we need to restrict the role of religion in State matters by shaping the opinion that religion itself is a personal matter & must not have say in the matters of state

Secularism is a religion itself (in my opinion)..

Read the definition of religion again

I think educating the people is a best way of resolving issues.. Educate the mullahs... bring reforms in madrassa systems...

agreed

raise up salaries of molvis....

no, religion must not be a source of income

Mullahs are very important part of our society and you cannot just ignore them and abuse them just because they are mullahs... if you want them changed bring the change..

No one's talking about ignoring them, we are talking about reducing their effects of their dogmatic beliefs & delusional mindset on masses & stop them from intervening in the matter by state by using religion as a weapon

 

[DaRk WaVe]

True but again the basic and the core laws will come from Quran and Sunnah, which is all what Sharia asks for. We will be judged by God's law in this world and By God himself in the hereafer.

Sharia of which sect? lol

There are somethings in Sharia which are not compatible with the times in which we are living & now read the article again...

 

[greatsequence]

you can in no way prove that as a fact, writer wanted to say in a way that we need to restrict the role of religion in State matters by shaping the opinion that religion itself is a personal matter & must not have say in the matters of state

It is Islamic Republic of Pakistan. For Islam Quran is the base and Quran says All the lands Belong to Allah. For a Muslim it is a fact for an atheist it might not be.

 

[Perceptron]

Superb articles !!! Dark Wave, you are another important flag-bearer in this Forum. I wish there were more people like you to inculcate in people that a Religion that is constantly progressive in terms of values is the religion that will be the beacon of humanity for people to follow.

I wish more people come forward and explore and put their thoughts on such ideas.

 

[kugga]

no, religion must not be a source of income, No Muslim Imams in time of Prophet took any salaries

I agree to you but you cannot just eliminate the system at once.. bring reforms and try to change the culture... Religion is not for making money but for making your life simple and smooth... but these mullahs are part of your society what alternate you have for them ?? I totally agree the system of Molvi in a masjid should end.. any one willing can be Imaam.... but what alternate for such a huge number of people ??

No one's talking about ignoring them, we are talking about reducing their effects of their dogmatic beliefs & delusional mindset on masses & stop them from intervening in the matter by state by using religion as a weapon

hmm You cannot easily reduce their effect... instead of reducing their effect you should educate molvis.. this will be far more beneficiary and effective than reducing their effect...

 

[xenia]

the question is not of reducing the role of islam..its about evolving it with changed realities of the world..its just the way how u look at things..Allama Iqbal regarded reformation of Turkey uner Kamal Pasha an act of ijtihad to evolve with changing times but here in pakistan people still consider democracy incompatible with islam..

 

[WAQAS119]

I think educating the people is a best way of resolving issues.. Educate the mullahs... bring reforms in madrassa systems... raise up salaries of molvis.... Mullahs are very important part of our society and you cannot just ignore them and abuse them just because they are mullahs... if you want them changed bring the change..

this is where whole problem is! What do mean by raising salaries of Mullahs,and madrassa reforms? How a person who has his self interest associated with being a mullah can be allowed to take decisions on religious affairs! how a person who has grown up in closed society with no interactions with outside world be allowed to decide our affairs! And why do you need madarassas (an alienated world)?

 

[DaRk WaVe]

It is Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Founder's of the nation never named it so....

For Islam Quran is the base and Quran says All the lands Belong to Allah. For a Muslim it is a fact for an atheist it might not be.

there's a reason why i told you to read it again, let me quote it here

• The next logical step is to argue that if Islam, as a religion, wanted to become political and exercise control in this world, then it loses its “divine immunity” and will be judged by human laws. This should be seen as breach of a contractual agreement, because the understanding was that God’s laws will apply in the Kingdom of God, but human laws will apply in the kingdom of human beings. If Islam wants to have influence in “our world”, then it will be judged according to “our” laws and it will be responsible and accountable to our laws just as we will be responsible to God’s laws once we enter His kingdom. This will happen, and it will happen not without a cost, but Islam and religion as an idea in Pakistan will stand disabused.
  
  
  
• Pakistanis will move away from the practice of organized religion and will practice more varied and individual forms of devotion. They will still be Muslims and they will still read the Quran, and they will still pray but they will do it on the basis of their own experiences and not on the basis of what someone tells them their experiences should be!

 

[greatsequence]

Sharia of which sect? lol

There are somethings in Sharia which are not compatible with the times in which we are living & now read the article again...

If talking specifically about Pakistan.. more than 90% are Hanafi in law so there shouldnot be any problem in that in the first place.

Sharia just asks for the Core and the sects are unanimous in most issues of the law.