The End of Jinnah’s Pakistan

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The End of Jinnah’s Pakistan

Governor Salmaan Taseer's murder raises questions about the future of Pakistan’s Western-educated elites.

By SADANAND DHUME

Every time you think things can’t possibly get worse in Pakistan, along comes something to prove you wrong. On Tuesday, in possibly the country’s most consequential political shock since the 2007 murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Salmaan Taseer, the 65-year-old governor of Punjab province, was gunned down in an upscale Islamabad market by one of his police bodyguards. The reason: the governor’s plain-spoken defense of Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. According to press reports, Taseer’s killer pumped nine bullets into him for daring to call the blasphemy provision a “black law.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, far right, at the 1947 partition conference.

Needless to say, Taseer was right. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws belong more in a chronicle of medieval horrors than in a modern society, let alone one that receives billions of dollars in Western largesse. Since the mid-1980s, blasphemy—including criticizing the prophet Mohammed—has carried a mandatory death sentence. Amnesty International calls the laws “vaguely formulated and arbitrarily enforced” and “typically employed to harass and persecute religious minorities.” Over the past quarter century, at least 30 people have been lynched by mobs after being accused of blasphemy. Many others have been forced to flee the country. Though Christians make up less than 2% of Pakistan’s population, they account for about half the country’s blasphemy cases.

In a larger sense, however, the significance of Taseer’s murder lies in what it says about the future of nuclear-armed Pakistan. Carved out of the Muslim-majority provinces of British India in 1947, the country has long struggled to reconcile two competing visions of its reason for being. Is Pakistan, as imagined by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—a London-trained barrister with a fondness for pork sandwiches and two-toned spats—merely a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims? Or was it created to echo the far more ambitious formulation of Abul Ala Maududi, the radical Islamist ideologue born roughly a generation after Jinnah: for the enforcement of Islamic Shariah law upon every aspect of society and the state?

Taseer broadly belonged to Jinnah’s Pakistan. He was educated as a chartered accountant in England, founded a successful telecom company, and published the country’s leading liberal newspaper in English. (Though, as the son of a famous Urdu poet, Taseer was perhaps more culturally authentic than his nation’s founder.) By contrast, Taseer’s killer, a 26-year-old named Mumtaz Qadri, symbolizes Maududi’s vision. In photographs, he’s bearded and moustache-less, in the manner prescribed by fundamentalist Islam. That Mr. Qadri could defy South Asia’s usually rigid codes of hierarchy by murdering someone far above his station jibes with the contempt radical Islamists often feel for traditional elites. According to press reports, Mr. Qadri showed no remorse for the murder.

The murder highlights anew the way in which Pakistan’s English-speaking classes resemble a small island of urbanity surrounded by a rising tide of fundamentalist zeal. They have only themselves to blame for their predicament. From independence onward, successive governments—military and civilian alike—have ridden the tiger of fundamentalism out of political expediency, misplaced piety or geopolitical ambition. A statistic from Zahid Hussain’s “Frontline Pakistan” is telling: When Pakistan gained independence in 1947 it housed 137 madrassas. That number has since swelled to about 13,000, between 10% and 15% of which are linked to sectarian militancy (Sunni versus Shia) or terrorism.

For many analysts, Pakistan’s slide began during the prime ministership of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the debonair, Scotch-swilling feudal from Sindh first elected in 1970. Believing that he could co-opt the then small fundamentalist lobby, Bhutto banned alcohol and gambling and shuttered night clubs. He replaced the traditional Sunday holiday with Friday and declared the tiny heterodox Ahmadiyya sect to be non-Muslim. Bhutto promoted the pious and ultimately treacherous Zia ul-Haq to head the army.

After Zia seized power in a coup in 1977, the Islamization of Pakistan took off in earnest. The general set up Shariah courts, began government collection of zakat (an Islamic alms tax), denuded libraries of books deemed un-Islamic, and mandated compulsory prayer for civil servants and marks in their personnel files for piety. In the 1980s, army officers were instructed to read “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book by a zealous officer, Brigadier General S.K. Malik, which argues that “terror struck in the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself.” Many of these officers subsequently rotated through the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence whose links to violent fundamentalist groups fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan and India in Kashmir are widely regarded as too deep to sever entirely.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. has worked hard to stem the rising tide of fundamentalism in Pakistan. First it backed the military strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf. When he failed to deliver, policy makers in Washington held out hope that a democratically elected government, armed with greater legitimacy, would fight a better fight. But so far—despite co-operating with stepped-up U.S. drone strikes against militants in the country’s remoter reaches—the regime of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani has hardly succeeded in stemming the tide of fundamentalist anger in either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Perhaps Governor Taseer’s murder will lead the country’s squabbling politicians and scheming generals to come together in a renewed bid to save Jinnah’s country from Maududi’s vision. Perhaps Pakistani society will be outraged enough to act against the thousands of madrassas that poison the country daily. But if the past is any guide to the future, it may not be a good idea to hold your breath. Jinnah, it can safely be assumed, is spinning in his grave.

Mr. Dhume is a columnist for WSJ.com and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704723104576062961607588454.html

Pakistan’s Medieval Constitution

Monday, June 21, 2010

Pakistan’s Medieval Constitution

It is the only Muslim nation to explicitly define who is or is not a ‘Muslim.’

By MIRA SETHI

In the early hours of May 28, Khalid Solangi was shaken awake by his wife. She told him that she’d heard news of a bloody attack on two Ahmadi mosques in Pakistan. Khalid’s older brother, an Ahmadi Muslim American, had recently flown to Lahore for a wedding and they feared he was one of the victims. “My wife said to me, ‘Your brother has never missed the Friday prayer.’”

And so Khalid dialed his sister-in-law’s number. She confirmed the worst: Her husband had called from his cellphone minutes earlier, asking her to pray for him and the others trapped inside the mosque. “The next thing we heard was that my brother had been martyred,” said Khalid. “He had gone to Pakistan for a wedding. He didn’t even live there.”

When the dust from the bombs settled and the Taliban gunmen stopped their shooting, nearly 100 innocent Muslims lay dead inside the mosques where they had gathered for Friday prayer. This wasn’t the first act of terror committed against this minority Muslim sect.

Since 1953, when the first anti-Ahmadi riots broke out in newly independent Pakistan, the Ahmadi community has lived under constant threat. In 1974, Pakistan amended its constitution to declare Ahmadis non-Muslims.

Ten years later, among a slew of anti-blasphemy laws—one of them famously known as “Ordinance XX”—the military dictator Zia ul-Haq made it a crime for Ahmadis to call themselves Muslims. They were forbidden from declaring their faith publicly, using the traditional Islamic greeting, and referring to their places of worship as mosques. In short, virtually any public act of worship or devotion by an Ahmadi can be treated as a criminal offense punishable by death.

Unsurprisingly, attacks on the Ahmadi community followed. In 2005 eight Ahmadis were gunned down in a mosque in a small town in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province. A year later a mob burned down Ahmadi homes and shops in a small village in the province, forcing more than a 100 Ahmadis to flee.

Last winter, while I was home in Lahore, I drove to a beige building near my house to get my passport renewed. The officer, in a small effort to assist me, made Xs next to the lines that needed my signature. First I signed the badly photocopied sheet, again and again. Then I found myself being asked to confirm that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad—a 19th century Punjabi reformer and founder of the Ahmadi movement—was an “imposter.”

This is standard. Every Pakistani Muslim applying for a passport must sign a statement deriding Ahmad, but I had forgotten about the procedure.

I asked the officer what would happen if I didn’t sign above the line. He looked at me blankly: “You don’t want passport?“

Later that day I went with my friends to a restaurant in Old Lahore—the city’s historic quarter—where cramped alleys lead to centuries-old Mughal mosques, forts and gateways. We ate kebabs and shared a hookah. On our way home, passing Lahore’s busiest road, I saw a banner on a building facing the Lahore High Court: “Jews, Christians and Ahmadis are enemies of Islam.” We passed a patch of grass where a bronze statue of Queen Victoria had once stood. It has been replaced by a tall glass box containing a Quran.

That the Ahmadi movement agrees with every tenet of Islam, save the additional belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad came to the Muslim community as a promised messiah, is irrelevant. The legal system has left minorities such as Christians and Hindus, and within Islam, Ahmadis and Shiites, socially and politically isolated.

Routinely, the graffiti along Lahore’s stylish boulevards will proclaim that Shiites are infidels. More than 100 Christian houses were burned in a town in central Pakistan last year over a claim that a Christian had defiled the Quran. That same year, 37 Ahmadis were charged under the blasphemy laws.

Pakistan is the only Muslim nation to explicitly define who is or is not a “Muslim” under its constitution. This serves only one purpose: to embolden groups like the Pakistani Taliban who use the laws as justification to declare Ahmadis as “wajib ul qatl” or “worthy of death.” As long as the state continues to decide who is and is not a Muslim—a personal, private question—we will continue to see attacks on minorities and medieval banners in the public square.

Ms. Sethi is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal this summer.

URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311043632237762.html