Saving Jinnah’s Pakistan

Pakistan Opinion

Saving Jinnah’s Pakistan

By Ayesha Siddiqa
August 14, 2010

The writer is author of Military Inc and a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, US ayesha.siddiqa@tribune.com.pk

The Awami Jamhoori Party’s march to save “Jinnah’s Pakistan” is commendable. It denoted mobilisation of civil society against violence and intolerance. The procession ended at Data Darbar, which is considered a symbol of the country’s liberal Islamic ethos or culture of religious multi-polarity. But are we quite clear about whether this is the kind of liberal Islamic tradition that Jinnah and other founding leaders of Pakistan opted for?

There was quite a bit of confusion regarding the type of religious ideology that the leaders thought was suited to the new state. According to renowned scholar Farzana Sheikh, whose latest book Making Sense of Pakistan adds to our knowledge of Pakistan’s polity, Iqbal and others did not prefer sufi Islam for the functioning of a modern Islamic state. For them, sufi Islam represented the traditional type which may be popular but was certainly not modern. In any case, Jinnah did not necessarily think deeply about the ideological and socio-political connotations of religion or using religion for nation-building. Much that some people may protest against the factual description of Jinnah’s personal habits, the fact of the matter is that he had a western lifestyle. Nevertheless, he created a state that defined citizenship on the basis of, what Sheikh argues, is the citizen’s putative relationship with religion.

Later, the Muslim League engaged with Majlis-e-Ahrar because the group had links with the Punjabi elite and made inroads into society. The anti-Ahmadi riots of the 1950s exhibited both the growing power of puritanical and illiberal ideology, and the Muslim League’s leadership’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Ahrar’s activities. Instead of giving a liberal direction to the state, if that was indeed the intention, Liaquat Ali Khan went for a formula that appeared as a concession to both the liberal and religious-right in the form of the Objectives Resolution of 1949. The document with its conservative-religious interpretation is central to Pakistan’s legal, constitutional and political frameworks.

But then is cultural or religious-liberalism all that falls in the purview of religion? How about political-liberalism, which no one really wants to talk about? One can be less sure of Jinnah’s intended direction as far as political liberalism is concerned. The conflict between words and actions emerged due to his decisions to annex the state of Kalat and sack Dr Khan Sahib’s provincial government in the frontier. This, as Ayesha Jalal argues, might have been necessary for establishing and strengthening the newly born state. The measures, however, set a politically non-liberal tradition which was followed by his successors. The emphasis was on building a central state with a singular identity. All sub-nationalities were forced to merge their independent cultural and social identity into one mega-identity. The formula did not work so well because the state’s option for sub-nationalities or individuals was to opt for the central narrative and abandon everything else.

But even if we were to use the narrow definition of liberalism as representing religious-liberalism, even that may not seem possible at this juncture. Religious liberalism cannot happen in the absence of political liberalism. Religious radicalism grows not just because the majority or a minority believe in a peculiar and narrow interpretation of religion, but due to the fact that they live in a politically closed system which does not empower them economically and politically. It is not money alone which checks radicalisation but also the richness of a political system. The combination of political and economic poverty makes the problem even denser.

A lot of people have been radicalised in Pakistan not because they understand the radical philosophy of Ibn Tamiyya, Syed Qutb,and Maulana Maududi or its tactical interpretation by Maulana Shamzai, Zawahiri, bin Laden and others, but because they view religion and violence both as necessary tools to fight existing political hegemony and oppression. Under the circumstances, talking about Jinnah’s Pakistan does not make sense until the capable people (those who have resources, education, contacts and power) have the sense to take the bulk of people along and give them at least some of the opportunities they deserve.

Maybe it is time we thought about all what Jinnah could not do.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 15th, 2010.


URL: http://tribune.com.pk/story/39340/saving-jinnah%E2%80%99s-pakistan/

The fountainhead of religious extremism

---Daily Times, Pakistan

Monday, May 17, 2010

VIEW: The fountainhead of religious extremism — Yasser Latif Hamdani
 

Pakistan will have to undo the Maududian infiltration of its state and society. It means liberating our campuses of organisations like the IJT. It means purging the state and its machinery of elements that are furthering the Jamaat’s hate-filled agenda

My article last week on Faisal Shahzad’s radicalisation elicited unprecedented response on the issue of Islamic organisations operating in the US, thereby necessitating this sequel. There are things that need to be said before it is all too late.

Faisal Shahzad’s e-mail to the “peaceful ummah” as published in the New York Times (http://documents.nytimes.com/e-mail-from-faisal-shahzad#text/p1) leaves no doubt about Shahzad’s state of mind. It was his association with Islamic organisations in the West that transformed him into a global jihadist in the classical Qutbian mould. His language, his denunciation of the West and of hypocritical governments in Pakistan, his appeal to “Khilafah” had all the fingerprints of a campus or a local Islamic body, possibly one infiltrated by the Hizb ut-Tahrir and/or global activists of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI).

All this however should not mean that we should shut ourselves off from the reality of religious extremism in our own neck of the woods. The lashkars and the mujahideen Pakistan’s cynical and wretched establishment prepared against the Soviets, with American blessing, are obviously one part of the overall story. Religious extremism in Pakistan has a sordid history, one of the state’s constant retreat in the face of religious parties — the same religious parties that had opposed the very creation of Pakistan — and horrible compromises with extremist and fascist elements.

To recap, Islamic religious organisations have been part of the political landscape of the subcontinent ever since Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi brought them into politics under the guise of the Islamist ‘Khilafat Movement’. It bears repeating that when Gandhi first encouraged Islamic religious clerics for his own anti-imperialist goals, the lone dissenting voice of reason was that of Pakistan’s founding father Jinnah who told Gandhi not to bring “unwholesome elements into public life”. Yet it is Pakistan — ironically — that has come to be associated with the same unwholesome elements today.

After partition, religious extremism in Pakistan reared its ugly head when Majlis-e-Ahrar, a vociferously anti-Pakistan Islamic party during pre-partition days and an erstwhile ally of Gandhi, in 1953 started its campaign of terror against a hapless sectarian minority with the help of another witchdoctor of dubious history, i.e. Maulana Maududi, who till then had become completely irrelevant after his opposition to Jinnah and the Muslim League. To the credit of Pakistan’s judiciary, it swiftly handed down a death sentence for the person who is singlehandedly responsible in providing the ideological foundations for not just the Islamisation in Pakistan but the global Islamic jihad.

Nevertheless the Maulana’s sentence was commuted and it is Pakistan that has suffered as a result. Subsequent to commutation, his book, Islam and Communism, was picked up, reprinted and distributed allegedly by CIA’s JI desk all over the Muslim world. The idea was to use Maududian extremism to stiffen resistance against Soviet expansionism. It is therefore ironic that the JI, Maulana Maududi’s enduring creature, which in 1977 received funds from quarters in the US to overthrow the increasingly pro-Soviet Bhutto, is today the bastion of anti-Americanism. Wonders never cease.

The fountainhead of religious extremism in our country is Mansoora, the headquarters of the JI, in Lahore. Unless Pakistan and the US seriously take a look at the activities of the JI, any meaningful progress in stopping extremism feeding this terror will be impossible. The JI actively works on Pakistan’s largest university campuses to spread its doctrine of hate and bigotry not just against other countries such as the US but religious and sectarian minorities in Pakistan. Its student wing, the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT) is modelled after the National Socialist Party. The JI seeks to infiltrate the army, the air force and the civil bureaucracy to weaken the state’s resolve against extremism in Pakistan. Key members of the JI sit in departments such as education introduce nothing but poison in Pakistan’s young minds.

The JI’s mouthpiece, the Daily Ummat, is full of (fifth) columnists who advocate not just extremism but open violence against minorities. Maududi has inspired a generation of Islamists globally. His exegesis of the Holy Quran is widely read and followed by the Salafi Islamic order, predominantly found in the West and the main source of terrorism in the name of religion. Along with Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, Maududi remains the most widely read Islamist ideologue for relatively more affluent Muslims in the west. Within Pakistan too, the target audience is the middle class. It is, therefore, not uncommon to find inter-city bus services advertising during their in-coach entertainment the publications containing “sagacity and wisdom that defeated Communism, Secularism and Capitalism, which flowed from the pen of Sayyid Qutb and Sayyid Maududi” (direct translation). In the triumphalist Islamist narrative, Qutb and Maududi are prophets without parallel.

Pakistan — if it is serious about tackling terrorism — will also have to undo the Maududian infiltration of its state and society. It means liberating our campuses of organisations like the IJT. It means purging the state and its machinery of elements that are furthering the Jamaat’s hate-filled agenda instead of doing their job. The time has come to take stock of the damage this body of conspiratorial and bigoted men has done repeatedly to the body politic of Pakistan.

It must be remembered, for those who still care about the reasons why we made this country in the first place, that Jinnah’s Pakistan and Maududi’s Pakistan are mutually exclusive. Pakistan must decide here and now: do we wish to make Pakistan a prosperous and democratic state, which is at peace home and abroad ala Jinnah? Or do we wish to make Pakistan a violent dystopia run by maniacs and religious extremists with twisted ideas about religion ala Maududi?

The former route shall save us a lot of heartbreak and humiliation. The latter will ultimately lead to our destruction.

Yasser Latif Hamdani is a lawyer based in Islamabad. He can be reached at yasser.hamdani@gmail.com

URL: www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\05\17\story_17-5-2010_pg3_4