Pakistan's Mullah Takeover

Pakistan's Mullah Takeover
Khalid Hasan
The Friday Times,
June 9-15, 2006 - Vol. XVIII, No. 16

It is a sign of these times of “enlightened moderation” that in this country of 150 million people, there is only one, just one, truly liberal magazine, a small monthly published in Urdu from Lahore without any advertising support whatever, its sole backers being its loyal readers, at home and abroad.

This brave little venture, the monthly Naya Zamana , was started seven years ago by Muhammad Shoaib Adil, whom I have never met but whose heroic commitment to liberal values in our increasingly Deobandi, mullah-infested land I greatly admire. One would have thought that a journal like this would derive its readership from the larger cities, but that is not the case at all, which does not say much for Pakistan’s larger cities. Almost all its contributors reside in small, often far-flung towns. Its correspondents, who, there can be little doubt, work for it out of love not money (since it has none), are mostly based in places like Gilgit, Dera Ghazi Khan, Rahim Yar Khan, Khanpur, Laiyah, Dinga Gujrat, Mianwali, Pattoki, Loralai, Sargodha, Rajanpur, Kharan and Qila Saifullah. Recently, the editor circulated a letter saying he had been unable to interest advertisers and in order to survive, he would need either a sizeable number of his readers to become life members by making a one-time payment of Rs 10,000 or to use their influence to get the struggling publication some advertising.

In its May issue, an analysis of mullah-propelled extremism by Amir Hussaini recalls that early on in Zia-ul-Haq’s draconian rule, an organised movement led by Ehsan Ali Zaheer against the Shia community and the followers of the moderate Barelvi school was launched with official connivance. Poisonous literature, much of it produced in Saudi Arabia, was circulated all over Pakistan. After Zaheer was killed by a bomb in a public meeting he was addressing, his place was taken by an unknown mullah by the name of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a diehard Deobandi who founded the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. His sole target was the Shia community and within a month there was hardly a wall in the country that did not carry the slogan ‘ Kafir kafir Shia kafir, jo na manay wo bhi kafir ’ (All Shias are infidels, as are those who do not believe it). The movement’s wrath was directed in equal measure at the Barelvis who were declared to be outside the pale of Islam because of the reverence they paid to saints and the fact that they celebrated Eid-i-Milad and were given to devotional music. The Sipah was also active in the so-called Afghanistan “jihad.” Once the war was over, its armed cadres descended on Pakistan, spreading their poisonous message from end to end. These forces operated with the connivance, if not the support and encouragement, of the regime. This is the dragon harvest that now infests Pakistan’s soil and which the state is unwilling, if not unable, to cut down.

It is difficult to believe and depressing to think that the Pakistan of today is the same country where in 1954, a great declaration of liberal and secular thought was produced by two distinguished judges in the aftermath of the first organised assault on the state’s secular structure by the mullahs. The document was the Report of the Court of Inquiry into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953. It is something everyone needs to read today. Gen Musharraf, instead of harping on the empty slogan of “enlightened moderation” every third day, should have the Munir Report, as it has come to be called over the years, become part of school and college courses, as well as made compulsory reading in every madrassa from Peshawar to Karachi. Between Justice Muhammad Munir, the president, and Justice MR Kayani, member, the two man-Court produced a document of such brilliant reasoning and intellectual clarity that it needs to be circulated in all Islamic lands which are dogged by bigotry and ignorance and where hostages are slaughtered and innocent people bombed in the name of Islam.

The mullahs, barring some exceptions, were dead set against Pakistan, since they considered a nation state un-Islamic. They made their first attempt to take over the new country when they set Punjab on fire by inciting riots against the Ahmediyya community. The two judges, discussing the question of the establishment of a state based on religion wrote, “No one who has given serious thought to the introduction of a religious state in Pakistan has failed to notice the tremendous difficulties with which any such scheme must be confronted.” They quoted from Allama Iqbal’s 1930 address to the Muslim League: “Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states. The principle that each group is entitled to free development on its own lines in not inspired by any feeling of narrow communalism.”

Munir and Kayani – the report was drafted by Kayani – argued that since a demand is being made to declare all Ahmedis non-Muslims, those who are making this demand must know who a Muslim is. They wrote, “What is Islam and who is a momin or a Muslim? We put this question to the ulema. . . but we cannot refrain from saying here that it was a matter of infinite regret to us that the ulema whose first duty should be to have settled views on this subject, were hopelessly disagreed among themselves.” The Court asked the leading Islamic scholars and theologians of the day to “give the irreducible minimum conditions which a person must satisfy to be entitled to be called a Muslim.” No two divines agreed as to who a Muslim is, leading the Court to observe, “Keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulema, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam, and if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulema, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.”

Munir and Kayani also condemned the authors of the Objectives Resolution for having “misused the words sovereign and democracy when they recited that the Constitution to be framed was for a sovereign state in which principles of democracy as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed.” The two judges observed, “An Islamic state, however, cannot in this sense be sovereign because it will not be competent to abrogate, repeal or do away with any law in the Quran and Sunnah. Absolute restriction on the legislative power of a state is a restriction on the sovereignty of the people of that state and if the origin of this restriction lies elsewhere than in the will of the people, then to the extent of that restriction the sovereignty of the states and its people is necessarily taken away.”

The Court asked Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, “Will you permit Hindus to base their Constitution on the basis of their own religion?” Maudoodi replied, “Certainly. I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India are treated as shudras and malishes and Manu’s laws are applied to them, depriving them of all share in the government and the rights of a citizen.” The two judges wrote, “Nothing but a bold reorientation of Islam to separate the vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a world idea and convert the Musalman into a citizen of the present and the future world from the archaic incongruity that he is today.”

That was 1954. Is there a judge in the Pakistan of 2006 who even dares whisper what his illustrious predecessors declared in open court for the world to hear?