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print versionThe News, July 11, 2007
The Lal Masjid drama goes on after six months.
One regrets the loss of valuable lives
irrespective of the exact numbers; numbers vary
and a possible final impends. There is little
that the state will prevail because of its
obvious military superiority. How long this will
go on looks suspiciously uncertain. But the event
has to be seen in perspective.
What do the Islamic extremists inside Lal Masjid
stand for? They stand for enforcing an Islamic
shariah of their own conception immediately. It
is literalist Deobandi interpretation of Islamic
tenets. It rejects modernist interpretations of
Islam. They are bereft of modern education,
indeed they reject the knowledge of pure and
applied sciences and modern thought on social
subjects. They want to take Pakistan back to
early years of Islam. For that reason they are a
big and growing challenge to most Muslim
countries.
They are not concerned with people’s day-to-day
social and economic problems; they happily accept
today’s economy being conservatives and thrive on
the social, economic and political backwardness
of Muslim masses. These Islamists have no
programme of ameliorating the poor people’s
living conditions but want power in the
unreconstructed societies — power for its own
sake. They are not committed to any enlightened
and egalitarian social reconstruction. That makes
them generic fascists.
Then, there are Lal Masjid leaders’ links with
the Pakistan Army. A wide swathe of intelligent
opinion believes that they have served Pakistan’s
intelligence services well during the 1980s jihad
in Afghanistan. As for America’s covert war
against the Soviets carried on by paid
Mujahideen, it and its friends pumped in
something like $ 40 to $50 billion in a decade in
a socially backward and economically poor area.
Plus some European agents taught the natives the
art of heroin-making and marketing. The
Americans, British, Germans and of course Saudis
and other conservative Arab regimes actively
favoured the reactionary Islamic extremism of
largely, but not exclusively, Pukhtoon jihadists.
This kind of Islam was reinforced in the 1990s by
introducing a new group of Islamic extremists
(Taliban) who quickly acquired the state of
Afghanistan minus its ethnically-different
northern region that was ruled by equally
intolerant and conservative Islamic leaders,
supported by India, Iran and successors of the
Soviets. Lal Masjid is commonly believed to have
played a role in both the Afghan jihad and later
the Kashmir one. No outsider can know the precise
limits of that collaboration by the Lal Masjid
leadership with the army and possibly other
agencies.
Then, there is the question of the state’s
behaviour towards it. Contrast the army’s
behaviour towards Baloch nationalists or other
(Al-Qaeda) Islamic extremists in FATA and NWFP. A
sharp distinction would emerge. Is this drama so
long-drawn-out because of the army’s surviving
affection for old collaborators? Or does it hope
to utilize this standoff for terrifying the
Americans and also for diverting public attention
from various domestic Crises, particularly the
judicial one?
While one opposes Islamic extremism or militancy
because of its social conservatism and its
pre-medieval outlook, one’s condemnation has to
be tempered with the understanding of what
motivates their uncontrolled anger and, in part,
extremism. After centuries of western domination
over the Islamic world, Muslims are now becoming
dimly conscious of how and why they could be
colonized, exploited, kept poor and backward.
This nascent awareness, albeit hazy, has some
validity. This is a partially positive fact.
Don’t forget these militant schools and groups
have no rational and workable social, political
or economic reforms. They want to go back to the
seventh century AD and replicate what was the
political structure of the state of Medina and
the subsequent four Islamic caliphates. They do
not want to replicate the latter periods. The
gaze is fixed only on the four right-guided
caliphs and their moral and religious ideas. That
makes their thinking antediluvian.
Pakistanis have to decide whether they want to
live in the modern world or go back to the
medieval ages accepting its structures and mores
or whether they must industrialise their
economies and reform politics to ensure economic
progress while enjoying fundamental human rights.
Social, political and intellectual stasis of a
bygone age cannot serve today’s needs. Scientific
knowledge, wherever found, must be acquired.
Societies must be scientifically studied.
Those who have excelled in modern sciences must
be honoured and those who bring to bear new
scientific and technological knowledge on
domestic political and economic spheres must be
encouraged. The greatest threat to any society’s
progress is the closed mind. So long as minds are
open, and people are ready to argue rationally,
new ideas about reforms, about the rights of the
people, about how to maximize wealth and how
distribute it better will be factors of progress.
The people must decide the purpose of public
policy to be the maximization of good for the
maximum number of people while also giving them
maximum freedoms. The inequality in society has
to be reduced and equally promoted. This is what
Islamic extremists deliberately ignore. They push
for an ambiguous (current) social and economic
system superimposed by an extra austere sexual
morality alone. They accept the unequal
quasi-feudal system that concedes few human
rights to the common people.
The dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq had
promoted a fake religiosity to be superimposed on
a highly unequal economic system with no
political rights under his martial law. An
equally fake Islamic extremism is now flourishing
that has to be eschewed. The country is
threatened by extremism over large areas in NWFP,
FATA and PATA areas. Indeed, it is now seeping
into Pakistan’s other settled areas. An idea of
what to do about it is to let all people speak
their truths honestly with equal access to the
media. The media must project the ideas of the
largest number of groups. Let ideas contend with
ideas rationally and freely. Let the people
freely choose. That is the way out.
Lal Masjid’s history is relevant. Its leaders
appear to have become too big for their boots and
have started out on a course of trying to acquire
power by imposing a medieval morality that is
threatened by music, dance, video cassettes, CDs,
DVDs etc. People and the media must ensure that
the Lal Masjid affair does not divert public
attention from other and major crises.
Tail piece: Now that the SC has taken a suo moto
notice of the Lal Masjid standoff, there should
be hope that many hitherto unanswered questions
would now find answers, especially those about
the links between the masjid’s administration and
the government’s undercover agencies. The SC is
sure to ask the secret agencies what they were
doing while Maulana Aziz’s men were amassing so
many guns and so much ammo.
(The article was written before the events of July 10)
The writer is a veteran journalist and freelance columnist.
