The question of tolerance —Rasul Bakhsh Rais

Intolerance stems from arrogance, from a belief that a person’s religion and ideology are true while all else is false. But above all intolerance grows from an individual taking responsibility for scrutinising and guarding the beliefs and practices of other and passing a final judgement on them.

We need to build tolerance by reforming the education system. A public education system that functions and has quality and public trust will go a long way toward cultivating young persons in modern values of respecting diversity and an opposite point of view

It is hard to contest the growing view that in recent decades, the social trends in Pakistani society have changed a bit for the worse in becoming less respectful of diversity. The question is, is it accommodative of or tolerant toward the religious difference as it used to be about three decades back? Our tentative answer is that it is not.

What is then the trend? The trend is toward seeking conformity to the dominant views on religion and religious values. There are many causes for this, but one of the salient ones is the failure to develop educational institutions into places of free debate and inquiry. We cannot expect it to happen with poor quality of academic leadership. And of course another reason is political expediency guiding the policies of governments that have lacked a vision and a practical programme to restore true spirit of learning and reflection in the colleges and universities.

We need to focus more on modern institutions than on other factors is for obvious reason; the primary function and the historical identity of the academy is associated with the training of free thinking, rational, tolerant and open individual that develops himself to respecting others and giving equal value and respect to beliefs of others. Sadly, our colleges and universities that churning out graduates in thousands and the majority of those who are imparting them modern knowledge lack some of the essential qualities of modern man.

Let me also discuss briefly two other reasons for growth of extremism and violence. The first is the worsening quality of governance at all levels. Contrary to official claims, our system of governance, including all branches has deteriorated. There are so many elegant philosophical and political debates, mainly in the western societies, about the purposes of the government.

These debates are open to everyone, and are part of collective human heritage; our rulers will greatly benefit by opening some pages of literature on why the government was created. Even if we take the first principle, law and order, being the primary responsibility of the government, we see a poor record of the Islamic Republic.

Most of the questions about law and order become centred on the fundamental rights of the individual—life, property, and in the Lockean sense, pursuit of liberty. Property rights are poorly enforced; life, if not short and brutish, its fullness and self-actualisation is uncertain and problematic; and liberty is hostage to tradition, conservative religious values and hybrid of feudal authoritarianism. The combination for these forces overtime has created an intolerant society. Because all elements of the iron triangle—mullah, bureaucracy and the feudal by their class interests and organisational culture seek conformity and punish dissent.

Whether or not the ruling classes help create a pluralistic social order would depend on what is their vision of the society and what institutions they create to resolve conflicts and help create a pluralistic social order. To gauge their capacity we need to look at their own socialisation or social learning. In the end it is culture of our ruling elites and their being insensitive or sensitive to larger question of social injustice violence against women, religious minorities that would increase tolerance or intolerance.

Our debate about the failure of the state in dealing with religious, ethnic and sectarian violence often revolves around its capacities. That is true, but not enough an explanation. The general mindset of three major groups that I have referred to above and their attitudes, values and orientation toward accommodation of difference need to be looked at closely to understand ineffectiveness of the government.

Intolerance stems from arrogance, from a belief that a person’s religion and ideology are true while all else is false. But above all intolerance grows from an individual taking responsibility for scrutinising and guarding the beliefs and practices of other and passing a final judgement on them.

The numbers of men and women who think it is their primary religious duty to make other Muslims believe and behave like them seem to be growing. They are possessed with an artificial sense of certitude, authenticity and being on the right-path to influence others’ religious and social choices.

A good number of them have become self-appointed soldiers of God, His judges and executioners. Violence motivated by sectarian considerations is not so infrequent and takes many forms of humiliation, physical assault and target killings of prominent individuals—religious scholars, professionals and community leaders of rival sects.

Religion is part of life and society and will remain so even in post-industrial societies, though it may take different forms. Religion has a great value in answering questions about the mystery of existence and giving a positive and purposive direction to a person’s life.

But we cannot rely on religion alone to create a peaceful, orderly and tolerant society. An individual made up of greed, ambitions and lust for power cannot be tamed by religious values alone. This role has to be played by the state through its strong arm of law. But then, law cannot be strong enough without the rule of law. Here we are back to the basics.

Never will intolerance and violence disappear from Pakistani or any society for that matter with sermons, speeches and florid statement of religious and political leaders. We must start a reform process in the governance, accountability of ruling political groups that have alternated in power.

We need to build tolerance by reforming the education system. A public education system that functions and has quality and public trust will go a long way toward cultivating young persons in modern values of respecting diversity and an opposite point of view.

The process of promoting social change and cultivating modern rational attitudes of tolerance of difference is a long-term developmental issue. No matter how difficult and long this social journey might be but we must set ourselves on this path by investing more in social development and by making calculated interventions through law and public policy into the structures of our social and political life.

Tolerance is dependent on culture, religious orientations and general social framework of the society. Our tradition cultural values both in social and religious realms were tolerant of other communities and accorded respect to the beliefs and practices of other religions and sects within Islam.

Unfortunately, the traditional social pluralism has been under constant threat for the last thirty years mainly because of militancy among some of the religious sects. This trends must be reversed, but it is not going to happen without major reforms, good political, better governance and rule of law regime.

Dr Rasul Bakhsh Rais is author of “Recovering the Frontier State: War, Ethnicity and State in Afghanistan” (Oxford University Press, 2008) and a professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He can be reached at rasul@lums.edu.pk (Daily Times)

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‘Bring back Jinnah’s Pakistan’ - By Ardeshir Cowasjee and Munno Bhai

By Ardeshir Cowasjee
Sunday, 01 Nov, 2009 (Dawn)

Had the Mideast and S.Asia heeded Jinnah’s advice on religion and state the world may have been in better shape today. —Photo by AFP

Of late, amidst the murder and mayhem accompanied by an absence of government or any signs of governance, a group of citizens has been circulating an email message exhorting whoever to ‘bring back Jinnah’s Pakistan’.

Now, to bring back something that existed for a mere moment in the life of this nation is more than difficult at a time when the national mindset is what it is.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan was denounced six months after his death when the Objectives Resolution was passed, negating the words he had so eloquently spoken to his constituent assembly on Aug 11 1947: ‘... You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’ Thus, willy-nilly, the state was made the custodian of religion.

In the early 1950s, the British writer Hector Bolitho was commissioned by the government to write an official biography of Jinnah. It was published in 1954. Such was the moral dishonesty and hypocrisy that had taken a firm hold and rooted itself in the country’s psyche that the ruling clique of the day perverted Jinnah’s words, and printed in the book was this version of the quoted sentence: ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.’

In April 1962, the days of President Gen Ayub Khan, came a lessening of the prevailing hypocrisy and the government press department published a collection of Jinnah’s speeches as governor general of Pakistan. The Aug 11, 1947 speech was printed in full in its original version. (These speeches were reprinted by the government of Benazir Bhutto and released for sale in 1989.)

In 1984, when wily Ziaul Haq ruled, came the finest biography of Jinnah so far written. Prof Stanley Wolpert’s well-researched book, Jinnah of Pakistan, was published in the US by Oxford University Press and 500 copies were sent to Pakistan to be released for sale.

Prior to its release, two copies were sent by OUP to the information ministry seeking permission to reprint locally. The minions of this pernicious ministry, which should not exist, took exception to certain passages in the book in which our founder-maker’s personal tastes and habits were mentioned.

The 498 copies of the book lying with OUP were removed from their storeroom and reprinting of course denied. To top this crass idiocy, Wolpert was approached and asked to delete the offending passages so that it could be reprinted and sold. Naturally, Wolpert’s response was that as a scholar he was unable to compromise on basic principles and any deletion/amendment was out of the question.

Thus the book effectively remained banned in Pakistan until in 1989, when, to give full credit to Benazir and her government, permission was given to OUP to reprint and the book was released for sale. Zia’s was an exercise in pure futility.

Our large neighbour also has blinkered intolerant elements in its midst. There is a long list of books that are banned in India, amongst them Stanley Wolpert’s ‘factional’ novel on the assassination of Gandhi, Nine Hours to Rama, which was banned by the government in 1962. And now, this August, two days after its release the government of the Indian state of Gujarat saw fit to issue a notification ‘forfeiting’ and ‘prohibiting’ Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (Mr Singh was also expelled by his party, the BJP).

The book was banned with immediate effect and in the wider public interest because it was alleged that its contents are highly objectionable, against the national interest, misleading, distort historical fact and that it is defamatory in regard to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who is largely regarded as the architect of modern India.

Mr Singh swiftly approached the Indian Supreme Court challenging the ban on the grounds of the violation of fundamental rights. The court issued a notice to the Gujrat government. In the meantime, an appeal was submitted to the Gujrat High Court which struck down the ban. With the Gujrat government prevaricating, the matter remains before the supreme court.

Now, to the bringing back in totality of Jinnah’s Pakistan — that we can never do as half of his Pakistan was shorn by the collusion of our politicians and army generals, the deadly mixture of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Gen Yahya Khan who threw away East Pakistan through a lust for power coupled by incompetence and insensitivity. What can be saved, if we had the leadership to do so, is the spirit of Jinnah’s Pakistan as expressed by him on that distant August day.

Had a large part of the Middle Eastern region and parts of South Asia been able to heed Jinnah’s words that religion, caste and creed ‘has nothing to do with the business of the state’ the world may well have been in better shape today. It is possible that the extremism that has galloped away in these areas would not have taken root had various states not been allowed to force upon the world their dangerously distorted version of a religion.

As for Pakistan, the Objectives Resolution forms the preamble to ZAB’s constitution and was additionally inserted as an annex by Ziaul Haq. Then we have ZAB’s second amendment to his constitution which reinforces bigotry and intolerance. No government has been strong enough to take on the mullah fraternity whose grip has strengthened with the years. To bring us back to Jinnah’s Pakistan, we must have a revolution — a revolution of the national mindset and a latter-day Ataturk to ensure that it is successful.

arfc@cyber.net.pk

Part II (Cowasjee)

There has to be something seriously wrong with a country in which many of its citizens are still arguing as to whether it should or should not have been made, or debating as to whether it came into being by accident, intent, design or even intrigue. All possible accusations have been levied against the logic of Pakistan’s making.

The fact is that Pakistan exists and has existed for 62 years — in what shape is quite another matter. Arguments on that score will never cease, and they should not as it failed initially to take off in the right direction.

A valid argument has been made by a few of the many who responded to last week’s column against the exhortation ‘bring back Jinnah’s Pakistan’ — that we should be looking and moving forwards rather than retreating.

A counter argument to this is that from shortly after its birth the nation retreated 300 years placing itself in mindset and religious-political intent back in the age of the Emperor Aurangzeb. (Had it chosen to retreat 400 years to the age of Akbar the Great it would have been on the correct and proper path.)

With the relatively recent advent of the Taliban we have retreated even further in time, back to the 11th century and the Hashishi who considered murder a religious duty and who dreamed up ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to face martyrdom.

Having retreated and firmly embedded itself, if the country is put at the take-off point of Jinnah’s Pakistan we will have in fact advanced. There is no latter day Mohammad Ali Jinnah to lead us but we do have his words and his example to look to. The fact is that, for whatever reasons and through whatever circumstances, Mr Jinnah managed to do what few men have done — he created a country and in doing so changed the course of history. Professor Stanley Wolpert’s opens the preface to his book Jinnah of Pakistan with this reminder.

All great men are controversial, so Jinnah, is highly controversial both in his own land and particularly in the country out of which Pakistan was carved (some 940,000 sq.km.). He learnt his politics from Dadabhoy Naoroji, Phirozshaw Mehta, Motilal Nehru, Gopal Gokhale and other men of substance. His alleged motives for having done what he did vary from the simple accusation of a grab for power to the suggestion that he was caught in a vice of his own making and against his inner will the creation of Pakistan was forced upon him. My belief and that shared by many is, knowing what we all know, that the Muslims of undivided India were a subjugated minority, Jinnah’s feeling was that in an independent India they would become even more downtrodden and face even more discrimination and thus have difficulty as a community in making much of themselves.

Jinnah’s intent was to create a homeland turning the minority into a majority, not subject to discrimination and challenges. He expected the Muslims of his country to rise above themselves, to join the modern world, work and prosper, in a land free from bigotry, imbued with tolerance for their fellow human beings of no matter what creed or race. Such was his intent, of this I have no doubt. What he subsequently had to work with after the birth of Pakistan caused him grief. His motive and intent being honourable, no blame can attach to him for where Pakistan find’s itself today.

He may have failed, as all others did, to anticipate the horrors of partition, and the mass migration and slaying that took place, but three days prior to the birth of his country he was still optimistic, he still had hopes that he could sway the hearts and minds of the men who would be the future law makers.

Apart from that most famous of quotations from his Aug 11, 1947 speech to the constituent assembly, when he made it abundantly clear that religion, caste or creed have nothing to do with the business of the state, a passage that most fortuitously is quoted with frequency in our press and media and in all books written about Jinnah, we must also remember the words he spoke back in February 1935 to the Central Legislative Assembly when he told the members that “religion should not be allowed to come into politics … religion is merely a matter between man and God”.

A year later, he announced at a Muslim League session that the question of constitutional safeguards for Muslims “was not a religious question, but purely a political problem”. All this was put paid to in March 1949 by the men who followed him.

What else did he tell these men to whom he was bequeathing a country? He told them that the first duty of a government is to impose and maintain law and order to protect the lives, properties and religious beliefs of the citizens. Not an impossible task, but one which successive governments have failed to achieve. We are today paying heavily for their corruption and incompetence.

Jinnah came down hard on bribery and corruption — he called them “a poison”. Again he was thwarted. In his very lifetime the men who would lead the country were scheming and stealing, falsely declaring properties owned in India so that they could grab what was left abandoned by the Hindus who had fled. Dishonesty, graft and robbery were part of Pakistan’s birth pangs and with the years they have blossomed exponentially.

The rot and ruin can only be retrieved if we have the will and ability to heed the words of the man who made us.

arfc@cyber.com
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Book Review: Islam and the Secular State:

Is future of sharia with secularism? —by Khaled Ahmed

Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia
By Abdullah Ahmed an-Naim
Harvard University Press 2008
Pp324; Price $35

The author links the concept of civic reason with the Quranic edict of shura or consultation even though it does not lay down any exact mechanism for this consultation. For the sake of avoidance of conflict in the modern state, he advocates consultation between the various communities inhabiting the state

Author Abdullah Ahmed an-Naim says: “This book is the culmination of my life’s work, the final statement I wish to make on issues I have been struggling with since I was a student at the University of Khartoum, Sudan, in the late 1960s. I speak as a Muslim in this book because I am accountable for these ideas as part of my own religion and not simply as a hypothetical academic argument.” And he has made us all think afresh about the nature of the state inhabited by Muslims.

There are many ways you can save the Muslims from going pre-modern and hurting themselves in the 21st century. Some of us say Sharia itself is secular and that the state after the first immaculate caliphs separated the religious from the political. Some others say the Prophet PBUH himself created a state that gave equal status to all Muslim and non-Muslim communities living in it. This book gives an inside view of how Islam needs to absorb some of the values of secularism that don’t militate against Islam.

The case is put like this: “The historical relationship among Islam, the state, and politics clearly reflects the permanent tension between claims of the conflation of Islam and the state and the need of religious leaders to maintain their autonomy from state institutions in the interest of their own moral authority over both state and society. The basic framework for the constant mediation of that tension was the expectation of Muslims that the state should uphold Islamic principles in fulfilling its obligations, on the one hand, and the inherently political and secular nature of the state, on the other.” (p.49)

The state is inherently bisected by its religious authority and its political exigencies. The ulema may insist on a seamless state but they often lack the power to implement what they have in mind; and since what they have in mind is not a functional Islamic state but a utopia based on theory, an Islamic state ruled by them may run the risk of becoming like all utopias, beginning with the one visualised by Plato. Dangers arise from the lack of the will of the ulema “to confront practical questions of maintaining the peace among local communities, regulating economic and social relations, or defending the realm against external threats”. The ulema may have to become users of force by cutting themselves off from the mainsprings of their theory of the state.

Author Naim refers to the authority of Ibn Taymiya (d.1328) to posit the possibility of a pragmatic state and its reliance on skill rather than religious piety with the support of the leading Islamic thinkers who asserted that ‘the selection of each public officer or magistrate should be based on the pragmatic requirements and the individual’s capacity to comply with the ethical and professional code of the job being assigned, not considerations of religious piety”. Ibn Taymiya cited in this context the example of how the Prophet PBUH repeatedly appointed Khalid bin Walid as commander of Muslim armies, despite his frustration and dissatisfaction with Khalid’s attitudes and behaviour from a religious point of view. (p.49)

Ibn Jawziya too thought that intelligence and practical wisdom should be the principle on which to run a government and held that it was only “through misunderstanding the political dimension of Islam that rulers misconceived the relation between Sharia and the actuality of experience” thus making serious mistakes under the rubric of applying Sharia. (p.50) The book points out that the same principle was favoured by Imam Ghazali too.

Naim tackles the more problematic question of the function of the state in regard to its population. He says: “Citizens often have a sentimental attachment to and identification with their state but this is not an essential characteristic of a state. The concept of the nation-state assumes common features, such as ethnicity or language, among groups that may identify with the state in this manner. But this can be misleading, because there is hardly ever a complete correspondence between a territory and the ethnic, religious, or other unity of its population. Such unity can be true of several groups within the territory of a state and may be shared by others living within the territory of another state. The fact that most states seek to cultivate feelings of uniform national identity is not a defining characteristic of the modem state.” (p.87)

What then is the defining characteristic of the modern state? The book brings in the concept of civic reason here: “The concept of civic reason entitles all citizens to publicly debate any matter that pertains to or reflects on public policy and governmental or state action, including the views of citizens about such matters.” Here the fundamental purpose is to allow all citizens of the state regardless of their religion and ethnicity to join the debate from their separate points of view. Naim says: “Muslims are of course free to observe the ban on riba personally or to organise zakat through civic associations, all through an entirely internal Islamic discourse. But if they wish to involve state institutions in the process, then they must provide civic reasons through a civic reasoning process in which all citizens can participate without reference to religion.” (p.93)

He links the concept of civic reason with the Quranic edict of shura or consultation even though it does not lay down any exact mechanism for this consultation. For the sake of avoidance of conflict in the modern state, he advocates consultation between the various communities inhabiting the state. And in this validation of the non-dominant communities together with the dominant ones he sees the function of the state as a neutral entity concerned with justice. And this no doubt is the fundamental characteristic of a secular state. (Daily Times)

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The enigma of Sonia Gandhi

Sunday, September 20, 2009 Aakar Patel No leader in the world is like Sonia Gandhi. She is a European leading a major Asian power. A Roman Catholic, and perhaps a practising one though she makes no display of her faith, in a nation that is dominant Hindu and Muslim. She has the sort of power in her country that few leaders in the west have. And though they do not seem keen to own her, not since Mussolini and perhaps not even since the Caesars has an Italian individual been this powerful. Sonia isn't properly educated, but is seen by India's middle-class as quite sophisticated. There isn't any evidence to show that she's well- read either, but her manner is refined, even reginal. She met her husband Rajiv Gandhi at Cambridge, though she wasn't at the university. She was taking English language lessons at a school, having come there from her home in Italy. Rajiv was attending Trinity, and said in a famous interview that he had 'flunked out' without a degree. Their son Rahul attended Trinity, and passed. Sonia was 19 when she met Rajiv and 22 when they married. He was only a couple of years older, and so it must have been a partnership of equals, particularly because Rajiv was relaxed and not chauvinistic. Within months of their meeting, Indira Gandhi became prime minister of India. Sonia's English isn't particularly good. This was noticeable last week when she inaugurated an institute raised by the software firm Infosys, in the southern city of Mysore. She meant to tell the audience that she was happy to get away from Delhi, and all the trouble that her job in politics brought her, but what came out was gibberish. She isn't good at Hindi either, though she has improved her control over it since she began speaking it publicly a decade ago. Certainly she speaks it better than Europeans who have been in India for much longer, like Mark Tully, or people who have dug into our culture more, like the author William Dalrymple. Most of the time she speaks precisely and unambiguously, like a European and unlike Indian politicians. When she talks as a leader, she uses the modest 'hum' referring to the collective, rather than herself. She is always deferential to the prime minister in public, and you can see that she's also quite fond of the old man (he's 77), which is unusual given that they share power. Sonia has been around power for a long time, over 40 years, so it must be second nature to her. Her mother-in-law was murdered in 1984, when Sonia was 38. She was the wife to India's prime minister, and it came to light that for many years after her marriage she had not taken Indian citizenship but retained her Italian passport (which she later gave up). She was widowed at 45 when Rajiv was murdered in 1991. She has raised her children well. They are independent and do not lean on their family identity beyond a point. And they are quite charming. Both are handsome and that's not surprising given how attractive their father was. Rahul is unexcitable and persistent rather than charismatic, and that is a very good thing for India. Priyanka is charismatic, and will come under pressure to join politics because crowds love her. For eight years or so after her husband died, Sonia only played the widow. She took no part in electoral politics, when the Congress under Narasimha Rao ruled between 1991 (when Rajiv died) and 1996. She also sat out the next couple of years while the party was restive under its new head, an old-style back-room leader called Sitaram Kesri. As the party began to wilt under the BJP's disciplined expansion and the rise of the peasants in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, she accepted the pleas to come and lead the Congress. Most leaders accepted her status as dowager empress. How did she adjust to the brutality of India's politics? How did she calibrate her strategies? It would make for a fascinating biography which is unlikely to be written. Unlikely by an Indian, in any case. Two attempts were made to delegitimise Sonia when the Congress was weak. The first by the ambitious Sharad Pawar, leader of the Congress in Maharashtra, a state with 100 million people whose capital is Bombay. He revolted in 1999, saying a foreigner should not head the Congress. Few joined him, and he has become a minor player now. Sonia showed pragmatism by later allying with Pawar's party, an act that kept Thackeray out of power. The second attempt was made after the Congress won in 2004. BJP leaders, led by Sushma Swaraj, said they would not allow Sonia to take office. The first election Sonia campaigned for, in 1998, was a disaster, and the Congress registered its worst performance. The next, the following year, was even poorer, and the Congress won only 114 seats out of 545. Sonia was now Congress president. Then, in the third one, against expectations, she triumphed and Atal Behari Vajpayee's government fell after the 'India Shining' campaign. Sonia could have easily become prime minister, winning from two Lok Sabha seats (one against Swaraj). The constitution was on her side. But she stepped aside in a moment of drama, broadcast live, which changed the way Indians looked at her. She said that she did not seek power and would not become prime minister. She remained Congress president, but Manmohan formed the government. For us the notion of Tyag, of self-sacrifice, is big in the Hindu faith, which reveres the one who renounces the world. Now the Congress is again India's most powerful party and has a clutch of modern young leaders. Sonia has become its unquestioned leader. She has revived the Congress from depths that neither Nehru nor Indira saw, and it is unlikely that her easy-going husband would have done as well as she has. Her behaviour since she anointed Manmohan has been exemplary. There has been little evidence that Manmohan has not been allowed to drive policy where he has control, such as over economics and foreign affairs. She has shielded him from the nonsense that comes to all who are in politics in the third world: the corruption, the venality and the arbitrariness. Manmohan is wise enough to let all of that pass while he tries to get on with his job. But it takes an exceptional person to absorb the nastiness voluntarily. Sonia was pragmatic again in Gujarat after being convinced that a strong secular attack on Narendra Modi would backfire. However, her strategy of ignoring the butchering of Muslims has not worked yet. She gave charge to Shankarsinh Vaghela, a former BJP man who defected but he failed. Given the sort of liberal person she appears to be she must have been repelled by her own actions, but she put party above herself. When the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, a state of 75 million people whose capital is Hyderabad, died in a helicopter crash a few weeks ago, Sonia showed a bit of steel. The chief minister's son, in his late 30s, was backed to become leader even though he had no political experience. Sonia blocked this because the son does not get good press. It will be difficult to keep the son out in future, but for now she has enforced discipline in a party which has not had it for a long time. She could do it in this case because she could point out to them that her own son could have become minister this time but chose not to. Sonia's preference appears to be to work with people who are modern, like her. S M Krishna, India's foreign minister, is a Fulbright scholar and his deputy Shashi Tharoor worked at the UN. This promotion of such elites is good for us. Sonia Gandhi is 63, and has led the world's biggest political party, and one of its oldest, for 11 years. At her age, her mother-in-law had just come back to power and would spend another four years in office. India is fortunate to have someone like her: we could have got Imelda Marcos. Today the most powerful man in Pakistan is not from the majority sect. The most powerful person in India isn't even Indian. We're bigoted in many ways and the world keeps reminding us of that. But in many ways also we are above pettiness and we should not forget that. The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@hillroadmedia.com

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Secularism versus Religion: An analysis by Muhammad Amir Khakwani

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Nadeem Paracha: Secular Blunders

Secular blunders

Nadeem F. Paracha
Sunday, 05 Jul, 2009 | 01:44 AM PST

Instead of containing the Islamist parties, ZABs constitutional concessions only emboldened them. — File Photo

The late President Anwar El-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated in 1981 by a faction of Egypt’s leading Islamist organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood. The irony is that this was the same organisation that Sadat had purposefully patronised.

He had replaced the charismatic Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser as the President of Egypt after Nasser died in 1970. Nasser had ruled the country as a popular president between 1952 and 1970, leaving behind a legacy of staunch secular/socialist Arab nationalism.

Though Nasser remained popular till his death, the glow of his influence across assorted Muslim and Third World countries was somewhat dimmed when Egyptian and Syrian armed forces backed by the Soviet Union were decimated in the 1967 war against Israel. Though Sadat had helped Nasser in toppling the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, and was also an integral part of Nasser’s socialist/secular policies, he initiated a shift. In Sadat’s view, Nasser’s socialist model could not sustain the new sombre realities that had surfaced after the 1967 war.

Sadat’s move towards the western economic model was welcomed by the country’s urban bourgeoisie, but it was vehemently challenged by the pro-Nasser and left-wing student groups and the Arab media. To neutralise the pro-Nasser and left-wing challenge to his shifting policies on campuses and in the print media, Sadat brought back to life one of the staunchest anti-Nasser and anti-left forces in Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood had been greatly radicalised by its second generation leadership led by the teachings of Syed Qutb. He had posed the biggest challenge to Nasser’s socialism and the regime’s pro-Soviet and secular make-up. However, after Nasser’s death, Sadat tactfully let loose the Brotherhood, using state power to help the organisation infiltrate campuses and the media.

To appease the organisation, Sadat instructed the state-owned radio and TV channels to not only start regular religious programmes, but to also show as many images as possible of him saying his prayers at a mosque. Sadat also lifted the ban on various Muslim Brotherhood magazines and newspapers. All this was done to soften Egypt’s pro-Soviet and Nasserite image and to mollify concerns of the West and Egypt’s new allies such as the oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Immediately after Egypt’s 1973 war with Israel — in which Sadat (falsely) claimed to have defeated the enemy — he completely pulled Egypt out from the Soviet camp. However, in 1977 when Sadat, in an unprecedented move, agreed to make formal peace with Israel, the Brotherhood became Sadat’s biggest enemy. Eventually, in 1981, he was assassinated by members of the Brotherhood — ironically the very organisation he had encouraged to nullify the perceived communist threat to his regime.

Something similar happened in Pakistan as well. In the 1970 elections, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party had routed the Islamic parties. But by 1973 Bhutto was under pressure from the PPP’s leading ideologues, asking him to hasten the regime’s socialist agenda. In response, Bhutto purged the PPP of its radical founding members. He then came under the influence of the party’s ‘conservative wing’ that encouraged him to appease his staunchest opponents, the Islamists, (especially the Jamat-i-Islami), which had declared the PPP’s socialism as 'un-Islamic.'

Though in private, Bhutto accused the Islamic parties of being 'anti-socialist American stooges,' in public he went along with some of his advisers’ counsel and declared the Ahmaddiyya community non-Muslim, naively believing this concession would appease and contain his Islamist opponents. The truth is, the Islamists were only emboldened by this gesture.

Also, while purging the left-wing radicals in the PPP (from 1974 onwards), Bhutto is also said to have ‘allowed’ the student-wing of the Jamat, the IJT, to establish a strong foothold on campuses which, till then, were mostly dominated by radical left-wing student groups such as the NSF.

Bhutto, like Sadat, had ignored the Islamist challenge to his regime, and seemed more concerned about imaginary 'Soviet/ Indian-backed groups.' His pragmatic indulgence in this regard had the reverse effect. Instead of containing the Islamist parties, his constitutional concessions only emboldened them. Not surprisingly, he was toppled by a reactionary general whom he had handpicked himself, shortly after the Islamist parties unleashed a countrywide movement against the PPP regime in 1976, calling for Sharia rule.

These are just two brief examples of the blunders committed by certain leading secular Muslim leaders that annihilated the over-blown left-wing and secular challenges by regenerating and using Islamist forces against them. This created daunting political and ideological vacuums in societies that were eventually filled by reactionary military regimes, rejuvenated Islamist forces and, eventually, a new breed of extremism — the sort that now worked towards grabbing state power and carving out a theological hegemony, based on mythical and Utopian illusions about an eternal ‘Islamic State.’

Pakistan and Egypt are prime examples; two of the many Muslim republics now desperately trying to reinvigorate moderate and secular forces to open a consensual front against extremism that was once state-sanctioned, to bludgeon opposing secular forces.

One wonders if it is already too late to do that; or if there are any worthwhile progressive sections in society today, in these countries, who can once again demonstrate the same boldness and imagination that they exhibited in the construction of their respective countries’ nationalism before their downfall. (Dawn, 5 July 2009)

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A meeting with Alan Woods and Dr Lal Khan: Tahir Sarwar Mir

Left: Alan Woods with Hugo Chavez - Right: Alan Woods with Lal Khan and Jam Saqi


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Munawar Hasan's anti-Secularism and anti-democracy agenda

A cursory reading of the op-ed in today's Daily Jang written by the newly elected leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami Syed Munawar Hasan suggests that the Jamaat has not learnt any thing from its historical and consistent rejection by the people of Pakistan. They are still committed to a Mullah-Military Alliance against democracy, a psudo-Islamic alliance against secularism, and a pseudo-Pakhtun front in support of their allies Al Qaeda and the Taliban.




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Hamid Akhtar: 'Soft Islamic revoluion' is a better approach to confront Talibanisation.

Express, 30-31 March 2009
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Liberals, Hardliners and Imran Khan

Illiberal liberals

The Pakistan report card Saturday, March 21, 2009 Fasi Zaka Imran Khan's recent address at the Rawalpindi District Bar Association demonstrates how far he has come as an orator. Had he chosen to participate in these elections, which were not rigged as he had feared, he would have served as a buffer between the PML-N and the PPP by preventing the escalation in verbal diatribes by becoming the channel to air the PML-N's grievances indirectly. In his speech on that day in Rawalpindi he kept using the word liberals disparagingly. He did so because he believed the liberals were the PPP who did not believe in the rule of law whereas those branded as hardliners, such as himself and the PML-N, did believe in it. So the liberals were actually quite illiberal, and the hardliners truly liberal? It's an interesting question. But to answer it, one really needs to know what a liberal is, and who in Pakistan's context can legitimately call themselves one. At the most basic level liberalism can refer to a broad class of ideologies, but the most common strands between them is respect for rule of law, constitutionalism, free speech and private property. By this definition we know most political parties in the country, including the religious ones, qualify to be liberals in one sense: they love private property, especially their own. But that was just a snide aside, back to the business of discovering liberal parties in Pakistan. First, the PPP. Since it came to power after utilising the NRO, it's definitely not constitution-loving, nor for the rule of law post the Farah Dogar episode and applying governor's rule in Punjab. Free speech is under threat; just ask Nawaz Sharif, whose diatribes may be classified as sedition sometime soon. There is freedom of assembly, as long as it is not for the long march, or to restore the deposed chief justice. On paper at least, the PPP of today (as opposed to the socialist one of the 70s), may describe itself as a social liberal party because of its emphasis on the poor and redistributing wealth, though frankly in the past the only redistribution discerned stopped at 10 percent. Then the PML-N. It is quite conservative on several moral issues but quite liberal in the classic economic sense, which makes it conservative liberal. They love rule of law, especially if it includes the law of an Amir-ul-Momineen. But since that's not happening, they are sticking to the deposed chief justice. In current times, they fit the rule-of-law bill well when it comes to rhetoric, even though their past on freedom of speech has been questionable. Their silence on the militancy and the Taliban is deafening, and, frankly, contradictory, since they want the chief justice to apply the national law while agreeing to contravention of the law though a parallel system in Swat. And finally Imran Khan himself. In his heyday, he was considered a liberal in Pakistan, but that had nothing to do with his politics, economics or social justice programmes, but more to do with a colloquial understanding of the word liberal as applied to one's personal life. While ostensibly he stands for the rule of law, he decries those who oppose the Rwat deal. But doesn't that reward those who contravened the law to get a new one? This begs the larger question: with all this talk of liberalism and the rule of law, is the issue only the restoration of the chief justice and not respect for the law itself? Is the movement hinged on the restoration of one man, or is hinged on a principle? Imran's love of jirgas doesn't bode well for constitutionalism. He was right to raise the issue of the paradox of those who are labelled as classic liberals (the PPP) opposing the rule of law and constitutionalism, but wrong in presuming that his own stance offered some kind of intellectual resolution under a conservative framework. Liberalism in the classic sense is not some superior ideology, in fact if its economic doctrines in the classical sense were applied mercilessly, it can create a woefully unequal society that rewards existing power elites. But if we nit picked the parts we liked, especially the rule of law that we desperately need, with or without the deposed Chief Justice, we would be getting our house back in order. As it is we far from having truly liberal parties, and further still from having coherent political stances that behove some kind of intellectual coherence, beyond the simply opportunistic. That, by the way, is also illiberal. (The News) The writer is a Rhodes scholar and former academic. Email: fasizaka@yahoo .com

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Washington Post: CJ should teach restraint to politicians

By Anwar Iqbal
Friday, 20 Mar, 2009 (Dawn)

Mr Chaudhry is seen by many middle-class Pakistanis as representing the rule of law: Washington Post.—Reuters

WASHINGTON: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry could set an example for the political leaders by embracing restraint and compromise —qualities sorely missing from Pakistani politics, says the lead editorial in The Washington Post on Thursday.

The newspaper describes the lawyers’ movement as ‘a third secular force’ in Pakistan and notes that Mr Chaudhry is seen by many middle-class Pakistanis as representing the rule of law.

The Post says that the lawyers and judges involved in the movement now have choice of either destroying the country’s fragile democratic system by choosing to reopen old cases involving President Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz Sharif or former president Pervez Musharraf.

Noting that Justice Chaudhry led the movement for the rule of law, the newspaper urges him to set an example and save the system by ‘embracing restraint and compromise.’

The Post says that while Pakistan's latest crisis has eased, for the Obama administration, the challenge of political dysfunction in this nuclear-armed state has hardly diminished.

‘As they showed during the past week, Pakistan's civilian and secular political leaders are more concerned with destroying each other than with fighting the extremists who are rapidly gaining strength in the country,’ the newspaper adds.

‘While saying they recognise the jihadist threat, Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif have resumed their ruthless competition parties’ that dominated national politics in the 1990s.

The newspaper blamed both leaders for using ‘undemocratic tactics.’ It notes that Mr Sharif chose to fight the government mostly in the streets rather than in Parliament, while Mr Zardari tried to block last weekend's protests with mass arrests and media censorship.

The Post pointed out that in the past; Pakistan's political feuding led to military coups, which have been tolerated if not welcomed by the United States. ‘But in the era of the Taliban and al Qaeda, which grow stronger with each new crisis in Islamabad, that pattern must be broken,’ the newspaper warns.

‘Pakistan's military leadership and the Obama administration need to play a stabilising role for the civilian leaders by arbitrating and limiting their conflicts.’

They should insist on faithfulness to the rule of law and to the democratic process, rather than picking a winner —in the case of the United States —or directly intervening, in the case of the military, the Post adds.

It also urges the Obama administration and the Pakistan Army to press for agreement on the country's main enemy —jihadism —and a comprehensive strategy for confronting it.

The Obama administration should recognise that it cannot combat the threat of terrorism in Afghanistan and western Pakistan without tackling the larger issues of governance in both countries, the newspaper notes.

‘The events of the past week showed that the United States must help to foster a stable and representative government in Islamabad. The same principle applies in Kabul,’ the Post concludes.

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Benazir Bhutto: Mein Baghi Hoon - I am a rebel

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A song dedicated to Islamic Brotherhood Week

By peitha

..... what we are missing in all this chatter is a modern version of someone like Tom Lehrer, producing songs like National Brotherhood Week about these conflicts - though I'm not really sure one wants to go down the route of wondering what an Islamic version of "I hold your hand in mine dear" would be like ... ( " ...The night you stole I cut it off ..." ?).

Anyway, tongue in cheek and in the spirit of Mr. Lehrer, perhaps it might just possibly be something like this ...

One week of every year is to be designated Islamic Brotherhood Week. This is just one of many such weeks honoring various worthy causes. One of my favorites is National Make-fun-of-the-headless Week which President Amadasahatter and Abu Zarqawi are in charge of as you know. During Islamic Brotherhood Week various special events are arranged to drive home the message of ummah. I'm sure we all agree that all Muslims ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow Muslims and I hate people like that. So here's a song about Islamic Brotherhood Week.

A song dedicated to the unity of Islamic Ummah, moderate and radical Muslims, Muftis and Ayatollahs, Sunnis, Shias, Qadiyanis and Ibadis.

Oh, the Saudi folks hate the Persian folks,
And the Persian folks hate the Saudi folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.

But during Islamic Brotherhood Week, Islamic Brotherhood Week,
Ayatollahs and Sunni Muftis are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don't let 'em in your sect.

Oh, the radical folks hate the moderate folks,
And the moderate folks hate the radical folks.
All of their folks hate all of your folks,
It's Islamic as caliphates.

But during Islamic Brotherhood Week, Islamic Brotherhood Week,
All the Sunnis love the Shias 'cause they're so sincia.
Step up and cut off the head
Of someone not yet dead.
You can kill him if you try.

Oh, the Qadianis hate the Ibadis,
And the Ibadis hate the Qadianis,
And the Wahabi hate the Ahmadiyya,
And everybody hates the Jews.

But during Islamic Brotherhood Week, Islamic Brotherhood Week,
It's Islamic Everyone-just-glare-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

Source

Tom Lehrer - National Brotherhood Week

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Threat to secular Balochistan? How real is the issue of Talibanisation in Quetta?

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How we lost Swat — Nasir Abbas Mirza

The loss of Swat is not the end of it. It is just another battle lost by us. This battle, and the many more to come, can only be won with more liberties, more freedom and more rights. And a state with a will to protect these at all costs. That’s the real battlefront of this war against terror and extremism

A pro-Taliban militant stands near a signboard of a police station after renaming it ‘Taliban Station’ in a town of Swat Valley on Sunday. (Daily Times, 19 Nov 2007)

We have worked long and hard at losing Swat. We lost it in hundreds of little battles fought over the last 35 years.

Since the mid-seventies, religious extremists have been chipping away at our liberties, our rights and our freedom. Bit by bit they have demolished, and continue to, all attempts to create a modern civil society.

We lost Swat the day we made discriminatory laws based on sectarian and religious divisions. I am reminded of a Jewish parable. An old Jewish man was on his deathbed and his entire family stood around him. The old man kept saying, “Take care of the Armenians; take care of the Armenians.” His son asked, “But we are Jewish; why do you keep saying take care of the Armenians?” The old man replied, “Because if they get to the Armenians, you will be next.”

We let them get one sect and now they are in the process of getting the Shias (non-protesting spectators include Mr Nawaz Sharif and Qazi Hussain Ahmad); next would be other sects and religions — Ismailis, Parsis, Barelvis and so on until, as Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy calls it, the Saudi-isation of Pakistan is complete.

We lost Swat when we banned alcohol. It’s banned but readily available. Anyone can have it and everyone has it. Smugglers and bootleggers laugh their way to the bank and the imbibers take it as a cocktail of sin, guilt and crime.

We lost Swat when the state abdicated its right to educate its people, leaving it to the private sector. For every modern school, the private sector gave us a thousand madrassas.

We lost Swat when we let the movie industry die and banned theatre, singing and dancing; when we banned Basant and everything else that can be termed entertainment (including cricket). Soon we will have the same fond memories of cricket as we have of kite flying.

There is as much drinking, gambling and fornication going on in this country as in any other country. But hypocrisy triumphs every day. We have been living a lie for the last 35 years. Google would tell you the largest number of visitors to porn sites are from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

We lost Swat when we permitted the Islami Jamiat-e Tulaba to terrorise our universities; when we inserted the religion column in our passports; when shalwar-qameez became our national dress; when we created women’s police stations.

It was a sad day when traders of Hall Road, Lahore, burned CDs after receiving an anonymous letter threatening to bomb them for selling adult CDs. Nobody is there to protect them. That’s how it started in Swat. Next in line are girls’ schools. Is Lahore ready for a bomb at any of the girls’ schools? Is there a plan?

We lost our way when we set up parallel systems with all kinds of Islamic councils and courts. Our society today is dominated by mullahs, pirs and bazurgs. A man today is known by the pir he keeps. The merit of a man is not his education and ability but the façade of religiosity. A man with beard is better than a man without one; a man who fasts is good, a man who drinks is bad. Rich man, bad; poor man, good. Can anything be more tribal than this?

It was at the peak of General Zia-ul Haq’s Islamisation that writers like Ashfaq Ahmad made an industry out of it. Glorifying the pir and the faqir, he promoted ruhaniat and praised otherworldliness. At prime time, on the state-owned television channel, Mr Ahmad vilified the rich and the successful while equating poverty with piety. How simplistic and fateful can one get?

The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman used to make fun of such philosophies, joking about a posteriori conclusions — reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,” he would say. “I saw a car with the licence plate ARW 257. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of licence plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. Read it again; this is taken as serious philosophy in Pakistan and such ‘miracles’ are the favourite topic of discussion among the educated.

The industry based on fatalism and extremism is the only one thriving in Pakistan today. From Zia-ul Haq to Mian Nawaz Sharif to Dr Aamir Liaqat to Inzamam-ul Haq to Farhat Hashmi, the list of the captains of this industry is too long to reproduce here. Those who spent their youth during Zia’s days have come of age and are at the helm of affairs in this country. After 35 years of mass duplicity, we have at hand a completely distorted society.

We lost Swat when someone in this country decided that our cultural and religious sentiments would be irreparably hurt if a man were to kiss a woman on screen. On the other hand, that same someone decided that repulsive violence was all right to be screened to audiences of all ages.

The rot started in the seventies because it took us nearly 30 years after independence to completely distort, dismantle and destroy whatever the British had given us. In tatters you would find the education system, the justice system, the irrigation system, the railway system, good governance, law and order, a military that cannot, or refuses to, fight subversive tribesmen, the merit system and everything else that could remotely be called civil or modern. Mind you, at the time, each one of the listed systems was the best in the world.

If it weren’t for British rule, how different would we have been from Afghanistan? We would still be facing marauding hordes of barbarians from the north who used to come down regularly to loot, rape and plunder. That’s our history, at its most concise. Six decades after 1947 we are once again facing those hordes. Swat they have pillaged and conquered. How far away are we from Swat?

The sad part is that while doing all of the above, we felt good about it. Now we know that we took a wrong turn in the mid-seventies. Every day we hear about “going back to the 1973 constitution”. What we don’t hear is “we need to go back to 1973”.

The loss of Swat is not the end of it. It is just another battle lost by us. This battle, and the many more to come, can only be won with more liberties, more freedom and more rights. And a state with a will to protect these at all costs. That’s the real battlefront of this war against terror and extremism. (Daily Times)

The writer is a freelance columnist

Also read:

The beginning of the Talibanization of Lahore? Hall road traders burn CDs after being threatened by terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba/Taliban

The Saudi-isation of Pakistan - By Pervez Hoodbhoy

Farhat Hashmi: The other side - The subtle rooting of extremism (Saudi version of Islam) in Muslim women...Facts, Fatwas and Videos...

The Mumbai attacks, Who could be behind terrorism? The role of Dr. Zakir Naik in supporting Islamic terrorism and spreading communal hatred...

Indian Muslims condemn Gustakh Dr. Zakir Naik

Imran Khan and the ‘liberals’

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Imran Khan and the ‘liberals’

This site has moved to http://criticalppp.com/archives/1075, click this link if you are not redirected
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Shireen Mazari: Jinnah, democracy, shariah and our lies...

Dr SHIREEN M MAZARI examines the difference in what we pratice and what we preach.

Living a lie

At the root of most of our real and imagined problems lies the fact that we have been living a lie since the death of Jinnah, thanks to our ruling elite. That has impacted on our perceptions and problems over the years as one lie after another was generated, both on the domestic and external fronts. The impact of living a lie can be felt across the board now, reflecting an insecure and fear-ridden mindset that is unable to take bold, innovative policy measures.

One of the most damaging lies we have been living, especially since the Zia dictatorship is the selective denial of Jinnah's legacy. In the theocrat's efforts to make Pakistan into an "Islamic" state - from what, one has never really been clearly told - the vision of Pakistan that the founder of the nation had has gradually all but vanished completely.

At a time when the government is trying to restructure the polity, recalling Jinnah's vision in its entirety, and not in distorted selectivity, is critical if we are to rise above the malaise of polarisation and sectarianism that has pervaded our civil society today. Because we have allowed ourselves the luxury of oblivion on Jinnah, those with vested interests are now clamouring to get their notion of Pakistan enforced, and are only too ready to call into question the Muslim identity of anyone who opposes them. In the process, these people have managed to create a divisive and polarised society where the minorities are being pushed more and more into a peripheral existence within the state of Pakistan. And from amongst the Muslim majority, sectarianism has successfully divided the polity with the threat of being branded "unIslamic" constantly hanging above everyone's head.

Yet, Jinnah's address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947 is as clear an enunciation of the foundation of Pakistan as one can hope to get. As Jinnah told the new nation:

"You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State ... We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State."

In other words, politically there was going to be no distinction or discrimination between any citizen because of his/her caste, creed or colour. Politically, all citizens were equal - a point Jinnah elaborated upon in the same speech:

"... you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State."

There was no "grey zone" on this count for Jinnah and there must not be one now for the present leadership. Too much hatred has stacked up because of a denial of resoluteness on this count. When the state creates political laws, including electoral laws, where citizens are discriminated against on the basis of their religion then that is a substantive move away from the Quaid's vision of Pakistan. And the imposition of separate electorates is one such impingement on the rights of the non-Muslims of Pakistan.

So why is the vision of Jinnah so critical even today? Because it is the basis for our nation's existence. The Muslims of India followed Jinnah to independence and the very foundations of the state must not be allowed to be destroyed. It is time we really examined whether Jinnah's Pakistan was a state for the Muslims of India - where they would be free to live and practice their way of life - or whether it was intended to be a theocratic state. When Jinnah himself was asked this point, this is how he commented in a press conference in Delhi, on June 13, 1947:

"Q: Will Pakistan be a secular or a theocratic state?

"Mr Jinnah: You are asking me a question that is absurd. I do not know what a theocratic state means.

"A correspondent suggested that a theocratic state meant a state where only people of a particular religion, for example Muslims, could be full citizens and non-Muslims would not be full citizens.

"Mr Jinnah: Then it seems to me that what I have already said is like throwing water on duck's back. (Laughter) For goodness sake, get out of your head the nonsense that is being talked about. What this theocratic state means I do not understand.

"Another correspondent suggested that the questioner meant a state run by Maulanas.

"Mr Jinnah: What about the Government run by Pundits in Hindustan? (laughter) When you talk of democracy,

Mr Jinnah went on, I am afraid you have not studied Islam. We learned democracy thirteen centuries ago."

So Jinnah acknowledges the underlying supremacy of Islam within the ideal of Pakistan but not in the distorted form of a theocratic state where non-Muslims are discriminated against and sidelined from the mainstream.

In his introduction to Volume II of the First Series of Jinnah Papers, the editor, Z H Zaidi, states that Jinnah clearly felt that the government of the new state of Pakistan would, as Jinnah put it "function with the will and sanction of the entire body of people in Pakistan, irrespective of caste, creed or colour."

According to Zaidi, "Jinnah vehemently disclaimed that the future State of Pakistan would be a 'theocracy'; far from it! He in fact declared that there was no room for theocracy, i.e. rule by religious divines. In his public speeches and statements, Jinnah did not leave a shred of doubt that the new State would not be run by an obscurantist religious leadership."

For Jinnah modern democracy was, according to Zaidi, "in essence a rediscovery of the old democratic tradition of Islam. ..."

One reason why we are able to be selective about Jinnah's legacy is because we are living another critical lie in the form of constant distortions of our history. Whenever governments change, so does the country's recorded history. Worse still, we as a nation have been extremely selective about owning up to our pre-1947 historical and cultural heritage. Being unable to come to term with all the varied influences of our past, we have been unable to come to term with the realities of the Pakistani state and its ruling elite over the decades. Every government seeks to rewrite the history books. And national traumas are glossed over - see what you can find on 1971 and the crisis in East Pakistan. And see whether anyone talks of the impact of the 1965 war in nurturing the seeds of Bengali nationalism?

But that was a major historical turning point. Our ruling elite cannot even tolerate the realities relating to past governments and political leaders - so the history books are constantly rewritten and our children grow up on lies. Lies breed an insecure nation - for confidence comes from being able to face the truth, no matter how unpleasant for in that confrontation we learn our lessons. Which is why it is not surprising to find mistakes continuously repeated by us as a nation.

Today we continue to be burdened by the habitual deception and lies that are the endemic to our ruling elite. There is a lack of courage to concede errors - be they historical or present in context. That is why we are easy prey for our enemies who are able to exaggerate our defeats and undermine our victories. Take the case of Bangladesh. One reason the Indians and other antagonists have continued to harp on the demise of the Two-Nation theory post-1971 is because we as a nation have failed to examine what led to the political crisis, which eventually emboldened India to aggress militarily in East Pakistan. Instead, we have tried to obliterate this momentous turning point in our history as far as we can. Our younger generations know nothing of the national trauma we suffered, so they cannot comprehend the tragedy of the Biharis and the unjust manner in which Pakistan's ruling elite continues to ignore the plight of these dedicated Pakistani nationalists. Worse still, because we refuse to own up to the crisis and have a national catharsis we are not able to assertively refute Indian claims regarding the demise of the Two-Nation theory. Yet, the reality is that the creation of Bangladesh is a reaffirmation of the Two-Nation theory - otherwise East Pakistan would have become a part of Indian Bengal rather than an independent Muslim state. But this point can only be argued once we have the national confidence to accept our shortcomings that allowed for the loss of East Pakistan.

Source: http://www.defencejournal.com/2000/aug/living-lie.htm

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Shireen Mazari joins PTI

Friday, November 28, 2008

ISLAMABAD: Defence analyst Dr Shireen Mazari on Thursday joined Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI).

PTI Chairman Imran Khan made Mazari the party’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) member and head of its Foreign Committee.

He said in a statement that Mazari had in-depth knowledge, analytical mind and longing for independent policy, which was completely in line with the PTI vision. staff report

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\11\28\story_28-11-2008_pg11_6

.....

Here is a picture of some of our "leaders" who are adding lies and confusion to Jinnah's Pakistan:

.....

Here is some evidence of how Dr. Shireen Mazari lives her own 'truths'.

Farrhat Taj responds to Shireen Mazari: FATA: some more fantasies

"Lady Taliban" Dr. Shireen Mazari, the latest addition into Imran Khan's pro-Taliban arsenal....

A specimen of Pakistani intellect - Khurshid Nadeem analyses a recent column by Shireen Mazari

Is Imran Khan the new choice of agencies (ISI) in Pakistan?

Read more...

Hamid Akhtar: Jinnah's ideal was Ataturk, not a Taliban style Khalifah

Also read:

Rubina Saigol: Some myths vs facts about fundamentalism in Pakistan

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Why do Taliban (and their supporters in the ISI) attack secualr Pashtuns?

US responsible for the situation in Pakistan

Irfan Khan Momand UK irfan188@hotmail.com

Source: "FRONTIER POST" FEB.12, 2008




The recent suicide attack on Awami national Party rally in Charsadda was certainly a very shameful act. We condemned this suicide attack and everywhere we are against every kind of violence and hatred. We have seen and observed in several such suicide attacks that the coward groups are using innocent children for the suicide attacks. Such coward people have no religion, have no culture and have no respect for the humanity because Islam doesn’t say for the suicide attack. The attackers and their coward planners are certainly the enemy of our Pushtoon nation, they are the enemy of our Pushtoon culture, and they are the enemy of our pushtoon norms and Pushtoon non-violent politics which we learnt from our great leaders Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan Baba and Khan Abdul Wali Khan. The enemy of Pushtoon cannot bear our peaceful politics and they are targeting our leaders, our elders and children in their own homes. We have already known our enemy and they are the coward establishment which is not only the enemy of Pushtoon but also the enemy of every democratic nation living in Pakistan because they cannot accept the democracy in this region.



The present cartoon government (interim government led by Musharraf and Soomro in February 2008) is certainly fully responsible for the recent bomb attack in charsadda because the government agencies know the so-called jihadis organisation in Punjab and in Kashmir and the agencies have already their full biodata of every person belong to those organisations but the so-called administrators sitting in Islamabad have no interest of peace, stability and democracy in Pakistan. They are just enjoying their posh life in their villas and they earn money by blackmailing the whole Pakistani nation. This corrupt mafia know that if there start the process of peace and democracy in Pakistan then there will be no chance for their corruption, and for this purpose they had harboured several kinds of criminal groups and stationed them in Pakistan especially in our Pushtoon region which are Arabs, Chechens and Kashmiri in the name of so-called Jihadi groups. They had been trained for these nefarious activities to blackmail the whole Pakistani people in every time. The sectarian violence in Peshawar, in Quetta and in Kurram agency and the destability in Karachi are the preplanned nefarious activities in which these organisations are used. They have been certainly given the task to postpone the election which is to be held in the coming days. Here I would like to mention also that the American agencies are also fully responsible for the destabilizing and the unrest of our region and our people. Pakistani people have no food to eat and the Americans are coming to help our corrupt cartoon government by providing them their sophisticated weapons. They are just introducing and purchasing their modern weapons in our Pushtoon region and nothing else. We will be compelled to say clearly that the American establishment also don’t want the real democracy in Pakistan because the American establishment have already a bad experience with the Democratic governments in India because there is always a real and pure democratic system in India and the American establishment have very difficulty from the Indian governments to fulfil their motives and therefore I can say that the American establishment don’t want to work with a real democratic government in Pakistan. And for this purpose the American policy makers had introduced the Washington’s sponsored Jihad in our region. They have always worked with the dictators and they have been supporting the dictatorship in Pakistan.

I request to my Pakistani people especially our youth men and women that they should start working for the real democracy in Pakistan because the establishment don’t want to educate the people about the politics and about the establishment policies. Everybody should take part in politics that what is going on around us. We should have complete knowledge about our regional situation. There is no war for Islam. The harboured criminals groups are just using the name of Islam. If we take part in politics then we can win our democracy and our rights. No one can snatch Islam from us. Our uneducated people have been used for these religious sentiments for long time starting from general Zia.

We have to fight against our poverty, we have to fight against our missiries, we have to fight for our rights as a respectable nation in the world. We have to throw those corrupt elements and foreign religious extremists in the Arabian see. We have no place for the American guests which is al-Qaeda. Here I will also request to the American people that they should have some know-how about their agencies and their establishment before they go to vote and to elect a new government in USA that what are they doing in Afghanistan and why even the Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is more then ever? If the American start servicing like other respectable nations members of NATO in Afghanistan then there will be certainly peace and stability otherwise the situation will be worst for our Pushtoon nation.

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JIHADIS TARGET FRONTIER GANDHI'S PARTY -INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER No. 366

Source: http://southasiaanalysis.org/papers26/paper2582.html

By B. Raman


The Awami National Party (ANP) of Pakistan was founded by the late Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi. He was very close to Mahatma Gandhi and tried to popularise Gandhiji's concept of non-violence among the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He strongly opposed the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.

2. After Pakistan became independent in 1947, its authorities arrested him because of his advocacy of the creation of an autonomous, if not independent, Pashtoonistan and because of their suspicions regarding his contacts with India. He made no secret of these contacts and of his love for India. When he was released after many years of his detention in the 1960s, he had the courage to openly visit India to renew his friendship with Indian leaders.

3.Ghaffar Khan was a leftist by ideology. The party founded by him is the only political formation in Pakistan, which is to the left of the political spectrum. It is secular and is strongly opposed to fundamentalism and wahabisation of the Muslim community in Pakistan.

4. The Frontier Gandhi was succeeded by Khan Abdul Wali Khan, his son, who was as great a lover of India as his father was. He was even more leftist than his father by conviction. He was very close to the erstwhile USSR and the then President Najibullah of Afghanistan. He openly used to visit India for a few weeks every year to meet Indian leaders, as well as Kabul as the personal guest of Najibullah. He was a strong critic of the jihad being waged by the US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Afghanistan. He ignored with contempt a disinformation campaign mounted by the ISI against him projecting him as an Indian and Soviet agent.

5. There were only two Pashtun organisations----both equally moderate, equally enlightened, equally secular, equally friendly to India--- which strongly opposed the Afghan Mujahideen, the late Zia-ul-Haq's attempt to Wahabise the Pakistani society, the Taliban when it came into existence in 1964 and the trend towards the Talibanisation of the tribal belt of Pakistan under President Pervez Musharraf. The ANP is one of them. The Pakhtoonkwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) headed by Mahmood Khan Achakzai is another. The ANP's following is confined to the Pashtuns of the NWFP. The following of the PMAP is confined to the Pashtuns of Balochistan.

6. When Wali Khan was incapacitated due to old age and illness, he was succeeded by Afsandyar Wali Khan, his son, another moderate and secular-minded person, who has been strongly opposed to the Taliban. After the death of Wali Khan in 2006 , differences cropped up between Afsandyar Wali Khan and Naseem Wali Khan, one of the two wives of Wali Khan, who was the step-mother of Afsandyar. The Army and the ISI took advantage of these differences. As a result, the party has been weakened, but it continues to be as secular, as moderate, as leftist and as opposed to the Taliban as it has always been.

8. Unidentified jihadi terrorists targeted an election rally of the ANP held at village Nahaqi, near Peshawar, in the NWFP on February 8,2008, killing 27 members of the party through an improvised explosive device (IED), which is suspected to have been detonated by a suicide bomber. In accordance with the security advice of the police, the meeting was held in a closed place and not in a public place. The enclosure had been subjected to security checks by the police. Despite this, the bomber managed to gain entry with his concealed IED undetected by the Police. The enclosure was closed immediately after the meeting started. It is stated that a large crowd of ANP supporters found themselves locked out. They pressed those responsible to let them in so that they could attend the meeting. The door was opened and the waiting crowd entered without being subjected to security checks. It is suspected that the bomber must have entered along with them.

9. Afsandyar Wali Khan was not present at the meeting, but Afrasiab Khattak, one of the senior leaders of the party, was. He escaped reportedly unhurt. Afrasiab Khattak was very close to Najibullah and used to live in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Najibullah was the President along with Ajmal Khattak, another senior leader of the party. Both of them returned to Pakistan after Benazir Bhutto became the Prime Minister in 1988.

10. No organisation has so far claimed responsibility for the attack. The attack has come shortly after Baitullah Mehsud, the Amir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, had announced an unilateral ceasefire in its operations against the Pakistani security forces---not only in the tribal areas, but also in the non-tribal areas. According to well-informed Police sources, this cease-fire announcement came after secret talks between the Pakistan Army and Serajuddin Haqqani, son of Jalalludin Haqqani, the Afghan Mujahideen leader, who belongs to the Neo Taliban led by Mulla Mohammad Omar. Serajuddin, for whom the US agencies have been hunting, is widely perceived as the mentor of Baitullah. According to these Police sources, the Pakistan Army is keen that the elections should be held as scheduled on February 18,2008, and hence had reached an informal cease-fire with Baitullah to prevent any disruption of the elections by the Mehsuds.

11. The fact that despite this cease-fire, the ANP election rally was attacked shows that either Baitullah has not been able to enforce the cease-fire or that other organisations such as the ant-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) do not feel themselves bound by this cease-fire and are determined to disrupt the elections at least in the NWFP, if not elsewhere.

12. There have also been indications that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan is not as united behind Baitullah as it is perceived to be. Even as Baitullah's followers were fighting fiercely against the Pakistani security forces in South Waziristan and the Darra Adam Khel-Kohat area of the NWFP, the leaders and cadres of the Tehrik in North Waziristan and the Bajaur Agency were observing an informal cease-fire.

13. The ceasefire with the Mehsud component of the Tehrik does not necessarily guarantee that the elections will not be subject to serious disruptions. That is the message from the attack on the ANP rally.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

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Another Jihadi Attack on Frontier Gandhi's Party - International Terrorism Monitor---Paper No. 368

http://southasiaanalysis.org/papers26/paper2584.html

By B. Raman

Ten persons, including some leaders of the Awami National Party (ANP) founded by the late Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, known as Frontier Gandhi, were killed in North Waziristan on February 11, 2008, when a suicide bomber, estimated to be 17 years old, blew himself up near an election rally held at Eedak village near Mirali held in support of a local candidate for the forthcoming elections to the Pakistan National Assembly on February 18, 2008. According to the US authorities, Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) are operating from sanctuaries in the Mirali area.

2. While Al Qaeda, the IMU and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan cadres in North Waziristan have been observing an informal ceasefire against the Pakistani security forces in the area, they have been targeting the leaders and cadres of the ANP and their supporters in the local Dawar sub-tribe, who have been strongly critical of the presence and activities of foreign terrorists in the Pashtun homeland. In fact, the ANP has persuaded some of the Dawars to form a Lashkar (self-defence force) to protect the ANP leaders and to counter the foreign terrorists. While the ANP has been strongly critical of the foreign terrorists as well as the Americans and the Pakistan Army for misusing the Pashtun homeland for their attacks on each other, Al Qaeda and the IMU suspect that the ANP, which is secular and anti-Wahabi, has been passing on information to the Americans about the sanctuaries of Al Qaeda and the IMU in the Pashtun belt.

3. Among those killed in the suicide attack were Haji Anwar Shah, President of the North Waziristan branch of the ANP, and Bakhtiar Khan Zeraki, President of the Mirali branch of the ANP. Nisar Ali Khan, the candidate for the election, reportedly escaped with minor injuries. Political parties are not allowed to contest elections in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Only independents can. But most independents are indirectly supported by some Party or the other. Nisar Ali Khan belongs to the ANP, but he is projecting himself as an independent. Local ANP leaders as well as ANP leaders from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) have been canvassing for him.

4. For information on the Dawars, please visit http://ramanspashtunbeltdatabase.blogspot.com/

Source: http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-secular-pashtuns-are-targeted.html
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