Islamist Posturing and the Battle for Minority Rights

“We’re all gathered here, and we are here to show our love for the Prophet (PBUH),” declared the vice president of a local Islamist organization, Owais Noorani, to media crews. In the background, one could hear the crowd of nearly 50,000 men chanting “Allah ho Akbar.” Cameras zoomed in on flushed faces. Reporters scribbled furious descriptions of fiery speeches by well-known Islamist leaders. It seemed like a spontaneous gathering of zealous Muslims, a heated, groundswell rejection of the government’s timid nods towards amending Pakistan’s notorious “blasphemy law.” But the rally, for all its appearance of spontaneity, was actually a meticulously organised event, carefully staged for mass viewing. That’s the fundamental point: Pakistan’s Islamist political parties have been somewhat successful at masquerading as defenders of Islam when they are, in fact, simply conventional political agents, as manipulative and politically-minded as any other party.

Following Governor Salman Taseer’s assassination, the Islamist organisation Jama’at ud Dawa, well known as a front for the banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, sponsored this rally near the Quaid-e-Azam’s mazaar in Karachi to exploit the recent controversy around the blasphemy law. The area was cordoned off, traffic was blocked, and the police was deployed in full force for the security of attendees. Journalists were hailed in through the blockade. Islamist leaders like Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman delivered impassioned speeches from atop a footbridge, while the rank and file sat on the street below draped in green and white flags embellished with political slogans and ayats. It was a carefully planned mass media event, like any other.

Similar to any other political party, Islamists organise “rallies” and “dharnas”. They raise funds, ask for votes, have meetings, make media appearances, deliver speeches, create alliances and so on. But what is vexing about their politics is that in order to position themselves as defenders of Islam, they are willing to prey on some of the weakest groups within Pakistani society, its religious minorities.

The rise of Islamist politics has been tragic for Pakistan’s religious minorities. According to a recent report by the Jinnah Institute, nearly a thousand cases of blasphemy have been registered since 1986. Of these cases, 476 have been registered against Muslims (various denominations), 479 against Ahmadis (who by law are classified as non-Muslim), and 180 against Christians. The report notes that in 2010 alone, 64 people were charged under the so-called “blasphemy law,” and 32 people were killed extra-judicially either by mobs or individuals. In August 2009, a mob of at least 150 attacked a Christian community in Gojra, setting 40 houses and a church on fire, burning 8 people alive including 4 women and a child, and injuring at least 18 others. Earlier the same year, trained militants opened fire on Ahmadis as they prayed, massacring 93 people. These are only some of the most dramatic incidents of violence and persecution in recent years. Everyday discrimination against religious minorities in schools, universities, and the workplace goes almost unnoticed.

It would be a grave mistake to see Islamist politics as essential or inevitable to the Islamic tradition, as many Western intellectuals and journalists, as well as some in our own “liberal” class, would have us believe. This position actually supports Islamists understanding of themselves as representatives of Islam.

In fact, the most prominent urban groups like the Jam’at-i-Islami and Jama’at ud Dawa often express hostility towards “traditionalists” for focusing too much on theological matters and ignoring politics. Islamism draws most of its strength from the urban lower middle and middle classes who are educated, not in madrassas, but in schools, colleges and universities. This does not mean that the madrassa system in Pakistan does not contribute to the making of religious extremism, just that the exclusive focus on “education” as a solution does not really account for the fact that many Islamists are already quite educated, and often in the same institutions that produce their secular-liberal counterparts. In short, Islamism has little to do with Islam. It has to do with national politics. And that means you will find Islamists in the same spaces that produce more secular-minded and liberal Pakistanis.

But, how exactly did we get here? After all, didn’t Jinnah envision a Pakistan in which religion “has nothing to do with the business of state”? While it is true that Jinnah professed avowedly secular ideals in his oft-quoted speech, the appeal of Pakistan did in fact have much to do with the promise of Islam. As the historian David Gilmartin has argued, the Muslim League defeated the Unionist Party in the elections of 1946 by marketing itself as a party that represented both a unified Muslim community and Islam. Muslims were deeply worried about living under the domination of Hindus in a post-independence India, but they were just as concerned about divisiveness and conflict within the ranks of Muslims, and they saw Islam as the only means available for averting chaos. The Muslim League capitalised on this sentiment by contrasting a united India with, as a number election flyers put it, an “azaad Islami riyasat.” The positing of Islam as a solution to domination by outsiders as well as force that helps overcome internal divisiveness has continued to be a consistent theme throughout Pakistan’s history.

Not surprisingly, Islam’s symbolic importance grew throughout the next few decades and peaked in the 1970s after the violent and traumatic loss of Bangladesh when Pakistani nationhood was in a crisis of radical doubt. The Jama’at-i-Islami, the dominant Islamist force in urban Pakistan, began its political ascent precisely during this period, and Islam was trumpeted as the only means to resist foreign domination and ensure internal harmony against the rising tide of ethnic nationalist movements first in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and then in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In 1974, Islamists pressured Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to declare Ahmadis “non-Muslim.” They were successful. Bhutto, later, made further concessions to the opposition by banning alcohol and gambling, and changing the day of rest to Friday. He even began calling his quasi-socialist platform the “equality of Muhammad.” Four years after seizing power from Bhutto in a bloodless coup, General Zia explained his Islamisation program as a defence of Pakistan. “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state,” the general declared. “Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make [it] a secular state; it will collapse.”

That belief still has strong backing today. The Pakistani state and particularly the Army continue to use Islamism as a centralising ideology and a bulwark against demands for ethnic autonomy, redistribution, and decentralisation. If Islamists have now turned on the Army, it is because many of them see the Army as having capitulated to American aggression and therefore as having abandoned its role as the defender of Islam and Pakistan.

What does this all mean for the minority question? Only this: we do not have the luxury of dismissing Islamist politics as simply the blind religious devotion of uneducated masses, as many “liberals” tend to do. It means that we cannot excise the issues faced by religious minorities from the larger political context that catapulted Islamism into the political mainstream. Ethnic divisiveness and foreign domination remain the central political concerns of Islamist ideology. If we want to undo this ideology, we cannot do so without remedying the political circumstances that give Islamism its appeal.

On the issue of ethnic divisiveness, Pakistan needs serious devolution of power and redistribution of wealth to the provinces so that ethnic tensions are managed and contained. The 18^th Amendment has moved us along considerably in this regard, and we should support further efforts to democratise and decentralise power. This means rejecting all military intervention in governance even if it is cast as the more “liberal” alternative, as was Musharraf’s dictatorship.

Regarding foreign domination, Pakistan’s liberal class has failed to take a principled stand against American imperialism in Pakistan, which has meant ceding that space to Islamists. Examples like the drone attacks or the Raymond Davis issue abound. Unless Pakistan’s liberal class provides an alternative platform to heal ethnic divisiveness and to reject American incursions, Islamism will continue to thrive.

And, Pakistan’s religious minorities will continue to suffer.

Originally published in Paper Magazine.

Knee-jerk Secularism Won't Solve Our Problems.

When I encountered Humaira Iqtidar’s Secularizing Islamists, I was pleased that someone had attempted to write a book that takes seriously how Islamists understand themselves and their own project. One does not have to agree with Iqtidar’s broader theoretical argument about the relationship between secularization and secularism to see that this is commendable. It challenges the tendency among Western “terrorism experts” to paint all social and political forces that appeal to Islam with the same black brush, despite their obvious ideological differences, distinct goals, and divergent strategies. Iqtidar demonstrates that rather than being driven by blind and irrational devotion to religious edicts and texts, Islamists are actually motivated by a more complicated set of values and interests.

This is also why I found Ayesha Siddiqa’s review of Iqtidar’s book in the Express Tribune so disconcerting. In Siddiqa, we have a prominent Pakistani intellectual who thinks that the mere effort to understand what motivates people in Islamist movements “may contribute to further radicalisation by presenting the militant narrative as a rationalised discourse.” Siddiqa insists that all ideological differences between these movements are superficial and argues that their “non-militant acts are mere tools to attract people or hide the real objective, which is to expand globally.” So, not only is it wrong to attribute any kind of rationality to Islamist movements, it is also naïve to think that non-militant tactics, say democratic participation, are anything more than a strategy to recruit people into their project for world domination.

So, what exactly bothers Siddiqa about Iqtidar’s book? Siddiqa’s primary complaint is that Iqtidar fails to address the role of the state and its agents—the middle class—in constituting and advancing Islamist ideology. This is an odd complaint given that Iqtidar actually explicitly points out how the Jama’at-i-Islami leadership is largely educated in government schools and universities, devotes an entire chapter to showing how the colonial state created the conditions for the rise of Islamism as a modern ideology, and explicitly highlights state patronage of the JI and IJT during Zia’s rule. At no point does Iqtidar suggest that Islamist ideology has flourished independent of a relationship with state power.

What bothers Siddiqa is actually Iqtidar’s willingness to go beyond the state and explore the values, ideals, and motives that underwrite the Islamist project and to suggest that these might constitute a coherent way of thinking. It is Iqtidar’s suggestion that Islamists might be something more than just mindless drones and may even have a semblance of agency that troubles Siddiqa. And, possibly the most troubling of all, I imagine, is Iqtidar’s suggestion that there may be deeper parallels between Islamism and Secularism, both being products of a common socio-historical process. For Siddiqa, this amounts to the unthinkable idea that “the behaviour of these people” might be “expressions of freethinking and hence rationality,” though at no point does Iqtidar make any such claim or address such a question. For Siddiqa, the mere willingness to examine their worldview on its own terms implies that Iqtidar has been “entrapped emotionally.” In other words, Iqtidar’s emotional connection to her irrational subjects, marked by her unwillingness to make sweeping generalizations and whole scale condemnations, means that she has forfeited her own rationality.

Islamist militancy is a very serious concern in Pakistan, and it is necessary to explore the socially and historically produced motives and values that underwrite it. Secularizing Islamists reflects one academic’s effort. Whether Iqtidar’s work is convincing is worth debating. But, to accuse her of “rationalising” the violent manifestations of Islamist ideology goes well beyond legitimate academic critique into the realm of knee-jerk condemnation. This knee-jerk condemnation is indicative of a broader approach to Islam and Islamism among some segments of Pakistan’s secular-liberal class who will condemn anyone that tries to complicate their us vs. them, good vs. evil, rational vs. irrational narrative. Such knee-jerk condemnation will not get us very far in understanding why so many of our fellow Pakistanis remain committed to this ideology, and why, despite its violent excesses, they continue to believe that it carries the promise for a better future.

Published in The Express Tribune August 24, 2011.

The Poetic Life of Afzal Ahmed Syed (Speech at Poet's House, NYC).

I am not in any meaningful sense a literary scholar and certainly not a scholar of Urdu poetry. I have been asked here to speak about my step-father, Afzal Ahmed Syed, and his life and work, and I been asked to speak in my capacity as a son, not as a critic or an expert. This is not an easy task because, as we all know, it is hard to talk about our loved ones in that detached and critical manner that is expected in intellectual and literary spaces. It is hard not because we do not have a sense of their achievements and talents, but because these are simply not as significant to us as other more mundane aspects of their being like the way they eat their food, how they manage a game of cards, their passion for cricket, or their penchant for watching political talk shows that only seem to arouse their anger. But, for my father, poetry and literature are never far removed from any of these activities. He reads and writes while eating or watching t.v., he draws on his knowledge of literature to make sense of everyday events, and his daily interactions and relationships are often cut through with a sense of the poetic. So it is not fair to say that literature and poetry are separate from his mundane existence. But it is also true that my father speaks very little about his own literary accomplishments. Maybe this is why his poetry remains as much a mystery to me as it is to other readers, and is definitely why I cannot claim to be an expert on it anymore than any one else. Nevertheless, given his absence here today, I will try to communicate what I feel are some of the salient features of his character and life experience and how they relate more generally to his poetic vision.

Let me begin with some broader aspects of his character that I think are most significant to him as a person. My father is generally a quiet and introverted man, although he frequently breaks from his reticent demeanor with humorous, INDEED poetic, insights about the world. He has a unique ability to draw our attention to the ways that absurdity masquerades as wisdom, and wisdom becomes silent in the face of its’ onslaught. But he usually does this in pithy quotes or by reciting a shaer (couplet), not through fanciful and elaborate explanations. My father would also strike many people as a cynical man, aware that the world is being hurled deeper and deeper into a crisis. But his cynicism is of a measured or soft variety in that it acts as a warning but never denies the potential of human beings to change their destiny. So, cynical but not misanthropic, and genuinely eager to find humanity in a world that more often than not seems bent on destroying it. Anyone that knows him will attest to the fact that above all my father is a humble man who generally downplays the breadth of his knowledge, which he has cultivated not only from a lifetime of careful reading and writing but also from listening to the concerns of other people. He has always been more invested in other people’s thoughts and ideas than in his own, more willing to listen than to speak, and more eager to understand other people’s ideals and motivations than to impose his own. Indeed, much of his life seems to be guided by the understanding that knowledge is a moral project that takes shape through engaging with the experience of others. This is a self-reflective and humanistic ethic that I believe defines his life and his poetry.

As many thoughtful commentators on his life and work have suggested, much of my father’s poetic vision has been shaped by his experience as a witness to immense political tragedies like East Pakistan’s violent rebirth as Bangladesh in 1971, the Lebanese Civil War, and the ethnic and sectarian violence that overwhelmed Karachi in the 1990s. Musharraf Farooqi, my father’s friend and translator, has suggested that his poetry evidences a long “inner migration” commonly found among writers and thinkers who have witnessed the enormity of war and suffering. Indeed, my father’s approach to his day to day life seems to confirm the existence of such“inwardness.” But, there is more to the story than just that. It is important to remember that experiencing great trauma does not necessarily generate the kind of humanitarian ethos that I believe is central to my father’s life and work. In fact, if our modern day experience demonstrates anything, it is that political tragedies are just as likely if not more likely to deepen the ethos of brutality and violence as they are to create an ethic of self-reflection and compassion. The great many political tragedies around the world highlight the fact that violence and brutality against others is often predicated on claims of one’s own past and present victimhood. Perpetrators of violence often believe themselves to be victims of some kind and always imagine that they are merely defending themselves against the machinations of others. It is no surprise then that the arc of history takes the shape of a recurring tragedy as one generation of victims becomes the next generation of perpetrators.

My father’s humanistic ethic is certainly born out of tragedy, but it is also built around a realization that the lines between victims and perpetrators of violence are often quite blurry. This too comes from experience, especially his experience in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the Bangladesh war of Independence. My father frequently says, and with no small measure of pride, that the first and only vote that he has ever cast in his life was for the Awami League Party in the 1971 elections. For those of you who are not familiar with Pakistani-Bangladeshi history, this election was won convincingly by Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader and champion of Bengali political autonomy and civil rights, but was later abrogated by the West-Pakistani establishment backed by the powerful Pakistani military. This event thrust the country into a cataclysmic Civil War that led to the deaths of millions and culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state. My father was from a minority Urdu-speaking community in East Pakistan called “Biharis,” but he was a firm supporter of the Bengali movement (Note: he was not actually from Bihar, so technically not a "Bihari," but Urdu speakers were often lumped in this way). This commitment was informed by his unbounded love for Dhaka, a city that he had made his own. He says that every night, around dusk, he would renew his love for the city by taking a stroll through its narrow streets and newly erected parks. But my father also supported the Bengali movement because he understood that a people, especially a people with such monumental intellectual and literary achievements, could only be subjugated so long before they revolted. Despite his support of the Bengalis movement, my father became a victim of the war. On the 16th of December, 1971, Bengali soldiers forcefully removed him from his home in Purbali, a suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, and interned him in Mirpur, a quarter of Dhaka where other Urdu-speaking Bihari minorities lived. He could no longer walk through his city and as a result his love, naturally, dissipated. In 1972, he was arrested as a Pakistani sympathizer and a collaborator with the Pakistani military. This was during a time when many such “internal enemies” were being executed. He was later deemed a “peaceful citizen” and released, possibly at the request of an influential member in the Bangladeshi militia forces. A year later, he along with his mother and six younger siblings managed to escape Dhaka, never to return, making their way through India and Nepal to Karachi where he now lives.

My father rarely speaks of Dhaka, but when he does it is with a tremendous sense of betrayal and sadness. His beloved city, he says, now only appears to him in nightmares. It was in Dhaka that he first began to think about the destructive potential of language, its capacity to strip people of their humanity and open them up to violent retribution. The War my father experienced was very much fought in language well before it was fought on the streets of Dhaka. West Pakistanis had long dehumanized their fellow citizens in East Pakistan, attacking them for being backwards and unsophisticated. This was also very much a war ABOUT language because West Pakistanis had imagined their Bengali counterparts to have a degraded and inferior tongue. Later, when everyone had abandoned speech for war, the Bengalis turned on their Urdu speaking Bihari minority with the same vitriol to which they had themselves been subjected. Now, it was Biharis who were imagined to be conspiring, by virtue of their language, against Bangladeshi liberation. Much of my father’s interest in poetry emerged in a context where everyday language had become deeply compromised on all sides. His poetic vision springs from the knowledge that our modern day political tragedies are rooted in everyday speech and language. Maybe this is why he remains to this day a conspicuously “quiet” and “inward” man and maybe this is why when he does speak, he prefers to speak in the language of poetry. Maybe poetry in his world carries a unique potential to transcend the violence of our modern world, a violence woven deeply into the tapestry of our everyday lives.

Thank you for your time.

The Mapmaker

The Mapmaker

How beautiful is this map with its red and black stripes and golden dots, its angles and curving lines, mountains that bulge and valleys that dip like the surface of an ocean. If I had a country, I would trade it for a map just like this one, only larger, a billion times larger, and made of white Chinese silk, the kind that one can fold a hundred times over without fear of undesirable creases or tears. And then I could fit this map in my back pocket and travel to distant lands, and in foreign tongues that I need not speak, I could explain to them the shape of this land, its curves and angles, bulges and dips, and the history of its red and black stripes and golden dots. But this I would do bit by bit, piece by piece, stripe after stripe, dot after dot, not to overwhelm or startle anyone. I would explain in that same elegant manner for which my country, the one I traded for a map, is known, and I would describe each fold with the precision of a Chinese silk weaver. And, with each turn of its flap, another man, and his women, will fall under its spell and will dream of stripes and dots, curves and angles, dips and bulges. And, without fail, one of these men, the most powerful in the land, will ask me in his dreaded tongue to see the whole map at once, and I, in my sonorous voice, will politely decline, leaving him wondering about the depths of my knowledge. And one day, when I have left many powerful men in a wonder, I will pull from my pocket a silken map and, without fear of creases or tears, will give it a jerk that leaves the land rattling. Then, I will gently smooth the map over the land, encasing even the most distant seas and oceans. In that dazzled moment, I will command that armies be erected for our land. An army of weavers to mend it if it tears! An army of dyers to keep the red and black and gold forever luminous! An army of sketchers to keep the curves from becoming angles and the angles from becoming curves! And, as for the bulges and dips, I will build an army of soldiers, selecting only the most able bodied men, to patrol its every inch, ensuring that all inhabitants tread with due reverence. With the map spread out and armies standing, we will sing a song of praise together in our newly conjured language. A poem will be written in red, black and golden ink. The children will invent a dance, their bodies curving and bending, rising and falling in unison. A few among us will undoubtedly be moved to tears. From that day on, we will proceed as if all the land is delicate Chinese silk.

Democracy is Dead! Long Live Democracy!!

The tragic death of Benazir Bhutto has revitalized concerns over the fate of democracy in Pakistan. The greatest fear is that the military and its supporters will conveniently interpret Bhutto’s assassination as the death of democracy itself. They will point to this tragic event as a justification for “controlled democracy” and “enlightened moderation,” which recent developments have shown are nothing more than euphemisms for dictatorship and elite rule. Musharraf and his supporters will claim that there are no viable democratic alternatives- it is now a choice between him and the extremists. Once again, the argument will be made that until we can groom a civil populace and an equally civil political leadership, we must content ourselves with “liberal” dictators. Supporters of dictatorship are often heard asking who should rule instead of Musharraf, forgetting that democratic procedures ensure that nobody rules as such. They are always lamenting the lack of political leadership in Pakistan, forgetting that political leadership itself emerges through democratic processes. Democracy, in their world view, is a final utopia in which Pakistan may one day nestle, not a necessary means to achieve social, political and economic justice.

Musharraf supporters frequently argue that The Emergency is not the suspension of democracy because “genuine” democracy has never existed in Pakistan, or the oft-heard, “Pakistan has always been in a state of emergency.” This seemingly pessimistic view of Pakistani society is actually underpinned by a romantic, idealized notion of what democracy is and should look like. In these arguments, “genuine” democracy can only be brought about by a complete overhaul of the Pakistani political and social landscape; “People have to be educated;” “feudalism has to be abolished,” “markets have to be opened,” “Islam has to be reformed.” Democracy, they suggest, brings to power elements that are insufficiently liberal and modern, elements that are trapped in backward mentalities and incapable of making their own judgments. The project of democratizing must be suspended till such a time when the populace and their representatives are educated and reformed. “Genuine” democracy, it is argued, can only be brought about through Musharraf’s liberal dictatorship.

It is clear that this political discourse rests on the assumption that our people, the Pakistani people, are incapable of controlling their own political destinies. Like naïve children, they are easily recruited into reactionary political projects. They are either blindly loyal to their feudal lords or easily manipulated by the ploys of Mullahs. The fault of course lies with the people and their representatives. Why our democracy would be a “spurious” one, while other democracies are “genuine” and which if any democracies in the world are genuine remains a mystery (India? U.S.? Kenya? Britain?). Some argue that the difficulty of establishing democracy in Pakistan can be explained by our perpetual identity crisis, “we don’t know who we really are.” This “identity crisis” apparently summarizes our lack of social cohesion and our penchant for violent confrontation. The demands for cultural, political and economic autonomy coming from different sectors of Pakistani society are explained away by some inherent and inescapable aspect of the Pakistani populace. This of course means that without military rule or at least the presence of the military in politics, Pakistan would disintegrate. The military has long fostered the impression that it is the only institution capable of maintaining the integrity and unity of the Pakistani state. It maintains this unity, so the argument goes, by containing the violent impulses and intractable differences that lurk under the surface. It is not surprising then that the military interprets any critique of it as an attack on the very idea of Pakistani nationhood. Wasn’t it for Pakistan that Musharraf declared emergency?

But, clearly somewhere “out there,” mostly in the West, there are countries which have “genuine” democracy, countries that are not burdened by this permanent “identity crisis,” countries where the citizenry is equipped to make the correct political decisions. This “genuine” democracy may not be our “present” but it is an ultimate goal; a goal that they argue can only be realized through liberal dictatorship. It is unclear when the population will be ready for democracy. Sixty years into Pakistan and our citizens are still not ready. This genuine democracy is unrealizable; it is a project to divert our people away from all that they value towards all that a small, elite segment of the population values. Maybe Pakistan will be ready for democracy when these people shed their backward attachments, when they realize that public morality is dictated only by the fashion houses and ad agencies in London and New York, or when they accept that democratic processes should not be used to demand a change in the distribution of power.

Controlled democracy is both a project of domesticating the population through the arms of a paternal state and a façade for foreign observers. We all know that it will never challenge the imperatives of military rule. Controlled democracy is buttressed by the “doctrine of necessity,” invented to offset the demands for ethnic and provincial autonomy, and the newly conjured “enlightened moderation.” It is obvious that these are new devices to secure the status quo and put off the project of decentralizing and democratizing power. Sadly, it is the status quo that generates the very violence and instability for which liberal dictatorship claims to be the remedy. And so we go round and round.

All societies have idealized models towards which they strive. There is nothing inherently wrong with having such models, but there are times when these models are put to insidious if not outright predatory ends (communism’s permanent revolution comes to mind). This idealized democracy with its ideal populace and ideal leadership is precisely this kind of romantic justification for elite rule and dictatorship. The tragic situation that Pakistan finds itself in does not spring from some “identity crisis” inherent to the people of Pakistan. The fragmentation of the Pakistani nation along ethnic, sectarian and religious lines occurs primarily because of the unwillingness on the part of military and business elites to share power and decision making with those that they consider insufficiently modern. Interestingly, Musharraf and his supporters have severed the idea of “democracy” from that of “modernity” and pitted them against one another. The liberal notion of popular sovereignty, the powerful idea that when people are allowed to choose their own political representatives and control their own political destinies they will learn to compromise with one another and even to respect one another's differences is one of the defining features of the modern world. This necessary and powerful idea has been renounced by those that have assumed the mantle of liberalism and modernity in Pakistan.