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.