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09 March 2013
By Saeed Qureshi
Was a country that came into being in the name of
religion destined to be a theocracy in the longer run?
And that is what exactly happened with Pakistan.
Pakistan is awash with religious militancy and
radicalism. The religious militants have taken
Pakistan hostage. The sectarianism is assuming
monstrous proportions and running amok with the social
peace and stability of the country. The founders would
have never imagined that in the state they are
striving hard to create, the religious sects would
slaughter in public view their opponents and still get
away from justice.
The civil liberties in the Islamic state of Pakistan
are fast disappearing. The national institutions like
police, courts, municipalities, post offices, banks,
schools, hospitals, water and power, transportation,
taxation and revenue collection are in a state of
continuous decay and dysfunction. All these state
building departments are infested with unremitting
maladies of corruption, malfunctioning, red tape,
disorder, and lawlessness. The visible progress that
one can witness is the number of mosques growing; the
religious traditional events celebrated every year
with renewed passion and fanfare and sectarian
vendettas escalating.
If this nascent country was supposed to be rampaged
and taken over by bigots and religious reactionaries
with no vision of civility and the need of a civil
society, then better it was not created. The cut
throats fundamentalists force the people to remain
stuck up in the past, follow the rituals and then feel
free to indulge in any conceivable villainy,
wickedness, lawlessness and rioting.
A good citizen, a good human being and a good Muslim
are the benchmarks to be set in a civilized society
specifically in a country like Pakistan with an
official religion. Perhaps in Islam and in other
religions, all these three facets merge in varying
degrees. In Pakistan, unfortunately, we are neither of
these. The religious robots are being manufactured by
the preachers, clerics and theocrats that
are mentally barren about the imperatives of a modern
society and its fundamentals.
The conflict between state and religion has started
after the state of Pakistan came into being. Prior to
that, under the British rule, the sectarian bad blood
and mutual annihilation, the sway of religious
factions and the ensuing massacres were almost
nonexistent. This is one of the great tragedies of the
modern times that a state that came up in the name of
religion, is now hostage to the religious lords and
fanatics who brook no mercy and no humanism. They
forcibly drive the people to adopt a way of life that
is out of sync with the imperatives of a modern civil
society.
The Islam that they project, profess and force down
the throats is not the real Islam. It is a distortion
and deformed version of Islam depending upon the sect
one belongs to. In Pakistan the religious
fundamentalist are serving Islam in getting it a bad
name. A liberal and progressive Islam could be the
answer to integrate the tradition with the modern. But
the emphasis of the religious clergy is on a kind
regimented theocracy that did not exist even in Medina
during the time of first four caliphs.
Now an orgy of bloodletting is sweeping across the
whole country. The barbarous religious militants
equipped and armed with all kinds of deadly weapons
have managed to strike terror in the hearts of the
citizens with loathsome and bestial acts. They kill at
will; kidnap for ransom, slaughter kidnapped captives
if the ransom is not paid or if they belong to a
different sect. They target mosques, shrines and
funeral processions, destroy schools, publicly flog
outgoing women and behead the religious rivals.
The Islamic radicals pick
up the youth from the religious seminaries and train
them into suicide bombers. They do not feel any qualms
of moral or religious conscience in marrying underage
girls with old bearded Jihadists and
militants.
This is how they spread the Islam: by intimidation, by
fear and hair-raising punishments and by bombing and
brutal vendettas. They do so because they earnestly
feel that what they were doing was religiously
justified as for them killing of infidels and
modernists was a religious obligation. Now if the
saner and educated Islamic scholars bear with these
distortions and defacing of Islam, how a true Islamic
polity could emerge that could be the envy of the
non-Islamic world.
But the tussle between a progressive (Ijtehadi)
Islam and the orthodox with improvisations by the
opportunistic, ignorant, illiterate clerics fixated on
rigid rituals and traditions has been there for
centuries. There has never been a consensus on a
unified code of Islamic creed or set of beliefs. The
cult of Taliban and within Pakistan the Jihadist groups
profess and follow another kind Islam that looks more
barbarians and savage than what the prophet of Islam
preached and passed on to humanity under the divine
command.
Just picture if you can, every male having a long
beard, with a heavy turban over the head, every female
confined within the four walls of the house. She can
come out only if covered from top to bottom in a baggy
veil with holes in front of the eyes. The modern
gadgets as cell phones, computers, and televisions are
all banned as instruments of Satan, and impiety. The
children permitted to attend solely the religious
schools for cramming the Quran or
Suras or
learning the etiquette for praying, fasting and
performing rituals.
The other branches of knowledge from Sociology to
Physics are banned for being Unislamic. The human and
fundamental rights such as freedom of speech,
expression and pursuit of religion, the choice of job
and entertainment would be effaced from the society.
The pagan justice of beheading even for the minor to
major crime would be imposed.
If you are ready for this kind of life in Pakistan, I
am ready too. If this is the antithesis and negation
of the pristine Islam and creation of an island of
ignorance, oppression, medieval-ism, and robots to
stereo-type certain dictated rules then let us accept
it or challenge it. Can we, born in an enlightened
age, wage a war against such antiquated and pitilessly
rigid way of life?
There is a dire need to reinterpret Islam by fusing
its fundamental obligations and beliefs, with the
ingredients and imperatives of the modern society. We
should not opt and resign to a frog's life living in a
well. The lethal sectarianism within Islam has
undermined its conceptual and doctrinal unity and
sublimity since the beginning.
Now Islam is divided into various sects. Can we make
it possible that all the sects coexist and follow
their tenets without fear and hindrance? Can we make
a broad-based and tolerant civil society where there
is freedom of practicing any religion? Why Pakistan
should be singled out to be the citadel of Islam.
Before partition in 1947, no parts of the undivided
India or Indian Muslims were ever looked upon as the
only defenders of Islam. Islam does not need custodian
in particular areas. It is universal religion and
would remain so on its own strength and merit.
Why can't Pakistan be a progressive modern state with
an Islam that is permissive and goes hand in hand with
the basic imperatives of a modern state? Should we
become another Saudi Arabia or another Iran for
implementing strict and orthodox versions of Islam at
the cost of a free society and by sacrificing
sectarian harmony? Shall Muslim societies remain
backward intellectually, scientifically,
technologically and socially under the misconceptions
that such dimensions were against Islam?
The indispensable need of the present times is to cast
away conservatism and embrace also what was beneficial
for the Muslims as human beings and citizens of a
modern state. Pakistan has got to be liberal,
enlightened, and secular state with the framework of
Islam. Islam was there when Pakistan was not born and
would be practiced if God forbids Pakistan disappears.
The religious right wingers want political power and
then forget the remarkable aspects of Islam and
humanitarianism. Their narrow agenda is to freeze or
turn Pakistan into a medieval state. The newly elected Egyptian president Morsi of
Muslim brotherhood is caught up in the same dilemma.
The majority of Egyptians do not want a rigid and
reactionary Islam. We in Pakistan need an enlightened
and forward looking Islam, not the one that looks like
an island of ignorance
and primitiveness catapulting brutal sectarian feuds,
bigotry and ruthless cults like Taliban. |
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