Middle East Policy
Spring 2008
A recent visit to Pakistan reminded me of the movie Gone With the Wind. The country where I lived and worked has been hit by turbulence that has blown away many of the symbols of secularism and Western lifestyle that once characterized its urban life. Gone were the bars and dance clubs, the love songs playing in restaurants, the movie posters showing scantily dressed actresses, and the Western women tourists strolling sidewalks in bikinis. Today stores and buses in Pakistan resonate with Quranic verses flowing out of cassette players. On college campuses coeds with elaborate hairdos have been replaced by women in head-scarves. Posh hotels known for their joyful musical performances have discontinued them; some have added prayer rooms. In the capital, Islamabad, I asked a journalist colleague what had brought about this cultural revolution.
“Wars,” replied Salahuddin Mahmud, a former editor at several Pakistani newspapers. “Your wars on terror and against Russia and our wars with India.”
External conflicts have doubtless ratcheted up Pakistan’s Islamization drive. Aren’t there, however, systemic sources of this phenomenon as well? What is Islamism doing to the Pakistani polity?
In this essay I analyze these questions. I argue that Pakistan was not really a nation when it was born but is evolving into one, and I focus on two of the key variables that are effecting this transformation. One is the so-called “war on terror” and other wars; the other is modernization. Both warfare and modernity have bolstered Islamism, and Islamism is helping strengthen Pakistani nationhood.
Islamism seeks to mold Muslim life and societies, in both private and public spheres, according to Islamic values and norms. The process through which this takes place is called Islamization. Islamist programs are being carried out by myriad organizations around the world: Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood in several Arab countries; Hamas in Palestine; Hezbollah in Lebanon; Al-Islah in Yemen; Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; al-Qaeda worldwide; the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and so on. Islamism repudiates foreign rule or domination, which it considers an offense to the Islamic umma (the global Muslim community) and an obstacle to the Islamization of Muslim life and societies. The Taliban (plural of talib, student) are the largest of Pakistan’s anti-American Islamist guerrilla groups, made up of current and former students from Islamic seminaries or madrasas. They express solidarity with the Taliban in Afghanistan in their struggle to expel NATO forces from that country. Most Islamist organizations espouse the democratic process. Some, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, resort to violence if they perceive it necessary to attain their goals.
Among my recent encounters with Islamism in Pakistan was a visit to Gomal University in the northwest. On October 10, 2007, I visited Muhammad Farid Khan, the university’s vice chancellor. Benazir Bhutto, the secularist former prime minister (who would later be assassinated in Rawalpindi), had been scheduled to return to Pakistan a week later after an eight-year self-imposed exile. She had been backed by the United States and had publicly committed herself to fighting anti-American militant groups in Pakistan. I wanted to ask Khan and his colleagues, among other things, what her return would do to the steady surge of Islamist militancy in Pakistan.
The smile on the vice chancellor’s face vanished as he read my calling card. He had thought I was “from Pakistan,” said the university administrator. Our common friend at Peshawar University who had set up the interview on the phone had not mentioned that I had been working for American newspapers and think tanks for the past quarter-century.
Khan said apologetically that he couldn’t “discuss anything” with me. I should have known that “nobody here would talk politics with an American journalist.” He was “worried about your safety,” he continued. My short-sleeved shirt, jeans and sneakers had marked me as an “outsider.” I should “leave the area as soon as you can” and keep quiet while there. The Rose Hotel in the nearby town of Dera Ismail Khan, where I had checked in, was known as a favorite of foreigners, and the Taliban “keep an eye” on its guests.
I knew that the Taliban in the tribal areas were targeting Westerners, other foreigners and all journalists. The seven “tribal agencies,” inhabited mainly by the Pashtun (used for both singular and plural, meaning people whose mother tongue is Pashtu), enjoy wide autonomy from the Pakistan government in administrative and security matters. The Pashtun make up about a quarter of Pakistan’s population and 40 percent of Afghanistan’s, and almost the entirety of the Taliban movement in both countries. So before visiting the Mohmond and Bajaur tribal agencies, I grew a bushy beard and dressed as a typical Pashtun — flowing trousers and shirt, a Chitrali hat and sandals. I left my U.S. passport, credit cards and calling cards in my room at the Civil Officers’ Mess in Peshawar.
Gomal University is outside the tribal areas, 65 kilometers from the nearest tribal agency, South Waziristan. I had not thought that I would have to worry about my American citizenship, media connections and “outsider” clothes there. Hemayetullah (he had no second name), chair of the university’s agronomy department, offered to drive me to the nearest Daewoo Company bus depot so I could make the reservation for my journey to a safer location, Peshawar or Islamabad. I accepted his offer and bought a bus ticket to Peshawar six hours later and returned to the Rose Hotel. At the reception I learned that a barber shop in town had been attacked because men were shaving beards there. Some Islamists (and traditionalists) consider shaving a beard a sin. I also met a white woman wearing a head-scarf. She would not give her name but said she was from Britain, a relative of a couple who had been abducted from Dera Ismail Khan several weeks before. She was visiting the town “for just a few hours,” accompanied by two guards, besides the driver of her rented car. I suspected that she may have had some leads about her abducted relatives. Why was she wearing the headscarf? I asked.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s my way of saying I respect Pakistani culture.”
As I waited for my Peshawar bus at Daewoo’s waiting room, a news bulletin flashed on the TV screen: The previous day, October 9, bomb blasts in Peshawar’s Hussein Plaza CD market had damaged nearly 40 shops and injured more than 20 people. Taliban attacks on symbols of secularism and Western interests in public places have been daily news. Targets of such violence included music shops, movie theaters, barber shops that shave beards, Western business places, and so on. The campaign spanned much of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and some parts of the rest of Pakistan. The news clip, repeated continually, said authorities in Peshawar, the NWFP capital, were on “high alert,” having received intelligence about possible further militant attacks.
I realized that Peshawar might not be all that safe and changed my ticket for a trip to Islamabad, a 10-hour ride. I had to wait eight more hours for that bus, which seemed an eternity in the crowded and dirty waiting room.
MODELS OF TOLERANCE
Islamist movements are essentially a reaction to Western hegemony over Muslim societies and to Islamic traditionalism. They could be the early, untidy phase of the renewal of the Islamic religion and civilization. Just as American invasions — following on the heels of European colonization of the Muslim world — have triggered Islamist movements, Ottoman invasions of southeastern and central Europe — following the Moorish conquest of Iberia — stirred Franciscan, Dominican and other Christian religious movements. “The fear that this Islamic aggression engendered in Europe,” writes the Reformation historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, “was an essential background to the Reformation.”1 The early years of the Reformation were much more brutal than anything caused so far by Islamism. In Germany, 250,000 Christians slaughtered other Christians during the first four years after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church. People would walk 20 miles to watch heretics burn at the stake in Calvinist Geneva. Extremist and violent at its dawn, the Reformation was a prelude to the renewal and secularization of European societies. Islamism, too, could spur the renewal of Muslim societies through which at least a major swath of Muslim life would be secularized.
Islamism in Pakistan and elsewhere cannot be understood without appreciating Islam’s public and private spaces, as Western scholars and media would describe them. Prayer, fasting and paying zakat (alms), and the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) which mainly involve Muslims’ relationship with God, constitute Islam’s private sphere. The public sphere may include activities that have spiritual merit, but it may also consist of public statements or the actors’ social and political positions. Public activities would include participating in programs to promote an Islamic political or social agenda, defending Muslim communities and Islamic causes against non-Muslims, adopting “Islamic” social behavior and dress code, and so on.
The idea that religion should, or can, be confined to a private space is partly a reaction to Christian Europe’s religious wars, the Inquisition and pogroms, which preceded the Enlightenment. Religion is privatized for good reason in Western societies. It does not seem practical in most of the East, which has not been similarly traumatized by religious feuds. Religious or faith-based political movements have been part of the public space in many Eastern societies. India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party ruled the “world’s largest democracy” for more than a decade, and Buddhist monks in Myanmar have led the largest public demonstrations against that country’s brutal military regime. In India, secularism does not mean privatization or renunciation of religion. It means “equal treatment of all religions.”
A growing number of sociologists such as Peter Berger, Grace Davie, Steve Bruce, Leyla Benhabib, José Casanova and Daniele Hervieu-Leger have debunked the argument for the privatization of religion in all societies. Hervieu-Leger has said that individuals live meaningful lives through a chain of memory and tradition underpinning society. Religion has historically been the core of tradition. Modern societies, she added, are not more rational than those of the past for being more secular, but because they suffer from a kind of collective amnesia from the loss of a religious memory.2 To this Davie adds: “Modern societies may well corrode their traditional religious base; at the same time, however, the same societies open up spaces or sectors that only religions can fill.”3
If so, Islam’s public space represents the chain of memories surrounding essential Islamic principles, embodied in Muslim ethnic and national communities, that lend meaning to Muslim life. Muslim collectivities with strong Islamic norms and values in their public space could, of course, collide with one another and with non-Muslim collectivities. But so do those with nonreligious public agendas and policies. The secularized public space in post-Enlightenment Western societies has arguably been history’s most violent, especially in the twentieth century. The secularized Western nations have spawned myriad colonial wars, the first and second world wars, the Holocaust, and countless covert and overt postcolonial conflicts and invasions, including those raging today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Islamism in Pakistan is part of the global religious ferment, fueled in part by the understanding that “the intolerance ingrained in modernity [is a] source of counterintolerance,” strife fueled by religion and ethnicity.4 The challenge for the twenty-first century is to search for sociopolitical models that would facilitate not only peace among state systems, but tolerance among cultures, creeds and ideologies within and across societies.
Foremost among those creeds is Islamism, which needs to be appreciated, engaged and accommodated in the global system if this century is to be spared some of the convulsions of the last. Pakistan is a major venue of Islamism. An examination of the Islamist upsurge there and its impact on Pakistani society and polity would illuminate some of the ways Islamists could help renew and revitalize Muslim societies.
THE “MOTH-EATEN” STATE
The struggle to create Muslim homelands in the overwhelmingly Hindu Indian subcontinent began as an anti-colonial movement in the1920s under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, an Anglicized, Oxford-educated Muslim lawyer. A larger movement to rid an undivided India of British colonial rule was led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or Mahatma Gandhi, an Oxford-educated Hindu lawyer.
The Muslim struggle, waged through the All-India Muslim League, initially aimed at preserving Muslim rights and interests in an undivided India. Eventually, Jinnah came to the conclusion that what he considered legitimate Muslim rights would be trampled by a “brute majority” of Hindus in a single Indian state, and the subsequent rise of Hindu nationalism in India and the Hinduization of Indian culture would partly bear him out. Hence he envisioned two “independent states” in India’s Muslim-majority zones. In 1940, the proposal was incorporated in a resolution adopted in Lahore (the “Lahore Resolution”) in what is now Pakistan by Muslim leaders from all over the subcontinent. Like all other anticolonial movements of the day, the Indian Muslim liberation struggle unfolded in the heyday of the Age of Nationalism, which originated in modern Europe. Jinnah, a product of that Europe, argued that British Indian Muslims were a “nation” and hence deserved a national state or states.
Countering Jinnah’s argument, Gandhi’s Hindu-majority Indian National Congress pushed for a division of Bengal — the proposed eastern Muslim state under the Lahore Resolution — so that its Hindu-majority territory could be added to the new Hindu-majority state of India. In 1946 in Delhi, fearing that a truncated Bengal would not be viable as a sovereign state, a convention of Indian Muslim legislators amended the Lahore Resolution to call for one single Indian Muslim state instead of two, to be called Pakistan. Pakistan’s eastern province, East Bengal or East Pakistan, would be separated from West Pakistan by a thousand miles of Indian territory. Jinnah was deeply disappointed at being handed what he called a “moth-eaten Pakistan.”
In his many statements, the secularist Jinnah argued that Islamic faith, culture and tradition formed an adequate basis for Pakistani nationhood. He apparently discounted the reality that the citizens of his Muslim state would speak different languages, belong to widely different ethnic groups and live in different territories and, moreover, that East Pakistan would have no land link to West Pakistan.
Among the most daring aspects of the Pakistan project was the concept that the Muslim polity would be a British-style secular nation-state. Three days before Pakistan was inaugurated, its founding father said this before its Constituent Assembly:
You are free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or any other places of worship in the state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state. As you know, history shows that in England conditions some time ago were much worse that those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and Protestants persecuted each other…. The people of England in course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the government of their country, and they went through that fire step by step. Today you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist. What exists now is that every man is a citizen, and equal citizen of Great Britain, and they are all members of the nation. Now I think you should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.5
Nationalism is a post-Enlightenment movement, and nations when they evolved in Western Europe and North America were underpinned by liberalism, the ideology that is concerned mainly about individuals who would be barred from public assertion of religious rules and norms, and pursuing happiness would be the overriding motif of their lives. The nationalists discounted religion and ethnicity, as Jinnah’s statement shows, and demanded that the citizen’s primary relationship rest with his nation-state. The Western nations, evolved over centuries as primordial ethnic communities, were assimilated into “imagined communities,” partly by the force of state power and partly through the industrial division of labor. In such “civic” nations, the members’ relationships to the state and one another would be utilitarian rather than organic.6
Outside the West, there have been “ethnic nations” in which the “emphasis [is] on a community of birth and native culture.”7 All historically developed nation-states, whether civic or ethnic, are characterized by common “high cultures,” each centered on a core ethnic group, transformed through modernization.
Pakistan, like many other postcolonial “nations,” belongs to a different category of collectivities. It was created almost overnight as a patchwork of a half-dozen major ethnic communities that had never been part of a nation-state. Jinnah may have realized the perils of such an enterprise, but he was forced into it. He was leading the struggle to find a political framework in which major segments of British Indian Muslims could live without the fear of cultural, economic or political domination by a Hindu community with more than three times their population. He tried for decades to achieve that goal within an all-Indian federation or confederation. Having failed, he opted for the separate Muslim state. The problem was that his Pakistan was a multi-ethnic state without a core ethnic group. Its citizens owed their primary allegiance to their ethnic or tribal communities or to Islam. The state’s artificial boundaries ran through some of these communities, among them the Pashtun tribes, who have been split between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Some of Pakistan’s five major ethnic communities began clashing over economic, political and cultural interests right from the beginning. East Pakistan seceded in 1971 to become the independent state of Bangladesh, after complaining for years of suppression and exploitation under military and civilian dictatorships dominated by the elites of West Pakistan’s Punjabi community.
In what remains of Pakistan today, the province of Punjab provides roughly 75 percent of the armed forces and government bureaucracy. The country has endured continual spasms of military dictatorship, during which Punjabi domination of the three other provinces — Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan — becomes especially harsh. This has been the case during the U.S.-sponsored “war on terror,” waged by the Punjabi-dominated army. The campaign has exacerbated Pashtun-Punjabi ethnic tensions as the mostly Punjabi troops cracked down on the mostly Pashtun Taliban and other Islamist militants. When the shorter, darker-skinned Punjabi soldiers engage the tall, fair-skinned Pashtun guerrillas, often killing civilians, the encounters take on ethnic significance.
Hemayetullah (a namesake of the Gomal University professor, a native of the South Waziristan tribal agency teaching English at Kuchlak College in Quetta) narrated such an incident. In 2005, Pashtun Taliban guerrillas lobbed grenades at an army jeep on a road near Wana, the main South Waziristan town, killing two Punjabi soldiers. The army troops had been sent out to fight the Taliban. The remaining troops, all Punjabis, jumped out to shoot the attackers but found none. The unit chief spotted a young bystander grinning and yelled at his men: “Kill him! He, too, is a [expletive] Pathan (Pashtun).”
A shot rang out, killing the young Pashtun. As the army jeep sped away, the dead man’s relatives and neighbors fanned out looking for Punjabis, often identified as darker-skinned, chubby and wearing slacks and collared shirts. Luckily, their passion cooled before they found any.8
The Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf denounces the Pakistani Taliban, who support Afghan guerrillas fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan, as “terrorists.” The Taliban, on the other hand, call their anti-NATO and anti-regime movement “jihad,” a struggle sanctioned by Islam. Ever since the inception of Pakistan, Islam has been the rallying cry for campaigns against foreign hegemony and conflicts with foreign powers. Most Pakistanis view America’s “war on terror” in that light. They ridicule it as itself being terrorism; military operations purported to target the militants usually kill innocent Pakistanis. Some call the anti-Taliban campaign a “war of terror,” and the Taliban’s attacks on the Pakistani troops chasing them “counterterrorism.”9
Many Pakistanis view their conflicts with alien forces as a defense of Islam, partly because Islam permeates Pakistan’s national culture and is almost the only glue holding its disparate ethnic communities together. It conjures up President George W. Bush’s description of 9/11 as an attack on “our freedom,” and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s characterization of the July 11, 2005, bomb blasts in London as an offense against “our way of life.”
The Taliban’s anti-American (NATO forces in Afghanistan are seen as serving American interests) jihad is mainly a Pashtun cause that draws its rationale from the Islamic doctrine of defense against foreign occupation or hegemony. Nearly 95 percent of the Taliban are Pashtun.10 Few Pakistanis believe that the Pakistani government — or, for that matter, the United States — has a chance to defeat the Taliban because almost the entire Pashtun population in Pakistan and Afghanistan pulsates with Islamic and jihadi fervor.
“You can’t separate Islam from Pashtun life,” said commentator Rahimullah Yusufzai, adding that Islamic inspiration would enable the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban to wear out the NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as the governments in Islamabad and Kabul.11 For the Pashtun, Islam is not just a faith but everyday life. In Bajaur tribal agency, if a man misses a Friday congregational prayer, villagers would “visit his house after the prayer to find out if he is sick.”12 Pashtun Muslim men would not miss the Friday prayer as long as they are able to walk to the mosque.
In fact, Islamic values have largely shaped the cultures and political outlook of all Pakistani ethnic communities. Non-Pashtun Pakistanis may be less fastidious about “religious” practices in the private sphere of life, but their commitment to some “Islamic causes” in the public sphere could be as strong or stronger than that of the Pashtun. Seventy percent of the Pashtun, for example, pray regularly (three to five times daily), while only 35 percent of the Punjabis do so.13 Yet when it comes to the Kashmiri Muslims’ struggle for independence from India, the Punjabis have been far more supportive than the Pashtun. Many of my Punjabi Muslim friends in Britain are lackadaisical about prayer and fasting in the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, but they were in the vanguard of Islamic organizations there. Some of them led the Muslim campaign in Britain against the publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, in which Muhammad and his wives are maligned.
The proclivity of many Pakistani youths to “fight for Islam [has] increased when their Islamic practices are decreasing,” said Jamil Ahmed, a Peshawar University anthropologist.14 Some Pakistanis identify anti-Americanism as “Islamic spirit.” Islamic spirit was instrumental in the creation of Pakistan. That spirit was reinforced by Pakistan’s four wars with India and the Afghanistan war in which Pakistan was America’s key ally. Successive Pakistani governments have promoted that spirit among the public and armed forces as part of the nation’s defense preparations.
The Pakistani military high command, in particular, inculcates jihadi spirit among troops through its training curriculum and public exhortations. The commanders instruct the soldiers about “the ‘ideology of Pakistan’ and the ‘glory of Islam’…[and sound] more like high priests than soldiers when they urge men to rededicate themselves to the sacred cause” of defending Pakistan through their “determination, courage and high ideals in the best tradition of Islam.”15
Because of the umma fraternity, the jihadi spirit often transcends artificial state boundaries. During a 1989 trip, I saw Pakistani mujahideen returning from Afghanistan offering thanksgiving prayers for their victory over Soviet Communists. “We were Arabs, Pathans, Punjabis, Sindhis, Bangladeshis,” one of them told me, “but we were all brothers in Islam on the battlefields…. We fought the infidels in the path of Allah …. Allah gives victory to the believers who fight in His Path.” Several other mujahideen (plural of mujahid, participant in a jihad) I interviewed echoed his comment.
NEW MUJAHIDEEN
I asked several mujahideen why 93,000 Pakistani Muslim soldiers had to surrender to the mainly Hindu Indian army in the Bangladesh war 18 years before. Their answers: Pakistani commanders did not go into that war in the name of Islam; Gen. Aga Muhammad Yahya Khan, then Pakistan’s president, was a “drunkard and adulterer”; the Pakistani army was not sufficiently inspired with jihadi ideals, and so on.16 They obviously attributed their victory to God and defeat to human agency because Islamic scripture had taught them to do so.
Apart from the Pakistani cricket team’s international matches, warfare is the only occasion on which the ethnically divided Pakistani nation comes together. It is not unique to Pakistan. Historically, warfare has promoted nationalism and national integration everywhere. “From the very beginning,” says Michael Howard, “the principle of nationalism was almost indissolubly linked, both in theory and practice, with the idea of war…. War has been a principal determinant in the shaping of nation-states.” Wars were instrumental in welding disparate and mutually antagonistic ethnic communities into the nation-states of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and so forth. In fact, as Howard further notes, “it’s hard to think of any European nation-state, with the possible exception of Norway,” which was not the product of warfare or other forms of violence.17
Warfare has played a particularly integrating role for Muslim Pakistan because its adversaries in the conflicts have always been non-Muslims. The most recent of those conflicts is the American-driven “war on terror.” Unlike the others, the campaign against the Taliban and other Pakistani militant groups has been waged by the Pakistani government. Yet most Pakistanis view it as sponsored by the United States, and they consider the NATO operations in Afghanistan as foreign aggression, which they say they have a right and duty to resist.
The Taliban and many other Pakistanis see no difference between their Afghanistan jihad today and the one Pakistani youths fought against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s. “The terrorists of today,” said Pakistani Senator Enver M. Baig, “were the mujahideen of yesterday.” Guerrillas who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan alongside the Americans were “known in America as mujahideen,” which American media translated as “freedom fighters.” The lawmaker from the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s party added that Pakistani guerrillas who are trying to help rid Afghanistan of Western tutelage are “today’s mujahideen.”18
Some Pakistanis say the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are clashes between “a race” (white) and “a religion” (Islam). Some argue that they are between two faiths (Islam and Christianity). Some Pakistani intellectuals say they are part of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” Many dismiss the argument that NATO troops in Afghanistan have been “invited” by a democratically elected Afghan government. British colonial authorities in India, they point out, had had native governments installed through free and fair elections in 1937 and 1946 that did not legitimize their colonialism.
Pakistanis generally do not think their country has a stake in the conflict between the United States and al-Qaeda, though they say they empathized with the Americans over 9/11. Many would like their law-enforcement agencies to search for any al-Qaeda fugitives inside Pakistan who may be wanted for terrorist activities. Yet they resent their government’s anti-militant military operations, especially as those operations are believed to be conducted on American orders and kill innocent people.
The anti-Taliban campaign has sparked a great deal of public resentment against the Pakistani army, whose stock was already low because of its support for successive coups, losses of wars with India, and proclivity to acquire property and money. In the 1970s, if a retired army colonel in Karachi invited you for lunch at his home, you would likely have visited him in a poorly furnished apartment, where he would have taken great pride in reminiscing about his military career and showing off his medals and testimonials. Today you would visit him in a lovely single-family house with expensive rugs and furniture, a manicured lawn and a garage with two cars; and he would be bragging about his estate, his partnership in a business and his children in American universities.
The army is especially criticized for its perceived subservience to America. The United States has coddled all four Pakistani military dictatorships, and top military officers — including the current army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — have been pro-American. Washington has heavily invested in the Pakistani military establishment. Of the $2 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan in 2006, 90 percent went into defense. Hence the Pakistan army was America’s bulwark against the Soviet Union’s southward thrust during the Cold War and is now fighting the U.S. anti-terror campaign inside Pakistan. “Pakistan is a pro-American army,” goes a popular joke, “that is holding a Muslim nation hostage!” The military’s American connection is especially disdained because of its association with the “war on terror.” The campaign has got Pakistani soldiers killing Pakistani citizens, and vice versa. Secondly, it shows Pakistani troops fighting for America, when the United States is more widely resented in Pakistan than ever.
Because of this, Musharraf, the spearhead in the anti-Taliban drive, is the most hated Pakistani ruler ever. “Musharraf has sold our independence to America,” said Nuzhat Firdous, who teaches social anthropology at the College of Home Economics in Lahore.19 Hence even though the “anti-terror” campaign has been conducted by Pakistani forces, it has galvanized Pakistanis across their ethnic divides against the United States and is helping bolster Pakistani nationhood. The Islamists, who include educated youths adept in modern communications skills, are disseminating anti-Americanism and using it to promote their causes.
Modernity is helping spread Islamism most effectively among the Pakistanis whom it has displaced from their native cultural niche: youths who have left the countryside in quest of education, jobs and business in towns and cities. In their native villages, they were known by their affiliations with their families, tribes, villages, mosques and so forth. In the urban polyglot environment, they face an identity crisis, and they build a new identity based on the beliefs, values and norms they cultivated at home and in the mosque. Those values and rules of conduct derive from Islam. This is why the quest for modern life and an Islamic identity go hand-in-hand in Pakistan and in many other Muslim countries. “Modernity,” said sociologist Fauzia Saleem, “has made Muslims more conscious of their Muslim identity.”20 But this Muslim identity is different from the one to which these youths were introduced in their village homes and mosques. They bring their native Islamic values to their new haunts — factories, offices, social gatherings, and political campaigns and parties — where interactions with different lifestyles, even if Islamic, transform their attitudes toward Islam and the world. Modernizing Islam is by its nature Islamism, an evolving creed most visible in public space. And its appeal is greatest among a particular category of youths, those from the lower-middle class who have migrated from the village to the urban social setting. A survey has found that 62 percent of the members of the premier Pakistani Islamist political party, Jamaat-i-Islami, in Punjab belong to the lower-middle class.21
Some non-Muslim postcolonial societies seem to be readily embracing a more secular lifestyle. Why, then, are so many modernizing Pakistani Muslims (like many of their fellowbelievers elsewhere) recycling their traditional Islamic values into Islamism? One reason is that, unlike other major religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintoism), Islam emerged with a panoply of sociopolitical concepts and institutions, built by the Medinese state under the Prophet Muhammad and the first four caliphs. “Median memory,” observes Peter Mandaville, a perceptive sociologist of Islam, “distant yet tangible, is pulling at the modern Muslim mind like a magnet. We might invoke here Lawrence Durrell’s description of Alexandria in the 1930s as ‘a city half-imagined, yet wholly real’.”22 These values are embedded in the Islamic consciousness. Many of them collide powerfully with Western political philosophy and norms, pulling the modernizing youth back into the Islamic epistemological framework.
Modernity, coupled with globalization, is also promoting the “translocality” of Islamic sociopolitical norms and thus “foster[ing] the presence of Islam in the public sphere.” Islamism today “would appear to challenge the conventional dualism between public and private.”23
In Pakistan, modernity’s Islamizing trend is clashing with an older, secular one that encompasses the country’s powerful feudal, military and bureaucratic elites. It spans the top echelons of the leading political parties, the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP) and the two factions of the Pakistan Muslim League.
The secular Pakistani elites are heirs to the colonial-era feudal-administrative class, and they make up barely 5% of the Pakistani population,24 among whom 500 “culturally and socially intertwined” people, according to author Stephen P. Cohen, exercise effective power in the military, politics and the economy.25 The social status of this class has undergone a striking transformation since independence. The grandparents of its members were entrenched in local communities. They mostly went to local schools, lived in the countryside and had daily contact with peasants, tenants, laundry men, cobblers, milkmen, mailmen and others who served them and lived around them. The majority of the contemporary secular elites are college-educated townspeople, many of them educated in the West. They have not only lost their roots in society but are estranged from the upwardly mobile middle and lower-middle classes, who have an Islamist orientation.
“There is a deep divide between the Westernized elites and the vernacular elites,” said Mukhtar Ahmed Ali, head of a research and development NGO in Islamabad. “They are not talking to each other.”26 The upper ranks of the PPP and the Muslim League factions belong to these rootless secular elites.
The absence of roots among the masses and their estrangement from vernacular elites has not, so far, loosened these elites’ grip on power. They retain their long-established links to key centers of power, especially the army. The Pakistani army, despite the occasional elections, has maintained its stranglehold on government since the late 1950s and cultivates corrupt and acquisitive politicians. “There is a growing disenchantment among the general public with the behavior of the political class,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, author of a best-selling book on the Pakistani military. Because of the public antipathy for them, “politicians are easily co-opted by the military rather than playing the political game through fair means.”27
Even many of the popular politicians are not enamored of the democratic process. The reason: There has not been a single election in Pakistan since 1970 that has not been rigged. “The whole [democratic] process has lost credibility,” said Sajid Ali, chair of the philosophy department at Punjab University. “The army rigs elections regularly…. Politicians are just puppets” of the army and other power brokers.28
Having been fired twice as prime minister at the behest of the military and knowing the U.S. clout behind the Pakistani army brass, Benazir Bhutto secured American backing before returning to Pakistan in October 2007 to face parliamentary elections. The United States, looking to put a democratic face to its “war on terror,” got Musharraf to immunize Bhutto against a string of corruption cases so she could lead the PPP in the elections. She was killed in a suicide attack during that election campaign.
Bhutto, a corrupt, wealthy and Westernized scion of a feudal family, symbolized Pakistan’s secular elites and their rise to power in alliance with the army and America. Even though this social segment still holds onto the levers of power, the mostly Islamized lower classes are showing growing impatience with it. Sajid Ali, among other Pakistani intellectuals, suspects that the time is coming soon when the increasingly assertive lower classes will challenge the corrupt and repressive establishment, spawning instability.
However, Pakistan is in better shape than it was two decades ago to weather a level of disorder. Pakistan could come unglued, however, if the military decides to let go of the country rather than its power, as it did in 1971, when it refused to cede power to an elected parliamentary majority from East Pakistan, prompting its secession. While a period of instability may accompany the resumption of the democratic process, the nation’s increased sense of solidarity — thanks to both the conflicts of external origin and Islamization — should help prevent its unraveling. After their encounters with the Punjabi-dominated army troops, the Pashtun Taliban sometimes denounce “the Punjabis,” but not Pakistan.
The prospect of external and externally orchestrated conflicts may, however, be diminishing. Many Pakistanis are already discounting an Indian military threat; Pakistan’s more than two dozen nuclear warheads have given them a sense of security. Pakistan has fought three of its four wars with India over the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir and lost all of them. Most Pakistanis now believe that there is no military solution to the dispute. Instead of worrying about India’s military juggernaut, they now envy its rise to the status of a global economic power.
The Pakistani military and intelligentsia doubtless have among their ranks many virulent anti-Indian hawks, among them my old friend Majid Nizami, editor and publisher of the Nawa-i-Waqt newspaper in Lahore. He would like to announce a “nuclear first strike” doctrine against India to neutralize its preponderance in conventional and nuclear military forces.29 Still, an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis realize the futility of massive military expenditure; they want peace and economic collaboration with India. “You can’t change your neighbors,” said Umbreen Javaid, chair of the Punjab University political science department. “It’s necessary to find mutually beneficial ways to live with [the Indians]. We need collaboration with India in trade and other non-military aspects of national security.”30
CONCLUSION
The “war on terror” is likely to be winding down as well. It is facing strong public resistance nationwide. The perception that America is on an anti-Islamic crusade is widespread and a major source of the unpopularity of the drive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, and Pakistanis are always leery of the real and perceived enemies of the faith and the umma. Many Pakistanis echo Senator Baig’s view that America’s invasions and hegemony in the Muslim world are tantamount to attacks on the umma and Islamic civilization. They say America’s professed desire to democratize Muslim societies is a smokescreen to hide its real designs in key Muslim countries: having subservient governments, military bases, markets for U.S. goods and cheap oil for the West. For many Pakistanis, Islam and the umma are a greater priority than democracy, which mostly serves the corrupt elites.
“People in Pakistan,” said Yusufzai, “come out on the street… when Islam is attacked anywhere. They don’t come out on the street when democracy is attacked in Pakistan.”31
The largest Pakistani public protests of the decade were staged in 2006 over the publication of the “Muhammad cartoons” in a Danish newspaper, perceived as an offense to Islam. They were not over the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who led a movement to democratize Pakistan, let alone the1999 overthrow of a democratically elected government by Musharraf, which passed peacefully.
But the Islamist surge in Pakistan, as elsewhere, is not so much spiritual as it is sociopolitical, and it is more visible in the public than the private sphere. While Islamist groups have forced the closing of bars and brothels throughout the country, alcohol consumption and prostitution have actually increased. Alcohol is being privately made and consumed in parts of Pakistan, especially southern Punjab, which was unheard of in the 1960s. Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University School of Management Studies, said he “can’t think of a dinner party [for professionals] without alcohol.”32 Call girls now are a phone call away in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad and perhaps other cities. In the 1960s and early 1970s, bars, brothels, music halls and dance floors were features of Pakistani urban life. Alcohol consumption in private homes was limited to a small segment of the Westernized elite, and call girls were practically unknown. As Pakistan’s public space pulsates with Islamism, part of the country’s private sphere seems to be secularizing. Anthropologist Firdous calls Islamism a “fashion.”33 Sociologist Amna Murad says Islamization has become “ritualistic.” She has noticed that many of her female students who have taken to wearing the Islamic headscarf also date men, an un-Islamic practice.34
Religious upsurge, says Anthony Smith, tapers off after “an enthusiastic phase” only to reinforce the ethnicity of the people affected by it.35 If so, Pakistan’s Islamist wave could leave its nationhood, rather than ethnicity, reinforced. Secularizing in important areas of their private lives, Pakistanis may still be nurturing Islamic social and cultural values, which the international community would need to respect. The British woman in Dera Ismail Khan who put on a headscarf appeared to have known this.
1 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (Viking, 2004), p.55.
2 Daniele Havier-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memories (Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 83-101.
3 Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 30.
4 Richard K. Khuri, Freedom, Modernity, and Islam: Toward a Creative Synthesis (Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 27.
5Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Speeches as Governor General of Pakistan 1947-48, Karachi: Government of Pakistan, 1964.
6 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (Macmillan 1944), pp. 329333; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verson Editions and NLB, 1983), p. 15; Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (University of Nevada Press, 1991), pp. 48-59; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 78-92.
7National Identity, p. 11.
8 Author’s interview with Hemayetullah, Quetta, Pakistan, October 22, 2007.
9 Author’s interview with Iqbal Khattak, bureau chief of the Daily Times, Peshawar, Pakistan, October 2, 2007.
10 Author’s interview with Nasirullah Wazir, Department of Pashtu, University of Balochistan, Quetta, Pakistan, October 18, 2007.
11 Author’s interview with Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor, The News International, Peshawar, Pakistan, September 27, 2007.
12 Author’s interview with Abdur Rahim Salarzai, the village Sheikh Menu in Bajaur tribal agency, Pakistan. October 7, 2007.
13 Author’s interview with Ali Khan Ghumro, Department of International Relations, University of Sindh at Jamshoro, Pakistan, October 28, 2007.
14 Author’s conversation with anthropologist Jamil Ahmed on their way to Mohmond and Bajaur tribal agencies in Pakistan, October 7, 2007.
15 Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi, The Military in Pakistan: Image and Reality (Lahore, Pakistan: Vanguard Books, 1996), pp. 163-64.
16 Author’s interviews with mujahideen fighters, Peshawar and Quetta, Pakistan, September 3-October 8, 1989.
17 Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 39-43.
18 Author’s interview with Senator Enver M. Baig, Islamabad, Pakistan, September 22, 2007.
19 Author’s telephone interview with Nuzhat Firdous from Peshawar, Pakistan, September 28, 2007.
20 Author’s interview with Fauzia Saleem, Sociology Department, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, September 14, 2007.
21 Author’s interview with Irfan Ali Akund, doctoral candidate in sociology, Karachi, Pakistan, November 1, 2007. Akund cited the data from the draft of his Ph.D. dissertation on “Government by the Army for the Feudals.”
22 Peter Mandaville, Reimagining the Umma: Transnational Muslim Politics (Routlege, 2002), p. 72.
23 Ibid, pp. 11-12.
24 Author’s interview with Mansur Ahmed Ansari, freelance journalist, Karachi, Pakistan, November 1, 2007.
25 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2004), p. 69.
26 Author’s interview with Mukhtar Ahmed Ali, executive director, Center for Peace and Development Initiatives, Islamabad, Pakistan, September 21, 2007.
27 Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 101.
28 Author’s interview with Sajid Ali, Department of Philosophy, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, September 7, 2007.
29 Author’s interview with Majid Nizami, editor-in-chief, Nawa-i-Waqt, Lahore, Pakistan, December 22, 2006.
30 Author’s interview with Umbreen Javaid, Department of Political Science, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, September 18, 2007.
31 Yusufzai, op-cit.
32 Author’s interview with Rasul Bakhsh Rais, Department of Political Science, Lahore University of Management Studies, Lahore, Pakistan, September 18, 2007.
33 Author’s interview with Nuzhat Firdous, College of Home Economics, Lahore, Pakistan September 17, 2007.
34 Author’s interview with Amna Murad, Department of Sociology, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, September 17, 2007.
35 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1987), p. 32.
