Pakistan: A Hard Country (22 page)

When, however, I pressed them to state a preference between the Shariah and the pashtunwali, twelve chose the pashtunwali and fourteen the Shariah, with the rest not voting. The striking thing was that most of the men chose the pashtunwali and all the girls chose the Shariah. They did not state their reasons, but they seem obvious enough. Restrictive though they appear to Westerners, the provisions of the Shariah proscribe the most savage provisions of the pashtunwali as far as women are concerned – like the odious practice of giving girls as part of the settlement of feuds between families – just as the Koran was intended to reform the savage tribal traditions of seventh-century Arabia.

The Shariah also guarantees a share of inheritance to girls, while the pashtunwali gives it only to boys; and furthermore it guarantees rights to wives in the case of divorce. This progressive aspect of the Shariah was also something that the Information Secretary of the MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal) Islamist al iance (then forming the government of the NWFP) stressed to me in an interview later that afternoon, emphasizing that his party stood for Islamic progress against tribal barbarism.

For al that, there is no chance of the Shariah as preached by the Taleban sweeping Pakistan, for the same reasons that the Taleban themselves cannot sweep Pakistan. The first is that while the ruling elites may be wil ing to make any number of local compromises with the Shariah, they wil fight hard and successful y to prevent Islamist revolution.

That leaves open the possibility that moderate Islamist forces in Pakistan might develop a new form of the Shariah like that of the modern state in Iran, more adapted to the contemporary world. But this wil be extremely difficult in Pakistan, because the different Islamist groups in Pakistan cannot agree on which form of the Shariah is in fact valid. While Iran has a unitary and centralized form of Shia Islam, Pakistan – quite apart from its Sunni – Shia divide – has a multifarious col ection of different forms of Sunni Islam. This critical obstacle to Islamist revolution wil be explored further in the next chapter.

NOT QUITE AS BAD AS IT LOOKS

Re-reading this chapter, I feel that it needs a certain correction.

Natural y a description of a country’s criminal justice system wil focus on crime, but it would be a mistake to draw from the above the idea that Pakistani society is in a state of permanent chaotic violence. A number of things need to be kept in mind. The first is that the jirga and panchayat mechanisms described in this chapter are explicitly dedicated to regulating and containing violence, and usual y do so successful y. Local saints and their descendants also play a part in this regard.

As Stephen Lyon has pointed out, one also needs to watch out for local hyperbole. If you believed al the stories you hear concerning violence in the countryside, ‘there would hardly be a man left alive or a women left un-raped’.19 Political violence aside, most of Pakistan is not in fact very violent or crime-ridden by the standards of many US

cities, let alone those of Mexico or Brazil. In fact, given levels of poverty, the level of ordinary crime (as opposed to crime stemming from politics, religion or ‘honour’) is in many ways remarkably low.

One reason is that this society is mostly dominated by landowning and business politicians who, while they have to be prepared to order kil ings if real y necessary, have general y inherited their positions, not murdered their way to them in savage gangland wars. They general y have to obey some sort of local moral consensus, which approves courage in defence of your izzat, but which certainly does not approve unrestrained murder and theft. Another factor is the relative (though of course only relative) lack of extreme class divisions, mentioned in the Introduction.

It is quite true that in much of Pakistan, tribes and chieftains operate as autonomous armed forces – but that was true of medieval Europe, and it did not prevent the great achievements of that period in terms of both culture and commerce. To paraphrase the words of various ‘feudal’ acquaintances and tribal chieftains, for by far the greater part of the time, the point of armed force is not war but deterrence – to show that you are strong so as not to have to fight. In a paradoxical way, therefore, to use violence may be a sign of weakness, and also of lack of self-control. This virtue is not prized as much as physical courage, but it is stil highly prized, since the consequences of lack of self-control can be both personal y fatal and bad for your kinship group’s prestige.

Final y, the rather miserable picture of the police and courts painted in this chapter is equal y true of by far the greater part of India; indeed, because of caste divisions, parts of India are considerably worse as far as police atrocities are concerned. The same is true of the dominance of customary law. In fact, throughout most of this chapter (except, obviously, those parts dealing with the Shariah), I could, without any substantial inaccuracy, have substituted the words ‘Indian’

or ‘South Asian’ for ‘Pakistani’.

This is awful for much of the Indian population, and has contributed directly to the growing Maoist insurgency among low-caste and tribal peasants in much of the Indian countryside; but it has not so far prevented the great recent economic achievements of the Indian state.

The difference with Pakistan is that in India there is no coherent and unified cultural alternative to the modern state and its legal structures, which also operates as a standing moral reproach to those structures.

In Pakistan, in the view of many believers, there is the way of Islam, reflected in the Shariah. This code for every aspect of life and society is the subject of the next chapter.

4

Religion

Don’t compare your nation with the nations of the West

Distinctive is the nation of the Prophet of Islam

Their solidarity depends on territorial nationality

Your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion

When faith slips away, where is the solidarity of the community?

And when the community is no more, neither is the nation.

(Sir Muhammad Iqbal)1

Verily God will not change [the condition of] a people, until they change what is in themselves.

(The Koran, Shura 13, verse 11)

Since 9/11, international discussions of Islam in Pakistan have focused mainly on the threat from religious extremism and terrorism. In these discussions, a dangerous intel ectual mess is often created by the mixing up of words such as ‘extremism’ and ‘militancy’ with the very different concepts of ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘conservatism’.

Long before 9/11, however, much of the discussion of Pakistani Islam, inside and outside Pakistan, concerned whether Pakistan, having been founded as a refuge for the Muslims of South Asia, should or should not be an Islamic state; or, on the other hand, why Islam had al egedly failed to keep West and East Pakistan together, and was continuing to fail to help develop Pakistan as a united and successful society.

On the first point, I have already argued that, while terrorism is obviously present and frightening, Islamist extremism in Pakistan presents little danger of overthrowing the state unless US pressure has already split and crippled that state. The religious barriers to the spread of extremism wil be outlined in the present chapter.

The second question is whether or not the state should have an official Islamic character, which wil go deeper than the formal y Islamic nature it has possessed since the constitution of 1973 (under the government of the ‘liberal’ Z. A. Bhutto) declared Islam the state religion. This is an important issue – but not nearly as central as many analysts have assumed. It makes no difference to the beliefs and behaviour of the vast majority of the population, which are deeply conservative and steeped in different Muslim traditions.

It is worth noting from this point of view that the PPP, general y regarded as a ‘secular’ party, is in fact in some areas of Pakistan partly religious in its appeal, in that many of its local politicians come from the families of hereditary saints, and owe much of their local power and prestige to this ancestry. Of course, though, this is a very different kind of religious appeal from that of the Islamist parties.

The point, therefore, is that the Islam of the Pakistani masses contains very different traditions. The Islamic character of the state would only be a real issue for most of the population if that state were to imitate Saudi Arabia or Iran and try to impose one monolithic version of Islam. However, the Pakistani state is too weak to achieve this even if it wanted to – as Zia-ul-Haq’s failure demonstrated.

A related issue is that of whether a strong formal state commitment to Islam is necessary to hold Pakistan together, as Islamists (and some non-Islamists) claim, or whether, on the other hand, as secular analysts would argue, this has already been tried and failed. Here, many of the analysts and reporters have been looking at the wrong things in the wrong places. Popular (as opposed to official) forms of Islam do in fact play a key role in holding Pakistan together, but often in ways which are very different from those that the forces of Islamist reform (whether moderate or extremist) would wish; just as in India Hinduism plays a far greater role in Indian unity than liberals wish to recognize, but a very different role from the one that Hindu nationalists would wish to create.

As in Europe in the past, even some Pakistani statesmen whose own religious practice has been very lax have wished to promote religion in public life as a way of trying to improve appal ingly low levels of public ethics in the state services and among politicians – especial y as the Western codes of public service left behind by the British have gradual y eroded. This in turn is part of the crucial question for Pakistan of whether it is possible to create loyalties and ethics which transcend those of loyalty to kin. Clearly, Islam in Pakistan has so far failed in this regard, though things would be even worse without its influence.

Closely connected with this unsuccessful role of religion, however, is another, much more effective role of Islam which is hardly noticed outside the country, but should be: that of softening the misery of Pakistan’s poor through charity. Levels of trust in Pakistani state institutions are extremely low, and for good reason. Partly in consequence, Pakistan has one of the lowest levels of tax col ection outside Africa. On the other hand, charitable donation, at almost 5 per cent of GDP, is one of the highest rates in the world.

Just how much of this is motivated by religious beliefs cannot be quantified, but, given the religious faith of most Pakistanis, it must be a great deal, in accordance with the commandment in the Koran that: Righteousness is not that ye turn your faces towards the east or the west, but righteousness is, one who believes in God, and the last day, and the angels, and the Book, and the prophets, and who gives wealth for His love to kindred, and orphans, and the poor, and the son of the road, beggars, and those in captivity; and who is steadfast in prayer, and gives alms.2

Thus the Citizens’ Foundation, the most widespread and effective educational charity in Pakistan (with more than 600 schools and 85,000 pupils), is a non-religious organization, but a majority of its founding members from the business community are practising Muslims – though they come from al the different branches of Islam represented in Pakistan and do not use any religious element in their public appeals.

Charities with a religious character also tend to be more favoured and more trusted by the population. It is also true of Pakistan’s most famous private charitable institution by far, the Edhi Foundation, which is non-religious; however, Abdus Sattar Edhi is himself a deeply religious man, known by the public at large as Maulana (a Muslim distinguished by his piety and learning) even though he is not a Muslim scholar and in fact greatly dislikes being cal ed this.

There is no sight in Pakistan more moving than to visit some dusty, impoverished smal town in an arid wasteland, apparently abandoned by God and al sensible men and certainly abandoned by the Pakistani state and its own elected representatives – and to see the flag of the Edhi Foundation flying over a concrete shack with a telephone, and the only ambulance in town standing in front. Here, if anywhere in Pakistan, lies the truth of human religion and human morality.

FEUDING THEOLOGIANS

As to modern Islamist politics in Pakistan, the most important question to be asked is not why they are so strong, but why they are so weak.

Think about it. Across much of the Middle East and the Muslim world more widely, Islamist political parties and reformist movements are making progress. Such a party rules in Turkey, and others would probably come to power in Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Morocco if those countries held democratic elections. Iran of course experienced an Islamist revolution, albeit of a specifical y Shia kind, as did the Shia of Lebanon.

Pakistan has always had a political system which is far more open than those of most other Muslim states; it has levels of poverty which would seem to cry out for a mass reformist movement in the name of Islam; and it has inherited from India before 1947 one of the leading intel ectual traditions of Islamist modernism and reformism. Yet with brief exceptions, the Islamist parties have always performed miserably in the pol s, and are no nearer today than they ever were to creating a mass political movement that would successful y pursue a truly Islamist system in Pakistan, whether by peaceful or revolutionary means.