Pakistan: A Hard Country (23 page)
The truth is that, while most forms of Islamist radicalism have ancient roots, they are also modern, and a response to modernity. Most forms of Pakistani Islam for their part are traditional and conservative – far too conservative to support a revolution, and far too diverse to submit themselves to a monolithic version of Islam. This in turn derives in part from the fact that Pakistan remains in many ways a very rural society, where even the rapidly growing cities are stil heavily rural in culture, owing to the constant flow of migrants from the countryside.
Islamist radicalism, whether of old or new varieties, has always been a basical y urban phenomenon, and derived from old and new patterns of urban society and culture. In Pakistan, the rural masses can occasional y be stirred up to furious panic by the cry of ‘Islam in danger’, as they were in 1947, but only two radical forces have established a long-running presence in parts of the countryside. The first are the Sunni sectarian extremists of the central and southern Punjab, who have succeeded in appealing to Sunni tenant farmers and the lower middle classes against the local Shia elites. Where, however, the landed elites are Sunni, they help prevent the spread of the Islamist parties through their control of the appointment of mul ahs to local mosques, which they use to bar anyone with a hint of social radicalism.
The other case of Islamist success in rural areas is the Pakistani Taleban in parts of the tribal areas and the NWFP – a success which is due above al to specifical y Pathan factors and traditions, and the impact of developments in Afghanistan. As of 2010, the Taleban and the Sunni sectarians have forged an al iance which is carrying out terrorist attacks across much of Pakistan; but to overthrow the Pakistani state would be quite a different matter, and something of which they are, in my judgement, incapable unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand.
Theological y speaking, al the Sunni Islamist groups, from the relatively moderate and democratic Jamaat Islami to the Taleban and other extremists, are drawn from one of two traditions: the Deobandi, named after a famous madrasah founded in Deoband (now in Uttar Pradesh, India) in 1866; and the Ahl-e-Hadith (‘People of the hadiths’, or traditions attributed to the Prophet), a branch of the international Salafi (fundamentalist-reformist; salaf meaning forerunner or spiritual ancestor in Arabic) tradition, heavily influenced by Wahabism, and with particularly close links to Arabia dating back to the original foundations of this tendency in the sixteenth century CE.
The Ahl-e-Hadith are more extreme than the Deobandis, and less concerned with questions of modern social justice and development.
Both traditions, however, can be broadly described as fundamentalist, in that they advocate a return to the pure teaching of the Koran and the Prophet; reformist, in that they advocate radical reforms to both contemporary Muslim society and much of contemporary Islam; and puritan (in the old Anglo-American sense), in their concern for strict public morality and their dislike of both ostentatious wealth and the worship of saints and shrines.
There is a difference between the two in this regard, however. The Ahl-e-Hadith loathe the Sufi and saintly traditions in general. The Deobandis – whose tradition is largely descended from the thought of Shah Waliul ah, himself a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order – praise the saints themselves (and used to claim miraculous powers for their own greatest Deobandi teachers), but condemn the ways in which the saints are worshipped, and the belief that they can intercede with God.
The Deobandi tradition gave birth to the Tablighi Jamaat, by far the greatest preaching organization in the Muslim world (indeed, in the whole world), which each year draws mil ions of people to its great ral ies at its headquarters in Raiwind near Lahore. The Tabligh was founded in India in the 1920s as a revivalist movement dedicated to strengthening scriptural Islamic practice among Muslims and resisting the efforts of Hindu preachers to draw them back into the Hindu fold. In recent decades the Tabligh leadership has strongly emphasized its apolitical character and has firmly distanced itself from extremism and terrorism; but its networks and gatherings have been used by radicals as a cover for meetings and planning.
However, until recently a majority of Sunni Pakistanis, in so far as they were aware of belonging to any particular tradition within Islam, belonged neither to the tradition of the Deobandis nor of the Ahl-e-Hadith but to that of the Barelvis (who cal themselves the Ahl-e-Sunnat, or people of the teaching of Mohammed and his companions), named after a madrasah founded in 1880 in the town of Bareil y – also now in Uttar Pradesh, India. Barelvi religious attitudes, which are linked to those of leading Sufi orders, are far closer to popular Islam as it has usual y been fol owed in South Asia. This popular Islam includes in particular a belief in the intercession of saints with God, the validity of miracles by the saints, worship at the shrines of saints (though not strictly speaking worship of the saints), and local traditions attached to the saints.
The Barelvis therefore might be cal ed Catholics to the Deobandis and Ahl-e-Hadith’s puritans – with the crucial distinction that far from being grouped in one hierarchical organization, the Barelvis are a very loose and fissiparous grouping which cannot real y be described as a ‘movement’ at al . Their rivals, though historical y fewer in number, have general y had the edge when it comes to organization.
Despite repeated attempts, the Barelvis have never created a large and enduring political party of their own, though they have played a leading part in al the wider Muslim mass movements in India and Pakistan. Barelvi parties formed part of the MMA Islamist al iance which governed the NWFP and Balochistan from 2002 to 2008, and supported that al iance’s cal s for the introduction of Shariah law and a variety of Islamic regulations. However, both of Pakistan’s main Islamist parties today, the Jamaat-Islami (JI) national y and the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) in the Pathan areas, are drawn from the Deobandi tradition.
The greater radicalism, and anti-Westernism, of the Deobandi theological tradition can be traced in part to its urban, social and institutional origins, which differ from those of the Sufi and Barelvi traditions. British rule made little difference to the practice of Islam in the South Asian countryside. Except in the case of the most outrageous abuses, the British never meddled with the shrines, and as long as local pirs did not rise in revolt the British tried to co-opt them.
It was quite otherwise in the cities. As the last chapter, on justice, described, the role of formal Islamic justice in the countryside was always very limited. In the old Muslim states, however, the qazis (Islamic judges) and ulema (Islamic scholars; singular alim) ran the justice and higher education systems in the cities, and played a crucial role in the administration of the Mughal empire and other kingdoms.
The destruction of those kingdoms, and the introduction by the British of British systems of law (with the exception of personal law) and higher education dealt a shattering blow to the power, prestige and income of the ulema and qazis. Inevitably, many were radicalized in response.
The decline of the urban clerics from their status under the Mughal empire was highlighted for me by the contrast between the Badshahi (Imperial) mosque in Lahore, and its state-appointed imam or chief cleric. The mosque is Pakistan’s greatest and most splendid architectural monument, and from its completion in 1673 to 1986 was the biggest mosque in the world. Its imam, however, lives in a cramped and shabby lower-middle-class house in its shadow. He sat on his bed while I interviewed him – a burly figure with a booming voice who dwarfed his smal bedroom.
His circumstances of course could reflect religious austerity; but other things suggested a man who essential y was a very minor government functionary: the deference he paid to my companion, a local PML(N) politician; the continual repetition – evidently from a very wel -worn official record for the consumption of Western visitors – of his commitment to peace, religious harmony, birth control and so on; and his bringing out of a tattered photo album showing his attendance on behalf of the Pakistani state at various international inter-religious conferences. Despite his international diplomatic role, he spoke almost no English, thereby marking his de facto exclusion from al Pakistan’s elites. I’m afraid that I was strongly reminded of meetings with official y sanctioned – and official y control ed – religious figures in the former Soviet Union.
I visited the imam during Moharram 2009. Twenty years earlier, I had also been in Lahore’s inner city during Moharram, to visit young activists of the Jamaat Islami. They al came from the educated lower middle classes. They were a pleasant lot, wel -mannered, hospitable and keeping whatever fanaticism they possessed wel veiled before a guest. What I took above al from my visit to their homes was the intensity of their families’ struggle to save themselves from sinking into the semi-criminal lumpenproletariat, and the way in which religion – and the Jamaat al egiance and discipline in particular – helped in that struggle. These boys spoke with deep feeling of the lure of street crime, heroin smuggling and heroin addiction. Not far away the Hira Mandi – the red-light district – beckoned as an attraction for men and a fate for women.
Something that one also takes away from visits to the lower and lower middle classes in Pakistan’s cities is the singularly repulsive nature of the semi-Western, semi-modern new culture these cities are liable to breed, especial y concerning the treatment of women – a mixture of Western licentiousness with local brutality, crudity and chauvinism. This culture threatens women with the worst of al worlds, in which they are exposed to exacerbated male lust without the protections afforded by traditional culture, and in which their children are exposed to a range of new dangers and temptations. This is why the support of women forms such an important background to many of the Islamist groups, and why al the intel igent Islamist leaders with whom I have spoken (that is, not the Taleban) have stressed an Islamic women’s education programme as a core part of their programme.
In these depressing social and cultural circumstances, adherence to a radical Islamist network like the Jamaat provides a sense of cultural security, a new community and some degree of social support – modest, but stil better than anything the state can provide. Poverty is recast as religious simplicity and austerity. Perhaps even more important, faith provides a measure of pride: a reason to keep a stiff back amid continual humiliations and temptations.
Faith also has its physical expression and impact through architecture, as the beauty and grandeur of the Badshahi mosque reminded me. In the blaring, stinking, violent world of the modern ‘third world’ Muslim inner city, the mosque provides an oasis of calm and reflection. The harmonious serenity of its traditional architecture contrasts with the ugly, vulgar clash of Western and Pakistani kitsch which is the style of so many of the elites, let alone the masses. Like the Catholic churches of Central America described by Graham Greene in The Lawless Roads, the mosque may be the only beautiful work of human creation that most people ever see, and the haven not only of beauty but of an ordered and coherent culture, and a guide to living.
THE LIMITS TO RADICALISM
On the other hand, the Islamist parties have never been able to break out from their relatively narrow cultural and ethnic bases to appeal successful y to the mass of the Pakistani population. For this a number of factors are responsible. Firstly, their religious culture is in fact alien to that of a majority of Pakistanis. This is changing as a result of social development and urbanization – but the lack of modern economic development, and therefore of truly modern urbanization in Pakistan (as opposed to migration from the countryside which brings rural culture with it), means that this change is not happening nearly as fast as might have been expected. The lack of modern development also means that unlike the Islamist Justice party in Turkey, the religious parties in Pakistan do not have support from modern educated business and technical classes, and have not been able to develop new thinking and new solutions to Pakistan’s myriad social and economic problems.
Secondly, the Islamist parties – or at least the Jamaat, since the JUI has become in effect just another patronage machine – chal enge the deeply embedded structures of power, property, patronage and kinship which dominate Pakistani politics and government. This is clearest in their hostility to the hereditary descendants of saints who dominate large swathes of the Pakistani countryside and play an important part in al Pakistani regimes.
Having failed to consolidate real mass support in the population, the Islamist parties have found themselves outflanked from both directions.
On the extremist side, their more radical supporters have been drawn away by violent jihadi groups like the Taleban in the Pathan areas, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Sipah-e-Sahaba and others in Punjab. Meanwhile, at the moderate end of their spectrum, pragmatic Islamists who wish to share in state patronage have been drawn to support first the military regime of President Zia-ul-Haq and then the Pakistani Muslim League (PML) of the Sharif brothers, both of which promised Islamization of Pakistan without any of the social and economic change for which the Jamaat stand.