Shia genocide is a rude wake-up call for the saner elements in Pakistan – by Raza Rumi
The joke is that those who raise the slogan of Islam in the loudest voices have nothing to do with the philosophy of this religion… Apart from imperialism, no mention is ever made of Islam’s great humanism, nor is it considered necessary to speak about the open-heartedness of Arab seers, Iranian poets and Indian Sufis (currently found as Sunni Barelvis in the Subcontinent). There is no interest in the philosophy of Ali and Hussain. Islam is being presented as a violent religion and a violent way of life.” (Qurratlain Hyder, Aag Ka Darya, 1957)
On August 16, 2012, passenger buses headed towards Gilgit-Baltistan via the Mansehra-Naran-Jalkhad route were stopped by killers dressed in military uniforms, who undertook a witch hunt of Shia Muslims by putting them through a theological test. Later, the terrorists killed 21 Shias and 3 Sunnis who tried to protect the former. This was the second such incident on the highway — in February 2012, 19 Shias were murdered in broad daylight. Only this year, there have been dozens of attacks on the Shia population in Pakistan, and hundreds have been killed.
More recently, the Gilglit Baltistan and Balochistan have emerged as the hot spots for Shia hatred and killings. These are zones where governance is weak and new havens are being established for Sunni militant organisations that can launder the Taliban and Al Qaeda agenda of destabilising the country and cleansing it of non-Wahabi-Salafi influence.
The expansion of sectarian hatred has emerged as a major threat to peace and harmony in Pakistan. According to an estimate, at least 19,000 Shias and thousands of Sunni-Barelvis have been killed in a slow motion genocide by Deobandi-Wahhabi militants. The denominational differences in Islam are not new. They have been there since the new faith spread from the seventh century onwards. Sects of Islam have always reinforced the pluralism of this faith and its ability to absorb myriad cultural nuances. From the spartan interpretations of the faith in the Arabian Peninsula to the eclectic Central Asian and Persian cultures, the core principles of Islam – equality, redistributive justice and focus on spirituality – have attracted a variety of groups and communities.
In South Asia, Islam arrived through the Sufis who were multicultural by birth and attitude. Sufis had their sectarian origins but they placed emphasis on the inherent cultural diversity of the subcontinent; instead of being exclusivist, they attempted to be as inclusive as possible. Most Sufi orders established in medieval India respected local traditions, folklore, languages and age-old belief systems. This is how the peculiar framework of a tolerant, secular local society emerged in South Asia. As court-based Ulema gained power and influence, there were communitarian and sectarian tensions, which usually come with the organised clergy.
The Shia and Sunni clerics opposed each other but kept the debates intellectual and theological. Manazara (a theological debate) was a popular instrument in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would shock many Pakistanis to know that even Ahmadis (also termed pejoratively Qadianis) held manazaras with Sunni clerics and no one brandished each other as infidel or called for ‘cleansing’.
The contemporary notion of violence and hatred is a political phenomenon that has come through the manufactured majoritarian religious identity developed by the state. This is why there was an official dilemma, a schism, manifested at the time of the funeral prayers for Jinnah, the country’s founder. The latter had converted to Shia faith but, as a leader of the Sunnis, his funeral had to subscribe to the majority norm. The civil-military bureaucracy — devoid of a political and progressive vision for the postcolonial state — allied with the clerics and capitulated at every stage. In the 1960s, the funeral of Jinnah’s sister, also a democrat, Fatima Jinnah underwent similar trajectory. Khaled Ahmed has quoted Ayub Khan’s diaries in his seminal work on sectarianism. The lines from Ayub Khan are tragicomic as well as indicative of how early we had started to pander to exclusion of Shia identity in the public arena. Here is our ‘progressive’ dictator recording the account of Fatima Jinnah’s funeral:
“11 July 1967: Major General Rafi, my military secretary, returned from Karachi. He had gone there to represent me at Miss Jinnah’s funeral. He said that sensible people were happy that the government had given her so much recognition, but generally the people behaved very badly. There was an initial namaz-e janaza at her residence in Mohatta Palace in accordance, presumably, with Shia rites. Then there was to be namaz-e janaza for the public in the Polo Ground. There an argument developed whether this should be led by a Shia or a Sunni. Eventually, Badayuni was put forward to lead the prayer. As soon as he uttered the first sentence the crowd broke in the rear. Thereupon he and the rest ran leaving the coffin high and dry. It was with some difficulty that the coffin was put on a vehicle and taken to the compound of the Quaid’s mazar, where she was to be buried. There a large crowd had gathered and demanded to converge on the place of burial. This obviously could not be allowed for lack of space. Thereupon, the students and the goonda elements started pelting stones on the police. They had to resort to lathi charge and tear gas attack. The compound of the mazar was apparently littered with stones. Look at the irresponsibility of the people. Even a place like this could not be free of vandalism.”
While the Sunni state was tottering for creation of an identity, the real putsch came in the 1970s with the formal alliance that Bhutto made with the Arab world and its proxies, ie, the religious right. Thereafter when General Zia contracted with the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia. There were a mix of factors: petrodollars, migration of Pakistani workers, vague notions of an Ummah (dominated by Saudi and Pakistani muscle), and later, the clear-cut alignment with US strategic interests in South West Asia.
Saudi money started to shape a new Pakistan: an influential madrassa network which followed the ‘Ahl-e-Hadith’ interpretation of Islam closely tied in with the puritanical Wahabbi-Salafi stream of Islam defined by the House of Saud to control the Arabian Peninsula and deny the Shia populations their voice and status in most of the Gulf belt. The introduction of mandatory Zakat collection and the promotion of Deobandi groups for jihadi purposes became state policies. To counter the evil Soviet Union was a collective project of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with US money and shortsighted objectives in the region. Today, the US cries foul of Islamic jihad, conveniently forgetting that decades of investment have created ‘demand’ for jihad as well.
This is why known clerics and ‘scholars’ such as Dr Israr Ahmad received state patronage. Their Shia hating views were well known, and state-run television gave them ample space, and the vernacular press articulated their version of Islam spreading hatred across all strata of society. Pakistan’s civil military bureaucracy prayed on Fridays under the leadership of Dr Israr who married his daughter in Muharram (month of mourning) to undermine the Shia religio-cultural practices. It is another matter that Pakistan’s inherent pluralism, which is centuries’ old, continues to resist this top-down project of the state.
But this ‘Sunnification’ project is now an existential danger for Pakistan. Despite the limitations of PEW polls, their new survey shows that nearly half of Pakistanis do not consider Shias as ‘true Muslims’. Hate literature is found everywhere, printed in thousands, and the Internet is the new bastion of religious extremism. On Youtube alone, thousands of videos calling and rationalising Shias as infidels can be found.
The top down sectarian hatred for Shias has been institutionalised through the formation and rise of anti-Shia militant organisations (mostly Deobandi and Wahhabi-Salafi) such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), or its ‘sanitised’ version Ahl-e-Sunnat-wal-Jamaat (ASWJ), all of whom have played havoc with the social fabric of the country, especially in the Punjab province. Reports suggest that they are in league with the anti-state Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Others have warned that this is the way Al Qaeda is operating in Pakistan. Thus the state and society of Pakistan are under severe threat. Ayaz Amir (The scope and tapestry of religious extremism, The News August 24, 2012) has put it plainly:
“North Waziristan extremism has ideological sympathisers, sleeper cells and a support network, a mosque support network, running from one end of Pakistan to the other. And it is thriving in an atmosphere of radicalisation marked by such incidents as the killing of Shias in Quetta, the murder of Shias in Kohistan… When the next bunch of Shias is murdered we read it as a newspaper item and shrug our shoulders and carry on as usual. And the call to prayers is sounded and it makes not the slightest difference to our collective conduct.”
Across the spectrum, Pakistan’s sane voices are calling for urgent attention of the state. But the politicians are scared of the power of Sunni extremists, as well as of their historical links with the intelligence agencies. The law enforcement agencies as a subset of the larger society are not free of radicalization either. The police recruitment and training methods are antiquated and do not have adequate focus on human rights’ protection. The prosecutors are in short supply and insecure to take a stance. Worse, the judges have also been cowed down by the might of these agencies. Some say that they also espouse the majoritarian [Sunni] Islamic identity. And the armed forces, never shy of advocacy on US Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, have nothing to say on the murder of their fellow citizens whose security is their professional duty. We are faced with an onslaught of silence, inaction and policy paralysis.
Pakistan has to protect its Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It has a Constitution, which needs to be upheld by all institutions of the state. Most importantly three areas of reform are critical: First, beefing up and re-educating the law enforcement agencies and giving protection to witnesses, prosecutors and judges who handle sectarian cases. Second, urgent measures to regulate the check the growth of hate industry, which should be unacceptable in a plural country like Pakistan. For this purpose, publications need to be screened and the seminaries’ curricula have to be regulated. Lastly, a comprehensive policy review by the military and civilian authorities that far from being the assets, the Sunni extremist organisations are now sources of social instability and can accelerate state collapse. Surely this is not what the ruling elites want unless they are on a suicidal path.
The writer is Director Policy & Programs at Jinnah Institute in Islamabad. The views expressed are his own. His writings are archived at www.razarumi.com
A few headlines this year say it all
January 13: Shia man shot dead in Karachi
January 15: Blast in Khanpur Shia Procession killing 18
January 25: Three Shia lawyers killed in Karachi
January 25: Three Shias shot dead in Quetta
January 27: Former Imambargah trustee killed in Karachi
January 30: Fast food outlet manager killed in sectarian clash in Karachi
February 6: Sectarian Clash resulting in 14 injured in Mansehra
February 16: Sectarian attack leaves one dead in Karachi
February 17: 29 Shias killed in Kurram
February 17: Sectarian attack claims two more lives in Karachi
February 28: 18 Shias shot dead in Kohistan
March 2: Suicide attack at valley’s mosque in Khyber Agency kills 23
March 12: Passenger van attacked in Kurram killing two
March 15: Jafferia Alliance leader injured, son killed in Karachi attack
March 18: Shia leader and member of peace committee gunned down in Hangu
March 24: Shia lawyer gunned down in Karachi
March 29: Seven Shias killed in Balochistan
April 3: Sectarian unrest boils over in Gilgit-Baltistan, after 16 were killed
April 3: Two people shot dead in sectarian violence in Quetta
April 9: Six Hazaras killed in Quetta sectarian attack
April 12: Three more Hazaras shot dead in Quetta
April 14: Eight more Shias gunned down in Quetta
April 16: Hazara Shias attacked in Quetta
April 21: Two more Hazaras killed in Quetta
April 22: Hazara man shot at, injured in Quetta
May 6: Shia passenger coach attacked in Kurram
May 6: Hazara man killed in Balochistan
May 15: Hazara Brothers killed in sectarian attack in Quetta
May 17: Two Shia policemen killed in Quetta
May 24: Member of Hazara community killed in Balochistan
May 28: Three Shias killed in Kurram bus attack
May 30: Another Hazara killed in Quetta
May 30: Two Shias shot dead in Karachi Violence
June 3: Four Shias gunned down in Quetta
June 18: Five Shia students killed in Quetta bus blast
June 28: Suicide attack on Shias kills 14
June 28: 60 Hazaras fall victim to terrorism this year
July 4: Senior government official, two others killed near Quetta
July 11: Bodies of two kidnapped Shias found in Quetta
July 17: Unidentified men torch three vehicles in Shia Action committee rally in Karachi
August 16: 25 Shias pulled off buses, executed in Kohistan
August 17: Shia bus attacked in Karachi killing two, wounding 18
August 21: Shia killings continue in Gilgit- Baltistan, two killed
Source: Adapted and edited from The News
A country lost
From the Newspaper | Cyril Almeida
IT began with the flag. A strip of white slapped on, but separate and away from the sea of green — the problem was there from the very outset: one group cast aside from the rest.
A more prescient mind would have thought to put the white in the middle, enscon-ced in a sea of green, a symbolic embrace of the other.
But why blame the flag?
It began with the founding theory.
A country created for Muslims but not in the name of Islam. Try selling that distinction to your average Pakistani in 2012. 1947 was another country and it still found few takers.
Pakistan’s dirty little secret isn’t its treatment of non-Muslims or Shias or the sundry other groups who find themselves in the cross-hairs of the rabid and the religious. Pakistan’s dirty little secret is that everyone is a minority.
It begins with Muslim and non-Muslim: 97 per cent and the hapless and helpless three. But soon enough, the sectarian divide kicks in: Shia and Sunni. There’s another 20 per cent erased from the majority.
Next, the intra-Sunni divisions: Hanafi and the Ahl-e-Hadith. Seventy per cent of Pakistan may be Hanafi, five per cent Ahl-e-Hadith.
Then the intra-intra-Sunni divisions: Hanafis split between the growing Deobandis and the more static Barelvis.
And finally, within the 40 per cent or so that comprise Barelvis in Pakistan, there’s the different orders: the numerous Chishtis, the more conservative Naqshbandis and the microscopic Qadris.
In Pakistan, there is no majority.
There’s the terror that every minority lives in: non-Muslim from Muslim, Shia from Sunni, Barelvi from Wahabi, secular Sunni from rabid Barelvi — the future is now and it is bleak.
Some mourn the passing of Jinnah’s vision and seek solace in his Aug 11 speech. But there never was an Aug 11 version of Pakistan: it was stillborn, killed off by the religious right as
soon as it was articulated.
The 1954 Munir report has been forgotten by most, but it contains some of the most poignant remarks on Pakistan’s search for an identity and peace within.
“The Quaid-i-Azam was the founder of Pakistan and the occasion on which he thus spoke [on Aug 11, 1947] was the first landmark in the history of Pakistan. The speech was intended both for his own people including non-Muslims and the world, and its object was to define as clearly as possible the ideal to the attainment of which the new State was to devote all its energies….
“We asked the ulema whether this conception of a state was acceptable to them and everyone of them replied in an unhesitating negative, including the Ahrar and erstwhile Congressites with whom before the Partition this conception was almost a part of their faith. If Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi’s evidence correctly represents the view of Jamaat-i-Islami,
a state based on this idea is the creature of the devil, and he is confirmed in this by several writings of his chief, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the founder of the Jamaat.”
But if the ulema hated Aug 11, surely they loved the Objectives Resolution, the death knell of a pluralistic and tolerant Pakistan that followed a year and a half later?
Not quite. Again from the Munir report:
“The Quaid-i-Azam’s conception of a modern national state, it is alleged, became obsolete with the passing of the Objectives Resolution on 12th March 1949; but it has been freely admitted that this Resolution, though grandiloquent in words, phrases and clauses, is nothing but a hoax and that not only does it not contain even a semblance of the embryo of an Islamic State but its provisions, particularly those relating to fundamental rights, are directly opposed to the principles of an Islamic State.”
The Objectives Resolution denounced as a hoax? To stand on a street and claim that in the Pakistan of today would be to invite a lynching. And yet, that’s exactly what the ulema of the 1950s said, on the record, in full view of the public and history.
Confused? You should be.
The contortions and convolutions of the religious right in Pakistan are enough to make the head spin. But that’s not really where the story of how Pakistan has arrived at the miserable place it has is located.
The religious right and its more rabid cousins have come to dominate Pakistan not because they are more coherent, united and organised.They have come to dominate Pakistan because theirs is the only discourse being peddled.
You fear for the 11-year-old girl accused of blasphemy, you weep for the dead Shias of Babuser Top, you blanch at the relentless persecution of Ahmadis, you shiver at the thought of life as a Hazara in Balochistan — but in all of it, you know there’s little that can be done.
A declining state unable to protect its most precious assets; a social contract between society and state that was never quite signed; dark forces long unleashed in society that have never really been challenged — who can stand up and how?
A general speaks out, a police chief stands up, a politician denounces intolerance, a preacher reaches out to other denominations, a television deity urges introspection — if any of that and all of that were to happen now, today, would it really help recover the vast spaces afforded the religious right and their monstrous counterparts since the birth of the experiment
we call Pakistan?
The future is now. The future is theirs. The future belongs to the right.
You and I, we’re just living here on their sufferance.
The writer is a member of staff.
cyril.a@gmail.com
http://dawn.com/2012/08/26/a-country-lost/
Saroop Ijaz
“The word Fascism,” Orwell wrote, “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” As an admission, I have been guilty in the past of using the term rather loosely and I shouldn’t have, nevertheless the term ‘Fascism’ has its use in Pakistan today. When Shias are periodically off-loaded from buses lined up and shot dead on public highways, the term ‘Fascism’ unmistakably lurks. A murderous cult with clear and public visions of a master race/sect is conducting “genocide” of one set of citizens; the term is useful in its full historical accuracy. So when those engaged in one-upmanship use terms like ‘liberal fascists’ they do not only expose their lack of knowledge of language or critical thinking faculties, infinitely significantly, they soften and make commonplace a word of the utmost condemnation and horror, similar to ‘genocide’ (which I can now claim to use with awareness in this context).
However, those having a flair for using these absurd, meaningless terms are exactly the sorts who find the emphasis on “Shia” killing and an 11-year-old Christian girl suffering from Down’s syndrome charged with blasphemy a bit too much and an attempt to detract from the “real issues”. This is nonsense of the most sinister and malicious kind. No issue is more real than murder and witch-hunt. Twenty-two Shias killed for their sectarian beliefs is not the same as the same numbered killed in a highway robbery or even by dengue fever. All loss of innocent life is to be condoled, yet not all funerals require the same mourning or outrage. Those who are being hunted and murdered in this country deserve our immediate attention and in Pakistan, there cannot be enough of it right now. Hindus are being persecuted so as to make them leave the country, the nation’s premier atomic scientist is allowed to come on television and spew hatred against the Ahmadis — this I say, with no hesitation, deserves the same if not more attention than the power crisis. The silly idea that when one speaks about an issue she ignores all others, if accepted, would make it impossible to speak on any issue.
Being a liberal or a conservative is no badge of pride. William Hazlitt in his essay on Edmund Burke wrote: “It has always been with me, a test of the sense and candour of anyone belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.” Whatever the flaws in Pakistan’s liberal community are (there are admittedly many), the opposition also falls considerably short of the Burkean ideal (with some rare exceptions). Oddly enough most people want themselves to be portrayed as the “real” liberals as if there is something inherently wrong with being a ‘conservative’ or a ‘centrist’.
The neat classifications of ideological divisions are from a different lexicon meant to cater to different times. Our challenges right now are elemental, even primitive and require more clarity. To condemn the murder of Shias, the persecution of the Christian girl and the barbaric nihilism of the suicide fanatics does not allow for shallow nuance. Silence on the issue, attempting to change the topic or worse, criminal rationalisation is not “conservative” or “anti-liberal” etc, actually it is no political thought; it is terrorist apology at best and probably complicity.
Differences on the strategy for “our” war on terror are valid and often helpful and so are the objections to drone attacks. Yet, using this and the drawing of false moral equivalences to explain or rationalise the theocratic fascist (another term that I am sure will stand the test of historical verification) assault on our society by the religious fundamentalists is malevolent and masochistic. The supposedly youthful anti-imperialist drawing inspiration from the once great Professor Noam Chomsky and the suicide bomber are in unspoken and perhaps, unknowing agreement here.
To speak against this murder and mayhem means to expose oneself to the charge of ignoring the power crisis, inflation, unemployment, Muslims in trouble in random parts of the world, in short a “government apologist”. A charge, I will gladly embrace as opposed to being a mouthpiece and a tool (even if unwittingly) of homicidal fanatics bombing our schools, hospitals and mosques.
Morality ordinarily has a very little place in political views, however, if “liberalism” is taken as per the maybe simplistic definition of its enthusiastic opponents as creating too much of a fuss over the murder of minorities, Shias and suicide bombings etc., then it becomes a question of morality and even humanity. As we progress, I am sure that we will evolve our own definition of what being ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ entails in our political and economic sphere but I hope we will never see (or perhaps, more accurately cease to see) the day when insidious justifications of murder of innocent civilians by terrorists are treated with any credibility or respectability.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 26th, 2012.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/426128/fake-liberals-and-liberal-fascists/
Ghazi Salahuddin
The issue of the migration to India by some members of the Hindu community in Sindh underlined the plight of religious minorities in Pakistan. Even more disturbing is the recurrence of sectarian violence. The Babusar Pass incident alone should serve as the decisive indictment against a society that proudly proclaims its Muslim identity. Imagine the ignominy of people being killed in cold blood because they were identified as Shias by militants, who are supposed to be on a mission. And this was just one episode in a chain of events.
Indeed, there is some evidence that the Sunni-Shia divide in Pakistan is becoming more violent and antagonistic. In some ways, it reflects the prevailing afflictions of the Muslim world and could be an extension of the treacherous politics of the Middle East. Still, Pakistan’s descent into this quagmire is becoming a virtual negation of the very idea of Pakistan. After all, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a Shia.
An article that I read on a blog this week offers valid assessments that at least I find quite astounding. It is based on the latest poll by the Pew Research Centre which has found that only half the Sunni Muslims in our country accept Shias as Muslims. Conversely, half the Sunni Muslims do not accept Shias as Muslims.
Hence, “the ethnic, sectarian, and tribal fault lines have reached such depths that the nation once founded to be the land of Muslims is now bickering over who gets to be called a Muslim”. Would those frenzied mobs who figure in protest demonstrations, particularly the ones that have a bearing on religious issues, more qualified to be called Muslims?
The survey mentioned here was part of the Pew Global Attitudes Project on the question of Sunni-Shia conflict, with the focus on Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq. The civil war raging in Syria has, of course, its sectarian dimensions. The Pew survey comprised interviews with 38,000 Muslims in 39 countries and territories.
It is interesting that according to the chart compiled by Pew, more than 80 percent of Sunnis in Afghanistan accept Shias as Muslims. For Bangladesh, this figure is more than 75 percent. But we should be concerned more about Pakistan and even if the Pew figures are to be contested, we cannot wish away the killings of Hazara Shias in Quetta and the grim situation in Gilgit-Baltistan. We have had spells of target killings of Shia doctors and lawyers in Karachi.
I have mentioned the fact that the Founder of Pakistan was Shia. This may have been incidental. More relevant is the Muslim history of South Asia. The Mughal Empire was almost a sanctuary for Sunnis of Iran and Shias from the Ottoman Empires who may have felt persecuted in their homelands. It was this tradition of sectarian harmony that was invested in the freedom movement.
In a larger context, the Mughal Empire flourished in its acceptance of the plurality of the Indian society. I would suggest that our ideologues take a look at ‘The Argumentative Indian’ by Amartya Sen. One of his main arguments is that “the most powerful defence of toleration and of the need for the state to be equidistant from different religions came from a Muslim Indian emperor, Akbar”. Alas, our ideologues do not read books and do not think.
Powerless to be born
The News
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-128348-Powerless-to-be-born
Jinnah rebranded?
Nadeem F. Paracha
A friend of mine, a Shia Muslim, often tells me an intriguing but a very telling little tale.
He is from Jhang in the Punjab province where he, as a school kid, was always a passionate participant of Shia processions.
During one Moharram day (in the late 1980s), a Shia procession he was a part of was attacked by a couple of armed young men belonging to a radical Sunni Muslim outfit.
Nothing surprising, especially in a Pakistan that began to take shape from the early 1980s onwards; and/or when the state under General Ziaul Haq actually encouraged the proliferation of violent Islamist and sectarian organisations as a way to bolster its efforts to whip up a jihadist frenzy against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan.
But my friend and some of his contemporaries were left surprised by the attack. Not because it was carried out by a sectarian outfit but because of the fact that one of the attackers was a young teenaged lad who was actually a contemporary of my friend at school.
The teen was arrested and thrown in one of the city’s lock-ups. When my friend told an empathetic teacher at the school, the teacher too was shocked and decided to visit the young militant.
Reaching the police station the concerned teacher let lose a volley of questions at the boy (in Punjabi): ‘Sohail, what have you done? Why did you attack your friends?’
The young militant was unmoved: ‘What kind of question is that? We all know they (the Shias) are kafir (infidels)!’
Taken aback by the sudden transformation of the young boy, the teacher remarked that the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, too wasn’t a Sunni.
‘What are you saying, sir?’ The young boy shot back. ‘Jinnah wasn’t the founder of Pakistan. Quaid-e-Azam was. And Quaid-e-Azam was Sunni.’
This is a fascinating little tale that is otherwise big on explaining the social and political outcome of the Pakistani state’s long-winded project to construct and impose a rather xenophobic model of faith that could be moulded and easily used to legitimise the hegemony of the religious, political, economic and military elites that make-up the country’s figurative establishment.
The fact that the Pakistani state used Orwellian tactics to twist and turn historical facts to construct a mythical socio-political narrative is now in the open.
Using the media and school textbooks, the state went on a rampage, especially after the loss of the former East Pakistan in 1971. A highly suspicious, xenophobic and aggressive narrative about Pakistan’s ideology, history and society was streamlined that eventually mutated into a warped worldview now found across the society.
One can rightly blame men like Z. A. Bhutto and more specifically, General Zia, for such a state of affairs. But those who came before these two weren’t all that truthful either. This tradition’s earliest roots actually lie in one of the first insistences of Orwellian manipulation of faith and nationalism way back in 1948.
Soon after the creation of Pakistan, Jinnah gave his famous speech to the Constituent Assembly in which he insisted that in Pakistan minorities were free to follow their faiths and that the Pakistani state had nothing to do with religion.
This speech did not go down well with that section of the Muslim League elite that had tasted the power of using religion as a political tool during the Pakistan Movement.
Soon after Jinnah’s speech, an attempt was made by a number of Muslim League leaders to censor the draft of the speech that was to be published in the newspapers.
It was only when the then editor of Dawn, Altaf Hussain, threatened to take the issue directly to Jinnah that the League leaders relented.
No wonder then, soon after Jinnah’s death in 1948, the League’s top leadership at once departed from the secular contents of Jinnah’s speech and, in fact, flipped it on its head by drafting the 1949 Objectives Resolution that in the future became the basis of Bhutto’s populist Islamic experiments and Zia’s Machiavellian Islamist demagoguery.
Re-imagining Jinnah and propagating him as seen from the eyes of the above-mentioned religious and political elite has been a vital tool for the establishment.
Sometimes this dastardly project has been stretched to absurd lengths just so Jinnah’s credentials of being a secular Muslim nationalist can be undermined.
For example, in July 1977 when Zia toppled the Bhutto regime, he almost immediately got down to the business of radically transforming the ideological complexion of Pakistan, changing it from being a ‘democratic Muslim majority state’ into peddling it as a state that was supposedly conceived as a theocratic entity.
Zia and his ideological partners, mainly the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), hit a brick wall when they couldn’t endorse their revisionist narrative with any of the speeches of Jinnah.
They came up with nothing, until one fine day in early 1983 when after still failing to get a worthwhile endorsement from Jinnah for Zia’s ‘Islamic’ narrative, his Ministry of Information enthusiastically announced the sudden ‘discovery’ of Jinnah’s personal diary.
Excited, Zia held a press conference in which he claimed that in the newly discovered ‘personal diary of the founder’, Jinnah had spoken about having a ‘powerful Head of State (read: dictator),’ and ‘the dangers of parliamentary democracy.’ Then he conveniently concluding Jinnah’s views being very close to having an ‘Islamic system of government’.
The Urdu press gave lavish coverage to the event, as the state-owned PTV and Radio Pakistan broadcasted discussions with ‘scholars’ on this breathtaking discovery.
But, alas, the euphoria around this farce was thankfully short-lived. Two of Jinnah’s close associates, Mumtaz Daultana and K. H. Khurshid, rubbished Zia’s claims saying there was never such a diary.After this, a group of senior intellectuals from the Quaid-e-Azam Academy also denied that such a diary ever existed in the Academy’s archives (from where Zia had claimed the diary had emerged).
Strangely once his claims were trashed, not only did Zia never mention anything about the supposed diary ever again, a number of Urdu newspapers that had splashed the drastic discovery went completely quiet as well.
But for the future generations that have produced confused kids like Sohail, Zia’s claims became a documented utterance, whereas Daultana and Khurshid’s refutations slid down becoming nothing more than mere footnotes.
No wonder the young lad in Jhang thought Jinnah and Quaid-e-Azam were actually two separate men.
http://dawn.com/2012/08/26/smokers-corner-jinnah-rebranded/
Nadeem F Paracha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! a liberal faccist. Islamisation was never been a problem. Problem was not brought about by objective revolution. Zia didnt bring islam he brought extemism he brought zionist agenda of Divide and Rule. If islam would have been problem iran would never had been able to develop such an expanded industry on its own. None of other islamic country has developed. Islam wants social justice. Islam wants chastity and condemn nudeness. All are danger, whethet liberal extremism or relegious etremism
intolerance among the masses has turned the face of our country. it is high time to take concrete and brave steps to halt these fearless, brainless, blood sucking perverts.
ironically, majority of public arent even bothered abt the fact that this intolerance has penetrated into our life styles and thinking patterns. we need to educated people more and more abt the historic facts n today’s demographics else this war within will never end.
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