Read the dark pages from the Recent History of Pakistan when Jamat-e-Islami and Mawdudi’s Perverted Breed “Prof Ghafoor and Professor Khursheed were in General Zia’s Martial Law Cabinet: 2nd Presidential Cabinet under President/CMLA General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
from 23-8-1978 to 21-4-1979

1 – Professor Ghafoor Ahmad – Minister for Production and Industries.

2 – Professor Khurshid Ahmad – Statistics, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission

You may find many names in the post/link below who also served in General Musharraf’s Martial Law. High Treason Cases against Pakistani Military Dictators & Collaborators/Abettors http://chagataikhan.blogspot.com/2009/08/high-treason-cases-against-pakistani.html

Ayub’s secularism as part of the military culture of British Indian Army was like an open book without any fine print. Even the prefix Islamic attaching to the Republic of Pakistan was dropped until restored under the writ of superior judiciary.

That continued to be the case until the fateful day of 1965 when India attacked Pakistan along the international border, with Lahore as its principal target. Even in his first address to the nation within hours of the Indian invasion, Ayub went on to recite the ‘Kalama-i-Tayyaba’ in a stirring, emotion-choked voice.

His subsequent meeting with religious parties – mainly the Jamaat-i-Islami under Maulana ‘Abul ‘Ala Maududi – marked the beginning of the military-mullah nexus. Yahya would not have much to do with things spiritual until the induction of retired Maj.-Gen. Sher Ali Khan into his cabinet as minister in-charge of information and national affairs. He initiated Yahya into ideological lore and saddled him with the mission of protecting the ‘ideology of Pakistan and the glory of Islam’.

Yahya’s intelligence chief, Major-(later Lieut.) Gen. Muhammad Akbar Khan made no secret of his close liaison with the Jamaat-i-Islami especially in respect of its pro-active role in East Pakistan. The Jamaat was to go even to the extent of certifying Yahya’s draft constitution as Islamic. The draft was authored by Justice A.R. Cornelius, Yahya’s law minister. As for Zia, he embarked on his Islamization programme even as he assumed his army command.

Mullah Military Alliance [1999-2007] – 1

Article below was compiled during 2002/2003 and it would clear many doubts regarding Political Mullahs of Pakistan.

Syed Abul Ala Maududi or no Syed Abul Ala Maududi, the Jamat-e-Islami is a Fitnah (Anarchy) [pure and simple] they were Fitnah since the time they came into being. The interview of Maudoodi’s son you thankfully posted 2 weeks ago depicts that Maudoodi’s son is still not ashamed of his Late Father’s Extra Curricular Activities [bad mouthing Jinnah, bad mouthing Pakistan saying that to call it a Pakistan is tantamount to call Prostitute a chaste lady [comparing Pakistan with Randi while Maudoodi and Jamat-e-Islami themselves prospered while living in Randi Khana (not my words they themselves have said it), Al-Shams and Al-Badar Terrorist groups at the behest of General Yahya Khan in Former East Pakistan to carry out the “good work” on behalf of Pakistani Military Establishment, Bad mouthing the Prophets [PBUT] and Companions [May Allah be pleased with them] of the Prophet Mohammad [PBUH] in his Quran’s exegesis, supporting General Yahyah PCO and terming it Islamic too, creating anarchy in every Civilian Government 1971-1977, 1988- 12 Oct 1999 [resulting in the deaths of innocent people]. Qazi Hussain Ahmed had shamefully declared Nawaz Sharif a Security Risk before 12 Oct 1999 and with similar brazen shamelessness he appeared with this Rampant “KHARJI” Jamaat Islaami to receive the same Nawaz Sharif at Rawalpindi Airport. Now they are opposing General Musharraf for whom Jamat-e-Islami extended their support in the shape of LFO AND 17TH CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

“Kuch humari khabar nahin aati Martay hain aarzo mein marne ki,

Maut aati hai par nahin aati kaaba kis munh se jaoge ‘Ghalib’, sharm tumko magar nahi aati”

If Gen Musharraf is calling the shots, which is a fact; the question is who had brought him to this position. All parties, which were participating in the movement against then prime minister Mian Nawaz Sharif, can’t absolve themselves of the responsibility. In 1999, their struggle against the
PML-N government was at its peak. They were branding Mr Sharif as a security risk and demanding the constitutional institutions play their role. At a time when Mian Nawaz Sharif enjoyed a two-thirds majority in the house and the president was his handpicked man no more than a figurehead, there was no constitutional way to remove him. And what opposition parties, some of which are now allies of the PMl-N in the ARD, were demanding clearly amounted to seeking military intervention. Some leaders said this on many an occasion that anybody succeeding Mr Sharif would be better than him. Unfortunately, Mr Sharif took a bad decision of sacking the army chief, which provided the institution an opportunity to take over. Whatever the
views of various opposition parties, now it will take them quite some time to get rid of the “unwanted blanket”. They have to blame themselves for the situation the country has been passing through since October 1999. Although MMA Secretary-General Maulana Fazlur Rehman is opposition leader in the National Assembly, it is not clear whether MMA belongs to the opposition or is an ally of the ruling party, it shares government with PML-Q in Baluchistan.
The MMA’s credibility has been dented after the elections and the electorate doesn’t believe that the religious alliance is part of the opposition. Its role in the adoption of the 17th Amendment strengthened suspicions that it was out to the help the rulers. The MMA repeatedly said that it did not accept the LFO as part of the Constitution, but ultimately changed its point of view. In an agreement with the ruling party, the MMA suggested a way for Gen Musharraf to legitimize his presidency. But when he followed the course, the MMA did not vote for him. There was a provision in the MMA-PML agreement that there “shall” be a National Security Council, which will be set up under an act of parliament. But when the enactment was introduced, the MMA refused to support it. Another contradiction in its attitude came to be seen when Maulana Fazlur
Rehman refused to attend the NSC meeting under the chairmanship of the very general the MMA had helped become legitimate president. The argument that the MMA will not like to participate in a meeting being presided over by a man in uniform holds no water. Gen Musharraf presides over the meeting as president, not the COAS, and thus there was no justification for MMA secretary-general to stay away.

Abstention could have been justifiable in case Gen Musharraf doesn’t take off his military uniform by the end of the year. That the prime minister should head the NSC is an argument, which carries no weight. What difference will it make if a prime minister – who feels proud to be called president’s PSO — heads such a body. As long as people in uniform are there in the NSC, their opinion will prevail, no mater whether the body is headed by the president, the prime minister or anybody else. Whether the MMA violated its agreement with the PML-Q and whether it is binding on Gen Musharraf to step down as army chief by Dec 31, an assumption on which MMA based its hope that Musharraf would step down as COAS why they fail to remember that a Military Dictator much worse than Musharraf i.e. General Ziaul Haq blatantly and shamelessly lied after reciting Quran on the Election Promise in 90 days. Someone had said somewhere that ‘assumption is the mother of all mess up’.

The MMA’s boycott of the inaugural session of the National Security Council remains a sort of a ‘riddle inside an enigma’. How would the MMA be able to reconcile its support of the passage of the controversial (and basically undemocratic) Legal Framework Order (17th Amendment) with its boycott of the NSC – an integral part and off-shoot of the LFO? Regardless of polemics, the MMA marshalled its parliamentary vote for the LFO as an expedient pro-democracy measure, irrespective of the fact that the LFO tended to violate both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. The MMA’s Supreme Council, in no uncertain terms, declared its resolve to ‘scrap’ the NSC when it ‘obtains a simple majority in the house’. The inaugural session of the NSC (June 24) was off to an unhappy and not a little ill-tempered start. Chairing the session, the president was livid over the absence of the leader of the opposition, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, and NWFP Chief Minister Akram Durrani.

He took particular note of the latter absenting himself as a government functionary – a somewhat strange observation to make about an elected public leader with a party mandate of his own. The president spoke spiritedly and at some length on the rationale and functions of the NSC. Prior to the NSC, he said, there was no forum where ‘key functionaries’ including the opposition, provincial heads and armed forces chiefs could debate issues of national importance and ‘exercise checks on each other and lend support to each other’. Of course, the defence committee of the cabinet (DCC) was always there, but hardly as a body as comprehensive as the NSC. The question now is: what other body could be either more comprehensive and competent to discuss and resolve all issues of national importance than an elected parliament? Even in the context of a best-case scenario, it won’t be easy to rule out a perpetually difficult relationship between parliament and the NSC.

MULLAH’S ROMANCE WITH MILITARY DICTATORS:

How can a popularly elected parliament through a joint session at all allow an elected president to stay in his military uniform as army chief even for a short period of time? Ayub, Yahya and Zia all forged devices like LFOs and ‘Continuance in Force’ laws to legitimize their regimes by an extra-parliamentary executive fiat. Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq had their parliaments indemnify their constitutional violations to close the chapter of their coups. Only Yahya ended with his boots around his neck as a vanquished general. Pliant and muted through Yahya’s disastrous reign, the superior judiciary came into action only after his fall to brand him a ‘usurper’. Never before, however, it fell to the sad lot of an elected parliament to vote for an army chief to combine in his person the brass and the bowler hat even as an expedient move. Political pragmatism is not the same as party or individual opportunism. While the pragmatist knows where to stop, the opportunist fails to resist the fatal attraction of yet another chance, yet another pasture new around the corner. The MMA’s supreme council must ask itself whether or not by supporting the passage of the LFO they did indeed commit a terminal error of judgement. And whether they did not sacrifice their reputedly principled party politics at the altar of expediency and opportunism.

Worse still, they did so at the cost of the united front they had forged with such mainstream parties as the PPP and the Muslim League-N. A major compromise was made with Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s regime, now invoking the NSC as the main plank of its future governance. If such were to be the end of the military-mullah alliance, it should not be difficult to see who is the loser. The nexus has been a part of our history, either marginally as under Ayub Khan or covertly as under Yahya Khan or naked and deeply written into the system as under Ziaul Haq. Ayub’s secularism as part of the military culture of British Indian Army was like an open book without any fine print. Even the prefix Islamic attaching to the Republic of Pakistan was dropped until restored under the writ of superior judiciary. That continued to be the case until the fateful day of 1965 when India attacked Pakistan along the international border, with Lahore as its principal target. Even in his first address to the nation within hours of the Indian invasion, Ayub went on to recite the ‘Kalama-i-Tayyaba’ in a stirring, emotion-choked voice.

His subsequent meeting with religious parties – mainly the Jamaat-i-Islami under Maulana ‘Abul ‘Ala Maududi – marked the beginning of the military-mullah nexus. Yahya would not have much to do with things spiritual until the induction of retired Maj.-Gen. Sher Ali Khan into his cabinet as minister in-charge of information and national affairs. He initiated Yahya into ideological lore and saddled him with the mission of protecting the ‘ideology of Pakistan and the glory of Islam’. Yahya’s intelligence chief, Major-(later Lieut.) Gen. Muhammad Akbar Khan made no secret of his close liaison with the Jamaat-i-Islami especially in respect of its pro-active role in East Pakistan. The Jamaat was to go even to the extent of certifying Yahya’s draft constitution as Islamic. The draft was authored by Justice A.R. Cornelius, Yahya’s law minister. As for Zia, he embarked on his Islamization programme even as he assumed his army command. He gave the army the triple motto of ‘Iman, Taqwa, Jihad fi Sibil Lillah’. Subsequently, as president, he introduced the Hudood Ordinance and collaborated with the Americans in projecting the Soviet-Afghan war as a jihad. The country continues to pay the bitter wages of Zia’s jihad syndrome. Gen Musharraf continued to recognize the Taliban’s radical Islamic regime as a legacy of the Nawaz Sharif period and extend muted support to the Kashmiri mujahideen until 9/11. That was the turning point and the defining moment for the future shape of relations between a para-secular government on the one hand and jihad-oriented, religious groups on the other. Musharraf relented on his temporal stance vis-a-vis the religious group under the pressure of political necessity during the general election of October 2002. He placed the mullahs at par with university graduates to qualify for membership of his ‘graduate’ assembly. The mullahs returned with strength sufficient to form coalition governments in the NWFP and Balochistan. Once in power they gradually and subtly clanged their religion-based stance into realpolitik where it suited their interest. They supported the LFO to extract from Musharraf the promise that he would shed his uniform by the end of 2004. However, when it came to endorsing
the NSC by an act of parliament, they abstained from voting.

GENERAL ELECTIONS 2002:

In a democratic society elections are barometer of National Aspirations and priority of the people in their Domestic and International Relations. Generally it is expected that the mandate given by the people will be followed. The October 10 Elections though manipulated by the regime sprang a surprise with the emergence of the Religio-Political Parties with a sizeable majority. No one had anticipated that the MMA would secure so many numbers of seats. Spin-Doctors and urban-based analyst mostly influenced by the Western Media were proved wrong when the results were announced. Some analysts allege that perhaps the Intelligence Agencies clandestinely helped the Religio-Political Alliance to stun the world but the voting pattern shows that the support for MMA was an emphatic reflection of the anger of the people towards the American led Western policies towards Afghanistan in particular and the Muslim countries in general. The
emergence of MMA had also embarrassed the Musharraf regime, which had given unconditional support to the US policies against the Talibans in Afghanistan. But at the same time the Pro-regime Spin-Doctors try to portray the results of elections as the political threat to the Western Interest as if the Musharraf was removed from the seat. The rise of MMA was interpreted a possible problem for Pakistan in dealing with donor agencies i.e. IMF/WORLD BANK/ADB and other Western countries as well because of their concern about fundamentalist type of policies/program and rise of religious parties in Muslim World, it is strange though that the World Bank has hailed the provincial budget of NWFP where MMA is ruling the roost. Most of the MMA component parties were in the forefront of supporting Taliban and condemning the US bombing and US led Western policies in Afghanistan and also American Intervention through FBI within Pakistan.

The security environment owing to situation in Afghanistan where the Indians have penetrated in through training the Police Force and other Fighting Arms any upheaval in the NWFP and Baluchistan would be an invitation to those lobbies which had been in the yesteryears advocating Pashtoonistan and Greater Baluchistan which would ultimately end up in Civil War. The rise of Religious Parties in Turkey, the strong presence of an “hard nut to crack” Clergy in Iran, and the mounting resentment of the Saudi intellectuals and religious people (who are also against Royal Saudis) in the Arab World should guide our policy makers to not to ignore the sentiments of the people who have thrown MMA in the power corridors. An adjustment in the Foreign Policy is imperative to reflect the aspirations of the people vis-à-vis the American Policy and the donor agencies.

BACKGROUND, STRUCTURE, MANIFESTO, RISE, DISADVANTAGES AND REGIONAL INFLUENCE OF MULLAHS IN PAKISTAN:

The MMA comprises six (now five) Islamic political parties that have sidelined their religious-sectarian differences, at least temporarily, to work together for pursuing a shared political agenda. These include the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rahman (JUI-F), the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Samiul Haq (JUI-S), the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) led by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan of Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani (JUP-N), and the Tehrik-i-Jafria Pakistan (TJP) headed by Maulana Syed Sajid Naqvi. The alliance has, on top of the contradiction in its ideology, failed miserably to include its manifestoes any vision of the Economy, Education, Health, other social and political problems. The only consensus with in the alliance, it seems, is not to confront the Military but the Military Government led by Musharraf
and his cabinet. The army is still close to the hearts of the Rightwing groups, that’s the opinion which suggests that the Pro-JI lobby within the establishment has worked miracle for the MMA victory and unity of the most diversified sects under banner and one leader is to stop and to counter PML-N and PPP’s rising popularity and the Establishment is much worried from the much more vicious anti-establishment stance of the PPP/PML-N than MMA.

So this lobby played the Anti-American slogans for MMA in Elections and it did work. These religious parties have a history of cooperation with the Military and US Establishment {Circa 1971in East Pakistan by the JI, 1977 till 11 Sept 2001 anti Bhutto campaign, Pro Zia stance during Afghan War and later Kashmir insurgency and Taliban Affairs}, so much so Qazi complained to the Musharraf about the army’s treatment of its erstwhile allies, therefore they cannot afford to antagonize the army and vice versa due to Greater American Games in Kashmir, Nepal for China through these Religious Parties. The other big reason of this unlikely unity were the details of Corruption Cases against many Islamic Leaders {Mehrangate and during the 1993-1996 PPP Government} which are with the Security Agencies of Pakistan. Some analyst still believe that the MMA victory which has shaken the Military Establishment to its very root was not expecting this as there are reports that some “agencies” had popped up the MMA to divide the vote of PPP and PML-N and not to give noticeable and crucial number of seats to the MMA. The govt. did support the component parties in MMA after 12 Oct 1999 Coup as the Military Govt. never banned the rallies of these parties as compare to the complete ban on Secular Political Parties. The worst was the surety, which reportedly Musharraf gave to the senior US officials before polls that religious parties wont get more than 5% vote.The two Pro-Taliban factions of the JUI are the followers of the Deoband School and have a strong following in the Pakhtoon areas of the NWFP and Balochistan. Both had strong links with the Taliban movement and supported their cause. The JI does not limit itself to a particular school of Islamic fiqh but it has been a supporter of the Taliban and Jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

The JUP (N) is the follower of the Barelvi school which disagrees with the other two schools on a number of issues and it is also facing an adversary in Sindh in the shape of rabidly maniac Sunni Tehreek . The JUP was not involved with the Taliban or the insurgency in Kashmir. The TJP follows the Jafria (Shia) fiqh and has renamed itself as Islami Tehreek-e-Pakistan since TJP has been declared outlawed by the authorities and it also stayed away from Afghanistan and Kashmir, they were rather bitterly against Deobandis Talibans. Despite sectarian-denominat ional differences, they decided to work together to advocate an Islamic alternative to the existing politico-economic arrangements, underlining the supremacy of the Quran and the Sunnah. Though they emphasized supremacy of “Allah” in their election campaign, Pakhtoon ethnicity influenced their electoral performance. The two factions of the JUI enjoyed support mainly amongst the Pakhtoons (Pashtun) in the NWFP and Balochistan. Their electoral performance in these areas is mainly responsible for the MMA’s electoral triumph. The JI chief is also a Pakhtoon but that party’s support cuts across denominational differences and ethnicities.

However, the JI is not in a position to pull through an electoral triumph all by itself. The support base of the JUP(N) is limited to the followers of its leader in Sindh and Punjab. The TJP does not have any known strongholds and it played only a symbolic role in the MMA campaigning by showing unity across the sectarian divide. The MMA electioneering in the NWFP and Balochistan was at two levels. At one level, its leaders and candidates focused on constituency- specific issues. Like elsewhere in Pakistan, they talked about improvement of civic amenities, construction and repair of roads and streets and development work for improving the quality of life for the ordinary folks. They promised to work for increasing job opportunities, schooling for
children and ending corruption in government.

They also vowed to make the administration more responsive to the needs of the people. The second level of electioneering emphasized broader themes with strong ideological overtones. This included a sharp critique of Pakistan’s socio-political and economic order and projection of an Islamic alternative. They talked of the primacy of the Quran and the Sunnah and demanded the restructuring of the socio-political and economic order on the basis of Islamic principles. However, they did not offer any detailed plan of the Islamic order they wanted to introduce. No specific solutions were offered for any constitutional, administrative, economic or legal problem. America figured prominently in their election campaigning. The major focus was the US military operation in Afghanistan and its consequences for Pakhtoons on both sides of the Durand Line. The JUI was the major supporter of the Taliban and its leaders launched street agitation after the US began air raids in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. This effort fizzled out because other political forces did not join in.
Some of the JUI and JI leaders were arrested and placed under “house arrest” for a couple of months. Anti-American sentiments intensified when dead and injured Pakistani Pakhtoons or their Afghan relatives were brought to the NWFP and Balochistan. The arrest and killing of Taliban armed personnel by the Northern Alliance after the fall of Kabul perturbed them the most because a good number of them were Pakistani volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the Taliban. Some Pakistanis are still in detention in Afghanistan and at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The neglect of the reconstruction of post-Taliban Afghanistan by the US convinced them that Washington was interested mainly in dislodging the Taliban and Al Qaeda and that it had no sympathy for ordinary people who suffered a lot in the American air and ground operations. Another factor that contributed to anti-American sentiments was the rise of the Northern Alliance with American support, which was blamed for deaths of a large number of the Taliban and other Pakhtoon prisoners in its custody. The over-representation of the Northern Alliance in the present-day Afghanistan government is another Pakhtoon grievance. All these factors strengthened anti-American sentiments which were widely shared in the NWFP and Balochistan. The MMA understood the ground realities in the two provinces and successfully articulated anti-America sentiments amongst the Pakhtoons there. Most Pakhtoon secularists and nationalists lost badly in both provinces because they had either supported American action in Afghanistan or stayed neutral on this. Commenting on the extremely poor performance of the ANP, a leader of MMA remarked that they lost for siding with the aggressor – the US.
It is interesting to note that foreign policy issues, including US action in Afghanistan, did not figure prominently in Punjab and Sindh. Some candidates did make comments on security and foreign policy issues but the election campaign focused primarily on constituency- related issues like how far the candidate would work for the welfare of the people and improve civic amenities for the community. The main reason was that these two provinces were not directly affected by American military operations in Afghanistan or by the predicament of the Afghans in the post-Taliban Afghanistan. The third important element of Pakistan politics, the Army, figured in the election campaign of the MMA. The military regime of General Pervez Musharraf was subjected to sharp criticism for “betraying” the Taliban and for facilitating American military operations in Afghanistan. The military regime was also criticized for letting American military and FBI personnel function in Pakistan.

Their resentment against the military government made them vocal champions of democracy and participatory governance. They talked of constitutionalism, fair and free elections, and return of military to the barracks. Rejecting the amendments made by the military government in the 1973 Constitution, they demanded its restoration minus these amendments. They highlighted their electoral performance to distinguish themselves from the Taliban, arguing that they appeared on the political scene though the ballots, not by the bullet, and therefore, they believed in dialogue and persuasion for implementation of their political agenda, including Islamization of the polity. Though the three leading factors of Pakistani politics – Allah, America, and the Army – promoted unity amongst the MMA partners and facilitated their electoral triumph, these factors might undermine internal cohesion and good governance after the MMA assumes power in the NWFP and Balochistan. The MMA will have to tone down its rhetoric on Islamization and relations with the US and adopt a down-to-earth approach towards domestic affairs, especially the army, and foreign policy. They may also have to accommodate some non-MMA elements for smooth functioning of their governments. This is likely to force them to dilute their domestic agenda. A failure to do so may entangle them in so many political controversies and confrontations that they will find it difficult to pursue their domestic and foreign policy agendas. Furthermore these religious parties had shown a dismal performance in 1997 election in particular and all the other elections which are held in Pakistan since 1947 was also not good.
They also failed miserably to counter US led campaign against Afghanistan in Pakistan as these parties could not stir the people against the govt. as one was expecting but the continued US bombing on Afghanistan, Camp X ray in Guantanamobay Cuba and very biased and extremely prejudiced treatment of the West vis-à-vis Muslim Community finally culminated in the landslide victory of MMA in NWFP and Baluchistan in particular and a visible presence and growing influence in other provinces as well. The rumor has it that a lobby within the Establishment has achieved this to upset the Musharraf Regime. The main theme on which the MMA fought the elections was Anti-US rhetoric, and surprisingly after the August meeting with Musharraf of Qazi and Noorani, the anti Musharraf rhetoric also vanished and now the slogan is supremacy of the Parliament. If the US attacks Iraq {which it already has though not fully} in near future then these parties which have an organized cadre of workers and funds to run an effective campaign and anti-US rhetoric to change the atmosphere then it will be a big problem for the govt. which is already in hot water due to minute majority and charges of pre-poll rigging, during poll rigging by EU, PPP, PML-N and even the MMA and above all forward blocs and horse trading galore. Some cynics also said that the Military Establishment had decided after 9/11 to have these Islamists inside the system rather than outside where they cant be approached and corrupted and that’s why there was so much efforts by National Alliance, PML-Q, and other proxies of the establishment but too much success of MMA went up it heads, maybe there are some Pashtoon elements in Establishment who wanted to provide solace to the disgruntled Pashtoon elements who are angry with Karzai so they adopted a far fetch plan to blackmail or take even Americans for a ride by cobble together a diversified alliance like MMA.
There are still some Adventists in the govt. who think that Hikmatyar can topple Karzai and MMA has strong links with the old guards. If Musharraf let the MMA allows forming the NWFP and Baluchistan govt. then it would be a big pain in the neck of the Govt as USA operations are mostly concentrated in these two provinces. Ultimately any such govt. in both of these provinces would be sympathetic towards absconder Taliban or may be even Al-Qaeda. The only situation which now is visible would be an all out effort to break the MMA as happened in the Past by igniting any controversial religious issue in the Parliament which obviously wont be acceptable to
this diversified clan called MMA. To be on warpath against the Central Govt. the would be Provincial Govts. of MMA in both the provinces would take some cosmetic measures to implement its agenda and try to satisfy its voters, like Friday as weekly holiday , doing away with co-education, put a halt to obscenity in the print and electronic media and reform interest based banking. The implementation of some of the measures would inevitably trigger protests and alarm the Civil and Military establishments and culminate in Governor Rule. The MMA is also not in a very easy position as JI, and JUP on Shia Issues are not as rigid as their counterpart JUI factions are so either they would have to make some compromises which will ultimately end up in damaged reputation or have to quit the would be provincial govts. to avoid loosing the support of the voters who want results now.
Cont/P—2

How Pakistani Mullahs Connived with Military Regime

Part 3:

“VIEWS OF THE WESTERN THINK TANKS”

Former Director General (DG) of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General (Retd) Hameed Gul’s anti-American rhetoric in post-retirement phase makes headlines off and on in national news media. It is interesting that when he was DGISI, US ambassador attended the meetings of Afghan Cell of Benazir government. In fact the major decision of Jalalabad offensive in 1989 was made in one of those fateful meetings. To date there has been no evidence (no statement by any other participants of those meetings or by General Hameed Gul himself) that Mr. Gul made any objection to the presence of US ambassador in these meetings, which had wide ranging impact on national security. It is probable that Mr. Gul was at that time a top contender for the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) race, therefore he didn’t wanted to be on the wrong side of the civil government. When he was sacked, then he found the gospel truth that US was not sincere.Another example is of former Chief of Afghan Cell of ISI, Brigadier (Retd) Muhammad Yusuf. For five long years, he was a major participant in a joint CIA-ISI venture of unprecedented scale in Afghanistan.

During this time period, he worked with several different levels US officials and visited CIA headquarters in Langley. In his post-retirement memoirs, he tried his best to distance himself from the Americans. His statements like, ‘Relations between the CIA and ourselves were always strained’, ‘I resorted to trying to avoid contact with the local CIA staff’, ‘I never visited the US embassy’ and vehement denial of any direct contact between CIA and Mujahideen shows his uncomfortability of being seen as close with the Americans.

“Pakistan’s former foreign minister Agha Shahi in a conversation with Robert Wirsing said that in 1981 during negotiations with US, he gave a talk to a group of Pakistani generals on the objectives of Pakistan’s policy toward US. He stressed the importance of non-alignment and avoidance of over dependence on superpowers. Few days later one of the generals who attended Shahi’s briefing met him and told him that Americans should be given bases in return for the aid.

“General Zia and DGISI Akhtar Abdur Rahman had very cordial relations with CIA director William Casey. To offset that uncomfortable closeness with Americans, Zia and Akhtar were portrayed as holy warriors of Islam and modern day Saladins. According to one close associate of Akhtar, ‘They (Casey and Akhtar) worked together in harmony, and in an atmosphere of mutual trust’. The most interesting remarks about the death of CIA Director, William Casey were made by Brigadier Yusuf. He states that, “It was a great blow to the Jehad when Casey died”. He did not elaborate whether by this efinition one should count Casey as Shaheed (warrior who dies in battle in the cause of Islam). It will quite be amusing for Americans to know that one of their former CIA director is actually a martyr of Islam.”

AFGHAN WAR WHICH MADE MULLAHS A SUCCESS; A BACKGROUND:

In December 1979, when Soviet troops rolled in Afghanistan, President Carter unveiled his doctrine.The salient features of his doctrine included assembly of a Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), increased naval presence on Indian Ocean, a collective security framework in the region and a commitment to the defence of Pakistan by transfer of significant amount of weapons and dollars. Pakistan was under the military rule of General Zia. Zia shrewdly played his cards knowing that Carter was on his way out and he may get a better deal from the incoming Reagan, which proved right. Military again making all vital decisions of national security did not have the strategic vision. Zia in an interview taunted the Americans stating that, When you lost in Vietnam, you went home and cried. When the Soviets got kicked out of Egypt, they decided to go after Libya… Is America still the leader of the free world? In what respect? I hope it will soon restore its countervailing role, abandoned after Vietnam Rhetoric was the same as his predecessor martial ruler Ayub had used about two decades ago.

Ayub had said in 1960, The English-speaking world ought to feel a special responsibility to assist Pakistan in attaining a reasonable posture of advancement. It is not just a claim. It is in fact the dictate of history. Both military rulers with their peculiar vulnerability were trying to get a short-term benefit of military assistance totally oblivious to the long-term consequences. The obsession of getting at least one state of the art piece of military equipment for psychological boost and to use as a symbol of US commitment in Pakistan to India took precedence over more complex and tricky issues. If F-16 fighter jets were asked in 80s as a price of Pakistani cooperation, in 1959, supersonic F-104 fighters were considered down payment for Badaber air force facility. In 1985 Pakistan gave its shopping list of military equipment. Pakistan’s priority must be to develop the necessary infrastructure in Balochistan and N.W.F.P…Together with raising an additional eight to ten divisions and the replacement of its obsolescent aircraft and tanks.32 One is reminded of the earlier shopping lists of Ayub Khan in 50s. In the beginning, Zia tried to get some legally binding agreement from US regarding Pakistani security but quickly abandoned the idea and settled for military aid only. US ambassador Arthur Hummel knowing the level of Pakistani leadership had firmly stood his ground. He later recalled, while they pushed the idea of a commitment on India and NATO type treaty, they knew very well they wouldnt get anything like that. They were genuinely concerned about provoking the Russians.

Zia’s Foreign Minister Agha Shahi was aware of the limitations of US-Pakistan understanding but some of Zia’s hawkish generals had different views. They were not averse to the idea of providing bases to US.

They were probably thinking that such direct commitment might prevent sudden abandonment of Pakistan at the time of serious crisis of national security. They had not learned from the experience of Badaber. In addition, they have not come to grips with the changed international defence scenario. The advanced satellite technology had made the aerial surveillance obsolete. Later as Vietnam and Somalia experience has shown that the decision of engagement and disengagement of US troops in any conflict area will be based on US national interest and not the interest of the client state. The biggest advantage, which Pakistan got during the relationship with US during the 80s, was effective and fast track acquisition of nuclear technology. The Reagan’s strong anti-Soviet policy overrode the concerns of non-proliferation lobby. In fact, US administration worked as a spokesperson for Pakistan as far as nuclear issue was concerned. They argued that by augmenting Pakistan’s conventional force strength, Pakistan might be dissuaded to give up nuclear option. Many efforts of non-proliferation groups in Washington were effectively thwarted by Reagan administration.

They were also privately advising Zia government on how to keep low profile about tricky nuclear issue. On November 2, 1984, State Department’s nuclear specialist, Ambassador Richard Kennedy at a press briefing in Washington, D.C. said that, fears about Pakistan’s nuclear program are grossly exaggerated and Pakistan was still a long way from nuclear weapons capability. Kennedy expressed his full faith in Zia by stating that, we accept President Zia-ul-Haq’s categorical statement that Pakistan’s nuclear programme is devoted entirely to power generation.

Foreign and defence relations have impact on domestic issues. Zia’s decision to hold elections in 1985 was not based only on domestic concerns. Upto 1983, Reagan administration have effectively kept the liberal, pro-democracy lobby away from Pakistan.

Democrats started to assert themselves. In 1983, a bipartisan vote in Congress created National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was aimed at improving the human rights record and democratic record of countries receiving US aid. Potential complications in the absence of a some kind of democratic process in Pakistan were conveyed. In 1984, Dean Hinton was appointed ambassador to Islamabad. He had pushed for and played a key part in the holding of elections in El Salvador during his ambassadorial stint there. The non-party elections of 1985 were influenced by the international environment as much as the unrest of 1983 especially in rural Sindh. In 80s, when the ruling group was basking in the glory of unlimited gifts from around the world and flurry of foreign visitors (including military personnel, spies, arms dealers, journalists, academics, diplomats, aid workers), the myopic leadership never thought of a day when they will be running mad from one corner to another to try to avoid being declared as Rogue” and terrorist country. They failed to recognize the limitations of relationship between two unequal partners. They conveniently forgot that Kashmir and India were problems of Pakistan not of US and there will be very limited if any support by US on this issue.

THE COLD WAR; A TRANSITORY PERIOD FOR THE RISE OF RELIGIOUS PARTIES:

In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World’s opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 — coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics– reached a record high of 4600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The ISI’s extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic “jihad” out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus essentially “served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia.”. Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington’s strategic interests in the former Soviet Union. Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI).

In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also “handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions…” And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that “half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI”

In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan’s ISI. 19 In other words, backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia. No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women’s rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of “the Sharia laws of punishment”. Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Ousmane bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI’s “most wanted list” as the World’s foremost terrorist.

While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America’s war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI –operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has –since the Soviet-Afghan war– supported international terrorism through its covert operations. In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad –featured by the Bush Administration as “a threat to America”-is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organizations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of humanity.

PAKISTAN BACKS TALIBAN:

“Despite denials by Musharraf and his aides, Pakistan’s ISI continued to provide military and financial assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan even after September 11, 2001.” Some experts and journalists have suggested that the Taliban and the terrorism that arose in Afghanistan occurred because the United States “neglected” and “turned its back” on Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, which supposedly led to the chaos in that country. The fact is that the United States did make an effort to cobble together a united front following the Soviet withdrawal and did consider helping with economic reconstruction. But that effort failed largely because of deliberate interference on the part of the Pakistani intelligence establishment. There was a “Pakistani-instigated chaos, but the U.S. contribution to it was not central,” argues Afghanistan watcher Robert Kaplan. Out of the Pakistani-instigated chaos came the Taliban. “The problem has not been U.S. neglect but Pakistani interference, under both democratic and military regimes.” Why did the Pakistanis interfere in Afghanistan? “Because they require an Afghan puppet state to supply them with strategic depth for their conflict against India,” explains Kaplan. In retrospect, one can raise serious questions about aspects of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, especially the willingness to permit the Pakistani military and the ISI to control the assistance to the insurgents and the decision, under the pressure of cold warriors and a pro-mujahideen Congress, to continue funneling arms to the mujahideen even after the Soviet withdrawal.

The American support through Islamabad tipped the balance of power in the Afghan civil war in favor of Pakistan and its allies among the Pashtuns, while weakening the military and political influence of other ethnic groups allied mostly with Iran, Russia, and some Muslim republics in Central Asia. But lack of support in Washington and abroad would have made it impossible for U.S. policymakers to work out a compromise solution with Russia and Iran and their allies in Afghanistan, and with Pakistan, to form perhaps a decentralized political structure with spheres of influence for each outside power.

The only other alternatives would have been direct military intervention by the United States or permitting the Pakistanis to establish control over most of the country. The atter alternative, a Pax Pakistana in Afghanistan, became the policy by default despite denials by Musharraf and his aides, Pakistan’s ISI continued to provide military and financial assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan even after September 11, 2001. Islamabad still regarded Afghanistan as a strategic ally and ideological associate.

Afghan training camps and Afghan recruits helped to prepare the next Pakistani-instigated insurgency against the Indians in Kashmir and to spread radical Islamic ideas and institutions around the world, through “jihad-international” brigades, some of which were tied to the al-Quad network. It is doubtful that the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan and its policy of turning the country into the center of international terrorism could have occurred without the support of Pakistan. “We are fighting a jihad and this is the first Islamic international brigade in the modern era,” bragged Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI, to a journalist in 1999. “The communists have their international brigades, the West has NATO, why can’t the Muslims unite and form a common cause?” Two years later, members of that Pakistani backed jihad international hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of Americans and others. On December 13 other members of those brigades attacked India’s parliament in a plot to kill its leadership.

Musharraf Pursues “Talibanization” with a Human Face:

“Musharraf can be described as a new and improved Zia adapting an ambitious agenda to changing circumstances”.

In a January 12, 2002, televised address to the Pakistani people, a confident Musharraf seemed to be taking more dramatic steps in the direction of once again aligning his country with the United States and the West, rejecting terrorism and theocracy, and criticizing those who “pervert” Islam to advance their interests. He announced the banning of five of the most radical Islamic groups and ordered hundreds of their members rounded up. Many of the madrassas were to be closed down or brought under government control, and other religious institutions, including mosques,would be monitored and warned not to promote terrorism. “The day of reckoning has come,” heannounced. “Do we want Pakistan to become a theocratic state? Do we believe that religious education is enough for governance? Or do we want Pakistan to emerge as a progressive and dynamic Islamic state?” He added that radical Islamists “did nothing but contribute to bloodshed in Afghanistan,” leading to “disruption and sowing seeds of hatred.” And he asked, “Does Islam preach this?”

This much-analyzed address was hailed by officials and commentators as an indication that, after reorienting his foreign policy toward the United States, Musharraf was now going to take dramatic steps to Westernize and secularize Pakistan à la Turkey. Indeed, several analysts went so far as to compare Musharraf to modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, and to argue that his address “set a new course for the Muslim world.” But Musharraf is no Ataturk dedicated to demolishing the religious and expansionist foundations of the ancient regime and establishing a new nationalist and secular identity for his country. If anything, one can compare Musharraf to some of Turkey’s last Ottoman rulers, who tried to accommodate domestic and outside forces that aimed either to change the status quo or to secure the ambitious intertwining of the nationalist and religious goals of the empire.

Indeed, Musharraf’s rise to power marked what can be regarded as the most recent attempt by members of the military-mosque nexus to preserve the achievements of Zia and his successors: veto power of the military, ideological supremacy of the radical Islamic groups, control of Afghanistan through the Taliban, mounting pressure on India in Kashmir, and development of a nuclear weapons capability. In that context, Musharraf can be described as a new and improved Zia adapting an ambitious agenda to changing circumstances.

Starting in the early 1990s, there were indications that changes in the regional and global balance of power were threatening the achievements gained by the militarymosque exus. The power of OPEC had been eroded, weakening the economic and diplomatic status of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s benefactor and its top lobbyist in Washington. Worsening relations between Beijing and Washington made it difficult for Islamabad to accentuate Pakistan-China ties in bargaining with the United States. The strengthening of the human rights lobby in Congress produced growing criticism in Washington of the rising influence of anti-democratic and radical Islamic forces in Pakistan and, of course, its fundamentalist ally in Kabul.

The preoccupation of the Clinton administration and Congress with enhancing the nuclear nonproliferation regime spurred new moves to punish Pakistan for developing nuclear weapons (as well as purchasing related technology from China). Pakistan’s support for the Muslim insurgents that attacked the town of Kargil in Kashmir in May 1999; Islamabad’s backing of the despicable Taliban regime, which Washington accused even then of harboring bin Laden’s terrorist network; and Islamabad’s decision to detonate a nuclear bomb in May 1998 led to enormous U.S. pressure (in form of diplomatic and economic sanctions) on Pakistan. That, in turn, led to a reaction by Pakistan’s military-mosque nexus.

The October 1999 military coup by Musharraf brought an end to the fragile democracy in Pakistan and strengthened the hands of the Taliban’s allies in Islamabad, including the ISI, the radical religious groups, and forces pushing for the expansion of ties with the jihad international, the “liberation” of Kashmir, and the acceleration of the nation’s nuclear program. The latter goal was the development of an “Islamic bomb” that would not only enhance Pakistan’s position vis-à-vis India and the United States but would also provide the Muslim world with an answer to the Western, Hindu, and Jewish (Israeli) bombs. According to U.S. sources, one of the major reasons Musharraf and the military decided to oust Sharif was “the fear that he might buckle to American policy and reverse Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban.” Musharraf and his allies were not calling for the “Talibanization” of Pakistan, but the policies they were advancing (either directly or through the use of political and military subsidiaries and “rogue” operations) were based on using the Taliban’s Afghanistan as both a strategic and an Islamic backyard, where training camps and arms depots could be used to promote the Pakistani-Islamic cause in Kashmir and around the world. According to recent news reports, that effort included cooperation between Pakistani nuclear scientists and the al-Qaeda network-although it is not certain whether Musharraf knew personally of that collaboration. There were no signs that Musharraf’s policy was strengthening Pakistan’s position in Washington in the months preceding September 11. President Clinton gave Musharraf’s regime a diplomatic cold shoulder; during a South Asia tour, Clinton spent five days in India and only five hours in Pakistan.

The Bush administration continued the process of marginalizing Pakistan and establishing more solid ties with India, as part of a strategy to contain China and expand ties with India’s huge democracy and emerging market. All this occurred against the backdrop of growing U.S. tensions with radical Islam and Washington’s strengthening of ties with Israel and secular Turkey, which only helped to highlight Pakistan’s pariah status. There was no indication strategic considerations, economic ties, ideological commitment, cultural bonds-that Washington needed to continue to maintain Pakistan as a client state. Conversely, Pakistan seemed to be losing its leverage over U.S. policy, a clear reversal of what occurred during Zia’s years. The relationship between America and Pakistan was being normalized. The dog was in control. In fact, the dog was discovering that it had no need to regularly wag that particular tail.
The End

Mawdoodi and Jamat-e-Islami Part – 2

Maududi was arrested, tried in a special military tribunal and sentenced to death in March 1953 for his alleged part in the agitation against the Ahmadiyah sect but the sentence was never carried out and he was released.

Mawdoodi and Jamat-e-Islami were ardently Anti-Pakistan before partition but prospered in a country which they hated.

“QUOTE”

The Jamat-i-Islami was also opposed to the idea of Pakistan which it described as Na Pakistan (not pure). In none of the writings of the Jama’at is to be found the remotest reference in support of the demand for Pakistan. The pre-independence views of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamat-i-Islami were quite definite:

“Among Indian Muslims today we find two kinds of nationalists: the Nationalists Muslims, namely those who in spite of their being Muslims believe in Indian Nationalism and worship it; and the Muslims Nationalist: namely those who are little concerned with Islam and its principles and aims, but are concerned with the individuality and the political and economic interests of that nation which has come to exist by the name of Muslim, and they are so concerned only because of their accidence of birth in that nation. From the Islamic viewpoint both these types of nationalists were equally misled, for Islam enjoins faith in truth only; it does not permit any kind of nation-worshipping at all.

Maulana Maududi was of the view that the form of government in the new Muslim state, if it ever came into existence, could only be secular. In a speech shortly before partition he said: “Why should we foolishly waste our time in expediting the so-called Muslim-nation state and fritter away our energies in setting it up, when we know that it will not only be useless for our purposes, but will rather prove an obstacle in our path.”

Paradoxically, Maulana Maududi’s writings played an important role in convincing the Muslim intelligentsia that the concept of united nationalism was suicidal for the Muslims but his reaction to the Pakistan movement was complex and contradictory. When asked to cooperate with the Muslim League he replied: “Please do not think that I do not want to participate in this work because of any differences, my difficulty is that I do not see how I can participate because partial remedies do not appeal to my mind and I have never been interested in patch work.”

He had opposed the idea of united nationhood because he was convinced that the Muslims would be drawn away from Islam if they agreed to merge themselves in the Indian milieu. He was interested more in Islam than in Muslims: because Muslims were Muslims not because they belonged to a communal or a national entity but because they believed in Islam. The first priority, therefore, in his mind was that Muslim loyalty to Islam should be strengthened. This could be done only by a body of Muslims who did sincerely believe in Islam and did not pay only lip service to it. Hence he founded the Jamat-i-Islami (in August 1941).However, Maulana Maududi’s stand failed to take cognizance of the circumstances in which the Muslims were placed at that critical moment.

References:

1 – Maulana Maududi, Nationalism and India, Pathankot, 1947, p-25

2 – The Process of Islamic Revolution, 2nd edition, Lahore 1955, p-37

3 – Syed Abul Ala Maududi, Tehrik-i-Adazi- e-Hind aur Mussalman (Indian Freedom Movement and Muslims), pp 22-23

4 – Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, Ulema in Politics, p-368

5 – Ibid., p-368

Between 1941 and 1947 the language and tone of the League’s political program was increasingly Islamized, and relations between the two parties in those years were affected by this change in character, which not only created a common ground between the two but also made the Muslim League more susceptible to Mawdudi’s maneuvers. The League’s appeal to Islamic symbols created a niche in the political arena for the Jama‘at and prepared the ground for its activities. The Muslim League’s actions began directly to influence the Jama‘at’s reactions. In collaboration, and more often in confrontation, with the League, the Jama‘at found a political existence, as the League’s policies became the Jama‘at’s calling. When in a speech before the students at Aligarh Muslim University in 1938 Mawdudi first outlined his idea of the Islamic state, he did so by comparing and contrasting it with the Muslim League’s plans for Pakistan.

So long as he was unsure of the future, Mawdudi had sought to keep his options open by maintaining the Jama‘at’s distance from the Pakistan movement. This did not attest to his aversion to Muslim communalism but to his rivalry with the Muslim League. Behind Mawdudi’s sanctimonious derision of the League’s enterprise lay his own political ambitions. To attract the League’s constituency, the Jama‘at intensified its campaign to expose the “un-Islamic” nature of the Muslim League’s program, believing that a people moved by religious concerns and loyalties were bound to gravitate toward the party that best represented the essence of their communal identity. That Mawdudi was proved wrong suggests that religion could serve as the handmaiden of communalism, but not as its mainstay. Although Muslims were attracted by the Islamic symbols, their political decisions were not religiously motivated. Muslim communalism encompassed Islam, but went far beyond the theological boundaries of the faith. It was not long before it became apparent that the Jama‘at’s campaign had failed to dent the League’s following, let alone derail its plans for Pakistan. Party members, however, did not lose heart and decided that theirs was not a political problem. Mawdudi explained the Jama‘at’s failure to attract a following by citing Jinnah’s wealth and his own comparatively meager means. He could not find much solace in that argument for long, however, and relieved his frustrations by further escalating his scurrilous attacks on the Muslim League.

From 1939 onward, Mawdudi ceased to attack the Jami‘at-i Ulama and the Congress and directed his invective against the Muslim League instead. As uneasy as the Muslim League felt about Mawdudi’s broadside blasts against Jinnah and his program and despite its reactions to them, he presented no real dangers to the League. For Mawdudi and the Jama‘at in those years had no concrete strategy; their idea of an Islamic state was too vague, intangible, and often unpalatable to the average Muslim to be persuasive; and their hatred of the Congress and the Hindus still outweighed their dislike for the League. More important, unlike the Ahrar, the Jama‘at had never openly sided with the Congress and, unlike the Khaksar, their anti–Muslim League rhetoric had never been translated into violence. Therefore, the Muslim League’s attitude toward the Jama‘at between 1939 and 1947, despite the party’s periodic genuflections toward Mawdudi, remained by and large cautious but cordial.

The rapport between the two parties was further strengthened by personal and, on occasion, institutional contacts. While the Jama‘at and the League found themselves at loggerheads in the 1940s, the cordial relations between Mawdudi and the League’s leaders continued to determine the Jama‘at’s politics. Chaudhri Muhammad ‘Ali (a future prime minister of Pakistan), himself a deeply religious man, had been an acquaintance of Mawdudi since the 1930s; Nawwab Bahadur Yar Jang, also a pious man and a prominent Muslim League leader, was also close to Mawdudi. They not only reduced Mawdudi’s distance from the League but also tempered the League’s reaction to Mawdudi’s rhetoric. A similar influence was exerted by Muslim League workers who had grown close to the Jama‘at, and on occasion had even joined the party. As a result, Mawdudi himself proved to be more flexible toward the Muslim League than is today thought to have been the case. A copy of Mawdudi’s Islam ka Nazriyah Siyasi (Islam’s Political Views), for instance, inscribed with the compliments of the author, is kept in the collection of Jinnah’s papers at the Ministry of Culture of Pakistan.

Mawdudi proved even more amenable if Muslim League overtures raised his and the Jama‘at’s standing in the Muslim community. In 1940 the president of the Muslim League of the United Provinces, Nawwab Sir Muhammad Isma‘il Khan invited Mawdudi to participate in the Majlis-i Nizam-i Islami (Council of Islamic Order) in Lucknow, which was convened to devise a plan for incorporating religion into the structure of the future Muslim state. Mawdudi accepted without hesitation. The council was to consist of Isma‘il Khan, Chaudhri Khaliqu’l-Zaman, Nawwab Shamsu’l-Hasan, Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi, Mawlana Azad Subhani, ‘Abdu’l-Majid Daryabadi, and Mawdudi. To be invited to this select council with religious luminaries was no doubt a great honor. The Muslim League may have been hard-pressed to find other religious leaders who would attend; or it may have sought to placate Mawdudi through this invitation; or it may have viewed the occasion as an opportunity for rewarding Mawdudi for his denunciation of the Congress and the Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Hind. Isma‘il Khan may also have been asked to invite Mawdudi by his friends among the League’s leaders. Whatever the case, it boosted Mawdudi’s ego and raised his stature as a religious leader. Between 1939 and 1947, the Muslim League paid back the favor Mawdudi had rendered it during the two preceding years by taking on the pro-Congress Muslim leaders.

Another cooperative effort between the Jama‘at and Muslim League came about at the request of Mawdudi following the Jama‘at’s formation. It pertained to a division of opinion between the Muslim League and the Jama‘at over the ultimate shape of the state of Pakistan. Soon after the formation of the Jama‘at in 1941, Qamaru’ddin Khan, the secretary-general of the Jama‘at, was dispatched to Delhi to meet with Jinnah. Through the good offices of Raja Mahmudabad—a deeply religious and generous patron of the League—a meeting was arranged between Qamaru’ddin Khan and Jinnah at the latter’s residence. During the meeting, which lasted for forty-five minutes, Qamaru’ddin Khan outlined the Jama‘at’s political platform and enjoined Jinnah to commit the League to the Islamic state. Jinnah responded astutely that he saw no incompatibility between the positions of the Muslim League and the Jama‘at, but that the rapid pace at which the events were unfolding did not permit the League to stop at that point simply to define the nature of the future Muslim state: “I will continue to strive for the cause of a separate Muslim state, and you do your services in this regard; our efforts need not be mutually exclusive.” Then he added, “I seek to secure the land for the mosque; once that land belongs to us, then we can decide on how to build the mosque.” The metaphor of the mosque no doubt greatly pleased Qamaru’ddin Khan, who interpreted it as an assurance that the future state would be Islamic. Jinnah, however, cautioned Qamaru’ddin Khan that the achievement of an independent Muslim state took precedence over the “purification of souls.”

At the time, the Jama‘at decided not to make this meeting public, although it had served to quell the anxieties of the pro-Pakistan members of the Jama‘at and had been seen as a green light for greater political activism by the party. If anything, Jinnah had hinted that his task was only to secure the land for the “mosque”; its building, the Jama‘at concluded, would be the work of the religiously adept. What this meant for the Jama‘at was that a continuum existed between the activities of the Muslim League and those of the Jama‘at; where one ended at partition the other began: the Jama‘at-i Islami was to inherit Pakistan. The symbiotic relationship between the League and the Jama‘at, within a communalist framework, was strengthened.

As India moved closer to partition, however, the Jama‘at’s competition with the Muslim League intensified, gradually overshadowing the concord which the contacts with the League in 1939–1941 had engendered. Perturbed by the League’s domination of the Pakistan movement, the Jama‘at increasingly focused its energies on undermining Jinnah’s position in the movement. The party’s attacks became more venomous and direct, transforming the relations between the Jama‘at and the League.

In October 1945, Mawdudi issued what amounted to a religious decree (fatwa) forbidding Muslims to vote for the “secular” Muslim League in the crucial elections of 1945. Muslim League leaders were understandably irritated at such behavior from the head of a party that was not even taking part in the elections and concluded that the move proved the Jama‘at’s pro-Congress sentiments. But, unperturbed by the implications of its anti–Muslim League campaign, the Jama‘at pushed ahead with its line of attack, which by 1947 became caustic vituperations. Mawdudi himself set the tone when in Kawthar in January 1947 he referred to the “Pakistan of the Muslim League” as “faqistan” (the land of the famished) and “langra” Pakistan (crippled Pakistan). While these insults were directed at the secular nature of Jinnah’s program for the new state, they incensed Muslim League leaders and rank-and-file members alike; they were having enough trouble defending their cause against the Congress party. They began to retaliate: when, at a regional Jama‘at-i Islami convention in Madras, Mawdudi said that “the Jama‘at’s sole objective is to present Muslims with virtuous leadership and to stop the ascendancy of a corrupt [fasiq’u fajir] leadership at the helm [of the Pakistan movement],” the crowd erupted into chants of “Long live the Muslim League,” “Long live the qa’id-i a‘zam [Jinnah],” and “Down with the Jami‘at-i Ulama [i.e. the Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Hind].” The crowd then turned the meeting into a Muslim League rally.

The Congress party was quick to take advantage of these confrontations, and this further deepened the antagonism between the League and the Jama‘at. The subtlety of the Jama‘at’s own communalism was all but drowned by the clamor of its confrontation with the League. Hopeful of enlisting the Jama‘at’s support and anxious to embarrass the League, the Congress openly wooed Mawdudi. In April 1947, during the Jama‘at’s regional convention in Patna, Gandhi attended a lecture by Amin Ahsan Islahi. After the lecture, Congress officials in the city announced that Gandhi had been invited to the session by the Jama‘at’s leaders, and a possible merger of the party into the nationalist movement might be in the making. Gandhi also lauded Islahi and endorsed his views, which the Mahatma argued “attacked the political uses of Islam!” Muslim League officials, already distressed by Mawdudi’s attacks, were finally provoked into saying what some of them had felt all along: the Jama‘at was Congress’s Trojan horse among the Muslims. The pro-Muslim League Nawa’-i Waqt of Lahore led the charge against Mawdudi, accusing him of anti-Pakistan activities, collaboration with the Congress party, and political duplicity. For the Muslim League, the Jama‘at had until that day been at worst a tolerable inconvenience, and at times a valuable “Islamic” tool against the pro-Congress ulama; it was now clearly a nuisance. Gandhi’s remarks changed the balance of relations between the Jama‘at and the Muslim League to the latter’s advantage. The Jama‘at, however, was not reconciled either to this change in its status or to the shift in its debate with the League from questioning the orthodoxy of the Muslim League’s program and leaders to questioning its own loyalty to the Muslim separatist cause.

Caught off guard, the Jama‘at appealed to Nawa’-i Waqt to publish the whole text of Islahi’s speech that Gandhi had alleged had been favorable to the Congress’s position, and it denied ever having invited Gandhi to the session. Nawa’-i Waqt declined to publish either the text or the denial; the League was not going to let Mawdudi off the hook that easily. To the dismay of the Congress, in May Mawdudi issued another salvo against the “secular, irreligious nationalist democracy” promised by the League, but sensing the adverse climate, desisted from attacking it further. In June 1947, Mawdudi wrote an open letter to the Muslims of India, encouraging them to choose Pakistan over the “Indian Republic,” and in July 1947 he encouraged the Muslims of the North-West Frontier Province to turn out their Congress ministry and to vote for Pakistan in the referendum which was scheduled to decide the fate of that province. In the same month, he issued a terse rebuttal to the well-publicized and damaging charge by the Congress that those Muslims who complained about the idea of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—as many Indian Muslims including Jinnah had—could hardly justify their demand for a Muslim one. Fearful of giving vent to accusations of being anti-Pakistan, the party withdrew into the “splendid isolation” of Pathankot.

Although the birth of Pakistan followed an ebb in the relations between the Jama‘at and the Muslim League, the concord which had characterized the relations between the two until 1945 continued to define their relationship at a more fundamental level. Since both were ultimately striving to secure communal rights for Muslims, the Jama‘at and Muslim League each legitimated the political function of the other in furthering their common communalist cause. It was the structure of this relationship that determined the interactions between the Jama‘at and the fruit of the League’s toil—the Pakistan state—more than their bickering over the nature of that state may suggest. The Jama‘at legitimated communalism in Islamic terms and helped the League find a base of support by appealing to religious symbols. The Muslim League, in turn, increasingly Islamized the political discourse on Pakistan to the Jama‘at’s advantage, creating a suitable gateway for the party’s entry into the political fray. The Muslim League leaders elevated the Jama‘at’s status, while institutional contacts and personal links between the two parties gave more concrete shape to the structure of relations between the two. Conflict, contact, and concord was rooted in communal interests and the legitimating role of Islam. That framework has governed the scope and nature of relations between the two parties since partition.

References:

1 – Cited in SAAM, vol. 1, 138–39.

2 – Malik Ghulam ‘Ali, “Professor Mawdudi ke Sath Sath Islamiyah College Se Zaildar Park Tak,” HRZ, 119.

3 – Qaid-i A‘zam Papers Seal, Paper Number 952, Ministry of Culture, Pakistan. The book was sent to Jinnah in January 1940.

4 – Sarwat Saulat, Maulana Maududi (Karachi, 1979), 22–23.

5 – The council was headed by Mawlana Azad Subhani, and its findings were later published in Mawlana Muhammad Ishaq Sindihlawi, Islam ka Siyasi Nizam (A‘zamgarh, n.d.).

6 – The details of this meeting were narrated by Qamaru’ddin Khan in Thinker (December 27, 1963): 10–12.

7 – TQ (September–October 1945): 2–3.

8 – Kawthar (January 13, 1947, June 13, 1947, and June 17, 1947).

9 – RJI, vol. 5, 140–41.

10 – Opponents of the Jama‘at among Muslim League workers have often viewed the Jama‘at-i Islami and Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Hind as one and the same.

11 – RJI, vol. 5, 257.

12 – Ibid., vol. 5, 170–77, and 253–62.

13 – Nawa’-i Waqt (April 30, 1947): 1.

14 – Kawthar (June 21, 1947): 2 and (July 5, 1947): 1. However, Mawdudi qualified his decree by stipulating that a vote for Pakistan was not a vote of confidence in the Muslim League; MMKT, vol. 1, 285–88.

15 – Kawthar (July 5, 1947): 1.

The status of minorities in Pakistan had long been of major concern to a number of the Islamic parties and to the ulama. Mawdudi, however, had never given much attention to what their place should be, believing that the question would be automatically resolved within the overall framework of an Islamic constitution. The other Islamic parties did not agree, particularly when it came to the Ahmadis, a sect which had emerged at the turn of the century in Punjab. The Ahmadis follow the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), who claimed he had experienced divine revelation. The orthodox believe that the Ahmadis, also known as Qadiyanis or Mirza’is, stand outside the boundaries of Islam despite the Ahmadis’ insistence that they are Muslims. For Ghulam Ahmad’s claims are incompatible with the Muslim belief that Prophet Muhammad was the last of the prophets. The opposition of the ulama to the Ahmadis predated the partition, and the Deobandis had campaigned against them as early as the 1920s. Mawlana ‘Uthmani had written a book in refutation of the claims of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1924.

The Ahmadi issue had been the favorite of the Majlis-i Ahrar-i Islam (Society of Free Muslims), a populist Islamic party created in 1930 that grew out of the Khilafat movement and that was best known for the impassioned style of its speakers. The Ahrar had vacillated between supporting the Congress and the Muslim League before partition and did not declare its allegiance to Pakistan until 1949. The one constant throughout its existence, aside from its socialism, had been its vehement opposition to the Ahmadis. The Ahrar had first expressed this opposition in 1934, when Shah ‘Ata’u’llah Bukhari, the party’s leader, had demanded the official exclusion of the Ahmadis from Islam and the dismissal of Sir Zafaru’llah Khan—the Ahmadi Muslim League leader and later Pakistan’s foreign minister—from the viceroy’s council. Following partition, the erstwhile pro-Congress Ahrar moved to Pakistan, and after losing a significant portion of its membership between 1947 and 1950, its new leader, Taju’ddin Ansari, joined hands with Daultana’s faction of the Muslim League in Punjab.

With the passage of the Objectives Resolution, the Ahrar decided to utilize the state’s professed loyalty to Islam to elicit a ruling on the Ahmadis. Throughout 1949 it incited passions in Punjab against them (they had meanwhile established their Pakistan headquarters in Rabwah, not far from Lahore). The Ahrar were once again demanding the ouster of Zafaru’llah Khan, this time from the cabinet, and to weaken his position went so far as to argue that two of the defendants in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case were Ahmadis. The anti-Ahmadi campaign soon found support among the ulama, and served as the foundation for a religious alliance comparable to the one forged earlier between the Jama‘at and the ulama.

The Ahrar found an unexpected ally in the putatively “progressive” chief minister of the Punjab, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, who had found the obstreperous Islamic party and the emerging anti-Ahmadi alliance a useful counterbalance to Mamdot and the Jama‘at in the election campaign. Mamdot had defected from the Muslim League earlier in that year and had formed the Jinnah Awami League. The resignation of the former chief minister had greatly damaged the Muslim League’s standing in Punjab, all the more so as Mamdot’s electoral strategy—forming alliances with the Awami League and the Jama‘at—was threatening Daultana’s position. Mamdot had been particularly effective in depicting Daultana and his allies in Karachi as “un-Islamic.” The struggling Muslim League, also aware of challenges by the Jama‘at on its right and Mian Iftikharu’ddin’s Azad Pakistan party on its left could hardly withstand charges of secularism. Daultana therefore decided to mobilize the Ahrar to shore up the religious legitimacy of his ministry.

The Punjab elections became a platform for the Ahrar’s anti-Ahmadi propaganda. Daultana, bogged down in the election campaign and eager to build a base of support among the religious electorate, turned a blind eye to these activities. Nor did he show any signs of discomfort with the Ahrar following his victory in the elections. The continued pressures exerted on the Muslim League by Mamdot, Suhrawardi, Mawdudi, and Mian Iftikharu’ddin made the Ahrar an indispensable asset. Further emboldened by Daultana’s sweep of Punjab, the Ahrar set out to turn the Ahmadi issue into a national debate.

The dire economic conditions in Punjab at the time—a rise in food prices and famine precipitated by the landowners—meanwhile provided fertile ground for the Ahrar’s agitations. The Islam League (formerly Tahrik-i Khaksar) had already done much to translate popular discontent into an Islamic movement. Throughout the summer of 1952, when food prices and the grain shortage reached their peak, Mawlana Mashriqi organized numerous anti-Muslim League demonstrations, demanding the amelioration of suffering and a greater Islamization of government. The economic situation in Punjab no doubt made local politics susceptible to religious activism. As social unrest spread, demonstrations led by religious activists in general and the Islam League in particular turned into riots. The Islam League’s penchant for violence convinced the government of the dangers of allowing the continued sacralization of politics and eventually led to Mashriqi’s arrest.

The Jama‘at had also tried to take advantage of popular discontent. It organized the February 24, 1952, demonstration at Machi Gate of Lahore to protest the hike in the price of wheat flour, a protest that soon turned into a riot, which was forcibly quelled by the police. Although the Islam League and the Communists were implicated by the authorities as the main culprits, the role of the Jama‘at in the whole affair did not go unnoticed. It was, however, the Ahrar, with its socialist leanings, that assumed the role of the Islam League after Mashriqi was arrested. The Ahrar continued to articulate economic grievances in Islamic terms, but with a new twist; it tied the demand for economic justice to the Islamicity of the state by questioning the status of the Ahmadis. Every harangue against government policy and demand for greater Islamicity were accompanied by complaints about the discrepancy between the wealth of the Ahmadi community and the poverty of the struggling Muslim masses: in the homeland of Muslims, it was the Ahmadis who reaped the benefits and the Muslims who suffered hunger and hardship. This strategy was by and large successful, though it was the Ahmadis themselves who set off the final conflict. Zafaru’llah Khan played directly into the Ahrar’s hands. On May 17, 1952, the foreign minister turned down Prime Minister Nazimu’ddin’s pleas of caution and addressed a public Ahmadi session in Karachi. By openly admitting his religion, Zafaru’llah Khan gave credence to the charge made by the Ahrar that the government was “controlled” by the Ahmadis. For the other Islamic groups and the ulama, who viewed the Ahmadis with opprobrium, the very presence of an Ahmadi minister in the cabinet was proof of the un-Islamicity of the state. The Ahrar and the ulama, infuriated by the foreign minister’s action, organized a protest march; the marchers clashed with the Ahmadis, and there was a riot.

On May 18, Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi, Pakistan’s new spiritual leader, convened an ulama board to formulate an official policy. Shaikh Sultan Ahmad represented the Jama‘at on the board. The board demanded that the Ahmadis be declared a non-Muslim minority, that Zafaru’llah Khan be removed from his cabinet post, and that all key government jobs be cleansed of Ahmadis. The board also elected a majlis-i ‘amal (council of action) to implement its recommendations. Amin Ahsan Islahi became the vice-president of this majlis, and Malik Nasru’llah Khan ‘Aziz one of its members.

The Jama‘at’s shura’ considered the unfolding events: a number of the Jama‘at leaders, including Sultan Ahmad, Islahi, and Nasru’llah Khan ‘Aziz, favored the party’s wholehearted participation in the agitations as a policy natural for the holy community to support; Mawdudi, who was keen on formalizing the Jama‘at’s political role, was reluctant to approve. He argued that the Ahmadi issue would be resolved automatically once the country was Islamized and that in the meantime riots would only tarnish the image of the Islamic groups, lessen the appeal of an Islamic constitution, and, by playing into the hands of the opponents of Islamization, was bound to derail the whole campaign for an Islamic state. The holy community’s choice of policy could not be premised on religious considerations alone; it had to be examined in light of the party’s political aims. Mawdudi was, moreover, not keen on alliance with the Ahrar built around the Ahmadi issue or any other cause. He never subscribed to the kind of impassioned denunciations which characterized the ulama or the Ahrar’s encounters with them. Mawdudi had always believed that proper Islamization would “reconvert” the Ahmadis to Islam, and the Islamic state would find a political solution to their place in society. However, even among the Jama‘at’s members there was support for the riots. It was clear that they could open up contacts with the Punjabi masses, whose politics had thus far been dominated by landowners and pirs. Until then the Muhajirs had served as the Islamic parties’ main constituency; now the Islam League, Ahrar, and the anti-Ahmadi riots had opened Punjabi politics to the Islamic groups. Given its political objectives, the Jama‘at could not ignore the opportunity. The desire to sustain the momentum for an Islamic constitution had to be balanced against the opportunities the agitations presented.

The shura’, therefore, would not give its wholehearted endorsement to the majlis-i ‘amal, then dominated by the Ahrar; but in recognition of the preeminence of the Ahmadi issue, it incorporated the demands of the majlis-i ‘amal into its own constitutional proposals. The August 1952 issue of the Tarjumanu’l-Qur’an carried a lengthy denunciation of the Ahmadis written by Mawdudi, and promised to include the demand for their exclusion from Islam into the Jama‘at’s proposals for an Islamic constitution. The Jama‘at members who sat on the majlis-i ‘amal, in keeping with Mawdudi’s views, sought to temper the Ahrar’s violence, but when they failed, the Jama‘at officially dissociated itself from the majlis-i ‘amal on February 26, 1953.

Between July 1952 and January 1953, Mawdudi had lobbied the ulama against the agitations, hoping instead to keep their attention on the Islamic constitution and to preserve the alliance which had produced the Objectives Resolution, repeating the argument that the Islamic constitution would provide a solution to the Ahmadi issue along with a host of other problems. Mawdudi was increasingly worried about what effect the riots were having on the government of Nazimu’ddin, which the Jama‘at regarded as an asset, and about the distraction they presented from the constitutional cause. In June 1952, when the Ahrar were busy with their campaign against the Ahmadis, the Jama‘at launched a nationwide drive to collect signatures in support of the Islamic constitution. In July, as the agitations grew worse, the Jama‘at demanded that the government reveal the contents of the Basic Principles Committee report before the assembly convened in order to ascertain its Islamicity. There followed a joint declaration of the Jama‘at and other ulama parties to hold a “Constitution Day” in Karachi on December 19, 1952, which the American envoy called “the only effort in Karachi on behalf of the constitution.” Finally, in January 1953, when the Ahrar were engaged in fine-tuning their anti-Ahmadi campaign, the Jama‘at joined the Jinnah Awami League, the Awami League, and the Azad Pakistan party in opposing the Muslim League by objecting to the committee’s report. The Jama‘at, however, failed to redirect national attention away from the Ahmadi issue. The majlis-i ‘amal, dominated by the Ahrar, and nudged along by Daultana and the Punjab Muslim League, proved a more decisive force in determining the position of the ulama than Mawdudi’s cautions.

In July 1952 the Punjab government imposed Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code restricting public gatherings. On July 19 the Ahrar organized a large demonstration in Multan which culminated in clashes with the police and the deaths of six people. Fearful of further escalation, Daultana sought to reign the Ahrar in, though his approach remained conciliatory. On July 21, after securing from the Ahrar a promise to help restore order, the Punjab government lifted the Section 144 restrictions and the ban on the Ahrar’s paper, Azad. A week later, in a gesture of conciliation, upon the insistence of Daultana “the council of Punjab Muslim League…adopted a resolution by a vote of 264 against eight in support of the anti-Ahmediya agitation.” Given the Punjab government’s response, the Ahrar found more reason to push for a showdown. On July 27, despite the Muslim League’s endorsement of the Ahrar’s position, it demonstrated against the League in Punjab and assaulted its councilmen. Daultana ordered the arrest of some 137 people and put Punjab under heavy police protection. The breakdown in the constitutional effort, which Mawdudi had feared, soon followed.

After a brief lull in January 1953, the Ahrar resumed its campaign in full force, and by arguing that the Muslim League resolution was not definitive enough again mobilized the ulama. Sacrificing their greater interests in the Islamization of Pakistan, the ulama, including the Jama‘at leader, Sultan Ahmad, gave Nazimu’ddin an ultimatum: either sack Zafaru’llah Khan and declare the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority within a month or face “direct action”—a euphemism for widescale riots.

Nazimu’ddin had initially tried to win over the agitators by expressing sympathy for the anti-Ahmadi cause. But he had refused to ask for Zafaru’llah Khan’s resignation, because in his view such a move would have upset the United States—which regarded Zafaru’llah Khan as an ally—and jeopardized the grain aid, which, given the gravity of food shortages in Punjab, was a risk he could not take. On August 14 he issued a decree which forbade those holding public office from proselytizing, an open reference to the Ahmadis and Zafaru’llah Khan, but this too failed to subdue the agitations, and he soon came under pressure to take a tougher stand. At this point he changed his strategy completely. He initiated a virulent attack against the ulama in the press that, given his reputation for piety, was a bolt out of the blue for the majlis-i ‘amal and a cause for remorse for Mawdudi. When his trip to Lahore on February 16 was marked by strikes and black-flag demonstrations and the agitators threatened to carry their protest to Karachi on the occasion of Zafaru’llah Khan’s return from abroad, the government reacted swiftly; on February 27 it ordered a number of ulama and Ahrar leaders to be rounded up and placed in protective custody.

Mawdudi was no longer able to remain aloof. The constitutional debates were set aside. The government and the Islamic parties were now clearly on opposite sides, and the loyalties of the Jama‘at naturally lay with the latter. The Ahrar’s meteoric rise to prominence and the direction public opinion was taking led the Jama‘at to reassess its own approach to the crisis. Mawdudi and Sultan Ahmad participated in an all-Muslim parties convention in January 1953, where they approved the declaration of the session which demanded the resignation of Nazimu’ddin. Mawdudi then joined the majlis-i ‘amal, but quickly withdrew. Mawdudi and the Jama‘at became entangled in the agitations, which between February and March spread throughout Punjab. On March 5, 1953, Mawdudi published the most systematic denunciation of the Ahmadis since the beginning of the crisis: Qadiyani Mas’alah (The Ahmadi Problem). It was designed to establish his primacy in the religious circles, to confirm his religious credentials before the ulama who had chastised him for not supporting the agitations, and to upstage the Ahrar. In doing so, the book placed Mawdudi squarely at the center of the controversy. True to form, Mawdudi, who was opposed to the agitations, now became their leading figure.

The federal cabinet, although disturbed by Daultana’s machinations, continued to vacillate. General Iskandar Mirza—the doyen of the bureaucracy and the defense secretary—was, however, sufficiently alarmed by the rising tide of agitations in Punjab, and especially by the Punjab government’s decision to endorse openly the demands of the agitators to act. On March 6, the Punjab government, in its capacity as the representative of the people of Punjab, dispatched a provincial minister to Karachi to put before the central government the demands of the agitators and push for the dismissal of Zafaru’llah Khan. Viewing Nazimu’ddin’s indecision and Daultana’s “flirtations with the mullahs as yet another example of the ineptitude and destructive potential of the politicians,” on March 6 General Mirza ordered General A‘zam Khan to place Punjab under martial law. Soon thereafter Daultana resigned, and Mawdudi, along with Mawlana ‘Abdu’ssattar Niyazi (the minister for religious affairs from 1990 to 1993) and a number of Ahrar leaders, was arrested.

Mawdudi was charged with violating martial-law regulations and “promoting feelings of enmity and hatred between different groups in Pakistan” by publishing the Qadiyani Mas’alah, as well as inflammatory articles in Tasnim. Some twelve Jama‘at leaders, including Islahi and Mian Tufayl, and twenty-eight workers, including the publisher of the Qadiyani Mas’alah, were also held on these charges; and Jama‘at’s newspapers, Kawthar and Tasnim, were closed down. The Jama‘at’s headquarters were raided, and its papers and funds were confiscated. Mawdudi, the editor of Tasnim, and the publisher of Qadiyani Mas’alah, would be tried on charges of sedition in May.

The anti-Ahmadi agitations, as Mawdudi had feared, proved to be the undoing of Nazimu’ddin, and a major setback for the Islamic constitution. With martial law in place in Punjab, and a climate of uncertainty and crisis reigning in the country, the governor-general, Ghulam Muhammad, found ample room for maneuvering and summarily dismissed Nazimu’ddin on April 17, 1953. In this he was backed by leaders such as General Mirza who had already taken issue with Nazimu’ddin’s “flirtations with the mullahs” and placed the entire responsibility for the crisis in Punjab on his shoulders.

The pious Nazimu’ddin was replaced by the more secular Muhammad ‘Ali Bugra. The change was immediately reflected in the constitutional debates. The Constituent Assembly played down the Islamic provisions of the Basic Principles Committee report, and the interim constitutional proposals of June 1953 did not even mention the hitherto agreed-upon provisions regarding the place of Islam in the constitution. A special court of inquiry was set up under the supervision of Muhammad Munir, the chief justice of the supreme court of Pakistan, to look into the roots of the agitation in Punjab and to roll back the gains made by Islamic groups. The power of religious activists was effectively reduced by the adroit Justice Munir, who depicted them as incompetent judges of how to run a modern state. The inability of the ulama and the lay religious activists to produce a unanimous response to such axiomatic queries as “the meaning of a Muslim” led to the
conclusion that no such definition of Islam, let alone of an Islamic constitution, existed and that the religious experts were best advised to leave the constitution-making process alone and concentrate on putting their own house in order.

Munir’s incisive inquiry, known popularly as the “Munir Report,” was later singled out as the most celebrated “modernist” expression of backlash against Islamic activism and an indictment of religious activism, an act of bravado allowed by the change in the balance between the government and the Islamic parties. Munir’s inquiry continues to cast its shadow over the activities of the sundry Islamic parties in Pakistan to this day.

By blaming Pakistan’s developmental crisis on the “perfidious” meddling of the Islamic parties in politics, the Munir Report turned the central question before the Pakistan state on its head. Islam was depicted as an unwelcome intruder into the political arena and an impediment to national development. What the Munir Report failed to realize was that, as deficient as the program of the Islamic groups may have been, in the absence of representative institutions, national elections, national parties with a strong organizational apparatus and a meaningful political platform, and shared national values Islam was all Pakistanis had in the way of a cohesive force, and that was the very reason why politicians had continued to appeal to it. In a society with arrested political development and state formation and deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian lines, Islam had become the intermediary between state and society, the more so as the former had faltered and the latter grown unruly. Islam could not be selectively appealed to and then successfully manipulated. Forays into the domain of the ulama and the Islamic groups by politicians and the resultant sacralization of the political discourse could generate uncontrollable and undesirable outcomes. Costs and responsibilities had to be shouldered by Jinnah, Liaqat ‘Ali Khan, Nazimu’ddin, and Daultana, to name only a few of Pakistan’s political leaders of the time, as well as by those whom the Munir Report sought to implicate. By inviting Islam into the political arena, it was the politicians, and not the Islamic activists, who confirmed the centrality of Islam to the national political discourse.

The same motives that governed the politicians’ appealing to Islam now conditioned the role of Islam in the politics of the masses. Just as the politicians had opened the door to political activism by the Islamic parties, so had the masses. With no national elections in which to express their demands, nor any national parties to represent their interests rather than those of the elite, the masses, whose commitment to Islamization until that point was by no means certain, turned to Islamic slogans and Islamic parties to express their political demands and vent their frustrations. But as the Punjab crisis indicated, neither the ruling elite nor the masses were capable of controlling the flow of Islam into politics or the sacralization of the national political discourse. Munir had really focused on the symptoms rather than the causes of that sacralization. The lesson of the Punjab crisis might have eluded Munir but not the military and bureaucratic
elite. From it they concluded that secularism was the handmaiden of political stability, and, moreover, only an apolitical polity could help bring about a secular society.

Politicians and Islamic activists alike agreed that what happened in Punjab was a testament to the emotive power of Islamic symbols. The ulama and Mawdudi may be ridiculed, but in the absence of nationally shared values or a viable state ideology they were bound to rise again. The Munir Report was the last attempt to extricate Islam from Pakistan’s politics; neither Munir nor Ghulam Muhammad, nor in later years, Ayub Khan, however, could find a substitute for its role. Islam held the state together. Whenever Pakistan fell into crisis in the years to follow, politicians and people alike appealed to Islam’s symbols and loyalties to construct political programs and social movements, thereby expanding the wedge through which Islamic groups entered the political arena. As Justice Munir was busy systematically rolling back the gains made by the Islamic parties, Nuru’l-Amin, the chief minister of East Pakistan, told Prime Minister Bugra that “Islam was the League’s one hope of warding off defeat in east Bengal” and keeping the wayward province under Karachi’s control. He then assured the public that the Muslim League was determined “to give the country a full-fledged Islamic Constitution within six months.”

Changes in the political climate in 1953 also proved to be a problem in the Jama‘at’s legal battles. In May the military tribunal convened to determine the fate of those arrested in Punjab. After a brief trial, on May 8 the tribunal found Mawlana ‘Abdu’ssattar Niyazi and on May 11, Mawdudi, guilty of sedition; both were sentenced to death. Many among Pakistan’s leaders were convinced that India was behind the Punjab disturbances, which made Mawdudi and Niyazi guilty not only of sedition but also of treason. This, however, does not explain why the harshest sentences were reserved for only these two religious leaders. The tribunal also sentenced the publishers of Tasnim and Qadiyani Mas’alah to three and nine years in jail, respectively. The sentences were unexpectedly harsh, and in the case of Mawdudi was thought by many to be incommensurate to his role in the entire affair, which was limited to having published the Qadiyani Mas’alah, and
even that book had been published the day before martial law was declared. In effect, Mawdudi had been arrested for violating a martial law ordinance that had not yet existed when the book was published. Mawdudi’s writings were hardly as inflammatory as those of the Ahrar leaders, none of whom received as severe a punishment. Even more perplexing, the most active of the Jama‘at’s leaders, Sultan Ahmad, had not even been arrested, and Mawdudi had received the same sentence as Niyazi, whose incendiary speeches had directly incited violence and on one occasion had led to the murder of a policeman outside of the mosque where Niyazi was preaching. The American consul-general in Lahore reported that the chief of the intelligence directorate of Punjab told him that “there is no evidence “as yet’ that Jamaat-i-Islami as a party was involved in the riots. He stated the arrests had been made of individuals against whom there was some evidence of participation in the riots…. He was sure a good case would be made” (emphasis in the original).

The government was fully aware that the public regarded its case against Mawdudi to be weak. It had been hard-pressed even to explain his arrest. Four days before Mawdudi’s sentencing, Justice Munir told the consul that “he [had] already been getting many informal petitions and letters challenging the legal validity of actions taken under Martial Law and especially of cases tried under Courts Martial which in many cases meted out severe sentences.” If the army, Justice Munir, or the secularist elite had thought they could cleanse the politics of Islamic parties this way, they were wrong. Nazimu’ddin criticized the sentence, and even offered to sign a petition for mercy for Mawdudi. Prime Minister Bugra, too, was surprised with the sentence and remarked that Mawdudi could appeal, and should he do so would get a most sympathetic hearing. Martial law and the persecution of religious groups proved to be highly unpopular enterprises, which only made heroes of the accused. On May 13, Mawdudi’s sentence was reduced to fourteen years.

The Jama‘at, however, was not assuaged and continued to clamor for justice. On May 21 four Jama‘at leaders were arrested for protesting Mawdudi’s fourteen-year sentence, but they continued their campaign for his release and complained of government vindictiveness and strong-arm tactics toward their party. On June 18, 1954, for instance, Sultan Ahmad, the provisional amir of the Jama‘at, declared that Mawdudi’s arrest and sentence had nothing to do with the anti-Ahmadi agitations, and everything to do with his constitutional proposals. Echoing a general sentiment among the Islamic parties, Sultan Ahmad stated that the government’s reaction to the agitations was merely a pretext for eliminating stumbling blocks to the passage of a secular constitution. Justice Munir’s probing into the politics of Islamic activists under the pretext of determining the causes of the Punjab agitations had only added to their suspicions. Many religious leaders, including those in the Jama‘at, charged that the court of inquiry was better advised to look for the cause of agitation in economic injustice and the political maneuverings of Daultana.

Some in the military and the bureaucracy saw the Punjab agitations and the five-year campaign for an Islamic constitution as interrelated, and therefore believed that Mawdudi’s crime extended beyond his role in the Punjab agitations. Zafaru’llah Khan and Iskandar Mirza claimed that Mawdudi was “one of the most dangerous men in Pakistan,” guilty of generating a national crisis. Munir himself believed that the Jama‘at had as “its objective the replacement of the present form of Government by a Government of the Jamaat’s conception,” a point that was hardly new since the Jama‘at had openly advocated the establishment of a government to its liking since setting foot in Pakistan. But now the Jama‘at’s campaign for Islamization was depicted as a seditious undertaking whose result was the Punjab crisis. It followed that there existed no difference between Mawdudi’s apparently academic activities and Niyazi’s manipulation of the mob.

Mawdudi himself remained unapologetic. While he may have received assurances regarding the outcome of his case from Muslim League leaders, he forbade his followers from seeking clemency on his behalf. They did, however, stage a number of strikes and street demonstrations decrying the “injustice.” To the government’s dismay, Mawdudi was gradually becoming a hero.

Reacting to pressures from within, reluctant to carry out the sentences against Mawdudi and Niyazi, and dismayed by the Jama‘at’s success in arguing its case before the public, the government grew conciliatory. Mian Muhammad Sharif, a judge of the supreme court, was appointed by the government to review the tribunal’s judgment. Sharif recommended that the martial law administration commute the sentences. By the end of 1953 most of the Jama‘at’s workers had been freed, and in March 1954 Islahi was released. Mawdudi, however, was to be kept away for as long as the government could manage. The court, however, once again proved to be a boon for the Jama‘at. Following the ruling of the federal court on a petition of habeas corpus for two defendants in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, Mawdudi and Niyazi filed a habeas corpus petition before the Lahore High Court in April. However, before the court could render a verdict, the government remitted Mawdudi and Niyazi’s sentences. After two years in prison, Mawdudi was released on April 29, 1955. Already a hero, he quickly became the spokesman for a religious alliance whose zeal he was determined to rekindle.

References:

1. Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 37.

2. U. S. Embassy, Karachi, disp. #1882, 6/21/1951, 790D.00/6–2151, NA.

3. U. S. Embassy, Karachi, disp. #1103, 1/27/1951, 790D.001/1–2750, 2, NA.

4. Nur, From Martial Law, 315–16, and Jalal, State of Martial Rule, 144–51.

5. U. S. Consulate General Lahore, disp. #146, 2/27/1952, 790D.00/2–2752, NA.

6. Malik Ghulam ‘Ali, “Professor Mawdudi ke Sath Sath Islamiyah College Se Zaildar Park Tak,” in HRZ, 123–24.

7. SAAM, vol. 1, 441.

8. U. S. Embassy Karachi, disp. #59, 7/17/1952, 790D.00/7–1752, NA.

9. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #3, 7/14/1952, 790D.00/6–1452; U. S. Embassy, Karachi, disp. #591, 12/11/1952, 790D.00/12/1152, NA.

10. Daultana’s financial and logistical support for the Ahrar and his direct role in precipitating the crisis in Punjab are detailed in reports of U. S. and British diplomats; see U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #41, 10/1/1953, 790D.00/10–153, and disp. #58, 11/19/1953, 790D.00/11–1953, NA; and U. K. Deputy High Commissioner, Lahore, disp. #23/53, 11/17/1953, DO35/5296, PRO.

11. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #10, 7/28/1952, 790D.00/7–2852, NA.

12. Jalal, State of Martial Rule, 153.

13. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #12, 7/31/1952, 790D.00/7–3152, NA.

14. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #17, 8/4/1952, 790D.00/8–452, NA.

15. Binder, Religion and Politics, 294.

16. Mawlana Abu’l-Hasanat, the president of the majlis-i ‘amal, told the Court of Inquiry of Justice Munir that Nazimu’ddin had intimated to the majlis that if Zafaru’llah Khan was dismissed “Pakistan would not get one grain of American wheat”; U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #41, 10/1/1953, 790D.00/10–153, NA. Similar views were also expressed by the Ahrar leader Taju’ddin Ansari, who said Nazimu’ddin had sympathized with their cause, but argued that Zafaru’llah Khan’s presence in the cabinet was essential to receiving wheat from the United States. See U. K. Deputy High Commissioner, Lahore, disp. #20/53, 10/1953, DO35/5296, PRO. Sayyid Amjad ‘Ali, who negotiated the wheat loan from the United States, recollects no such threat on the part of the United States; interview with Sayyid Amjad ‘Ali.

17. Report of Court, 50.

18. The Jama‘at’s relations with the majlis-i ‘amal were sufficiently ambivalent to implicate the Jama‘at in later court proceedings; see ibid., 69–71: “While Jama‘at’s criticism[s] of acts of violence by agitators were only indirect and veiled, Mawdudi was throughout emitting fire against the Government in a most harsh language.”

19. The book was not rounded up by Martial Law authorities until March 23, and in eighteen days it sold fifty-seven thousand copies; SAAM, vol. 2, 32.

20. U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, disp. #405, 3/6/1953, DO35/5326, PRO.

21. In his memoirs, unpublished in full to this date, General Mirza takes full responsibility for martial law in Punjab. See General Iskandar Mirza’s “Memoirs,” 52–54 (unpublished manuscript). General Mirza’s claim is confirmed by reports of U. S. and British diplomats; see U. S. Embassy, Karachi, tel. #5258, 4/16/1953, 790D.00/4–1653, and tel. #1913, 4/7/1953, 790D.00/4–753; U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #71, 1/5/1954, 790D.00/1/454, NA. Also see U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, disp. #56, 4/18/1953, DO35/5377, PRO.

Other sources detailing the course of events which led to the imposition of Section 92a in Punjab place greater emphasis on the role of the central government and Nazimu’ddin in the events leading to the declaration of martial law. Aware of Daultana’s dealings with the Ahrar, and eager to prevent him from assuming the image of a martyr once the martial law was imposed, the army prevented his resignation. Daultana was forced to negotiate with Nazimu’ddin, and agreed to hand in a letter which explicitly endorsed and supported the army’s direct action. The army even summoned Daultana’s links with the Ahrar to Karachi, indicating that unless the chief minister cooperated in the termination of his political career a case would be made against him and he could face a trial at a later date. The final deal which led to Daultana’s resignation also explains the fact that Justice Munir in his probe into the agitations glossed over the chief minister’s role in the agitations, and then in camera; U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #159, 3/17/1953, 790D.00/3–1753, NA. Also see U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, disp. #442, 3/11/1953, DO35/5326, PRO.

One British source has pointed to General A‘zam Khan as the prime mover behind the coup, reporting that “General Azam, who had for the past two days been pressing for authority from Nazimu’ddin but had not been able to get any orders, had taken over (as I understood it), entirely on his own”; U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, disp. #417, 3/7/1953, DO35/5326, PRO. In light of the foregoing and evidence to the contrary, it is unlikely that A‘zam Khan acted independently. The period March 4–6, during which A‘zam Khan had demanded action, was likely used by General Mirza and Nazimu’ddin to elicit concessions from Daultana.

22. The articles were published in February 28 and March 7, 1953, editions of the magazine; see HRZ, 134.

23. Ibid.

24. Memoirs of General Mirza, 46–48.

25. Binder, Religion and Politics, 305.

26. Even the uncompromisingly secularist Iskandar Mirza appealed to Islam to bolster his political standing and promote national unity. For instance, during a tour of Pathan tribal areas in October 1957, he lectured the tribes on the importance of Islamic unity; U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #58, 10/10/1957, 790D.00/10–1057, NA.

27. Jalal, State of Martial Rule, 184.

28. Cited in U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, savingram #199, 11/26/1953, DO35/5284, PRO.

29. Civil and Military Gazette (July 22, 1952): 1.

30. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #169, 4/2/1953, 790D.00/4–253, NA.

31. U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #185, 5/7/1953, 790D.00/5–753, NA.

32. U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, savingram #94, 5/13/1953, DO35/5284, PRO.

33. U. K. Deputy High Commissioner, Lahore, disp. #10/53, 5/19/1953, DO35/5296, PRO.

34. For instance, the Awami League, hardly a friend of the Jama‘at at this time, announced its intention to hold a Mawdudi Day on May 22, 1953, and was thwarted in its efforts only by government pressure; U. S. Consulate, Dacca, disp. #99, 5/28/1953, 790D.00/5–2853; also see U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #192, 5/31/1953, 790D.00/5–2153, NA.

35. Report of the Court, 92, and Abdur Rahman Abd, Sayyed Maududi Faces the Death Sentence (Lahore, 1978), 14–15.

36. See Na‘im Siddiqi and Sa‘id Ahmad Malik, Tahqiqat-i ‘Adalat ki Report Par Tabsarah (Lahore, 1955).

37. U. S. Embassy, Karachi, tel. #1711, 5/12/1951, 790D.00/5–1253, NA. In an interesting exchange soon after the anti-Ahmadi agitations came to an end, the U. S. Consul reports that Malik Firuz Khan Noon, chief minister of Punjab, asked the American consulate general not to give any money to the Jama‘at should the party ask for it under the pretext of waging an anti-Communist crusade. The chief minister then explained that the consulate should be aware that the Jama‘at was “very dangerous” and that the anti-Ahmadi alliance could be revived to “kill off the Muslim League.” U. S. Consulate General, Lahore, disp. #103, 1/4/1955, 790D.00/1–455, NA.

38. Muhammad Munir, From Jinnah to Zia (Lahore, 1979), 55.

39. Abu’l-Khayr Mawdudi, who seems to have always taken pleasure in cutting his younger brother’s ego to size, mentions that such Muslim League stalwarts as Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, Chaudhri Muhammad ‘Ali, and the ousted premier, Nazimu’ddin, had told Mawdudi that he would not be harmed; cited in Ja‘far Qasmi, “Mujhe Yad Hey Sab Se Zara Zara…” in Nida (April 17, 1990): 28–34. Also see Aziz Ahmad, “Mawdudi and Orthodox Fundamentalism in Pakistan,” Middle East Journal 21, 3 (Summer 1967): 369–70, where the author argues that Nazimu’ddin and Chaudhri Muhammad ‘Ali interceded on Mawdudi’s behalf with the authorities, preventing his execution. King Saud of Saudi Arabia, too, intervened on Mawdudi’s behalf with Governor-General Ghulam Muhammad; cited in Sayyid Asad Gilani, Maududi: Thought and Movement (Lahore, 1984), 103–4. After Mawdudi’s sentence was commuted, the Muslim League of Punjab lobbied for his release from prison; U. K. High Commissioner, Karachi, disp. #INT.29/26/4, 5/1/1954, DO35/5405, PRO.

40. ‘Abdu’ssattar Niyazi recollects that a section of the army was unhappy with the decision of the military tribunal in Mawdudi’s and Niyazi’s cases; interview with ‘Abdu’ssattar Niyazi in Herald (January 1990): 272.

41. For instance, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the former grand mufti of Palestine, congratulated Mawdudi, which appeared in the press; cited in U. K. Deputy High Commissioner, Lahore, disp. #16/55, 8/8/1955, DO35/5297, PRO.

“UNQUOTE”

I have found worst scum of earth in Jamat-e-Islami and IJT members e.g. back stabber [Mohsin Kush] of worst kind, deceivers, adulterers and sanctimonious pricks.

A Minor Glimpse of Mawdoodi’s ‘Pure Islamic Training’ to Jamat-e-Islami Fascist Student Wing IJT as per daily news papers and then read detail history of Jamat-e-Islami’s Terrorist Wing IJT.

1- Students rise for Imran, against IJT Unprecedented campus march By Mansoor Malik

http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/nat6.htm

LAHORE, Nov 15: A large number of Punjab University students on Thursday held a protest demonstration against Islami Jamiat Tulaba (IJT) for its manhandling of Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf Chief Imran Khan.

2- APDM asks JI to stay away from protest By Our Correspondent

http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/top7.htm

SWABI, Nov 15: The Awami National Party, Pakistan Muslim League (N) and Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf which are in the All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM) on Thursday asked Jamaat-i-Islami to stay away from their protest to be held here on Friday.

3- Freedom doesn’t come easy By Ayaz Amir

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm

This brings me to Imran Khan’s manhandling at the Punjab University, Lahore, by activists of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba, the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami. Not only was he prevented from holding a demonstration and courting arrest, as he had intended, but he was seized and confined in one of the departments before being handed over to the police. Words fail me to describe this shameful incident. But Imran has not been diminished by it. He continues to stand tall. He is a brave man who has showed great courage during the post-martial law period. It is the Jamiat and its parent body, the Jamaat, which look small. Manhandling one of the few national heroes we have and then handing him over to the police: can anything be more despicable? But even in evil there can be some good. If May 12 exposed the true face of the MQM, Nov 14 has revealed the ugly face of the Jamiat and the Jamaat. Qazi Hussein Ahmed’s populist posturing had led many simpleminded souls to believe that the Jamaat had changed its spots. The incident with Imran dispels such illusions.

The Jamaat remains wedded to an ideology suspiciously close to fascism, (which makes one wonder about the uses to which Islam has been put in this country). From Gen Yahya onwards it has worked as a handmaiden of our spook agencies, the dark forces who have always undermined democracy. As a matter of policy its student wing has practiced unabashed violence to promote its political ends. Indeed, when the definitive history of the collapse of Pakistani education is written, the Jamiat’s ‘danda-bardar’ (baton-wielding) tactics will figure prominently in it.

4- Imran Khan’s arrest

http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/ed.htm#3

It is also important to take note of the IJT’s behaviour. The group has more or less terrorised the Punjab University for the last year or so, bullying the administration into taking certain decisions like shutting down the musicology department or disrupting cultural functions. The self-professed morality police seem to be upset that Mr Khan was invited to the PU campus without their knowledge, as if the university is their sole turf. This self-righteous attitude coupled with coercive force — similar to another fiery ethnic student group’s in Karachi — has never been taken to task by university administrations or the political leadership of the parties the student groups belong to. This time a JI leader has condemned the behaviour of IJT but it must be followed through by stern action against them. No student group should have a monopoly on campuses.

5- Imran caught on the wrong foot By Asha’ar Rehman

http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/op.htm#2

Imran Khan came to the campus in the face of ‘stay-away’ warnings from Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba. He was pushed and shoved and insulted and thrown to the keepers not long after. Did the Jamaat-i-Islami leadership know what was about to happen or was it a personal initiative of their student wing to assail the idol? While the first possibility is highly unlikely in the case of ‘the most organised political force in the country’, in either case it is as dangerous an occurrence for the Jamaat as it is for Imran Khan and his Justice Party. For the Jamaat is nothing without its ‘likeminded’ allies.

BORN-again Muslims are not good enough for Islamists. The sorry drama enacted on the Punjab University campus in Lahore on Nov 14 should solve the mystery for those emerging from the sidelines to claim the command of a team of motivated students in whose selection and training they have played no part.

Mawdoodi and Jamat-e-Islami Part – 3

“QUOTE”

The most important of the Jama‘at’s unions is the Islami Jami‘at-i Tulabah (IJT). Unlike the labor or the peasant unions, the IJT has no ideological justification. It does not galvanize support among any one social class. However, it has proved to be effective in battles against Jama‘at’s adversaries, it has diversified the party’s social base, and it has served as an effective means of infiltrating the Pakistani power structure. As the most important component of the Jama‘at’s organization, its workings and history both encapsulate and explain the place of organization in the Jama‘at and identify those factors which control continuity and change in its organization over time.

Central to contemporary Islamic revivalism is the role student organizations have in translating religious ideals into political power. The IJT, or the Jami‘at as it is popularly known, is one of the oldest movements of its kind and has in its own right been a significant and consequential force in Pakistani history and politics. In this capacity it has been central to the Islamization of Pakistan since 1947. It has served as a bulwark against the left and ethnic forces and has been active in national political movements such as those which brought down the Ayub Khan regime in 1969 and the Bhutto regime in 1977.

The roots of IJT can be traced to Mawdudi’s address before the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College of Amritsar on February 22, 1940, in which, for the first time, he alluded to the need for a political strategy that would benefit from the activities of a “well-meaning” student organization. Organizing Muslim students did not follow immediately, however. Not until 1945 did the Jama‘at begin to turn its attention to students. The nucleus organization was first established at the Islamiyah College of Lahore in 1945. The movement gradually gained momentum and created a drive for a national organization on university campuses, especially in Punjab, that would support the party. The IJT was officially formed on December 23, 1947, in Lahore by twenty-five students, most of whom were sons of Jama‘at members, and the newly formed organization held its very first meeting that same year. Other IJT cells were formed in other cities of Punjab, and notably in Karachi. It took IJT three to four years to consolidate these student cells into one organization centered in Karachi, and IJT’s constitution was not ratified until 1952.

IJT was initially conceived as a missionary (da‘wah) movement, a voluntary expression of Islamic feelings among students, given shape by organizers dispatched by the Jama‘at. Its utility then lay in the influence it could have on the education of the future leaders of Pakistan, which would help implement Mawdudi’s “revolution from above.” IJT was at the time greatly concerned with attracting the best and the brightest, and it used the exemplary quality of its members—in education as well as in piety—as a way to gain acceptance and legitimacy and increase its following. Although organized under the supervision of the Jama‘at, IJT was greatly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, which its members learned about from Sa‘id Ramazan, a brotherhood member living in Karachi at the time. Between 1952 and 1955, Ramazan helped IJT leaders formalize an administrative structure and devise an organizational strategy. The most visible marks of the brotherhood’s influence are IJT’s “study circle” and all-night study sessions, both of which were means of indoctrinating new members and fostering organizational bonds.

Initially IJT saw its primary concern as spreading religious propaganda on university campuses. In 1950 it launched its first journal, ‘Azm, in Urdu; it was soon followed by an English-language magazine, Student’s Voice, in 1951. IJT members were, however, as keenly interested in politics as in religious work. Hence, it was not long before they turned their attention to campus politics. Their involvement was not at the time an end in itself, but a means to check the growth of the Democratic Student Federation and the National Student Federation, the two left-wing student organizations on Pakistani campuses.

Throughout the 1950s, opposition to the left became the party’s propelling force. It was on a par with Islamic consciousness, to the extent that the student organization’s view, in large measure, took shape in terms of its opposition to Marxism. All issues put before the students were soon boiled down to choices between antithetical and mutually exclusive absolutes, Islam and Marxism. Although this was a missionary attitude inferred from the Jama‘at’s doctrinal teachings, in the context of campus politics it controlled thought and, hence, action. The conflict between Islam and Marxism soon culminated in actual clashes between IJT and leftist students, confrontations that further radicalized the IJT and increased its interest in campus politics. Egg tossing gradually gave way to more serious clashes, especially in Karachi and Multan. Antileftist student activism had become the IJT’s calling and increasingly determined its course of action. Once part of the Jama‘at’s holy community, it now began to look increasingly like a part of its political organization, hardly a source of comfort for the Jama‘at’s leaders, especially as between October 1952 and January 1953 leftist student groups clashed violently with police in the streets of Karachi, greatly radicalizing student politics. The tactics and organizational power of left-wing students in those months taught the IJT a lesson; it became more keenly interested in politics and began to organize more vigorously.

As radical politics spread in Karachi, the Jama‘at persuaded the IJT to temporarily move its operations elsewhere to keep it away from student politics.From that point on, Lahore was its base of operations, and the IJT found a voice in Punjab, Pakistan’s most important province. It recruited in the numerous colleges in that city and across the province, which proved to be fertile. In Lahore, IJT leaders could also be more closely supervised by Jama‘at leaders, and as a result the students became more involved in religious discussions and education. With increasing numbers of the organization’s directors elected from Punjab, in 1978–1979 the organization’s headquarters were permanently moved to Lahore.

Despite its moderating influence, the party proved unable to restrain the IJT’s drift toward political activism, especially after the anti-Ahmadi agitations of 1953–1954 pitted Islamic groups against the government. The Jama‘at had had a prominent role in the agitations and as a result had felt the brunt of the government’s crackdown. The IJT reacted strongly, especially after Mawdudi was tried for his part in the agitations by the government in 1954. The student organization had ceased to view itself merely as a training organization for future leaders of Pakistan; now it was a “soldiers brigade,” which would fight for Islam against its enemies—secularists and leftists—within the government as well as without. The pace of transformation from a holy community to a political organization was now faster in the IJT than in the Jama‘at itself. By 1955 Mawdudi had begun to be concerned with this new direction and the corrupting influence of politicization. However, the Jama‘at’s own turn to political activism following Machchi Goth obviated the possibility of restraining the IJT’s political proclivities, and by the mid-1960s it had abandoned all attempts at checking the IJT’s growing political activism and was instead harnessing its energies. With the tacit approval of Mawdudi, the students became fully embroiled in campus politics and to an increasing extent in national politics.

Between 1962 and 1967, locked in battle with Ayub Khan, the Jama‘at diverted the students from confrontation with the left and from religious work to opposition to Ayub Khan and his modernist religious policies. They stirred up unrest on Pakistani campuses, initially to oppose the government’s attempt to reform higher education then to protest against the concessions made to India at the end of the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. Their agitation led to clashes, arrests, and incarceration, which only served to institutionalize agitation—increasingly in lieu of religious work—as the predominant mode of organizational behavior; it also attested to the potency of student power.

Not surprisingly the IJT was pushed farther into the political limelight between 1969 and 1971 when the Ayub Khan regime collapsed and rivalry between the People’s Party and the secessionist Bengali party, the Awami League, resulted in civil war and the dismemberment of Pakistan. The IJT, with the encouragement of the government, became the main force behind the Jama‘at’s national campaign against the People’s Party in West Pakistan and the Awami League and Bengali secessionists in East Pakistan. The campaign confirmed the IJT’s place in national politics, especially in May 1971, when the IJT joined the army’s counterinsurgency campaign in East Pakistan. With the help of the army the IJT organized two paramilitary units, called al-Badr and al-Shams, to fight the Bengali guerrillas. Most of al-Badr consisted of IJT members, who also galvanized support for the operation among the Muhajir community settled in East Pakistan. Muti‘u’l-Rahman Nizami, the IJT’s nazim-i a‘la (supreme head or organizer) at the time, organized al-Badr and al-Shams from Dhaka University. The IJT eventually paid dearly for its part in the civil war. During clashes with the Bengali guerrillas (the Mukti Bahini), numerous IJT members lost their lives. These numbers escalated further when scores were settled by Bengali nationalists after Dhaka fell.

The fights with the left in West Pakistan and the civil war in East Pakistan meant that the IJT’s penchant for radical action had clearly eclipsed its erstwhile commitment to religious work. The party’s attitude toward its student wing was, by and large, ambivalent. Although pleased with its political successes, the Jama‘at nevertheless mourned its loss of innocence. Yet, despite its trepidations, the party in the end proved reluctant to alter the IJT’s course, for the students were delivering tangible political gains to the party, which had little else to work with. While Mawdudi may have, on occasion, chastised student leaders for their excesses, other Jama‘at leaders such as Sayyid Munawwar Hasan (himself a one-time leader of the IJT) and Khurshid Ahmad (again a former IJT leader) were far more tolerant. They saw the political situation before the Jama‘at at the end of Ayub Khan’s rule and during the Bhutto period (1968–1977) in apocalyptic terms and felt that the end thoroughly justified the means. The IJT’s power and zeal, especially in terms of the manpower needed to wage demonstrations, agitate, and conduct electoral campaigns, were too valuable for the Jama‘at to forego. Political exigencies thenceforth would act only to perpetuate the Jama‘at’s ambivalence and expedite the IJT’s moral collapse.

The Jama‘at’s ideological perspective, central as it has been to the IJT, has failed to keep the student organization in check. The IJT and the Jama‘at have been tied together by Mawdudi’s works and their professed ideological perspective, and IJT members are rigorously indoctrinated in the Jama‘at’s ideology. Fidelity to the Jama‘at’s reading of Islam is the primary criterion for membership and for advancement in the IJT. Jama‘at’s ideology is indelibly imprinted on the IJT and shapes the student organization’s worldview. But as strong as discipline and ideological conformity are among the core of IJT’s official members, they are not steadfast guarantees of obedience to the writ of the Jama‘at. Most of the IJT’s power comes from its far more numerous supporters and workers, who are not as well trained in the Jama‘at’s ideology, nor as closely bound by the IJT’s discipline. In 1989, for instance, while the number of members and sympathizers stood at 2,400, the number of workers was 240,000. The ability of the ideological link between the Jama‘at and the IJT to control the activities of the student organization is therefore tenuous. The political interests of the IJT often reflect the demands of its loosely affiliated periphery and can easily nudge the organization in independent directions; Nizami’s decision to throw the lot of the IJT in with martial rule in East Pakistan in 1971 is a case in point. In addition, organizational limitations have impeded the Jama‘at’s ability to cajole and subdue the IJT. The two are clearly separated by formal organizational boundaries, which create visible constraints in the chain of command between the them. Hence, while since 1976 a deputy amir of the Jama‘at has been assigned to supervise the IJT, his powers are limited to moral persuasion.

The IJT grew more independent of the Jama‘at, and the party more dependent on the students, with the rise to power of Bhutto in 1971. The Jama‘at had been routed at the polls that year, while the IJT, fresh from a “patriotic struggle” in East Pakistan, had defeated the People’s Party’s student union, the People’s Student Federation, in a number of campus elections in Punjab, most notably in the University of Punjab elections, and had managed to sweep the various campuses of Karachi. The IJT’s victories breathed new life and hope into the dejected Jama‘at, whose anguish over the student organization’s conspicuous politicization gave way for now to admiration and awe. The IJT had “valiantly stood up” to the People’s Party and won, parrying Bhutto’s political power. The victory had, moreover, been interpreted to mean that Mawdudi’s ideas could win elections, even against the left.

Following its victory, the IJT became a more suitable vehicle for launching anti–People’s Party campaigns than the Jama‘at, which as a defeated party was hard-pressed to assert itself. Unable to function as a mass-based party before the widely popular People’s Party, the Jama‘at increasingly pushed the IJT into the political limelight. The student organization soon became a de facto opposition party and began to define the parameters of its political control accordingly. When in August 1972 the people of Lahore became incensed over the kidnapping of local girls by Ghulam Mustafa Khar, the People’s Party governor of Punjab, for illicit purposes, they turned to the IJT. The organization obliged, raised the banner of protest, and secured the release of the girls by staging sizable demonstrations. The IJT performed its role so effectively that it gained the recognition of the government. IJT leaders were among the first to be invited to negotiate with Bhutto later that year, once the People’s Party had decided to mollify the opposition.

The IJT’s rambunctious style was a source of great concern to the People’s Party government. The student organization had not only served as the vehicle for implementing the Jama‘at’s political agenda but also was poised to take matters into its own hands and launch even more radical social action. While the Jama‘at advocated Islamic constitutionalism, the IJT had been advocating Islamic revolution. The tales of patriotic resistance and heroism in East Pakistan gave it an air of revolutionary romanticism. The myths and realities of the French student riots of 1968, which had found their way into the ambient culture of Pakistani students, provided a paradigm for student activism which helped the IJT articulate its role in national politics and to formulate a strategy for mobilizing popular dissent.

The IJT thus became the mainstay of such anti-People’s Party agitational campaigns as the nonrecognition of Bangladesh (Bangladesh namanzur) movement of 1972–1974, the finality of prophecy (khatm-i nubuwwat) movement and the anti-Ahmadi controversy of 1974, and the Nizam-i Mustafa (Order of the Prophet) movement of 1977. As a result, the IJT found national recognition as a political party and a new measure of autonomy from the Jama‘at. The organization also developed a penchant for dissent, which given that it was an extraparliamentary force, could find expression only in street demonstrations and clashes with government forces. The IJT soon adapted well to militant dissent and proved to be a tenacious opponent of the People’s Party—a central actor in the anti-Bhutto national campaign that eventually led to the fall of the prime minister in 1977. Success in the political arena took the IJT to the zenith of its power, but it also restricted it to being a consummate political entity.

Following the coup of July 1977, the IJT continued on its course of political activism. It collaborated closely with the new regime in suppressing the People’s Party, used government patronage to cleanse Pakistani campuses of the left, and served as a check on the activities of a clandestine paramilitary organization associated with the People’s Party, al-Zulfiqar, in urban centers. The IJT also played a critical role in mobilizing public opinion for the Afghan war, in which the organization itself participated wholeheartedly, producing seventy-two “martyrs” between 1980 and 1990.

Political activism, therefore, contrary to expectations, escalated rather than abated during the Zia period. It had proved to be an irreversible process, an end in itself that became detached from the quest for an Islamic order. As a result, even though Pakistan was moving toward Islamization, the pace of political activism only increased. The students became embroiled in a new cycle of violence, fueled by rivalry with other student organizations.

Campus violence by and against the IJT and continuous assassinations, which claimed the lives of some eighty student leaders between 1982 and 1988, began to mar the heroic image which the IJT had when it was in opposition to Bhutto.[46] Violence became endemic to the organization and was soon directed against the IJT’s critics off campus. The resulting “Kalashnikov culture,” efficacious as it had proved to be in waging political campaigns and intimidating opponents, was increasingly difficult for the Jama‘at either to control or to approve of. Nor was General Zia, determined to restore stability to Pakistan, willing to tolerate it.

Despite pressures from Zia, the Jama‘at was unable to control its student group. Zia therefore proceeded to ban all student union activities in February 1984, which led to nationwide agitation by the IJT. Mian Tufayl (then amir), following pleas from the general, interceded with the IJT, counseling patience, but to no avail. The IJT’s intransigence then began to interfere with the Jama‘at’s rapport with Zia and affect the party’s image. It was only when the IJT realized the extent of popular backlash against its activities, which translated into defeats in a number of campus elections between 1987 and 1991, that it desisted to some extent from violence on Pakistani campuses. The tempering of the IJT’s zeal was, however, merely a lull in the storm; the transformation of the student body into a militant political machine has progressed too far to be easily reversed.

The IJT’s central organization is modeled after the Jama‘at’s. At the base of its organizational structure are the supporters (hami), loosely affiliated pro-IJT students; next come the workers (karkun), the backbone of the IJT’s organization and its most numerous category; the friends (rafiq); the candidates for membership (umidvar-i rukniyat); and finally, the members (arkan). Only members can occupy official positions; the most important office is the nazim-i a‘la (supreme head/organizer). The organizational structure at the top is replicated at lower levels, producing a set of concentric circles which extend from the lowest unit to the office of nazim-i a‘la. Each IJT unit has its own nazim (head or organizer) elected by IJT members of that unit.

The first four layers of the IJT’s organizational structure have shura’s which are elected by IJT members of that unit. An IJT votary may participate in several elections for nazim or shura’ each year. For instance, he can vote in dormitory, campus, university, city, province, and national elections for nazim. The IJT’s activities and interorganization matters are supervised by the secretary-general (mu‘tamid-i a‘la), appointed by the nazim-i a‘la. Lower units of the IJT also have secretaries-general (mu‘tamids), who are selected by their respective nazims and the secretary-general of the higher unit. Each level of the IJT forms a self-contained unit and oversees the activities of the one below it. For instance, the command structure extends from the IJT’s national headquarters to the Punjab IJT, the Lahore IJT, the IJT of various universities in Lahore, the IJT of the campuses in each university, and finally the IJT of departments, classes, and dormitories in each university. On each campus, units monitor student affairs, campus politics, relations between the sexes, and the workings of university administration and faculty, at times acting as the de facto administrators of the university. The IJT regularly uses the university campus as its base of operations and utilizes university facilities such as auditoriums and buses for its purposes. Admission forms to the university are sold to applicants, generating revenue and control over the incoming students. The IJT uses strong-arm tactics to resolve the academic problems of its members or associates, provides university housing to them, and in some cases gains admission for them to the university.The IJT also has subsidiary departments for international relations, the press, and publications which deal with specific areas of concern and operate out of IJT headquarters.

This organizational structure is duplicated in the IJT’s sister organization, the Islami Jami‘at Talibat (Islamic Society of Female Students), which was formed at Jama‘at’s instigation in Multan in September 1969. This organization works closely and in harmony with the IJT, extending the power of the latter over university campuses. Most Talibat members and sympathizers, much like the IJT’s founding members, come from families with Jama‘at or IJT affiliation. Their ties to the Talibat organization are therefore strong, and as a result the requirements of indoctrination and ideological education are less arduous.

The principal problem with the IJT’s organizational setup is an absence of continuity, a fault which is inherent in any organization with revolving membership. Because they must be students, members remain with the organization for comparatively short periods of time, and leaders have limited terms in office. The nazim-i a‘la and other nazims, for instance, hold office for one year and can be elected to that office only twice. Since 1947 only fifteen nazim a‘las have held that title for as long as two years. The organization has therefore been led by twenty-nine leaders in forty-four years. To alleviate the problems produced by lack of continuity, the IJT has vested greater powers in its secretariat, where bureaucratic momentum assures a modicum of organizational continuity. Also significant in creating organizational continuity has been the IJT’s regional and all-Pakistan conventions, which have been held regularly since 1948. These gatherings
have given IJT members greater solidarity and an organizational identity.

All IJT associates from worker up attend training camps where they are indoctrinated in the Jama‘at’s ideological views and the IJT’s tactical methods. Acceptance into higher categories of organizational affiliation depends greatly on the degree of ideological conformity. To become a full-fledged member, candidates must read and be examined on a specific syllabus, consisting for the most part of Mawdudi’s works. All IJT associates are encouraged to collect funds for the organization through outside donations (i‘anat), which not only helps the IJT financially but also increases loyalty to the organization. Each nazim is charged with supervising the affairs of those in his unit as well as those in the subordinate units. IJT members and also candidates for membership meet regularly with their nazim, providing him with a diary known as “night and day” (ruz’u shab), in which every activity of the member or candidate for membership is recorded.

The logbook details academic activities, religious study, time spent in prayers, and hours dedicated to IJT work. The book is monitored closely, and gives the IJT total control over the life of its associates from the rank of friend up to that of member.

The strict requirements for membership and advancement in the IJT have kept its membership limited. Yet organizational discipline has surmounted any limitations on the IJT’s ability effectively to project power. Its accomplishments are all the more astounding when the actual numbers of the core members responsible for the organization’s vital political role in the 1970s and the 1980s are taken into consideration

2. Distribution of IJT Members, 1974–1992 Punjab Lahore Sind K

Karachi NWFP Baluchistan Total for Pakistan

Source: Jama‘at-i Islami.

1974

Members 82 20 62 40 25 6 175
Friends 881 150 676 350 270 65 1,892

1978

Members 134 38 102 80 41 10 287
Friends 762 106 584 425 233 56 1,635

1983

Members 236 34 131 90 63 20 450
Friends 1,588 190 553 417 284 75 2,500

1989

Members 274 42 200 110 100 10 584
Friends 844 129 616 339 308 30 1,800

1992

Members 256 50 143 107 106 8 414
Friends 2,654 314 1,260 1,403 657 64 3,698

The IJT has also extended its activity beyond the university campus. The circle of friends (halqah-i ahbab) has for a number of years served as a loosely organized IJT alumni association. The IJT has also more effectively extended its organizational reach into high schools, a policy initiated in the mid-1960s but which gathered momentum in the late 1970s, when the IJT reached the limits of its growth on university campuses. Further organizational expansion led the IJT to look to high schools for recruits and to reach the young before other student unions could. This strategy was particularly successful in universities where a large block of students came from particular regions through special quota systems. At the Engineering University of Lahore, for instance, the IJT was increasingly hard-pressed to compete with the ethnic appeal of the Pakhtun Student Federation for the support of students from the North-West Frontier Province. To solve the problem, in 1978–1979 it began recruitment in North-West Frontier Province high schools, creating a base of support among future students of the Engineering University before they arrived in Lahore, where they would come into contact with the Pakhtun Student Federation for the first time. The strategy was so effective that the Pakhtun Student Federation was compelled to copy it.

The IJT’s recruitment of high school students, a program they referred to as Bazm-i Paygham (celebration of the message), began in earnest in 1978. In the 1960s a program had existed for attracting high school students to the IJT, named Halqah-i Madaris (the school wing), but the Bazm-i Paygham was a more concerted effort. Magazines spread the message among its young audience and promoted themes of organization and unity through neighborhood and high school clubs. The project was named after its main magazine, Bazm-i Paygham (circulation 20,000). Additional magazines cater to regional needs. In Punjab the magazine was Paygham Digest (circulation 22,000); in North-West Frontier Province, Mujahid (circulation 8,000); and in Sind, Sathi (circulation 14,000). These journals emphasize not politics but religious education, so students can gain familiarity with the Jama‘at’s message and affinity with the IJT. Bazm-i Paygham has been immensely successful. Since 1983 the IJT has been recruiting exponentially more associates in high schools than in universities. The project has also benefited the Jama‘at; for many of those whom Bazm-i Paygham reaches in high schools never go to university and would not otherwise come into contact with the Jama‘at and its literature. More than a tactical ploy to extend the organizational reach of the IJT, this effort may prove to be a decisive means for expanding the social base of the Jama‘at and deepening the influence of the party on Pakistani society.

Although the IJT was modeled after the Jama‘at, it has transformed itself into a political organization at a much faster pace than the parent party. That the IJT relies more heavily on a periphery of supporters than the Jama‘at has sublimated its view of itself as a holy community in favor of a political organization to a greater extent. For that reason the IJT serves as a model for the Jama‘at’s development, and not vice versa.

While the Jama‘at’s membership has been drawn primarily from the urban lower-middle classes, the IJT has also drawn members from among small-town and rural people. Students from the rural areas are not only more keen on religious issues and more likely to identify with religious groups but are also more likely to be affected by the IJT’s operations on campuses than urban students are. The IJT controls university hostels and provides administrative and academic services, all of which are also more frequently used by rural and small-town students than by city dwellers. In essence, the IJT exercises a form of social control on campuses which brings these students into its orbit and under the Jama‘at’s influence.

The vagaries of Pakistani politics provide rural and small-town students with an incentive to follow the IJT’s lead. Religious parties—the Jama‘at is the most notable case in point—have since 1947 provided the only gateway for the middle and lower-middle classes, urban as well as rural, into the rigid and forbidding structure of Pakistani politics. Dominated by the landed gentry and the propertied elite through an intricate patronage system, political offices have generally remained closed to the lower classes. As a result, once attracted to political activism, rural, small-town, and urban lower-middle class youth flock to the ranks of the IJT in search of a place in national politics. The IJT’s social control on campuses is therefore reinforced by the organization’s promise of political enfranchisement to aspiring students.

A third of the current leaders of the Jama‘at began as members or affiliates of the IJT. The IJT recruits in the ranks of the Jama‘at have created a block of voters in the party who bring with them close organizational bonds and a camaraderie born of years of student activism, and whose worldview, shaped by education in modern subjects and keenly attuned to politics, is at odds with that of the generation of ulama and traditional Muslim literati they will succeed. By virtue of the sheer weight of their numbers, IJT recruits are significantly influencing the Jama‘at and are improving organizational continuity between the Jama‘at and the IJT.

In the final analysis, the IJT has been a successful organization and a valuable political tool for the Jama‘at, though its very success eventually checked its growth and led the organization down the path to violence. Throughout the 1970s, the IJT seriously impaired the operation of a far larger mass party, the People’s Party, a feat accomplished by a small core of dedicated activists. The lesson of this success was not lost on other small aspiring Pakistani parties, who also turned to student activism to gain political prominence. Nor did larger political organizations such as the People’s Party or the Muslim League, who had an interest in restricting entry into the political arena, remain oblivious to student politics as a weapon. They concluded that the menace of student activism could be confronted only by students. The Muslim Student Federation was revived by the Muslim League in 1985 with the specific aim of protecting that party’s government from the IJT. The resulting rivalries for the control of campuses, needless to add, has not benefited the educational system in Pakistan.

3. Jama‘at-i Islami Leaders with a Background in the IJT in 1989–90

Rank in the Jama‘at Level of Affiliation with IJT

Source: Office of the secretary-general of the Jama‘at-i Islami.

Qazi Husain Ahmad Amir Friend

Khurram Jah Murad Deputy amir Nazim-i a‘la

Khurshid Ahmad Deputy amir Nazim-i a‘la

Chaudhri Aslam Salimi Secretary-general Friend

Liaqat Baluch Deputy secretary-general Nazim-i a‘la

Hafiz Muhammad Idris Deputy secretary-general[a] Member/senior Member

Sayyid Munawwar Hasan Amir of Karachi[b] Nazim-i a‘la

‘Abdu’l-Muhsin Shahin Amir of Multan Member

Shabbir Ahmad Khan Amir of Peshawar Member

Rashid Turabi Amir of Azad Kashmir Member

Amiru’’l-‘Azim Director of information department Member

Maqsud Ahmad Secretary-general of Punjab Member

‘Abdu’l-Rahman Quraishi Director of international affairs Secretary-general of Sind

The proliferation of student organizations was also a function of the sacralizing of campus politics. The IJT’s success in the 1970s had pointed to the importance of Islamic loyalties among students. Few other viable “Islamic” student organizations existed then, and the IJT reigned supreme among religiously conscious Pakistani students. The IJT had successfully manipulated this state of affairs, translating disapproval of the People’s Party’s avowed socialism and Bhutto’s indiscreet breaches of Muslim moral sensibilities among the religiously conscious students into victories in campus elections. As a result the IJT was able to produce a single political platform and to win votes far exceeding its numbers—exactly what the Jama‘at had always aimed at and failed to do. Other Islamic parties, however, quickly became aware of the basis of the IJT’s success and, wishing to tap into the same vote bank, strengthened student organizations of their own. Many of these organizations were formed by those who broke away from the IJT. The founders of the Jami‘at-i Tulabah-i Ahl-i Hadith Pakistan (Ahl-i Hadith Student Organization of Pakistan) and the Anjuman-i Tulabah-i Islam (Society of Muslim Students), a student group affiliated with the Jami‘at-i Ulama-i Pakistan (Society of Pakistani Ulama), in 1987–1988, for example, had been members and leaders of the IJT. By 1981, Punjab had become infested with student organizations, most of them associated with right-of-center and religious parties. No longer restrained by their opposition to a common enemy—Bhutto, socialism, and the People’s Party, which the IJT had purged from the campuses between 1977 and 1981—the neophyte student organizations began to nibble at the IJT’s base of support, splintered the religious vote, and significantly reduced the IJT’s power base.

The IJT’s predicament was also precipitated by the authoritarian nature and Islamic image of the Zia regime. Urban students in Pakistan are more politically conscious than rural ones, who are primarily motivated by religious concerns.The People’s Party government in the 1970s, with its authoritarian style and secular posture, had provided the IJT with the means to coalesce the antiauthoritarian urban and the religiously conscious rural students into a single student protest movement. Zia, by appealing to the religious sensibilities of rural students and antagonizing the politically conscious urban students, divided the IJT’s constituency. As a result the IJT began to lose elections on one campus after another, and by 1984 it had become bogged down in a vicious battle with rival student organizations—religious, ethnic, and secular in orientation—to protect its turf. Most small-town campuses in Punjab were lost to the Anjuman. Competition with the Anjuman by 1989 escalated to pitched battles in Gujranwala which left at least one student dead. The Muslim Student Federation, meanwhile, managed to unseat the IJT in a number of Lahore campuses, again culminating in a cycle of assassinations. The violence brought the burgeoning anti–People’s Party alliance, Islami Jumhuri Ittihad (Islamic Democratic Alliance [IJI]), which included both the Jama‘at and the Muslim League, to the brink of collapse in 1989. The People’s Student Federation and the Pakhtun Student Federation in North-West Frontier Province, the People’s Student Federation in Islamabad, and the Baluch Student Federation in Baluchistan went into battle against the IJT. Finally, in rural Sind the People’s Student Federation and Sindhi nationalist student groups and in Karachi and Hyderabad the All-Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization (APMSO), a breakaway of the IJT floated by the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (Muhajir National Front), routed the IJT in student elections and restricted its maneuverability on campuses. The Muhajir organization was founded in 1986 by a group of Muhajir IJT members who objected to the Punjabi domination of the IJT. It has since controlled the politics of the urban centers of Sind and has emerged as a formidable force in Pakistani politics. The IJT’s confrontation with the APMSO in 1988 turned Karachi University into a war zone, forcing the military to occupy the university and to close it down. During 1990–1992, when the Jama‘at was a member of the ruling coalition, clashes between the IJT and the APMSO acted as a major source of tension within the IJI government. Fighting simultaneously against religious, ethnic, and secular student organizations has also created confusion in the ranks of the IJT with deleterious consequences.

Despite all these setbacks and after more than a decade of student battles (1980–1992), the IJT continues to remain the most prominent student force in Pakistan. Efforts such as Bazm-i Paygham have helped the IJT to overcome some of the ground lost in the universities, but more important, the IJT has remained the only student organization which exists in every province and on every university campus and therefore is the only student organization capable of acting on a national scale. As a sign of its continued vitality, the IJT has managed to retain control over the University of Punjab, the most important Pakistani university and the prize of student politics.

The greatest significance and long-run effect of the IJT, however, lies in its influence on Pakistani society. Year after year a multitude of students come into contact with the Jama‘at’s literature through the IJT; many even undergo various levels of indoctrination at a formative and impressionable juncture in their lives. Through the IJT, the Jama‘at leaves a permanent mark on the potential thinking and style of future Pakistani leaders, intellectuals, and bureaucrats. Regardless of where the alumni and sympathizers of the IJT go following their graduation, whether they stay close to the Jama‘at or veer off in other directions, they carry the mark of the Jama‘at—its reading of Islam and its social ethos—with them. They become the vehicles for a gradual and yet fundamental process of cultural engineering that is at the center of Mawdudi’s original program and that has far greater social and ultimately political ramifications than the immediate gains of the IJT.

References:

1. Sayyid Abu’l-A‘la Mawdudi, Tafhimat (Lahore, 1965), vol. 2, 286. At that time student activism was rampant in northern India, and critical to the success of the Pakistan movement; Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Education in Pakistan: An Inquiry into Objectives and Achievements (Karachi, 1975), 263–65.

2. Interview with Zafaru’llah Khan in JVNAT, vol. 1, 11.

3. Ahmad Anas, “Jami‘at ka Ta’sisi Pasmanzar,” in TT, vol. 1, 113–14.

4. Interview with Khurram Jah Murad in JVNAT, vol. 1, 48.

5. Interviews with Khurshid Ahmad and Absar Ahmad in JVNAT, vol. 1, 144–45 and 153.

6. Interview with Khurshid Ahmad in JVNAT, vol. 1, 127–28.

7. Gilani, in fact, cites combating the left as a reason why the IJT was initially formed; see Sayyid Asad Gilani, Maududi: Thought and Movement (Lahore, 1984), 78.

8. Interview with Khurshid Ahmad.

9. Interview with Zafar Ishaq Ansari, an early leader of the IJT.

10. Interview with Israr Ahmad in JVNAT, vol. 1, 92–99.

11. See Mawdudi’s speeches of May 30, June 19, and October 30, 1955; cited in MMKT, vol. 3, 31–36, 51–54, and 108–17.

12. On November 9, 1969, for instance, Mawdudi told a gathering of IJT members that the important task before them was to rid Pakistani universities of the left; cited in SAAM, vol. 2, 348–49.

13. Salim Mansur Khalid, Al-Badr (Lahore, 1985); and K. M. Aminu’l-Haq, “Al-Badr Commander Bulta Hi,” in TT, vol. 2, 326–54.

14. Interview with Muti‘u’l-Rahman Nizami in JVNAT, vol. 2, 234–35.

15. The Annual Report of Islami Jami‘at-i Tulabah (Lahore, 1988), 4–10.

16. The extent of the IJT’s activities have led to charges, often credible, that IJT workers receive stipends from the Jama‘at, suggesting that furtive financial linkages do exist between the two organizations. One source cites that stipends of Rs. 150 to Rs. 1,000 per month are dispersed among IJT workers, depending on the level and function of the worker or member; Friday Times (September 14, 1989): 11.

17. ‘Abdu’l-Shakur, “Jahan-i Tazah ki Takbirin,” in TT, vol. 2, 71–72.

18. Javid Hashmi, “Ik Jur’at-i Rindanah,” in TT, vol. 2, 51–52.

19. Hafiz Khan, “Zawq-i ‘Amal,” in TT, vol. 2, 23.

20. U. S. Embassy, Islamabad, disp. #5303, 5/7/1979, DFTUSED, no. 45, 61.

21. Information was provided by offices of the Jama‘at-i Islami of Sind, Karachi.

22. Cited in Zahid Hussain, “The Campus Mafias,” Herald (October 1988),

23. On the attack on the offices of the Muslim newspaper in Islamabad, see U. S. Embassy, Islamabad, disp. #7850, 7/12/1979, DFTUSED, no. 46, 1–2.

24. Muhammad Afzal, Zia’s minister of education, negotiated with Khurshid Ahmad, Jama‘at’s overseer of the IJT, on the issue of student violence a number of times. The Jama‘at resisted taking serious measures, in part due to its fear of being unable to control the IJT. The regime then decided to ban all student union activities as a way of clamping down on the IJT; interview with Muhammad Afzal.

25. Interview with Mian Tufayl.

26. Friday Times (September 14, 1989): 11.

27. Hamqadam (July and August 1965).

28. Information provided by the Office of Secretary-General of the IJT.

29. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry and Peter McDonough, “State, Society, and Sin: The Political Beliefs of University Students in Pakistan,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 32, 1 (October 1983): 28.

30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991), 3.

31. The Jama‘at-i Islami was officially divided into Indian and Pakistani organizations in February 1948. Of the organization’s 625 members at the time 385 ended up in Pakistan and 240 remained in India; see JIKUS, 52.

32. The Jama‘at-i Islami of Kashmir was formed in 1947 at the time of Partition. RJI, vol. 5, 61, which gives a list of Jama‘at members in 1947, cites no members in Kashmir. It has, however, been argued that a number of Kashmiris had visited Daru’l-Islam as early as 1937–1938. They set up the first Jama‘at cell in Jamun in 1944 and in Kashmir in 1946; see ‘Ashiq Kashmiri, Tarikhi Tahrik-i Islami, Jamun’u Kashmir (Lahore, 1989), 212–99. The party in that province, however, continued to grow independently of its sister organization centered in Delhi and is today a major actor in the separatist movement in that province. According to Jama‘at sources the Jama‘at-i Islami of Kashmir runs over 1,000 schools in the vale of Kashmir; interview with Khurshid Ahmad.

33. Mumtaz Ahmad, “The Politics of War: Islamic Fundamentalisms in Pakistan,” in James Piscatori, ed., Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis (Chicago, 1991), 180.

34. As a result the Jama‘at has influenced the development of revivalism across the Muslim world. On the Jama‘at’s influence in the West, the Arab World, Afghanistan, Iran, and Malaysia, see Larry Poston, Islamic Da‘wah in the West: Muslim Missionary Activity and the Dynamics of Conversion to Islam (New York, 1992), 64–93; Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, 1985); John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York, 1992), 154–55; Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “The Long March from Lahore to Khartoum: Beyond the “Muslim Reformation,’ ” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 17, 2 (1990): 138–39; Abdel Azim Ramadan, “Fundamentalist Influence in Egypt: The Strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Takfir Groups,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance (Chicago, 1993), 156 and 161; Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (New York, 1990), 68–70 and 80; Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1988); and Zainah Anwar, Islamic Fundamentalism in Malaysia (Kualalampur, 1989).

35. Mawdudi’s works were, for the main part, translated into Arabic by four of his followers: Mas‘ud ‘Alam Nadwi, Muhammad Kazim, ‘Asimu’l-Haddad, and Khalil Ahmadu’l-Hamidi. The four were all competent Arabists, of whom only Hamidi remains with the Jama‘at today, as the director of the Arabic Translation Bureau. For an outline of the bureau’s activities, see Khalil Ahmadu’l-Hamidi, “Jama‘at-i Islami ki Dasturi Jadd’u Jahd,” in CRTIN, 337–55.

36. Mawdudi’s works began to appear in Iran in the 1960s. They were translated into Persian from Arabic by Ayatollah Hadi Khusrawshahi and members of a translating team working with him. Articles on Mawdudi and excerpts from his works also appeared in various issues of Khusrawshahi’s journal Maktab-i Islam. Following the revolution of 1978–1979, a number of Mawdudi’s works were translated into Persian from Arabic by Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Khamana’i. Interestingly, the first Persian translation of a work of Mawdudi was done in Hyderabad, Deccan, by Mahmud Faruqi in 1946; RJI, vol. 4, 90. More recent translations of Mawdudi’s works into Persian have occurred in Pakistan by the Jama‘at, which target the Afghan community of Pakistan.

@Aamir Mughal
@Aamir Mughal
You went a bit overboard in explaining the ’scumbaggery’ of the JI. Well, it goes without saying, the real culprits of Pakistan isn’t maududi or the JI, as they never made it to the government…. You have seen what Muslim League did so far !! even today, clean water is still a dream to come true, preferential treatment(subhumanly) in Europe & the US, education system which is worse-than-mediocrity.
Keep in mind the West will never give you a smacker as long as you you call yourself muslims… my pseudo-liberal friend !! strap on a pair and stop being a backassward muslim, get it?

Awesome. Thanks for posting this.

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