BY RAZI AZMI
At a time when enlightenment is seeping through the
Islamic heartland in the Middle East, jahiliyah (stubborn
arrogance)
is taking Pakistan by the throat. If the founder of the country,
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, were alive today, he would live in fear, like the
millions of others who share his secular ideology. Murderous thugs
control the country in the name of Islam, from Khyber to Karachi and
from Lahore to Lasbela. This is no accident; it has been a long time
coming. The chain of actual events and the process of constitutional and
mental regression that have led to this can be traced back to Pakistan’s
beginnings.
Intolerance and bigotry first began to creep rather
innocuously into Pakistan’s body politic with the passage of the
Objectives Resolution under Liaquat Ali Khan. It gathered pace under
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s politically expedient concessions to the
Islamists. Zia ul-Haq’s constitutional amendments and propaganda on the
pretext of Islamisation turned it into a fearsome juggernaut.
At the mundane level followers of a religion that means
‘submission’ and ‘peace’ and preaches tolerance first systematically got
rid of the Hindus and Sikhs who chose to live in Pakistan after
partition. Then they began to bay for the blood of Ahmadis, a minority
sect of Islam at the time, and did not rest until they were put on a par
with infidels or worse.
With the known ‘infidels’ out of the way, religious
fundamentalists needed new enemies to keep their fires stoked and their
hateful hunger satiated. So they turned on themselves, creating a whole
new set of heretics, apostates, blasphemers and infidels. The Wahhabi/
Deobandi sect, organised variously as Jamaats, Jamiats, Taliban and
Lashkars, went after Shias, Christians and Barelvis. Now it is the
Barelvis, organised as Tehreeks, Jamiats, etc, who have vowed to
physically liquidate all real and alleged blasphemers – Sunnis,
Christians, Hindus, Shias and Ahmadis. Only Allah knows where and when
this will end.
Secular-minded, peaceful and tolerant people, even if
they constitute the majority, are no match for these fanatical, armed
marauders when the state itself cowers before them. Not that the
majority can claim to be totally blameless in the acceleration of this
descent into mayhem. As long as Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were directed
primarily against non-Muslims, the majority did not care and even
welcomed these laws. But soon it turned into a Frankenstein ready to
devour its own creators. Over half of the nearly one thousand persons
charged under the blasphemy laws are mainstream Sunni Muslims. Some
accused have been killed in jail or outside the court. Many rot in jail
for years before they are released without a conviction, only to be
killed later.
A qari (cleric) was burnt alive some years ago
after being thrown out of a police station where he had taken refuge to
escape a lynch mob. A doctor has recently been arrested for trashing the
business card of a medical salesman, part of whose name happened to be
Muhammad. Even as I write, a Muslim who had been acquitted by a court
about a year ago after being accused of blasphemy has been shot dead
near Rawalpindi.
Leaders of mainstream Islamic parties represented in the
federal and provincial parliaments and cabinets openly extol murderers
and suicide bombers; government ministers and security officials blame
the ‘foreign hand’; and Urdu newspapers and TV anchors rant against the
West. It has to be admitted that the so-called silent majority is in
general agreement with them as far as the ‘vile’ West is concerned,
somewhat ambivalent on the issue of suicide bombings since it began to
hit home, a little embarrassed about the harassment of our poor
Christians but in total agreement on the persecution of Ahmadis and the
physical liquidation of alleged blasphemers.
One recoils at the very thought that in the country
founded by Jinnah, tens of thousands of people would join processions
led by politico-religious parties demanding the death sentence for a
Christian mother of five for some words she is alleged to have uttered
but which she denies and that lawyers would applaud the cold-blooded
murderer of a provincial governor as a hero.
Contemporary Muslims, one and all, like to boast about
the contribution of earlier Muslims to science and civilisation. Not
many know that the Muslim scientists who give them a sense of pride in
their past were invariably secular-minded rationalists who were able to
pursue their chosen interests under enlightened caliphs or kings. A
London-based Wahhabi journal has denounced them for precisely that: “The
story of the famous Muslim scientists of the middle ages, such as Al-Kindi,
Al-Farabi, Ibn al-Haytham and Ibn Sina, shows that aside from being
Muslims, there seems to have been nothing Islamic about them or their
achievements. On the contrary, their lives were distinctly un-Islamic.
Their achievements in medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics and
philosophy were a natural and logical extension of Greek thought.”
Add to this list the name of Al-Razi, called the “most
brilliant genius of the middle ages” for his contribution to medicine,
and that of Ibn Rushd, the great rationalist Muslim philosopher. All the
above-mentioned suffered persecution at the hands of fundamentalist
rulers and religious bigots.
In India itself, the brightest periods of Muslim rule
are associated with secular emperors like Akbar and Shahjahan. The
decline of the Mughal empire commenced when Aurangzeb began to push
orthodoxy, punishing freethinkers and persecuting minorities.
There is a famous statement attributed to Pastor Martin
Niemöller that tries to explain how the Nazis were able to purge all who
opposed them one by one while everyone who was not immediately affected
remained silent. It goes like this:
“First they came for the communists; and I did not speak
out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade
unionists; and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews; and I did not speak out because I was not a
Jew. Then they came for me; and there was no one left to speak out for
me.”
Unless the majority immediately and forcefully speaks
out against the religious inquisition and witch-hunting, for the
acceptance of religious diversity and in support of tolerance of
dissenting and minority viewpoints, Pakistan is fully on course to push
itself into the dark pit of jahiliyah.
(Razi Azmi is a well-known Pakistani columnist. He
can be contacted at [email protected]. This article was published on
the Daily Times website on Tuesday, March 15, 2011.)
Courtesy: Daily Times;
www.dailytimes.com.pk
