Clerical errors

The Pakistan I visited last month differs from the Pakistan I once knew in an important respect. Two provincial governments are in the hands of clerics and their political associates, and the third largest group in the National Assembly is the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, a coalition of the most reactionary Talibanised forces in the country. The MMA is the spokesvoice of the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutionally authorised body of Islamic jurists whose task it is to fulfill the “Ideology of Pakistan” injunctions of the Objectives Resolution of 1948 on which the Pakistani Constitution is based (or supposed to be based). In principle, there is no reason why the Council cannot be composed of the most enlightened Islamic jurists to use the long sanctified instrument of ijtehad to work out a jurisprudence which derives from the Islamic tradition but is compatible with the imperatives of the contemporary world. But Zia-ul-Haq, who set up the Council, and Musharraf now, have preferred to pack the Council with the most hidebound scholars.

In consequence, the decisions of the Council have included the following: the nikah made by a girl without the permission of her wali (father or other male relative) is invalid; co-education should be banned; paper used for printing the Quran should not be recycled; bank interest should be prohibited as this is not an “economic issue” but “related to the Quran and the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him)”; insurance must not be permitted; Prize Bond schemes should be outlawed; zakat must not be used by the poor for investment in business; soft drinks cannot be marketed as non-alcoholic beer; kalima tayyaba should be inscribed along with “Allah-u-Akbar” on the national flag; civil servants who do not say their namaz should be fired; beards may be worn by soldiers without securing the permission of higher officers; Friday should be the weekly holiday; and prison sentences should be abolished as imprisonment is not permitted in Islamic law. The lone lady member of the Council is required to sit between two vacant chairs.

The Council was something of a laughing stock till the October 2002 elections propelled the MMA to the political fore. For the MMA have declared that their Islamisation of Pakistan will be based on the recommendations of the Council. The proximate cause of the sudden rise to eminence of the religio-clerical parties is the ham-handed manner in which the Americans went about ousting the monsters they had done so much to create, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Umar. True, they decimated the regime. But the Taliban have fled into Pakistan. And Pushtun anger on both sides of the Durand Line (dividing not only Pakistan from Afghanistan but also Pushtun from Pushtun) at the “foreign occupation” of Afghanistan (read non-Pushtun, backed by the US) has led to a massive MMA victory in the Frontier as also to a Pathan majority, swollen by the ingress from Afghanistan, overwhelming the native Baloch to capture Baluchistan for the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam, a constituent of the MMA. In the National Assembly, the once derisory clerico-theological group has emerged as the third largest party with a decisive voice in the continuation of the present dispensation. And, as Prof. Khaled Ahmed of the Quaid-e-Azam University, from whose paper much of the information in this column derives, said at the seminar, “Tragically, after the war in Iraq, the nation thinks more on the lines dictated by the clergy than ever before.”

The army which spawned the political elevation of the religio-clerical parties is now becoming the first target of these parties. Where Pakistani strategists had sought strategic depth in Talibanised Afghanistan, the Taliban secured in return ideological depth in Pakistan. So the MMA almost formed the government at the centre. Thwarted in that by some deft footwork on the part of Musharraf, the MMA are bent on disrobing him of his military uniform. By uninterrupted barracking, they turned into a shambles what should have been a triumphal budget address last week lauding the stunning revival of the economy. “Islamisation in one Province” — NWFP — in ironic imitation of Stalin’s “Socialism in one Country” is the immediate challenge to the Musharraf-Jamali establishment. Never before has the theological threat to the modernisation of Pakistan loomed as large as it does today.

The chickens have come to roost: this is the moment of reckoning for the consequences of the military and the theocracy having mutually promoted each other since the creation of Pakistan. Thinking Pakistanis recognise, even if thinking Indians are hardly aware of it, that a settlement with India would perhaps be the most effective way of stalling a Taliban-like takeover of Pakistan. We would be well advised to seize the opportunity.