Another 1971 in Pakistan?

Islam, the religion of love and tolerance, has been incessantly interpreted, misinterpreted and defined in versatile ways. But is the new wave of modern Islam, given the political complacency, giving rise to another Taliban Afghanistan? Or is Pakistan headed towards another 1971?

Unhappy with the broken promises of President Zardari of restoration of the deposed Chief Justice, Ifthikar Chaudhary, Pakistan Muslim League’s (N) leader Nawaz Sharif on Monday warned against creating a “1971-like situation”.

The recent imposition of Governor’s rule in the Punjab province by Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leading to an immediate dismissal of Shahbaz Sharif led provincial government has further jolted the ever crumbling democratic structure in Pakistan.

With an unstable political situation, religion has become more assertive and hardliner. Barelvi, the tolerant, Sufi-minded form of Islam is now pushed out of fashion by the new wave of Wahhabism flourishing in Pakistan, especially in the north-western frontier province. These Saudi-funded madrasas have adopted a more radical and political face.

The shrine of Rahman Baba, an 18th-century Sufi poet, unable to counter the wrath of these Wahhabi Islamists, was finally blown up on Thursday, a few hours after the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in Lahore. The students of the madrasa complained that the shrine was a centre of idolatry and superstition, and tagged it ‘unislamic’.

The Wahhabi sect of Islam, to which the royal family of Saudi Arabia belongs, had its origins in the 13th century. When oil wealth opened Saudi Arabia to the West in the 20th century, some Wahhabi clerics became radical opponents of a royal family they no longer saw as keepers of the faith but as decadent apostates.

One of the main reasons why the Wahhabis have been so successfully infiltrating and sculpturing Islam in Pakistan is because of the vacuum created by the collapse of the state education. Religious education is still prevalent in several parts of Pakistan and the drop out rates stay high. Over 140 schools were shut by the Taliban last month in the Swat Valley because they don’t approve of the curriculum.

Also, many of the madrasa buildings have been financed by the Saudis. Quickly advancing in Pakistan, this imported education has swept an entire generation to abandon the indigenous, tolerant Sufi-Islam.

There are now 27 times as many madrasas in the country as there were in 1947: from 245 at independence, the number has shot up to 6870 in 2001.

The entire Islamic society has been a victim of theological conflicts over centuries. Call it their ulterior motives, successive major political parties have allowed the religious education in madrasas breed alongside democracy. Given the rigid support they get from the international community, in no time these propagated ideologies find acceptance in a politically weak country. Under the military rule of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan adopted Shariat and other laws based on Islam. In the 2004 national elections, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of Islamic religious parties, won elections in North-West Frontier Province and increased their representation in the National Assembly until their defeat in the 2008 elections. Lal Masjid, a madrasa in Islamabad, where the madrasa students allegedly held hostage women and children, was said to have faced a “massacre” by the Musharraf’s military regime. Musharraf was said to have “antagonizing the country’s tribal and Pashtun minorities” by doing so.

Over the recent imposing of a ban on education in the Swat Valley by the Taliban, William Darlymple in an interview to a BBC journalist said that the Pakistani Taliban, who were a minor force until about 18 months ago, have come out of FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is a dubious buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the al-Qa'eda high command is presumed to be sheltering. They are now out in the north-west frontier province, which is about a fifth of Pakistan and they control it a great deal now.

With Sufism on its way to be rooted out with Wahhabism, suicide bombings and attacks on the police and the army almost a daily routine and uprooting the democratically elected provincial government in the region, it is high time the government focus to stabalise and check it’s internal matters. In Darlymple’s words, “The Pakistani government could finance schools that taught Pakistanis to respect their own religious traditions, rather than buying fleets of American F-16 fighters and handing over education to the Saudis. Instead, every day, it increasingly resembles a tragic clone of Taliban Afghanistan.”

With widening ideological differences among the leaders and one pitching against the other, the military, as says history, may again assume power. Or is Pakistan heading towards another Bangladesh of 1971?