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The return of jahiliyah
(Stubborn Arrogance)
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, Muhammad 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. Ziaul 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 Ahmedis, a minority sect of Islam at the time, and did
not rest until they were put at 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 Wahabi/Deobandi sect, organised variously as Jamaats,
Jamiats, Taliban and Lashkars, went after Shias, Christians and
Barelvis. Now it is the Barelvis, organised as Tehriks, Jamiats,
etc, who have vowed to physically liquidate all real and alleged
blasphemers — Sunnis, Christians, Hindus, Shias and Ahmedis.
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 primarily directed 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 burned 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 aquitted 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 Ahmedis and the physical liquidation of alleged
blasphemers.
One recoils even to think 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 four 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 Wahabi 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 the 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 Shah Jahan. The
decline of the Mughal Empire commenced when Aurangzeb began to
push orthodoxy, punishing free thinkers 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 didn’t speak out
because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the trade
unionists; and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade
unionist. Then they came for the Jews; and I didn’t speak out
because I wasn’t 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.
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