The Take over of Pakistan by mullahs

1.
The Takeover of Pakistan by Mullahs
Posted by: "Tarek Fatah" tarekfatah@rogers.com tarekfatah
Fri Jun 9, 2006 8:21 am (PST)
Pakistan’s Mullah takeover

Khalid Hasan
private view
The Friday Times, Lahore

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It is a sign of these times of “enlightened moderation” that in this
country of 150 million people, there is only one, just one, truly liberal
magazine, a small monthly published in Urdu from Lahore without any
advertising support whatever, its sole backers being its loyal readers, at
home and abroad.

This brave little venture, the monthly Naya Zamana , was started seven
years ago by Muhammad Shoaib Adil, whom I have never met but whose heroic
commitment to liberal values in our increasingly Deobandi, mullah-infested
land I greatly admire. One would have thought that a journal like this would
derive its readership from the larger cities, but that is not the case at
all, which does not say much for Pakistan’s larger cities. Almost all its
contributors reside in small, often far-flung towns. Its correspondents,
who, there can be little doubt, work for it out of love not money (since it
has none), are mostly based in places like Gilgit, Dera Ghazi Khan, Rahim
Yar Khan, Khanpur, Laiyah, Dinga Gujrat, Mianwali, Pattoki, Loralai,
Sargodha, Rajanpur, Kharan and Qila Saifullah. Recently, the editor
circulated a letter saying he had been unable to interest advertisers and in
order to survive, he would need either a sizeable number of his readers to
become life members by making a one-time payment of Rs 10,000 or to use
their influence to get the struggling publication some advertising.

In its May issue, an analysis of mullah-propelled extremism by Amir
Hussaini recalls that early on in Zia-ul-Haq’s draconian rule, an organised
movement led by Ehsan Ali Zaheer against the Shia community and the
followers of the moderate Barelvi school was launched with official
connivance. Poisonous literature, much of it produced in Saudi Arabia, was
circulated all over Pakistan. After Zaheer was killed by a bomb in a public
meeting he was addressing, his place was taken by an unknown mullah by the
name of Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a diehard Deobandi who founded the
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. His sole target was the Shia community and within a month
there was hardly a wall in the country that did not carry the slogan ‘ Kafir
kafir Shia kafir, jo na manay wo bhi kafir ’ (All Shias are infidels, as are
those who do not believe it). The movement’s wrath was directed in equal
measure at the Barelvis who were declared to be outside the pale of Islam
because of the reverence they paid to saints and the fact that they
celebrated Eid-i-Milad and were given to devotional music. The Sipah was
also active in the so-called Afghanistan “jihad.” Once the war was over, its
armed cadres descended on Pakistan, spreading their poisonous message from
end to end. These forces operated with the connivance, if not the support
and encouragement, of the regime. This is the dragon harvest that now
infests Pakistan’s soil and which the state is unwilling, if not unable, to
cut down.

It is difficult to believe and depressing to think that the Pakistan
of today is the same country where in 1954, a great declaration of liberal
and secular thought was produced by two distinguished judges in the
aftermath of the first organised assault on the state’s secular structure by
the mullahs. The document was the Report of the Court of Inquiry into the
Punjab Disturbances of 1953. It is something everyone needs to read today.
Gen Musharraf, instead of harping on the empty slogan of “enlightened
moderation” every third day, should have the Munir Report, as it has come to
be called over the years, become part of school and college courses, as well
as made compulsory reading in every madrassa from Peshawar to Karachi.
Between Justice Muhammad Munir, the president, and Justice MR Kayani,
member, the two man-Court produced a document of such brilliant reasoning
and intellectual clarity that it needs to be circulated in all Islamic lands
which are dogged by bigotry and ignorance and where hostages are slaughtered
and innocent people bombed in the name of Islam.

The mullahs, barring some exceptions, were dead set against Pakistan,
since they considered a nation state un-Islamic. They made their first
attempt to take over the new country when they set Punjab on fire by
inciting riots against the Ahmediyya community. The two judges, discussing
the question of the establishment of a state based on religion wrote, “No
one who has given serious thought to the introduction of a religious state
in Pakistan has failed to notice the tremendous difficulties with which any
such scheme must be confronted.” They quoted from Allama Iqbal’s 1930
address to the Muslim League: “Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation
of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of
religious rule in such states. The principle that each group is entitled to
free development on its own lines in not inspired by any feeling of narrow
communalism.”

Munir and Kayani – the report was drafted by Kayani – argued that
since a demand is being made to declare all Ahmedis non-Muslims, those who
are making this demand must know who a Muslim is. They wrote, “What is Islam
and who is a momin or a Muslim? We put this question to the ulema. . . but
we cannot refrain from saying here that it was a matter of infinite regret
to us that the ulema whose first duty should be to have settled views on
this subject, were hopelessly disagreed among themselves.” The Court asked
the leading Islamic scholars and theologians of the day to “give the
irreducible minimum conditions which a person must satisfy to be entitled to
be called a Muslim.” No two divines agreed as to who a Muslim is, leading
the Court to observe, “Keeping in view the several definitions given by the
ulema, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are
agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned
divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others,
we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam, and if we adopt the definition
given by any one of the ulema, we remain Muslims according to the view of
that alim but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.”

Munir and Kayani also condemned the authors of the Objectives
Resolution for having “misused the words sovereign and democracy when they
recited that the Constitution to be framed was for a sovereign state in
which principles of democracy as enunciated by Islam shall be fully
observed.” The two judges observed, “An Islamic state, however, cannot in
this sense be sovereign because it will not be competent to abrogate, repeal
or do away with any law in the Quran and Sunnah. Absolute restriction on the
legislative power of a state is a restriction on the sovereignty of the
people of that state and if the origin of this restriction lies elsewhere
than in the will of the people, then to the extent of that restriction the
sovereignty of the states and its people is necessarily taken away.”

The Court asked Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, “Will you permit Hindus to
base their Constitution on the basis of their own religion?” Maudoodi
replied, “Certainly. I should have no objection even if the Muslims of India
are treated as shudras and malishes and Manu’s laws are applied to them,
depriving them of all share in the government and the rights of a citizen.”
The two judges wrote, “Nothing but a bold reorientation of Islam to separate
the vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a world idea and convert the
Musalman into a citizen of the present and the future world from the archaic
incongruity that he is today.”

That was 1954. Is there a judge in the Pakistan of 2006 who even dares
whisper what his illustrious predecessors declared in open court for the
world to hear?