It is election year in Pakistan but so far attention is focused not on spirited meetings and processions characteristic of the subcontinent but on several focal points of violence linked to the politics of religious extremism.
The conflict triggered off by Pakistan’s decision to join the so-called war on terror in the long tribal belt that separates its settled districts from the Afghan border has not disappeared; it is only passing through a different phase. Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammad Ali Jinnah won the hearts and minds of the tribes by completely reversing the British policy of maintaining a coercive military presence amongst them. Called upon to protect the post-Taleban Afghan government from insurgents, President Musharraf ended this demilitarization and deployed 80,000 Pakistani troops along the legendary “lawless frontier”. Battles with tribes outraged by the US invasion of Afghanistan have left approximately 700 Pakistani soldiers dead. More recently, the Pakistani government has entered into a peace agreement with some of the tribes that makes them responsible for any cross-border intrusions by the Al-Qaeda-linked foreigners living amongst them. This deal has split up the jihadis and more than 250 lives have been lost in fierce fire fights between tribal forces honoring it and the fighters from Central Asia who had found refuge with them after the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Religious passions of one kind or another inflame other spots as well. There is tension in the strategically sensitive Northern areas marking the trijunction of China, Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistan. In another frontier area, the Kurram agency, more than forty persons have recently died in sectarian skirmishes. Several suicide bombings in cities including the capital, Islamabad, indicate that violence is no longer localized in the badlands of a tortuous border.
A madrasa complex in the heart of Islamabad has now embarked upon unprecedented religious activism. It has announced the establishment of a Shariah court outside the national secular and Shariah-based legal systems. Clad in black burqa from head to toe, hundreds of girls from Jamia Hafsa attached to the same complex keep pouring out on the boulevard to act as a vigilante group enforcing its own edicts on vice and virtue. They want the abolition of all practices they consider anti-Islamic in the capital including the sale of unacceptable music videos and films.
The Western media often projects such events to demonize Pakistan. And yet, none of this is natural to the Pakistani society where pluralism and diversity are accepted as norms. Regrettably, time-honored mechanisms by which differences of doctrine and opinion were traditionally mediated have weakened. External events such as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the continuing tragedy of Palestine also create internal tensions that are exploited by extremists.
In essence, Islamic revivalism in South Asia cannot be separated from similar movements in the Maghreb, Egypt and East Asia. Dispossession, economic impoverishment, intellectual stagnation, crises of cultural identity and, above all, a shared colonial experience became ingredients of a pan-Islamic upsurge.
Complicating the situation in Pakistan was the military-backed regime’s decision to align itself with the United States in 2001-02 in its war on terror without making any conscious effort to gather general support. There is a palpable disconnect between the government, which avowedly acted in national interest, and the masses who remain passionately preoccupied with Muslim causes globally; it disturbs internal peace and harmony. A widespread emotional insurrection against the West impinges on domestic politics.
All this places President Musharraf in a two-fold dilemma. He has to go beyond the facile modernization of the last seven years and permit, if not facilitate, a more natural and organic synthesis between orthodoxy and modernity sought by Indian and Pakistani Muslim thinkers for more than a century.
Secondly, he has to position Pakistan more independently in the tragic Western paradigm of a struggle between political Islam and the West. He shares this predicament with several other Muslim states and in all likelihood, it will need a collective solution.
— Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.
