Khaled Ahmed - Madrasa muscle: Jihad has made the Pakistan state powerless before the monster it has created
Moment of hope:
February 29, Pakistan finally hanged the policeman Mumtaz Qadri who riddled
Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer with bullets in 2011. Moment of despair: March
3, a mammoth gathering mourned Qadri and buried him as a “martyr”. The state
cowered as the clergy, empowered to act like warriors over many years,
condemned the supreme court for allowing the hanging, instead of beatifying
Qadri as a blasphemer-killing saint.
The court had observed
that the governor had not blasphemed, and that, even if he had, Qadri
criminally took the law into his own hands and must hang for it. Five years
after the killing, the masses that gathered to mourn Qadri called him a
“defender of Islam” and cursed the state. At Qadri’s funeral, the mourners were
around 1,50,000, frighteningly disciplined, as directed by their religious
leaders. The 39 Barelvi parties, blasphemy-obsessed, were there in strength;
the Deobandi jihadi seminaries, empowered by training for assaults on India and
Iran, blessed it.
There was an English-Urdu
divide over the event. Urdu fulminated against the hanging in the opinion of
the columnists known to be aligned with religious parties. One recalled the
pre-1947 hanging of Ilm Deen “Shaheed”, who killed a Hindu publisher in Lahore
for writing an insulting book on the Holy Prophet, reflecting that the Islamic state of
Pakistan had followed the example of the secular (pagan) British Raj. Another
regretted that the government had not heeded his advice to indefinitely
postpone Qadri’s hanging as he had overwhelming support from the legal
community. The post-hanging furore was unprecedented as the mob gathered for
funeral prayers in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh, where Pakistan had shot and
killed two of its prime ministers, Liaquat Ali Khan and Benazir Bhutto.
The supreme court had
snubbed all signs of the neutering of the state in the face of an empowered
clergy and ignored what had happened last year when half a dozen persons trying
to observe the murder anniversary of Taseer were thrashed by “unknown” persons
in the presence of a bunch of scared policemen. Pakistan President Mamnoon
Hussain had signed the death warrant without anticipating the reaction from the
multitudes that immediately took to the street and blocked all traffic in most
big cities at pre-designated choke points. The cry went up: Don’t touch the
blasphemy law that targets non-Muslims and doles out death verdicts against
them to make them realise they live in an Islamic state.
How could the state
forget it had fostered the clergy into becoming jihadi, an act of empowerment
that gives them executive power to challenge the state’s lawmaking on the
touchstone of sharia that only they are supposed to interpret? In 2009, the
state watched as seminaries distributed the 130-page monograph by al-Qaeda
ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, titled The Morning and the Lamp, which challenged
Pakistan’s constitution and called for the state’s undoing.
Everybody knew that
jihad had castrated the state and it was powerless to defy the Frankenstein of
the madrasa. Then why did it hang Qadri? It knew that the growing middle class
represented by the clergy and the lawyers loved Qadri for having killed a
secularist who had sided with a poor illiterate Christian woman condemned to
death for blasphemy by a judge after condoning the poor girl’s “entrapment” by
a local mosque cleric?
Another act of
“un-Islamic” derring-do was committed by Lahore’s Punjab assembly the same week
that stirred the madrasa cauldron of Pakistan even more. It passed the
Protection of Women Law to prevent violence against them. It sought to punish
men — no reference to “husbands” as that could offend against their Quranic
right to physically punish wives — who raped and thrashed women and subjected
them to coercion. The husband, the permitted tyrant in the lives of Muslim
women, was only implied.
But there was a catch
in the law that gave a handle to the clergy already offended by the army’s
bombing of the Taliban in north Waziristan. The new law implied that a woman
could be located “outside the house” during the offence. The clergy says the
place of the Muslim woman is in the house; she can’t go out without a male
guardian from the family called a “mehram”. The Taliban had thrashed women
flouting the law on the streets of Kabul.
Mufti Naeem of Jamia
Binoria of Karachi, the nursery of most Islamic killers, fulminated against
Punjab. Maulana Fazlur Rehman came to Multan in south Punjab to condemn the law
favouring women and said, “The religious parties have few votes, but it doesn’t
mean they can’t topple the government. They can’t allow society to become
secular”. The message was clear: Pakistan was on the edge of an abyss, it had
to draw back and not think of changing the nature of the state.
The horrible scenario
in the Iraq-Syria battlefield first unfolded in Pakistan. No one in the Middle
East took note of it; no one analysed Pakistan. Pakistan, sunk in denial, was
not able to undertake self-analysis. Foreign reporters were kicked out for
predicting Pakistan’s endgame. Today, Pakistan is surprising itself on a daily
basis.
The writer is
consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’
