Khaled Ahmed - Past imperfect: The project of Islamisation is a kind of planned ‘retribalisation’ of the state
Shocking news from
Belgium: Only eight of the 114 mosque imams in Brussels speak any of Belgium’s
traditional languages. When Muslims betake themselves to the mosque to relieve
their isolation in the host state, and listen to sermons advocating laws
totally alien to modern life, they become more alienated than non-Muslim
expats. The reason for this is the nature of the laws imposed on them as
compulsory observance. The sharia was once disputed among Muslims; it is no
longer. How should such old laws of behaviour be modified in our lives today?
This modification is also required due to the tribal origin of sharia.
Muslims are undecided
about modifying the law of diyat (blood money), which anciently existed among
tribes. Sadly, in the 21st century, they are moving towards a literalist
interpretation of their law. In other words, the project of Islamisation is a
kind of planned retribalisation of the state. The expat Muslim, therefore, is
not only alienated/ dislocated by migration; he is also retribalising himself
as a mark of the identity he thinks he is losing.
Akbar Ahmed, in his
book, The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global
War on Tribal Islam (2013), pointed out that the wave of terrorism striking the
Muslim world was essentially “a clash, not between civilisations based on
religion, but between central governments and the tribal communities on the
periphery”. He thinks America is waging a global war, not against terrorism,
but against the tribal societies of Islam. Borrowing from Tolstoy’s account of
rebel Hadji Murad in the Caucuses, Ahmed compares the tribal man to the
“thistle” plant that bites the hand that touches it.
The Soviet Union
walked into “tribal” Afghanistan because it had forgotten what the tsarist
armies in the tribal Caucuses had suffered at the hands of Chechen warriors.
Then, America stepped in and got bitten by the same prickly “thistle”. Pakistan
activated its tribal areas against India, not realising that 9/11 will cause a
rift between it and the tribal warriors. It forced them to choose between
co-tribals — Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden — and the rest of the world. The
Muslim tribes of north Africa today are challenging the world by aligning with
the supra-tribal Islamic
State bent on retribalising the Muslims of the world.
Like Pakistan, Arabs,
too, have used the tribes to quell unrest in their societies. Frederic M.
Wehrey, in Sectarian Politics in The Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab
Uprising (2016), tells us how Sunni-ruled Bahrain, facing a Shia-majority
challenge at home, imported “tribals” from other Arab states to put down the
revolt. In September 2006, a Sudanese-born advisor to the Bahraini cabinet
affairs ministry, in a 240-page report, revealed “a long-standing trend by the
government of recruiting foreign Sunnis from the tribal areas of Pakistan,
Yemen, Syria and Saudi Arabia into the Bahraini security services and then
granting them citizenship”.
Radicalisation is
another name for retribalisation. The Arab world saw its population squeezed
into big cities earlier than India and Pakistan, where agriculture has kept a
majority of people out of cities. But in subcontinental cities, the rising
middle class is turning to religion and increasingly electing rightwing,
religion-favouring parties to power. In Pakistan, large swathes of territory
are occupied by the “proud” and “warlike” tribes deeply committed to sectarian
Islam. But in the cities, the rising madrasa is retribalising the urban middle
class as well because of the tribal-law-based faith it preaches.
In 1997, French
scholar Gilles Kepel first warned the world about what was happening to expat
Pakistanis in the UK in his book, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in
America and Europe. Workers’ mosques were built in the 1950s in the industrial
areas of the UK, as opposed to France, where this trend started only in the
1970s. Clearly, this early development reflected what Pakistan itself was going
through: A transition from soft Barelvi Islam of the mystical kind to the hard
Deobandi Islam of jihad. Pakistan stopped sending out its Barelvi preachers
without London realising what was happening till it became “Londonistan”. As
Deobandi preachers from Pakistan took over mosques in the UK, Arab money
followed; and today, expat Pakistanis visiting their home country shock their
relatives with the hard isolationism of their faith.
Religious disaffection
in Pakistan is comparable to the isolationism of the expat Muslim. Expats see
Pakistan as a “pagan” state because of its banking system, which allows riba
(usury). Most Muslims in Pakistan do interest- or riba-based banking, while
most of the Muslim expats in England do Islamic banking. The madrasa in
Pakistan is offended that Pakistan doesn’t cut hands for stealing although the
punishment is in the statute book; nor does it stone women to death for
fornication, as in Iran.
Pakistan will be
endangered if the Taliban gets back in power in Afghanistan. Had Pakistan and
India not chosen Afghanistan as their next battlefield, they could have
cooperated for survival against the rise of outfits like the Islamic State. The
revival of the Hindu religion in India doesn’t help the disenchanted Pakistani
leaders who belatedly try to observe Holi with their downtrodden Hindu
communities.
