Khaled Ahmed: Shrinking The Nation - From the Middle East to Malaysia, Muslim states are ‘expelling’ minority elements
Is it true that 93 per cent of Malaysia’s women are
“circumcised” and that Malaysia’s highest religious authority issued a fatwa in
2009 requiring the “cutting” of all Muslim women? This appeared in Pakistan’s
The Express Tribune (February 20, 2015) and is difficult to digest. But a
cousin of mine, who was once quite normal living here in Lahore but has gone
nuts after becoming a British citizen in Liverpool, has written to tell me that
Islam actually allows female genital mutilation.
Years ago, Malaysia’s great leader Mahathir bin Mohamad told
us in Lahore that his country couldn’t afford to follow Pakistan in imposing
primitive hudood laws that reduced the testimony of non-Muslims and women to
half. Today, Malaysian PM Najib Razak says his country is moderately Islamic.
But others say he is letting the state go hard-shell Islamic because the
Islamist elements in his party are too strong. And he has used the country’s
notorious sedition act to jail his opponents because they reject hudood.
If Malaysia goes down this familiar road, it will lose some
basic attributes of the modern nation-state and will be of a piece with the
rest of the Muslim world. Ironically, nation-states lose the “nation” part
after “expelling” minority elements — and, somehow, women. Primitive minds
equate a nation with one identity. This has happened to Pakistan. The Balkan
region first did this, with its nationalists saying the “state periodically
expels its trash”.
Is it “Muslim trash” we see in the states Muslims created as
nation-states, getting the word “nation” all wrong? Somehow women get a raw
deal in this process of removing minorities from the “nation”. Is Malaysia
moving to where Pakistan, and possibly Bangladesh, have already got? What
appears to be Islamic reform in Malaysia now will ultimately get the Chinese and
Indians expelled like “trash”. Pakistan under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto too did this
in 1974, on the pretext of purifying the Muslim identity. Today, it is
increasingly a state without a nation.
In The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in
Pakistan (2015), Ali Usman Qasmi reveals what may compare to what Najib Razak
is going through — Bhutto got parliament to apostatise Ahmadi Muslims. He was
driven, like Razak, by a strange internal impulse Muslims ultimately succumb
to. Today, Pakistan is killing Shias, the next “trash” the state wants to
expel. What Nusrat Bhutto grasped intuitively about Pakistan’s future was
missed by a left-leaning Bhutto in his obsession with the nation-state as he
understood it. Today, Shias are being slaughtered while other “trash” Muslims,
like the Ismailis, are next in line. Non-Muslims are targeted by the blasphemy
law. Those who can run away are leaving Pakistan. Those who can’t
are the victims of a state expelling its “trash”.
In Bangladesh, a secular
Sheikh Hasina Wajed is ruling a state gone crazy about Islam. Some say a
Salafist fundamentalism funded from abroad has caused Bangladeshi society to
become intolerant, but the fact is that the state of Bangladesh had
started expelling its “trash” soon after its “liberation” from Pakistan.
Mujibur Rahman couldn’t stop the expulsion of Hindus and couldn’t restore the
properties grabbed from them by Muslims.
Today, an Islamised Bangladesh is fast becoming a state
without a nation. In the Middle East, Muslim states, artificial imperial
impositions, should have become nations after living together for half a century.
The West’s “democracy evangelism” has picked them apart. Iraq, says Fareed
Zakaria, is no longer a state. Once, Kemalist Turkey was the model. M.A. Jinnah
kept Mustafa Kemal’s biography under his pillow; Allama Iqbal thought secular
Turkey was the new model for Muslims.
Today, an angry Turk called
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is leading the nation back to where communities have to
suffer to allow the state to cleanse itself. I thought there were no Shias in
Egypt, but now the news is, Egyptians find them and thrash them for being
“different”. The Muslim faith has reasserted itself and wants to remain
unchanging, even as the modern state mutates in order to survive. In Africa and
the Middle East, Muslims are not able to cope with change. Now, the Muslims of Malaysia
and Indonesia might get pulled into this new crisis.
The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek
More articles on Pakistan
