The road to normalcy

The writer advises governments, donors and NGO's on public policy.
"He who does not know evil, will fall into it" – Hazrat Umar Farooq
Eighty-six dead bodies lay in sub-zero temperature for over four days in Quetta last week waiting for this country to bury them. The carnage inflicted upon the Hazara community in this country has had to compete with carnage of all sorts on all fronts. But there is always something a little more painful about watching a minority struggle to stay alive in a country built on a foundation made up of the thoughts and words of Muhammad Allama Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
The proverbial tipping point in the sustained campaign to kill members of the Fiqh-e-Jafria in Pakistan should have come a long time ago, when the first chants of “Shia kaafir” rang out of Jhang in the Punjabi heartland over two decades ago. It did not. Today, we have a galaxy of seminaries and mosques dedicated to the branding of Shias as kaafir. We have educated and illiterate men and women from all ethnicities that readily remind us of how Shias don’t respect the Sahaaba. We have terrorists that roam freely in this republic who emanate from the original mother ship of sectarian violence in Pakistan – the Sipah-e-Sahaba.
The families of the murdered Hazaras in Quetta were not trying to help Pakistan achieve a tipping point. They were simply crying out for help. It was heartening to see Pakistan respond to this cry for help. For the better part of three days, sit-in protests were able to mobilise thousands of Pakistanis across at least a dozen different cities to demand a resolution to the burial impasse on Alamdar Road in Quetta, and action against the perpetrators of the latest atrocity against Shias.
In the Pakistani tradition, Shias and Sunnis are separated by only the thinnest of lines. The big difference between the two ‘sects’ here has always been where we put our hands during the recitation of Surah Fatiha during salaat. Many Pakistanis of my generation can readily remember a time when they didn’t even know what Sunni or Shia was. When did it really start to matter? It never did. Until recently.
Since the late 1970s Pakistan has allowed countries that we call ‘brotherly’ to infect our country with their quarrels. Saudi Arabian charities have poured billions into Pakistan’s mosques and seminaries to promote a Saudi version of Islam. Post-revolution Iran hasn’t been any better, obsessed with scoping out influence in Pakistan, and investing heavily in sectarian rhetoric. The results have been disastrous.
This problem will not go away on its own. The divide between mainstream Sunnis and Shias has been injected into the culture through a concerted and well-financed international effort. It will only be addressed through a concerted and well-financed Pakistani effort.
There are two main stages that we need to cover in a Pakistani journey to the re-establishment of normalcy.
The first is, unequivocally, the complete annihilation of any openly violent group – be it Sunni or Shia – beginning with the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. We cannot enter people’s minds and turn off the radicalisation switch, but surely we can prevent open calls to arms and brazen violence? If not, then we are doomed – economically, socially, politically, and most importantly, spiritually.
The second is, without delay, a concerted campaign that holds every single mosque and madressah in the country to account for the funds used to sustain the mosque. This should not in any way be part of an aggressive posture toward mosques. Instead, it should be seen, quite rightly, as a ‘National Mosque Revitalisation Campaign’. Such a campaign would set construction, maintenance and cleanliness standards on the infrastructure side, and on the content-side, duty of care standards that would prevent hate speech in our khutbas and madressah curricula.
No mosque in any part of the country operates without the knowledge of the local police station. SHOs need to be deployed, with a complementary raise in staffing and funding for each thaana (police station), to engage every mosque in their jurisdiction. Broader conferences and seminars need to be convened to help build mosques deal with a new Pakistan in which hate speech will not be tolerated. Concurrently, mosques will be lavished with the kind of attention that will make them the community centres they are meant to be, in the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and the Righteous Companions, Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddiq, Hazrat Umar Farooq, Hazrat Usman and Hazrat Ali.
Audited and transparent accounts for mosques will reveal where funding for the most egregiously radicalised religious rhetoric comes from. This, in turn, would empower Pakistan to take up those cases in which foreign-funded mosques or seminaries are fostering violent extremism.
Such a step would automatically address another concern, often voiced by hyper-nationalists for whom every Pakistani problem has another country’s fingerprints on it. If intelligence agencies around the world are using the sectarian divide in Pakistan against us, a comprehensive National Mosque Revitalisation Campaign that generates transparent and audited accounts, and sets and enforces standards for content, would expose them rather quickly. Our law-enforcement and intelligence communities would then be able to act swiftly to take legal, diplomatic and counter-intelligence measures to address such cases too.
There are some vital conditions, however, to this two-stage process – both the annihilation of violent groups and the revitalisation of the Pakistani mosque and madressah.
For starters, this cannot be done as a partisan activity. It requires national consensus, across all power centres and political parties. The most vital of the power centres, apart from parliament and the various secretariats, are the military and the judiciary. The military, in particular, needs to sustain a vigorous intolerance for takfiri (excommunicative) and anti-Shia rhetoric. The most vital political parties are the PML-N, PML-Q and the PTI. This is for no reason other than the fact that, together, they currently dominate the Punjab’s politics. If they agree on one thing, visibly, unequivocally and enduringly, it needs to be this.
Second, this cannot be achieved without the visible involvement of religious groups. The recent death of Professor Ghafoor Ahmed of Jamaat-e-Islami was a reminder of a time when the Jamaat was a contributor to the intellectual life of Pakistan. It can only benefit Pakistan for that Jamaat to re-emerge, rather than continue on the extremist path it set for itself during the 1990s. Sirajul Haq’s statements and Mian Aslam’s appearance at the Islamabad sit-in for the Hazara killings indicate that this may be even be possible; it should be encouraged.
Third, any effort to address the problem must not be allowed to get derailed by silly arguments about sensitivities in Riyadh, Tehran or indeed, anywhere else.
Fourth, it must not be attempted without investing in the necessary capacity – large improvements in the resources and autonomy of the police, a set of legislative measures that create the legal framework for these stages, and a funding envelope that necessarily will be inter-generational, at a minimum, no less than a ten-year commitment.
Pakistan owes itself a culture in which we should never have to chant “Shia-Sunni bhai, bhai” because this is an understood part of the bedrock of our society. The urgency of addressing the situation should be self-evident. We’ve gone from Quaid-e-Azam as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to a political leadership (one hundred years later) that needed 86 dead, freezing corpses in Quetta to be moved to ask, “Hey, what’s happening in Quetta?”
Something evil happened in Quetta. We must heed the coffins of the Hazara, and the words of Hazrat Umar Farooq. We must deal with this evil.