The rot within

Side-effect
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
No more an external threat. Nor an easily manageable one which the liberal-hypocrite segments within the power establishment may continue to be complacent about. As you sow, so shall you reap. We thought we would use religion to control our people, discourage them from asking for their economic rights as they would believe that their worldly fate is determined by the heavens; build a unitary nation state where smaller provinces could be reined in and their resources could be controlled, and fight our overt and covert wars on the eastern and the western fronts by branding them holy. This strategy has fallen flat on its face. Whatever we could do externally is known to all and sundry. Internally, we are fast fragmenting as a people – more in terms of religion than in ethnic or linguistic terms.
A family friend who lives in Karachi told me that many of the women in her neighbourhood and her colleagues in the college she teaches at refused to come to her annual milad this year – an event to celebrate the birth of the Prophet of Islam (pbuh). They told her that a proper dars (religious sermon) is better than singing exaggerated praises for the Prophet that actually sound like bid’a and borders on shirk. Meaning thereby, the Greatness and Oneness of God is challenged if you hold a milad. A few weeks ago, a former colleague had called me from Gujranwala. He said that for about 30 years his mother had distributed some special dish as neyaz – among her mostly non-Shia neighbours – during Muharram. For the first time no Sunni family in the neighbourhood accepted that food. His mother, feeling insulted and dejected, wept for hours.
A sitting MNA from the southern part of Punjab who comes from a Sunni family also related an incident. During last year’s Muharram, he was clad in a black kurta shalwar and taking his morning walk in a park in his native town. A group of young boys between the ages of 12 and 16 who were also wearing white caps and looked like students from a local madressah started stalking him. Then they began to chant in a chorus, Shia kafir Shia kafir (Shias are infidels and not Muslim). First he thought of engaging with them but as their chants became louder and louder, he felt scared and rushed out of the park.
In the same part of the country, when a couple of years ago I was invited to speak at a seminar for youth on the rights of religious minorities in Pakistan, a vocal student who seemed very sympathetic to my views, told me after the seminar that, although Shias are non-Muslims, they must not be killed.
A young Christian Pakistani friend whose family has contributed to this country’s progress and development in more than one way once narrated an interesting story from his high school days. It was August 14 and Independence Day was being celebrated in the school as well. A group of boys came up to him and asked with curiosity and earnestness, “Do you also celebrate 14th August? Will you and your family participate in our Independence Day celebrations?” Another interesting incident was narrated by a friend from Chakwal who has served in one of the wings of our armed forces as a senior officer.
Himself a progressive and enlightened Muslim, he got a complaint from one of the Christian staff that a Muslim colleague had suddenly stopped eating with him and insisted on him having a separate set of crockery and cutlery. My friend summoned that Muslim staff member and inquired if he would ask a superior non-Muslim officer to do the same? He, of course, knew very well that this Muslim staff member worked under a non-Muslim Pakistani officer, washed his dishes and polished his boots. There is a class element that gets introduced when we treat poor Christians and Hindus with contempt in Pakistan. In affluent households, where utensils for Christian servants are even further separated from those of Muslim servants, an ordinary semi-literate European or an American would come and eat in Grandma’s traditional china and porcelain.
Coming back to growing sectarianism and faith-based extremism, the more you see things closely the more you realise that while some got the conditions ripe and found national and international support to resort to intense forms of violence and spread massive terror, it is not a particular school of thought among Muslims or a particular religio-political party that can be held solely responsible for what we see happening in our homes, communities and society today in terms of attitudes. Everyone has played a part. While Salafis and Deobandis, with all their inherent differences, preach an orthodox and puritanical form of religion and also take to violence, the Tableeghi Jamaat continues to create legitimacy for such an exclusive form of faith in its own apparently benign way. To me it is not benign at all.
After Salafis and Deobandis were castigated by a part of the state institutions and were seen as fighting the interests of the country, there was so much fanfare about being an inclusive Sunni Barelvi or being a Sufi. But you can see that those calling themselves Ahle Sunnat, Barelvi and followers of Sufism created havoc around the controversial blasphemy law. They inspired the killing of people and turned to violence in order to regain the political space they had lost to other Sunni sub-sects who were patronised by the Pakistani establishment for many years. A real threat in some parts of Pakistan in the near future is violence between Sunni sub-sects.
While people are being killed indiscriminately across the country, Shias undoubtedly remain the most persecuted Muslim sect in Pakistan today. Sometimes I do feel like asking the Shia clerics why they didn’t see this coming when they sided with Sunni clerics in running ferocious campaigns against Ahmadis to get them ex-communicated from the fraternity of Islam. To declare someone non-Muslim by an act of parliament will continue to haunt our legislative history. ZA Bhutto should not have succumbed to the pressure of the clerics. Even if the majority of Muslims thought that Ahmadis were not Muslims, parliament must not have been the place to get the law enacted.
The policies pursued and strategies applied by the state and its dominant institutions within and outside the country created an intolerant society. Each of our homes has become prejudiced as a result. Each Pakistani cannot put up with anything different, anything that may differ from our own belief system and anything that forces us to think. Facts are to be rejected if they challenge our preconceived thoughts and ideals.
Nations perish if they do not realise their mistakes in time. We are losing time. There can be no confusion anymore. It is not just the madressahs that need reform. The curricula of public and private schools have to change as well. The media messages have to change. Hate speech and promoting intolerance and exclusion in the name of faith has to be stopped. Ignorance, myopia and intolerance have to be replaced by knowledge, enlightenment and inclusion. Don’t call it secular if it makes your blood boil. But make it a plural society that respects diversity. The government and institutions of the establishment have to drastically change their policies. They have to refrain from being apologetic to medieval clerics and stop conceding more and more social space. We all have to speak up in our circles of influence – homes, offices, schools and places of worship.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com