Celebrating the hegemony of political Islam (Shaukat-e-Islam) while addressing a mass gathering at Larkana, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, amir of the JUI-F, came down heavily against those who want ‘liberalism’ in Pakistan – further fuelling a debate ignited with the remarks of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif about the necessity of liberalism and modernisation for the future of Pakistan. In fact, my friend Maulana Fazl did not know quite what he was saying. When the prime minister mentioned liberalism in his speech, he had neo-liberalism in mind – a laissez-faire market economy (minus co-essential small government) with some aspects of political liberalism, such as representative governance. Interestingly, after forgetting some of the socialist and secular principles professed by one of his gurus Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi in his draft of India’s constitution, Maulana Fazlur Rehman actually concurs with Sharif’s classical liberal economic paradigm. If the Maulana represents the religious Right – the notion of marrying Islam with democracy in a conservative framework without actually conceding some fundamental rights and liberty – Sharif, being a centre-right liberal, also does not subscribe to some of the pertinent principles of liberalism, such as the separation of religion and state and certain obscurantist traditions. Most of the religious political parties – essentially representing various sects engaged in apostatising one another – while taking a parliamentary and legal course collectively reject some of the essential features of liberty as a challenge to their conservatism. These features being freedom of thought and speech, pluralism and equality before law, especially the rights of minorities and women. The intellectual evolution of our ‘Muslim democrats’ is struck up as compared to ‘Christian democrats’ who, while supporting the separation of Church and state, mix democracy with Catholic social/moral ideals. As opposed to Christian democrats, our Muslim democrats have great reservations over the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are caught between the terrestrial nation-state and extra-terrestrial Ummah, and democracy and Khilafa (which rejects universal suffrage and liberty), despite showing their allegiance to the 1973 constitution – a unity of opposites of enlightened liberalism and Islamic conservatism. If our parliamentary ulemas subscribe to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they can be considered equivalent to the Christian democrats. Our so-called liberal/social liberal and ethno-nationalist parties, such as the PPP, ANP, MQM, National Party and PkMAP, do broadly support two cardinal principles of liberty and equality. However, they lack consistency in their adherence to some very pertinent features of liberalism and social liberalism. The leading social liberal, the PPP, and ethno-nationalist liberals ANP, NP, PkMAP protect hereditary privileges, remnants of feudalism and have coalesced in conservatism on the Islamic provisions in the 1973 constitution. The PPP is even more confused about the kind of social liberalism or social democracy it wants to pursue, and is being held back by its feudal upper echelons dominating the party. It vacillates between Thatcherism and populist egalitarianism while taking pride in constitutionally discriminating against the Ahmadis. The MQM, being an ethnic entity, has the privilege of separating religion from politics but is not liberal as far as tolerance of the liberties and freedoms of others are concerned. Most confusing of all is the PTI, much like the multi-dimensional personality of Imran Khan. The party combines a wide range of patriarchal traditionalism and conservatism with liberal egalitarianism and mixes social populism with neo-liberal economics. It has the most confusing propensity to play favourably to the Taliban while attracting modern women towards the Western ethos of good governance. Khan’s populism is right wing in its ideological content and appears to be revolutionary in demagogic terms. Divorced from the long democratic struggle in Pakistan, it shows greater inclination to join authoritarian forces. Among the various paradoxes that Pakistan inherited and faced in its political evolution, the role of Islam in constitution-making and nation-building continued to reinforce a kind of split personality of the nation-state, antithetical to the spiritual ummah. Mindful of the ideological and political paradox, Jinnah – who propounded the ‘two-nation theory’ – had to shed it in favour of a liberal and secular statehood, regardless of the faith of any citizen, in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947. But after his death the right-wing in his conservative party compromised with the mullahs while formulating the Objectives Resolution. Similarly, a social liberal Zulfikar Ali Bhutto compromised the secular character of the 1973 constitution to win over the religious Right led by Mufti Mahmood, a coalition partner of the so-called secular NAP, and committed to all legislation in accordance with the tenets of Islam. Successive authoritarian military regimes, even though some of them pretended to be liberal, were against most of the liberal values of freedoms and rights, the separation of power between various branches of the state, universal suffrage, rule of law and democratic institutions. The intervention of the army both distorted and stunted the evolution of the state and its constituent branches. Even when democracy was restored, those who were created and nurtured under the military’s tutelage could not break with the characteristics of an authoritarian state. Even our education system has been fashioned in the light of a most conservative and authoritarian ideology. Consequently, the ideological paradox continues to inhibit the evolution of political thought and nationhood. Most astonishing is the attitude of those who reject liberalism, despite embracing various facets of liberalism – freedom to think and speak, equality before law, universal suffrage, representative institutions, separation of power – and who support various version of the classical liberal free market economy or a mixed-economy and even anti-capitalism socialism. I was stunned to hear a Marxist professor rejecting the need to fight religious extremism and for secularism at a left-wing gathering in Lahore. The battle of ideas in Pakistan has been – and is – so crucial, in which Marxists have made a tremendous contribution. Thanks to misconceptions spread by semi-literate mediapersons, an overwhelming majority of both the literate and illiterate population moralistically misconceives liberalism as some kind of an immoral anarchism, and secularism as anti-religion or atheistic. Secularism in fact is extremely moralistic, while liberalism defends religious freedoms. Worse are those who out of their ignorance have invented the term ‘liberal fascism’ – ignoring both theoretical and historical fact that liberalism and fascism are irreconcilable. The word liberal comes from the Latin word ‘liber’, meaning free. Liberalism is based on the notions of liberty, equality, freedoms of conscience, speech, religion and human rights, universal suffrage, pluralism, tolerance, women’s rights, equal rights for minorities, separation of the powers of the state and rejection of violence, sectarian/ethnic/ideological hatred, authoritarianism, fascism, obscurantism, absolute monarchy etc. It has many variants that have evolved over the last few centuries. During the age of Enlightenment, liberalism rejected absolute monarchy, the ‘divine right of kings’, hereditary privileges, prejudice and bigotry. The idea of liberalism (liberty and equality) found its realisation in the Glorious Revolutions of 1688 in England, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. The Magna Carta, the UK Bill of Rights established the supremacy of law and parliament over monarchs; the US Bill of Rights ensured all civil and human rights to the people. Similarly, France abolished feudalism and passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens, ending both the Inquisition and the Holy Roman Empire. It is quite obvious that we have not seen the intellectual, philosophical, political and systemic upheavals and transformations that laid the basis for the civilised world of our age; we insist on living in the shadows of our medieval past. Maulana Fazal is ironically partially right in claiming the hegemony of his conservative ideology torn by sectarian divisions in a country that was anathema to his predecessors, as opposed to Jinnah who was against theocracy in a liberal Pakistan. Islamists, at worse, can come up with alternatives like Daesh and, at best, become Muslim Democrats. But there is no alternative to Jinnah’s liberal Pakistan if it were to survive as a nation-state under threat from religious extremism/terrorism. The writer is a political analyst. Email: imtiaz.safma@gmail.com Twitter: @ImtiazAlamSAFMA
