The Intellectual Imperative

All times must seem, to the people of the day, as times of great
transition. Even accounting for this historical parallax, however,
one has to concede that contemporary Pakistan is indeed in a time of
great transition, at once standing at multiple crossroads in
economics, politics, development, sociology and theology. The core
institutions that anchor the focus and direction of the modern
nation-state, such as the well-developed traditions of law, finance
and social welfare in mature Western democracies, are still embryonic
in Pakistan. As a result, this post-colonial overpopulated developing
country, conceived in the name of Islam, confronts many grave choices
today, as the millennium turns and a new century beckons.

The Problem
Matters are very much in flux. Such
momentous concerns as the optimal system of government, the curriculum
in our schools, the rights of our fellow-citizens, the social balance
of our varied ethnicities, and our geo-political relationships around
the world are still developing concepts in Pakistan, making them
fragile and vulnerable but also, importantly, malleable by discourse.
And then there is the inevitable question of Islam, in which the
stakes are especially high. I believe the core question is how do we
best fulfill our religious heritage and spiritual obligations as we
march in step with the rest of the world and endeavor to make our
people comfortable and prosperous; but there is also an important
backdrop, having to do with the larger question of Islamic revivalism.
Inasmuch as Islam in modern political relief represents little more
than the ravages of colonial defeat, modern Pakistan is also obliged
to formulate a meaningful role in the recovery of Islam as a global
polity. Thus we find ourselves in the midst of terribly, terribly
confusing times, simultaneously confronted with several crucial
branchpoints in the course of our national evolution. Our need to
find intellectual direction has never been greater.
Evolving
societies have traditionally received the most enduring intellectual
guidance from the gifted amongst them, from the few inspired
visionaries who are able to combine the depth of their knowledge with
the sweep of their wisdom to assay the dilemmas of their day, in the
process extracting a coherent philosophy of life and how best to live
it. Think, for example, of how the great jurists and thinkers of
early Islam shaped Muslim society at the height of its power, and how
modern Western society draws on intellectual foundations that matured
in Europe and America through the last three centuries. I think it is
fair to say, however, that in our particular case the course of events
leading from the arrival of Islam to the Indian subcontinent up to
well after 1857 had been such that no coherent intellectual traditions
were able to take root. If we ask ourselves today what are the
intellectual foundations of modern Pakistan, what is our future, and
where are we headed - one finds few good answers forthcoming.


The Aligarh Movement
A major hurdle, it seems to me,
has been that since Pakistan represents the eventual confluence of
three separate tributaries - Islam, Indian culture and British
imperialism - any sophisticated and intellectually sound framework for
Pakistan's national direction must contend with having to weave these
three distinct forces into a meaningful whole. This cannot be an easy
marriage and it is hardly surprising that, although Islam had arrived
at India's shores as early as 712 AD, it was not until after the
failed War of Independence of 1857-59 that the need for developing a
coherent outlook for Muslim India was seriously addressed for the
first time. These efforts resulted in what would come to be called
the Aligarh Movement, for which revival was the rationale, defeat the
catalyst, and Sayyid Ahmed Khan the founding protagonist. One could
argue that it was only after 1857 that the sociopolitical climate
demanded such an effort, but I think this lets the pre-colonial Muslim
world off too lightly. When the Renaissance took hold in Europe, the
Muslim world consisted of three strongholds, the Osmanli (Ottoman)
Empire centered in what is now Turkey, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and
the Mughal Empire centered in north India. By the scholarship
standards of sixteenth to eighteenth century Europe, none of these
bastions can boast of any major intellectual accomplishments. In
India, the meeting of Islam and native Hindu traditions did produce an
intellectual flowering in the form of Sufi thought, but this was a
mystic, metaphysical movement, having little to do with running and
guiding a nation and its people. Beyond this, we are just left with
tales of the quick-witted and the entertainingly clever - the Faizis
and the Abul Fazls - who left enough of a mark on the Mughal darbaars
of their time to have themselves immortalized in anecdotes that
percolate in the subcontinent even today. Indeed, even Urdu
literature did not begin to blossom until Mughal decline had set in,
as Urdu poetry first flourished after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 and
Mir Amman's Bagh-o-Bahar, arguably the first proper Urdu novel, was
not written until 1801.


After the defeat of 1857, the Muslims of India finally took
stock and began an intense search for meaning in their lives and
situation. There were really only two intellectual traditions to draw
on: the writings of Muslim thinkers from the classical age and the
attitudes and practices of English colonial masters. Although by this
time Urdu literature had evolved into a refined pursuit claiming a
respectable creative output, the corpus of work largely comprised
poetry as a study in aesthetics and like Sufism it, too, fell short of
providing any sort of recipe for galvanizing the collective
consciousness of a directionless people. Nazir Ahmed, the
quintessential Aligarh warrior, dismissed Urdu's creative
contributions up to that point with the rhetorical question, "Hamaray
yahaa'n ki shaairi mein ishq-baazi aur bay-tehzeebi kay siva hai kiya
?" (Ralph Russell's translation: What is there in our poetry except
love-making and lack of refinement ?)


Born to an aristocratic family with strong links to the Mughal
court, Sayyid Ahmed Khan proved to be a remarkable thinker and leader
who synthesized traditional Muslim and modern English approaches into
a novel program for the uplift of Indian Muslims. Because the central
thrust of the Aligarh Movement was progressive and liberal, calling
for the corruption of established Islamic ways with European
attitudes, it did not find universal appeal in Muslim India, invoking
inevitable opposition from the traditional order that is perhaps best
typified by the Deoband school. The uniqueness of the Deoband
position was not so much in its insistence on the strict and
unquestioned preservation of the pre-existing Islamic order, albeit
under colonial subjugation, as it was in its clean, non-negotiable
rejection of the West as having nothing good to offer. Nevertheless,
as the nineteenth century drew to its imperial close in India, the
Aligarh position emerged as a dominant ideology and was able to
successfully engineer a revival at least of purpose and spirit, if not
of political power, in the Muslim community. Luminaries like Altaf
Husain Hali, Nazir Ahmed and Sayyid Mehdi Ali (Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk)
came to embody this particular outlook and passed it on to the next
generation of writers and thinkers such as Abdul Halim Sharar and
Shibli Naumani. Not only had the collective mindset of an entire
people been seeded, an altogether new intelligentsia was brought to
life. To the extent that the Aligarh Movement had created a new kind
of Muslim who would substantially condition the sociopolitical climate
in which the empire endgame was played out in British India, it
ultimately represents the intellectual moorings of the creation of
Pakistan. As a measure of its success, I think it is fair to say that
the ideals and values of the Aligarh school continue to shape the
modern Pakistani consciousness and probably also to an appreciable
extent the contemporary consciousness of Muslims in post partition
India.


The Twentieth Century and Iqbal
The Aligarh
Movement gave way to the events of the twentieth century, which saw
the political crystallization of Muslim India in the form of the
All-India Muslim League. With war in Europe and the maturation of the
United States into the leading superpower of its time, a new global
order was afoot and India, too, was sucked into the maelstrom. We are
told that in 1930 Muhammad Iqbal, a poet and philosopher from Lahore,
first gave voice to the idea of a separate Muslim state in India with
self-government. Thereafter, in a series of political shifts, some of
tectonic proportions, the barrister Mohammed Ali Jinnah successfully
presided over a campaign for such a state, which culminated in 1947
with the end of colonial rule in India and the birth of East and West
Pakistan. In the intellectual landscape of Muslim India, however, who
can argue with Iqbal's hold on the twentieth century ? Standing on
the shoulders of the Aligarh Movement, Iqbal articulated a philosophy
and wisdom with a pan-Islamic scope that placed a fierce emphasis on
proud self-reliance. The essence of his position is best captured by
a couplet that, although having long become a cliche, must be
revisited as it has no substitute:


Khudi ko kar buland itna kay har taqdeer say pahlay

Khuda banday say khud poochay bata taireey raza kiya hai



[Ralph Russell's translation -

Exalt yourself so high that before issuing each decree of fate

God will Himself ask you, His servant, 'Tell me, what is your wish ?']


Iqbal had a Master's in philosophy from Government College,
Lahore, another Master's from Cambridge and a PhD from Munich received
for work on Persian metaphysics. He had also qualified as a barrister
in London. His is an intensely proud thesis that rejects defeatism
and elevates man by an unapologetic celebration of the self. Iqbal
extends the departure from the pre-colonial status quo initiated by
the Aligarh school but, ultimately, his intellectual depth is so
enormous that he transcends Indian politics and the predicament of the
Indian Muslim. To this extent, I believe, his legacy rivals the
contributions of classical Muslim philosophers like Ibn-Sina and
Al-Farabi and elevates him to a position in our culture reserved only
for the most august and the most revered. In the Pakistani psyche,
Iqbal has joined those whose word becomes sacred and whose views go
unchallenged. But if Iqbal's message was more complex and
far-reaching than the teachings of the Aligarh school, it was also
harder to absorb and to live up to. I think it is important to note
that even though the Aligarh revival is deeply embedded in the
historical origins of Pakistan, Iqbal's lofty expectation of a vibrant
and confident people stridently marching at the head of an Islamic
Renaissance has not yet come to pass.


So Where To Now ?



If Aligarh and Iqbal provided the intellectual guidance that
led Muslim India from the depths of despair in 1857 to the creation of
Pakistan in 1947, one cannot escape the fact that post-1947, the
country has been in intellectual free-fall. It is easy to blame this
on the usual suspects - inept politicians, a power-hungry military,
feudal landowners, an ineffectual educational system, rampant
corruption and overall general national malaise. While these
constraints have certainly played a role, I tend to take a larger
view. In my opinion, one explanation for the lack of intellectual
focus is that the chaotic burdens and practical realities of
self-government have now taken over. The pre-requisites of an ordered
social life, such as food and shelter as well as the maintenance of
law and property rights, not to mention the political responsibility
of being an independent debt-ridden state within the global fold of
nations, are consuming almost all our energies and attention. These
were not the headaches of India's Muslims when Hali, Nazir and Iqbal
expounded on their philosophies of life. We have to admit that, for
Pakistan, life is a struggle: the country is so busy just trying to
get by that little energy is left over for any intellectual appraisals
of our destiny. A second reason for the relative intellectual vacuum,
I believe, is the widespread opportunity to enter well-paying
professional vocations. The lure of a secure life as a high-income
professional has probably resulted in some of our best creative
intellects being lost to medicine, engineering, business, law and
finance. After all, who's to say that potential Sharars, Nazirs,
Halis, perhaps even Iqbals, aren't born in Pakistan every year but,
faced in young adulthood with the choice of a secure career as a
engineer versus an uncertain life in the world of ideas, opt for
stability?


The problem, of course, is that while Pakistan struggles to
stay afloat as a country, the clock of destiny continues to tick away.
In the wake of Mughal decline, British rule, and the events of the
twentieth century, so many things need to be sorted out, which brings
us back to the questions raised at the beginning of this piece. The
merger of Islam and the West begun by the Aligarh Movement over a
hundred years ago still remains incomplete. Is this our destiny? If
so, let's finish the job. Our judicial, educational and civil
bureaucracies, although colonial relics, continue to wield great power
in the lives of all Pakistanis even as Islam and the culture of the
subcontinent course in their veins. As a side-show, we have flirted
with socialist philosophy, following on the communist ethos of the
Progressive Writers' Movement, the economic policies of Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz's compelling exhortations to turn left,
but the central question of our ultimate identity and direction as a
people has been left almost entirely untouched by this foray. The
intelligent union of those three tributaries - Islam, Indian culture
and lessons from the West - still awaits an intellectual masterplan
that will give meaning, direction, context, confidence, vision, and
maturity to Pakistan and its people. Pan-Islamism and Pakistan's role
in it, although perhaps not a viable prospect for the immediate
future, remains a profound concern as the Islamic world awakens to a
global Islamic revival. Meanwhile, the daily business of state and
society goes on. Speaking of the despair of Indian Muslims in the
immediate aftermath of the struggle of 1857, Marshall G. S. Hodgson
wrote: "Among no other Muslim people was the problem of the meaning of
their cultural and spiritual heritage posed so searchingly."


The search continues.