Rafi Aamer April 17, 2007

Tags: taliban , pakistan , society , Jamia Hafsa

rel="tag" href="/tag/Afghanistan">Afghanistan where the Mullahs assumed the rule of the country, may not be possible in most parts of the Pakistan because of substantially different socio-economic conditions than Afghanistan. A different sort of Talibanization though, where the jurisdiction of religion is expanded to every walk of life, from legislation to education and from sports to personal conduct of private citizens, is not only possible but is in steady progress in Pakistan. This sort of Talibanization didn’t start just recently or in the era of General Zia-ul-Haq as commonly alleged. It started back in 1949 when Pakistan’s first constituent assembly adopted the Objectives Resolution as the preamble to the constitution of Pakistan. Various constitutions have come and gone by the wayside since then but the resolution has survived and it is still a part of current Pakistani constitution.

The resolution states that “sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to God Almighty alone and the authority which He has delegated to the State of Pakistan through its people for being exercised within the limits prescribed by Him is a sacred trust”. Thus it was ordained that no legislation could be adopted in Pakistan which was against the tenets of Islam. Everything had to stay within the “limits prescribed by Him”. The resolution was presented to the assembly by the first Prime Minister of the newly created republic of Pakistan, Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan. His presentation of the resolution was accompanied by a speech in which he explained the purpose and rationale of the various clauses of the resolution. The speech has unmistakable Talibani thought process embedded in a couple of places. The most glaring of them is utter disdain towards secularism. Mr. Khan doesn’t trouble himself much by explaining what exactly is wrong with a system that is not “subservient to God” and where “spiritual and ethical values”, (read religion) had no part to play in the “governance of the people”. He just dismisses it by calling it “Machiavellian”. Similarly, while in the other parts of the speech, Mr. Khan presents Islam as a tool to the welfare of the people of Pakistan, at one place, he states that “the real goal” of Pakistan was “the service of Islam and the furtherance of its objects”.


To be fair though, the large part of the speech describes Islam in quite liberal terms. Mr. Khan goes to a great length in his speech to clarify that this resolution was not an attempt to create a theocracy. Many of the commentators at that time said that the resolution was in fact a measure against theocracy because it stated that the authority delegated by the God to the people will be practiced by the chosen representatives of the people. It meant that the system being suggested was a democracy which would be Islamic in its nature. There are a couple of problems with this approach at a conceptual level such as how a system can be called a democracy, in which the supreme power is supposed to rest with the people, when you are clearly stating that that is not going to be the case and the supreme power would rest with God alone. Moreover, neither the speech nor the resolution defined any mechanism in any detail thru which it could be decided what’s Islamic and what’s not. Perhaps, the proponents of the resolution thought that this would be achieved thru a discussion between the chosen representatives of the people. If that was the case, they were sadly mistaken because that is not how religion works. Religious faith consists of beliefs etched in stone that no vote or rational discussion can erase and the Mullahs do not need to be in the parliament to dictate the legislation.

By declaring that no law in Pakistan would be made against Islamic beliefs, the constituent assembly gave religious establishment the monopoly over legislative discourse thru which they could influence every part of the society. After such proclamation, the role of the chosen representatives of people was doomed to become irrelevant and so it did. This was quite evident last year when the government of Pakistan tried to pass Women Protection Bill thru the parliament. Overwhelming part of the debate in parliament and in the media that preceded the passage of the bill revolved not around whether the bill actually protected the women or not but whether it was consistent with Islam or not. The government, eventually, had to go to a select committee of Ulema, who were not elected by the people of Pakistan, to get the certificate of compliance before passing the bill.

Under the aegis of Objectives Resolution, the religious bullies in Pakistan have been having their way for past many decades. Their influence keeps growing and in recent years, the rise has gained an unprecedented sharpness. The bands of hooligans who used to gatecrash private parties to stop the consumption of alcohol and smash the windscreens of cars parked outside some hotel on a new year’s eve have now graduated into openly challenging the writ of the state by kidnapping people on the charges of prostitution, holding policemen and their vehicles hostage and issuing notices to the video shops to stop pedaling “obscene” videos (and, of course, these religious vigilantes are the ones who would decide what’s obscene and what’s not). By all indications so far, the chosen representatives of the people who were supposed to practice authority delegated to them by God are willing to tow the line drawn by the Maulanas of religious seminaries if only the Maulanas would not challenge the state so openly.

Once the monopoly over the societal discourse is handed over to the religious establishment, they would be the ones who would decide the priorities as well. If seen thru Maualans’ eyes, the cardinal social “evils” in Pakistan are obscenity and consumption of alcohol. Rampant corruption, gender/religious discrimination and illiteracy do not appear anywhere on Maulanas’ radar screens and for good reasons; most of these real social ills are actually patronized by religious organizations.

When Musharraf emerged on the scene, he was seen as an anti-religious establishment guy. The gulf between him and the religious community further widened after Musharraf’s unconditional support to the war on terror. The two sides have been in constant tussle in the past few years. Musharraf’s weakness against the religious establishment has been exposed many times thru half-measures like removing the religion column from the passport. On the other hand, the religious establishment is not used to half measures. The recent incidents are a troubling indication that Musharraf has miserably failed to curtail the influence of Mullahs in Pakistan. The Talibanization, Pakistan-style, is nearing its completion.