Where are the Questioning Minds?

I don`t think it is called ``questioning``; it is called ``the usual piss and vinager and anti-Muslim bigotary``.

Azra Ji: Bravo! Encore!!

More like you are needed to salvage Pakistan which was part of unified South Asia once!!!

My name is Inquirer, today is my Wedding Anniversary, and I regard my wife as equal in all aspects!!!!

She may not share my interests in Physics, Philososphy, and Mathematics but we both consider each other equal in love!!!

I will provide a more detailed response once I get over the moment!!!!

Azra Rashid...

While one agrees with your liberalism and rant against patriarchy ...

Your understanding of South Asian history is pathetically poor ... so poor that it really destroys your own argument and opens it up for a complete destruction by the opponents of your liberal progressive view...

You write: ``But hundreds of years before British India ever existed, the region was anything but patriarchal and the religion of Islam was anything but repressive. Hindus and Muslims used to live under laws based in local custom in the pre-British India. ``

You have no clue... you have not bothered to read history before making such a weird claim... The coming of the British unified, modernised and rationalised existing laws ``based on local customs``... they would have done better to abolish them altogether...

Many local customs - Muslim and Hindu- were abolished... Child Marriages Restraint Act for example was a British law... though locals like Jinnah played an important in its passing... Satti was abolished by the British... the list goes on.

And then you make another outrageously stupid claim... you claim that Rabia Al Basari was ``south asian``... Please for god`s sake... why don`t you atleast try and research what you are writing ...

``society dominated by religious fanatics``

Please... lets not be so self critical as to start lying...

This is what an Indian- an academic unlike yourself - wrote about Pakistan in DT today..


By Yogi Sikand


Contrary to Indian media representations, the average Pakistani is just about as religious or otherwise as the average Indian. The average Pakistani is certainly not the wild-eyed fanatic baying for non-Muslim blood or waging violent jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony that our media would have us believe. Like the average Indian, he is emotionally attached to and culturally rooted in his religion, but he does not wear it on his sleeve; nor does it dictate every thought or act of his. In fact, the thing that first strikes the Indian visitor to Pakistan is how almost identical the average Pakistani is, looks and behaves to the average north Indian.

Almost all the many people I met in the course of a recent month-long visit to Pakistan that took me to several places in Punjab and Sindh do not even remotely fit the description of the average Pakistani peddled by our media. Islamist radical groups undeniably do have an important presence in parts of Pakistan, but they certainly do not command widespread popular support all over the country. This explains the continual dismal performance of religious parties in every Pakistani election. Despite concerted efforts by Islamist and mullah-based parties to establish a theocracy in the country, Pakistani politics are not dominated by religion as much as by economic, ethnic and regional concerns. It is, therefore, crucial not to exaggerate the influence of radical religious outfits in Pakistan, as the Indian media generally does.

Indian media descriptions of Pakistan tend to portray Islam in the country as a seamless monolith. The variety of local expressions of Islam are consistently overlooked so as to reinforce the image of a single version of Islam that is defined by the most radical of Islamist groups. The fact, however, is, that most Punjabis and Sindhis, that is to say a majority of Pakistanis, ascribe to or are associated with the sufi traditions which are anathema for such Islamists. Popular sufism is deeply-rooted in Pakistani soil and provides a strong counter to radical Islamist groups and their exclusivist agenda. Many sufis were folk heroes, radicals in their own right, bitterly critiquing tyrannical rulers as well as Muslim and Hindu priests. This is why they exercised a powerful influence on the masses, irrespective of religion. This explains, in part, why Islamist radicals are so fiercely opposed to the traditions that have developed over the centuries around such figures.

The popular sufi tradition in large parts of Pakistan thus limits the appeal of radical Islamists, making the chances of an Islamist takeover of the country a remote possibility. In recent years, it is true, these groups have gained particular salience and strength, but this is said to be less a reflection of a growing popular commitment to the Islamist cause than to other factors. One of these is the role of the state. Although the ideological founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged Pakistan as a secular Muslim state, successive Pakistani governments have used Islam to bolster their own frail support base, exactly in the same manner as the Congress and the BJP have done with Hinduism in the Indian case. Islam has also been used to weld together a number of the country’s ethnic groups that have little in common other than their profession of Islam, in the same way in which advocates of both ‘soft’ Hindutva, such as the Congress, and ‘hard’ Hindutva, such as the BJP, have sought to invoke Brahminical Hinduism to define the Indian nation state. Hindutva ideologues propagate a form of Hindu ‘nationalism’ that has no space for Indians of other faiths, and is, in fact, based on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindu ‘others’. Creating a Hindu identity in this fashion is predicated on excising all elements of culture and tradition that Hindus are seen to share with others. The same has happened in the case of official and radical versions of Islam in Pakistan. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, and certainly not the dominant, form of Islam in Pakistan, as my interaction with numerous Pakistanis from different walks of life revealed to me.

“Radical Islamist groups are not a true reflection or representative of Pakistani Islam”, a social activist friend of mine from Sindh explains. “State manipulation of religion”, he argues, “has had a major role to play in promoting radical Islamism in Pakistan”, which, he says, “is largely an expression of elite politics and Western imperialist manipulation”. “To add to state patronage of such groups”, he points out, “there is the fact of mounting economic and social inequalities, sustained military rule, the continued stranglehold of feudal lords and the absence of mechanisms for expressing democratic dissent, all of which have enabled radical Islamist groups to assert the claim of representing normative Islam against other competing versions and visions of the faith.”

In some parts of Pakistan, such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, he says, electoral support for Islamists “reflects anti-American sentiments rather than popular demands for theocratic rule”. Such groups, he says, have gained added strength from the ongoing conflict in Kashmir by “tapping into Pakistani nationalist sentiments on this issue in the same way as Hindutva groups used the Kashmir conflict in India, both seeking to present the issue in religious terms”. “In short”, he claims, “the limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes”.

“The task before Indians and Pakistanis seriously concerned about the future of our common subcontinent”, says another friend of mine, a journalist from Lahore, “is to rescue our religious traditions from the monopolistic claims of the radicals. Islamism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India feed on each other while claiming to be vociferous foes. We need to revive popular forms of religion, such as sufism and bhakti, that are accepting of other faiths and that at the same time are socially engaged and critique the system of domination that produces radicalism as a reaction while at the same time using it as a means of stifling challenges to it.”

The writer is post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden. He also edits a web-magazine called Qalandar, which can be accessed at www.islaminterfaith.org

It pains me to say but the fanatic Urstruly is right on the money on this one...

Azra Ji:

I do believe you expected the reactions of the types you got from Mantolives and, Of course, Urstruly. Even though it pained Mantolive to agree with Urstruly but they share a common goal. Need I elaborate on it?

But there are sensible people, yes even in Pakistan, like Nazarhayatkhan, Salim and Feroz. Let us support the likes of them. They along with likes of you are the only hope for return of sense to Pakistan as the Yogi imagines stting in Leiden. Yes, that is true inspite of your denigration by the Mantolives and Urstruly.

Inquirer..

Why must Indians make it an issue of Pakistan vs India...

Look dude... As the Ismaili son of an Ahmadi... I don`t share any common goals with urstruly ... I share a common goal with Azra of a Progressive and democratic Pakistan... I am not a misogynist... I believe in equal rights for women...

Which is I am pained at what she has expressed above... She claims for example that Rabia Basri was a South Asian... Rabia Basri lived in Basra all her life... Basra I checked last was NOT part of South Asia...

And the British were so bad... and patriarchal but they abolished slavery, child marriage and satti... which existed in the times that Azra is praising as ``non-patriarchal``.


If sensible means to be ``ignorant`` then I am glad I am not according to you.

PS: Inquirer...

I do wish you to elaborate on that

Which one of the points I raised in #3 is wrong?

How does it give me a common agenda with Urstruly whose existence and mine is mutually exclusive because he`d rather hang me from a public square... Is quoting Yogi wrong? Is what I have said about the British Empire wrong? Is Rabia Basri South Asian?

So where is the denigration?

This is a well-intentioned article written from the heart – especially the last two paragraphs. A little bit more of thoughts on practical ways (perhaps in small steps) for changing the mindset will enhance its value.

Hello Azra: you make some good points - and some real howlers! As Yasser said: was pre-British India really some matriarchal utopia? Are you seriously blaming the poor British for the misogynistic attitudes in Pakistan today?

Rabia al-Basri`s inclusion seemed really forced.

I have to ask: Were you in a ``fort`` when you met Maulana Israr? :)

Keep writing.

zia...

Oh gawd... Now Inquirer is going to call you zia-ul-haq for pointing out Azra`s obvious mistakes...

Somehow it is always our capacity make noise that wins an argument. Unfortunately moderates by virtue of their being moderate do not make a lot of noise and this creates an impression that they are a minority. Yogi makes an argument that Indian media creates the impression........``. Media does not create any impression. It only shows what is glaring and out of ordinary therefore newsworthy. We make impression from those images.

Re: # 10

Heh! No worries. I`m used to it :)

Azra is right on the money about Israr Ahmed however...

``Maulana`` Israr Ahmed is a crazy rabble rouser... an utterly disgusting fellow.. ironically in love with India which he calls a modern miracle and Indian Muslims who are according to him the most pious Muslims on the planet... He is interestingly the kind ``inquirer`` and other Indians would really love ... despite his retrogressive ideas and views on women...

An Indian equivalent of Dr Israr is Dr Naik... but Israr has focused mainly on building up Islamic credos as an equivalent of some sort of neo-marxist-Islamist hotch potch called ``Khilafat`` - he is also the convener of the global ``Khilafat Movement`` not just in Pakistan but all over the world... Dr Naik on the other hand has concentrated on proving that Hindus are wrong to be vegetarians...

Azra,

A well intentioned but flawed article. About the transformation in Islam esp. about the status of Females, you are bang on target. A lot needs to be done and may the force be with you ;)

As other interactors have already identified the flaws in your article, pre-British Hindu and Muslim societies were not perfect esp. about the treatment of females. Good riddance we got rid of these medieval customs; Let`s be fair and give credit where it`s due i.e. the British.

Also another tangential but related point, Hindus and Muslims were not living in harmony as you and many others believe. Hindus were prosecuted in their own motherland by some of their own who converted to Islam. It`s tragic and will never be repeated again..

Thanks,
Avkrishna

Azra:

Nice piece. Hats off.

However, tell me if you care, how many of the 15 million Pakistanis do you seriously believe are hostage to extremists like Maulana Asrar Ahmad? And on the `fort`, how many Pakistani women out of approximately 7.5 million do you think listen to the maulanas?

In most of Pakistan, you are free to do anything. I believe that the society in my province of the NWFP and in Balochistan, is what you are talking about. But the things are changing even in the NWFP.

re: Manto # 13

Israr Ahmed is an admirer of India?! God/Allah/Bhagwaan have mercy on us.

Naik brings no credit to Islam.

---

I do agree that India has produced the most liberal and, next to Saudi Arabia, the most regressive and intolerant breeds of Islam.