Preventing More Lal Masjids Is there a viable quick fix to the radicalism that has engulfed Pakistan over the last one decade? I don’t think so there is one. Then what is the alternative. Regrettably there is not any single alternative either. There will always be a diversity of interpretations of Islam (as has been historically), diversity of religious expressions, political persuasions and some form of radicalism. This has been the general historic pattern and character of any Muslim society for a very very long period of Islam’s tumultuous history. Given these conditions and I suppose sweeping assumptions about the nature of our history then what is so questionable and bewildering about contemporary radicalism in Pakistan. It is the senselessly violent behaviour that has penetrated in the minds of religious zealots that is going to be a terrible thing. So where is the wellspring of this hatred and violence that has to be directed against? It is the West, if we talk in terms of geography, and modernity and its consequences if we talk about in terms of the guiding philosophy. Although West may be a confined idea of a monolithic real and abstract entity but modernity is fluid. Modernity is all over, it has penetrated into the heart of ‘Islam’. So the enemy is all that is modern. These unassailable religious horsemen of apocalypse, always talk about the ‘signs of the day of judgement’ and deliver endless sermons in mosques denigrating the West and its ‘moral decadence’. They will endlessly talk about the promiscuous behaviour of Western women and their jealously guarded liberty, but they miss the fundamental point about this whole exercise.
What is it that they miss? Well they miss the point that modernity is not just a conspiracy against Islam or modernity leads to moral decadence. This is a totally mis-understood phenomenon in the minds of religious zealots. Modernity is all about adopting a critical attitude towards everything, applying human reason in matters of faith, politics, economics and in all aspects of life. The application of reason simply melts away, what Marx called, ‘all that is solid into air.’ It is the constant change that has to stay here staring at our faces to be understood. So what is really important to minimise the catastrophic consequences of radicalism is to radiate the minds of these people with not the symptoms of modernity as symbolised by the West but to illuminate its real intellectual foundations. This way is the only way forward.