A brave new book describes how Pakistan unraveled — and provides a blueprint for understanding declining pluralism across the Middle East.
By Kim Ghattas, FOREIGN POLICY, OCTOBER 20, 2017,
Women walk through Kabul in 1972. (Via Amnesty International UK)
When national security advisor H.R. McMaster wanted to convince U.S. President Donald Trump that Afghanistan was not hopeless, he whipped out a 1972 black-and-white picture of women in miniskirts on the streets of Kabul.
The point of this exercise was presumably to show that the country once embraced Western ideals and could do so again with America’s assistance. McMaster’s trick worked: Trump ultimately reversed his earlier skepticism about the war effort and decided to raise troop levels. But it also showed the continued limits of America’s understanding of the countries it has sought to remake in its image. The snapshot depicts Kabul’s urban elite — an elite that was unrepresentative, even back then, of the wider Afghan population. Not everyone was walking around in a skirt before the Taliban imposed the burqa.
Not every Afghan woman wore a miniskirt in the 1970s, but they could do so without fear of an acid attack or a flogging. Other pictures from that era depict the educational and professional opportunities available to Afghan women. But it’s always the clothes that get the most attention. Pictures of Saudi Arabia from the 1960s and 1970s are also making the rounds these days in the Middle East, showing men and women in bathing suits by the pooland on the jetty of a famous beach resort. Most of those in the pictures look like foreigners — some are airline staff on a break in Jeddah. But Saudis also patronized these beaches, and even if some shook their head with disapproval, the option to go to the beach without fear of violence was there.
Beyond skirts and beaches, the 1960s and 1970s were also a time of vigorous intellectual debate about the role of religion in society. Debates between leftists, secularists, capitalists, Marxists, and Islamists raged across the region, from Egypt to Pakistan. Militant Islamists will dismiss those decades of more progressive, diverse thought and culture as decadent Western imports — the lingering after-effects of colonial influence. But if some of it was certainly emulation, much of it was also indigenous. One of the Arab world’s most famous feminists of the early 20th century was Nazira Zain al-Dine, from Lebanon, who had no connection to the Western feminist movement of the time.
Yet over the course of the last few decades, the space for debate and freedom of choice has become increasingly narrow. Pakistan provides a stark and cautionary tale for other countries about how intolerance gets legitimized. It’s not only when a group like the Taliban seizes power violently that a country loses its more diverse, vibrant past. A slow erosion of progressive norms, a slow shift in beliefs can be just as devastating.
From 1927, when the British introduced blasphemy laws, to 1985, in modern-day Pakistan, only 10 blasphemy cases were reportedly heard in court.* Between 1985 and 2011, more than 4,000 cases were handled. Even worse, blasphemy, real or alleged, can get you killed in today’s Pakistan.
Even worse, blasphemy, real or alleged, can get you killed in today’s Pakistan.
In January 2011, Punjab governor Salman Taseer was killed by his bodyguard for coming to the aide of a young Christian woman who had been charged with blasphemy. Taseer’s killer was sentenced to death, but he was celebrated as a hero by tens of thousands who attended his funeral, and a mosque was built in his name in Islamabad.The assassination of Taseer — as well as that of Pakistan’s first Christian federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, just two months later — shocked Farahnaz Ispahani, a friend of both men. Ispahani, a former journalist, was at the time a member of Pakistan’s parliament serving on the Human Rights Committee. Together, the small group had repeatedly tried to raise the issue of minority rights. In parliament, Ispahani had access to more information than the general public and was shocked about the extent of daily violence against minorities — and that none of her colleagues were willing to discuss the issue.
The assassination of her two friends prompted Ispahani to write “Purifying the Land of the Pure.” The book, published last year, charts the slow death of minority rights and pluralism in Pakistan, and what it means for the future of democracy. The result is a sweeping but concise chronicle of how things unraveled. A minority herself, as a Shiite, Ispahani was careful to avoid polemic and opinion by delivering a thorough, methodically researched work. She and her husband, former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani, have both faced death threats for their work and live in self-imposed exile in Washington.
In her book, Ispahani tracks the unraveling to within a few years of the independence of Pakistan. The country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah — a secular Shiite — envisioned a country where “you are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship.” But Ispahani writes that “his hopeful declaration of religious pluralism” remains unfulfilled.
The trend toward making Islam a central tenet of life in Pakistan started soon after independence in 1947, a result of Muslim feelings of being victimized by both Hindus and British colonialism in India. By 1973, Islam was declared as the state religion of Pakistan. In 1974, under the ostensibly progressive Prime Minister Zulfiqar Bhutto, parliament declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims. A Muslim movement that started in the late 19th century, Ahmadis follow the teachings of the Quran and consider their founder to be a prophet, upsetting orthodox Muslims who believe Muhammad is the final prophet.
No need to conduct apologetics for Muslims. Their ideology is flawed period.
There is no moderate Islam. There are only some moderate Muslims that happen not to follow their religion. But when they or their offspring go back to their roots, perhaps when in a crisis, divorce, losing their job or otherwise, seeking solace from their religion, they become radicalized.
So the religion has to go. Period. In WWII, you didn’t look to capture the hearts and minds of moderate Nazis.
Now, before you become too optimistic about the potential for secularization in the Arab world, you must realize one important concept.
Due to the totalitarian nature of Islam and its resistance to reform by dogma, until its religion will become totally eradicated, any modernization must come through dictate.
Any Muslim country that modernized, did so under the yoke of dictatorship. In Turkey it took the heavy handed rule of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He outlawed the Arab script, banned the Fez which made it more difficult to kneel and bow with your head to the floor, and he monitored the speeches in the mosques. The Shah of Persia had the unsavory SAVAK harass the clergy.
The pressures of the EU to curb in the Turkish Generals, the betrayal of the Shah by President Carter, or the hostility of the Obama administration against the Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup in Egypt, the toppling of the Libyan strongman Kaddafi, all this was done in order to promote democracy.
However, as long as a democracy co-exists with the Muslim religion, it is doomed to fail over time.
In the words of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an: “democracy is like a train, you get off once you have reached your destination”.
“As for Moslems losing the right to choose, this only points up the constant tension between the religious Moslem community and the rest of the Moslem community.”
All that is true. Which leads to an uncomfortable question… let’s leave the hadiths aside for one sec. If the Muslim ummah looks at the West and sees the results of our own policies and prescriptions, which side of the debate is strengthened?
All the Islamists have to say is: “You can follow the hadiths, or you can look at the West where families are unstable, and they’re using surgery to change 8 year old boys into girls. Which side are you on?”
Everyone assumes we’re some kind of shining example that everyone wants to follow. That isn’t true. It’s becoming less true.
@ Abdul Ameer:
Don’t troll.
Of course Ahmadiyya are not accepted by the rest. They all fight against each other. Sunnis against Shiite, Arabs against Pesdians, Rafidite dogs against Takfiris, Yazidis, Kurds, you name it.
The fact that someone over there hates the Ahmadiyya does not rehabilitate them.
The Ahmadiyya are a fraud. The friendly face of Islam. They are not extreme enough, initally at least. Once you enter, you are entrapped.
Actually, the Ahmadis do not follow the teachings of the Koran; they only say that they do. That is why the rest of the Moslem world persecutes them.
As for Moslems losing the right to choose, this only points up the constant tension between the religious Moslem community and the rest of the Moslem community.
This tension is reflected in the conflict between the Moslem heads of state and the Moslem religious community. The problem is that the religious community has the Islamic sacred texts on their side. They will always point out that the semi-secular Moslems, including the semi-secular Moslem state, deviate from the Koran and the Sunnah. Moslems who are serious about their religion will follow the Moslem religious community whose goal it is to seize political power and enforce sharia law throughout society, just as their god and their prophet command them to do.