Ideologically Adrift

What role has Islam played in Pakistan’s evolution? Has the issue of religion that has been used for multiple objectives-from nation building to strategic security-produced a deadly blowback that is now confronting Pakistan with unprecedented challenges?

This chapter addresses these vital questions by providing a political and cultural understanding of the role of ideology in Pakistan to argue that its viability as a state depends in large part on its ability to develop a new and progressive Islamic narrative. The question is not whether religion has a role but how it can be channelled as a force for progressive change.

Contested Idea

Pakistan was a contested idea at its birth in 1947. Having lost their privileged status when the British supplanted India’s Mughal rulers, Indian Muslims divided in responding to their deepening cultural and political insecurity under colonial rule.

Culturally, a schism emerged between the Aligarh tradition, which balanced selectively embracing Western notions of modernity and learning with retaining an Islamic identity, and the Deoband tradition, which rejected Western mores as a deviation from religious orthodoxy. Politically, as the independence struggle gathered pace, Muslims divided into three main groups. The first, affiliated with the Indian Congress Party, advocated territorial nationalism.

The second was affiliated with the All-India Muslim League led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which contended that Muslims had a special identity that would be erased in a Hindu-majority India—an argument that evolved from calls for political safeguards and a federation to an eventual demand for a separate Muslim homeland.

The third included the religious parties that shared the Muslim League’s concerns but opposed a separate Muslim homeland on the grounds that the ummah should not be divided by the dubious concept of a nation-state. Ultimately, the Muslim League prevailed and Pakistan was carved out of the subcontinent.

The irony of the dedicated struggle for Pakistan was the ambiguity over the end goal. As Ayesha Jalal has argued, the lack of consensus over

Pakistan’s ideological and territorial contours was vital to its establishment:

Jinnah’s resort to religion was not an ideology to which he was ever committed or even a device to use against rival communities; it was simply a way of giving a semblance of unity and solidity to his divided Muslim constituents. Jinnah needed a demand that was specifically ambiguous and imprecise to command general support, something specifically Muslim though unspecific in every other respect. The intentionally obscure cry for a ‘Pakistan’ was contrived to meet this requirement.

This ambiguity played out in the pivotal 1945-46 elections in which the Muslim League was able to demonstrate that it was the sole representative of India’s Muslims and Jinnah the sole spokesman. Jinnah and many of the Muslim League’s leaders, though secular in their personal orientation, invoked Islam to make their case for an undefined Pakistan to Muslim voters.

Proponents of Jinnah’s secular vision for Pakistan often point to his eloquent speech delivered before the Constituent Assembly three days before independence on 11 August 1947:

You are free, free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state….. In the course of rime Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State. time.

The speech’s inclusive message, however, has been diluted with The climax of this ideological debate in Pakistan’s early days was the adoption of the Objectives Resolution in 1949. The Resolution laid out 127the principles for Pakistan’s future constitution, notably calling for a state wherein ’the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, and tolerance as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed’ and ’the Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and Sunnah’. The Resolution injected religion into the core of Pakistan. Such a formal association between Islam and Pakistan was in many ways natural but it was the subsequent manipulation of religion for political and strategic ends that sadly emerges as a central theme in Pakistan’s Islamic narrative.

In reflecting on the rampant religious extremism and sectarianism wracking Pakistan today, many liberal Pakistani commentators wistfully point to how far Pakistan has deviated from Jinnah’s original vision. But Jinnah was ultimately part of a movement that was shaped by circumstances and alliances-one that evolved from fashioning an equitable postcolonial constitutional arrangement for India’s Muslims to securing an independent nation. Indeed, throughout the movement, there never was a uniform vision of Pakistan or the role of Islam. This means that Pakistan was and remains a product of contesting visions.

Fortifying a Nation

After independence, Pakistan’s leadership was faced with the daunting task of defending and consolidating a fragmented state against real and perceived external and internal threats. The Pakistan that emerged from the ravages of Partition consisted of an ethnically fractured West and East Pakistan divided by a thousand miles of Indian territory.

Many Muslims had remained in India, undercutting the two-nation theory of Muslims needing a separate homeland. Looming over this ideological and territorial vulnerability was the conviction that an irrevocably hostile India was bent on unraveling Pakistan, as it continued to stonewall on the delivery of Pakistan’s vital and due share of resources inherited from the British. It was in this atmosphere of insecurity that Pakistan’s rulers embarked on the process of using Islam to fortify a nation.

An early manifestation of this was to leverage the notion of jihad in shoring up the country’s borders. Squaring off against India over the disputed territory of Kashmir in the hour of their separation, officers in the Pakistan Army involved in the Kashmir operation of 1947-48 invoked jihad to mobilise tribesmen from the frontier and send them to raid and seize Kashmir; the government in turn called on religious scholars to issue supportive fatwas or religious decrees. This was to be the beginning of a longstanding state policy of using religiously motivated proxies to asymmetrically secure political and territorial gains vis-a-vis a seemingly hegemonic India.

The notion of jihad has historic roots in Pakistan’s frontier in particular. In Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, Ayesha Jalal describes the Deoband-inspired Sayyid Ahmad’s jihad against the Sikh empire in his quest for an Islamic state in the northern areas as a landmark event. In the early days of Pakistan, the Army-though defined by a secular British military tradition-tapped these jihadi sentiments as part of its campaigns.

Unsuccessful in wresting away Kashmir in 1948, the Army again sent irregular forces into Kashmir in 1965 only to fight an all-out war resulting in a stalemate.

Just as Islam was leveraged in response to the external threat of India, it was also used to tackle internal challenges, from discrediting political adversaries to unifying divided nation. As early as 1953, Jinnah’s vision of a pluralistic Pakistan was challenged by street protests calling for a declaration that Ahmadis—followers of an alleged nineteenth- century messiah called Mirza Ghulam Ahmed—were non-Muslims. The protests were orchestrated in part to destabilise the federal government by calling for the resignation of Pakistan’s first foreign minister, Sir Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi.

It was in this explosive environment that the 1954 Munir Report, authored by two justices of the Federal Court, was issued, sounding perhaps the most far-sighted warning about ideological dangers. Calling on the government to refrain from declaring Ahmadis as non­Muslims, the report cautioned against the notion that Pakistan was an Islamic state and that the state should define who is a Muslim; this would only foment charges of apostasy, divide the nation, and be inconsistent with Jinnah’s vision of an inclusive polity:

The result of this part of inquiry, however, has been anything but satisfactory and if considerable confusion exists in the minds of our ulama [religious scholars] on such a simple matter, one can easily imagine what the differences on more complicated matters will be…. Keeping in view the several different definitions given by the ulama, need we make any 129comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental.

These words were to fall on deaf ears. In 1974, Ahmadis were officially declared non-Muslims through a constitutional amendment. In a similar strain, during the first indirect presidential elections held under Ayub Khan in 1965, Khan’s allies sought to discredit his adversary, Fatimah Jinnah—the Quaid’s sister—by having a fatwa issued that Islam did not allow a female head of state—a refrain that would echo decades later about Benazir Bhutto—Pakistan’s first female prime minister. Such attempts to Islamically delegitimise political players and segments of civil society—be it Ahmadis or later the Shi’a—has assumed an increasingly lethal undercurrent in Pakistan as many militants pave the way for killing their fellow Muslim citizens through takfir or declaring them as non- Muslims.

A more legitimate challenge facing Pakistan’s political and military elite was how to unify a fractured state. For many, despite their secular orientation, the answer lay in the systematic promotion of an Islamic ideology as part of a top-down nationalist project. Upon assuming power, Ayub Khan in a 1960 Foreign Affairs article spoke of his intention of ’liberating the basic concept of our ideology from the dust of vagueness.’

Elaborating in his autobiography on a people’s need for an ideology, he stated, ’they will have tremendous power of cohesion and resistance. Such an ideology with us is obviously Islam. It was on that basis that we fought for and got Pakistan, but having got it, we failed to define the ideology in a simple and understandable form…'

The execution of this thinking was parochial as illustrated in the education sector. As taught in schools, the history of Pakistan was no longer a product of a postcolonial constitutional power-sharing struggle or the subcontinent’s syncretic and shared Hindu-Muslim heritage, but an almost inexorable culmination of the arrival of Islam on the subcontinent. Notions of implacable Hindu and Indian hostility were reinforced.

But Ayub Khan’s vision of Islamic ideology did not go unchallenged. In the spirit of the Munir Report, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who briefly served as Pakistan’s prime minister from 1956 to 1957, argued that an emphasis on ideology, ‘would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of independence.’

Instead, he argued for a Pakistan with ‘a durable identity between government and people derived through the operation of consent’—a vision that has yet to prevail.

Ideology and Integrity

Under Ayub Khan’s military successor, General Yahya Khan, developing an Islamic identity for Pakistan’s unity and defence remained paramount. Brigadier A. R. Siddiqui, head of military Inter-Services Public Relations, described the ideology and rhetoric espoused as follows: Expressions like the ‘ideology of Pakistan’ and the ‘glory of Islam’ used by the military high command were becoming stock phrases… . They sounded more like high priests than soldiers when they urged men to rededicate themselves to the sacred cause of ensuring the ‘security, solidarity, integrity of the country and its ideology.’

Seeking to retain power, Yahya Khan utilised the intelligence agencies to orchestrate attacks by Islamic parties against the two major political parties-the Awami League and the Pakistan People’s Party.

Both were accused of being un-Islamic for their secular and socialist beliefs. Suspicious of its own Islamic political allies such as the Jamaat­ e-Islami, the regime even encouraged the emergence of other counter-vailing Islamic groups. As political and ethnic tensions boiled over in East Pakistan, the military launched a campaign that descended into a full- blown civil war leading to Indian intervention.

The war in 1971 was framed as a struggle for Pakistan’s Islamic identity, threatened now by the Bengalis of East Pakistan, who though Muslims, were periodically depicted as corrupted Muslims and in collusion with Hindu India. As in previous wars, religious zeal was systematically employed to motivate soldiers and frame the cause. General A. K. Niazi, who led the forces in East Pakistan, invoked the ‘spirit of jihad and dedication to Islam’ that would enable the defeat of an enemy ‘whose goal and ambition is the disintegration of Pakistan.’ The Jamaat-e-Islami was enlisted in East Pakistan in helping launch two paramilitary counterinsurgency wings. The enemies of Pakistan, according to Yahya Khan, were doing ’their level best to undo our dear country[,] … a people whose life is pulsating with love of the Holy Prophet…. [E]veryone of us is a mujahid [holy warrior].’

131The 1971 war ended in catastrophe for Pakistan. East Pakistan separated, becoming Bangladesh, while nearly eighty thousand Pakistani soldiers became prisoners of war. Pakistani fears of India’s hegemonic designs deepened; Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan’s use of Islam to promote Pakistan’s ideology and integrity failed; the rhetoric masked military interventions that weakened civilian rule, papered over legitimate ethnic grievances, and resulted in the loss of over half the nation. As in the wake of previous crises, an invaluable opportunity arose in the ashes of defeat to create a new national narrative.