The state’s reluctance to confront clerical power makes its earlier promises ring hollow. Take, for instance, madressah reform. Forgotten is the anti-terrorism National Action Plan that called for financial audits of madressahs, uncovering funding sources, curriculum expansion and revision, and monitoring of activities. That’s a dead duck. Try auditing TLP-associated madressahs.
The security establishment must now ask itself hard questions: has its mainstreaming of religious extremism gone too far? Can extremists actually be moderated by bringing them into the political fold? On the political chessboard, was it a good move to try to balance ‘hard’ Deobandi power with ‘soft’ Barelvi power?
Don’t get me wrong. If your children are in confrontation with the state today and facing violence, then they are the same kind of ghazis or martyrs as the martyrs of Afghan jihad, i.e. neither the son of a religious Mullah nor the son of any military general is among them. If you are looking at the conflict between power struggle and politics through your own lens, then it is your own choice.
Getting wasted in the game of Power-struggle, politics, establishment and religious bigotry is the height of stupidity and naiveness. It’s not martyrdom, nor sacrifice and no religion supports it.
On the other hand, in any case, if the state or those in power massacre their own citizens, then it’s barbaric, inhumane and clear fascism. Undoubtedly, the protest too must be peaceful, reasonable without challenging the writ of the state. Slogans and demands should be actionable.
Religious Mullahs are alien to modern political science and international diplomacy. Hence, this is not the first time where their ignorance is on display out in the open.
Shaykh-ul-Islam and the religious leaders of the Ottoman Caliphate had banned the printing of the Qur’an. Not a single eminent scholar in the entire Islamic world disagreed with them. Photography and videography were considered evil and haram. Loudspeakers and televisions are just spectacles right in front of our eyes. But all proved wrong.
An individual is by no means a scholar if he had only memorized a certain curriculum of the 16th century in a foreign language. Knowledge is not related to worship, but to the world and worldly actions. A scholar is the one who fully understands the prevalent world order and acts in accordance with it.
Disrespecting the Holy Prophet is not acceptable to any Muslim. But if 52 other Islamic countries in the world are not aligned or supporting our position, then we must review our stance instead of pointing fingers. Recognition of sectarian prejudices and beliefs, discrimination on the basis of faith among the citizens of the state, are illegal and oppressive according to modern trends.
We have to compare the opinions of our religious scholars with the knowledge of the modern world. And in the end, every time our religious Mullahs are found as ignorant, uncivilized and extremists of highest order.
Gain knowledge, educate yourself and spread awareness among your children. In the capitalist system, a commodity is something that a consumer consumes. Don’t let yourself and your children be used for the agendas of hate mongering clerics or fascists.
The wise rulers know that the situation should not be taken to the point where they have to take up arms against their citizens. If they have the power, then they must have the discipline and style to exercise it. The civil war in Syria began with the government’s response to the wall-chalking of just a few youngsters. Lal Masjid is still fresh in memories where power was used instead of dialogue. Thus, more than 70,000 Pakistanis lost their lives to the wave of extremism that followed.
No normal state rewards those who once stood up against it in violent, armed insurrection and now threaten it again. Normal states do not reward those who kill their own soldiers and policemen. The authorities must explain why they are choosing to appease those who fought the state and killed its soldiers and policemen. They have to tell us why they are handling with velvet gloves those responsible for the tragic sufferings of our civilians. Else a second tragedy may not be far away.
The solution? Only a long shot involving a very difficult transition can work. Instead of education serving the needs of a security state, it must seek to produce well-informed, thoughtful, law-abiding, considerate, and caring citizens capable of independent thought and critical reasoning. Ziaism in education has proved catastrophic but nevertheless remains largely intact even today. It must be dumped. Else the mass production of hooligans with high degrees will continue unabated.
When large masses of people react unthinkingly to emotive slogans, everyone is endangered by an explosive, unstable configuration. Ultimately political leaders — and those who secretly engineer political outcomes — also become unsafe. Have we not suffered enough tragic blowback since Soviet times? Pakistan must firmly reject the rule of religiously charged mobs. Instead it should aspire towards becoming part of civilized, cosmopolitan world society. Surrender is not an option.
