Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan

315 Pages·2012·1.56 MB·English

by  M.J. Akbar

Tinderbox
The Past and Future of Pakistan
M. J. Akbar
Dedication
For Mukulika and Carl Nordenberg,
and their future
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. The Age of Defeat
2. A Scimitar at Somanath
3. A Theory of Distance
4. An English Finesse
5. Grey Wolf
6. Gandhi’s Maulanas
7. The Non-violent Jihad
8. The Muslim Drift from Gandhi
9. Breaking Point
10. Faith in Faith
11. The Godfather of Pakistan
12. God’s General
13. The Long Jihad
14. Pakistan: The Siege Within
15. Dark Side of the Moon
Notes
Books Cited
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I
t was one of those suggestions that seem perfectly sensible during a spirited
conversation at the home of a dear friend in Karachi. Bravado comes easily in
the drawing room. A fellow guest, a former dignitary, offered to take me to the
Binori mosque and madrasa, founded by Maulana Yusuf Binori soon after
independence in 1947; it says something that he had not seen it either. We were
not inspired by visions of a local Taj Mahal, but by the widely held belief that
this was the sanctuary of Osama bin Laden during the fallow period between the
Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and his declaration of war upon America.
In 1998, the then spiritual mentor of Binori, Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, had
issued a fatwa saying that killing Americans was justified. A little later, Lashkar-
e-Tayyiba, which became an international outcast after it organized the Mumbai
attacks on 26 November 2008, issued a similar decree. The Taliban in
Afghanistan honoured any visitor from Binori as a state guest.
The ride was uneventful, the mosque large rather than imposing. We
mounted steps that opened into a spacious, rectangular courtyard surrounded by
rooms. A few students loitered around, for it was neither time for study nor
prayer, their dress indistinguishable from any Islamic seminary on the
subcontinent: white pyjamas ending two inches above the ankle, white kurta,
white cap taut over the scalp. As I bent to unlace my shoes, I dismissed a slight
tremor of unease, unwilling to accept that I was afraid. It was impossible,
however, not to sense that we were on the threshold of a different world, where a
different law and a separate order prevailed. The Karachi police would probably
have guffawed at the thought that they needed to do something about an Indian
held hostage in the mosque. Fools deserve their fate. Then, without a word, my
companion signalled, with a jerk of the head, that it was time to end this
stupidity. We returned to the car at a brisk pace, just short of a panic run.
The time for rumination would come later. But surely there was an obvious,
immediate question that demanded an answer. Muslims of British India had
opted for a separate homeland in 1947, destroying the possibility of a secular
India in which Hindus and Muslims would coexist, because they believed that
they would be physically safe, and their religion secure, in a new nation called
Pakistan. Instead, within six decades, Pakistan had become one of the most
violent nations on earth, not because Hindus were killing Muslims but because
Muslims were killing Muslims.
Nations are not born across a breakfast table. Their period of gestation is
surely one of the more fascinating chapters in the study of history. The
indisputable stature of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a master of the endgame, has led
to a notion that Pakistan emerged out of a resolution passed in March 1940 at the
Muslim League session in Lahore. The reality is more complicated. Pakistan
emerged out of a fear of the future and pride in the past, but this fear began as a
mood of anguish set in among the Muslim elite during the long decline of the
Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. The embryo had a long and turbulent
existence, particularly during the generations when it remained shapeless.
This book is a history of an idea as it weaved and bobbed its way through
dramatic events with rare resilience, sometimes disappearing from sight, but
always resurrected either by the will of proponents or the mistakes of opponents.
It began hesitantly, in the shadow of the age of decline, in the 1750s, when the
collapse of the Mughal Empire and the consequent disintegration of what is
called ‘Muslim rule’ in India could no longer be disguised by explanations,
theories or hope of revival.
Pakistan is a successor state to the Mughal Empire, the culmination of a
journey that began as a search for ‘Muslim space’ in a post-Muslim
dispensation, nurtured by a dread that became a conviction: that a demographic
minority would not be able to protect either itself or its faith unless it established
cultural and political distance from an overwhelming majority Hindu presence.
Muslims, who had lived in India for five centuries with a superiority complex,
suddenly lurched into the consuming doubt of an inferiority complex which
became self-perpetuating with every challenge that came up during different
phases of turbulent colonial rule.
The infirmities of this idea were never recognized because they could only
become evident in practice. An existentialist question was completely ignored:
was Islam so weak that it could not survive as a minority presence? There was
nothing in its glittering past to suggest this, but those who raised the question,
like the brilliant scholar–politician Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, were dismissed,
ironically, as traitors to Islam.
The first phase consists of the years between 1739 and 1757. In 1739, a
Persian marauder–king, Nadir Shah, entered Delhi as Mughal Emperor
Muhammad Shah’s ‘guest’. Two days later, Nadir Shah, using an untenable
excuse, ordered a massacre which did not discriminate between Muslims and
Hindus. An estimated 20,000 were killed, women raped and the capital
plundered of private and public wealth. After fifty-eight days of terror, Nadir
Shah departed with a hoard of invaluable jewels, gold and coins, including the
Kohinoor diamond and Shah Jehan’s Peacock Throne. The Mughal Empire, a
superpower three decades before, never recovered from this humiliation; it had
failed in its basic duty, the safety of its subjects.
Shah Waliullah, the premier Sunni theologian and intellectual of his age,
read many meanings in the catastrophe. The security that Muslims had taken for
granted was over. The disintegrating empire was being replaced by powerful
regional dynasties that were largely Hindu. The most important Muslim
principality, Awadh, was in the control of Shias, a ‘deviant’ sect that could not
be trusted with the preservation of Islam, and who were in his eyes even worse
than the infidel. Nadir Shah, who broke the bent back of Mughals, was a Shia.
Shah Waliullah proposed a theory of distance and the protection of ‘Islamic
purity’ as his prescription for a community that was threatened by the cultural
power and military might of the infidel. While he thanked Allah for keeping the
blood in his own veins ‘pure’ and ‘Arab’, he recognized that the majority of
Indian Muslims were converts from Hinduism; there was enormous cultural
overlap in their habits and behaviour. He feared a lapse into Hindu practices
among Indian Muslims in the absence of the religious leadership that had been
preserved by political power. Islam could survive in India, he argued, only if
Muslims maintained physical, ideological and emotional distance from Hindus.
He urged Muslims to live so far from Hindus that they would not be able to see
the smoke from their kitchens.
Shah Waliullah’s seminary would play a vital part in the shaping of the north
Indian Muslim mind in the nineteenth century, when British rule moved from a
southern enclave and eastern corner to dominate the whole of the subcontinent.
British rule originates in a minor but epoch-changing battle in 1757, in a village
called Plassey, which ended Mughal rule in the richest trading province of the
country, Bengal. The students of Shah Waliullah’s seminary, however, were not
so easily defeated. One of them, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, inspired the long jihad
which began in 1825 and continued long after his death in 1831, on the
battlefield, at Balakote (today, a principal centre of the Pakistan Taliban).
Mistrust of Hindus, fundamental to the theory of distance, became the
catechism of Muslim politics when it sought to find its place in the emerging
polity of British rule in the early twentieth century. The very first demand made
by Muslim notables, when Indian representation was proposed in the legislature,
was unique: that Muslims should be elected only by fellow Muslims. This was
the ‘separate electorates’ scheme which the British happily endorsed into law. A
perceptive young man, who would later be honoured as the father of Pakistan,
recognized the implications immediately, even as he dissociated himself from
the demand. Jinnah said, as early as in the first decade of the twentieth century,
that separate electorates would lead to the destruction of Indian unity; and so
they did.
Jinnah was an exceptional product of British India. He loved Shakespeare
and fashionably tailored suits, called English his mother tongue, had an upper lip
stiffer than an earl’s, and had to be dissuaded by his father when he wanted to
join the stage in England after a law degree from Lincoln’s Inn. He desired
freedom as passionately as anyone else, but unlike the father of India, Mahatma
Gandhi, he would not break the law in the process, since he considered that
incompatible with his professional ethics as a lawyer. Ironically, on the eve of a
movement that changed the course of the freedom struggle but left a residual
disappointment that alienated Muslims from Gandhi, Jinnah warned Gandhi
about the dangers of mixing religion with politics, and indulging Muslim mullah
firebrands.
Between 1919 and February 1922, Gandhi became the first non-Muslim to
be given leadership of a jihad. Gandhi accepted the ‘dictatorship’ (a term that
clearly had different connotations then), but on one condition: that this jihad
against the British would be non-violent. Muslim leaders, including the most
important ulema, accepted, and absorbed Gandhi into what is known as the
Khilafat movement, or the Caliphate movement, since it was launched in support
of the Ottoman caliph of Islam and his suzerainty over the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina. The caliph was the last symbol of Muslim power against the
sweeping tide of British and European imperialism, which is where it intersected
with Gandhi’s needs. He saw in this the opportunity to unite Hindus and
Muslims against the British Raj, irrespective of their starting points. Having
achieved Indian unity, Gandhi promised swaraj within a year. Instead, by
February 1922, he realized that he could not contain the violence that was
bursting in corners across the country. Gandhi arbitrarily abandoned the
movement, to the shock of his Muslim supporters. The bitterness of failure was
so deep that Muslims never really returned to Gandhi’s Congress. But this did
not take them directly to the Muslim League either; suffice it to say that the
search for ‘Muslim space’ did not catch fire until it was converted into a demand
for ‘Islamic space’, and Gandhi was successfully converted by Muslim League
leaders into an insidious Hindu bania whose secularism was nothing but a
hypocritical term for Hindu oppression and the consequent destruction of Islam
in the subcontinent. Islam was in danger, and Pakistan was the fortress where it
could be saved. With an advocate as powerful as Jinnah, enough Muslims were
persuaded that the man who had spent his life caring about their welfare and
eventually lost it in their cause was actually their sly enemy.
Jinnah’s forensic skills were at their finest in the court of public opinion,
even when his sarcasm was devoid of finesse, as when he described Gandhi as
‘that Hindu revivalist’. Jinnah, who drank alcohol, went to the races for pleasure,
never fasted during Ramadan, and could not recite a single ayat of the Quran,
created such a hypnotic spell upon some Muslims that they believed he got up
before much before dawn for the Tahajjud namaaz, the optional sixth prayer
which only the very pious offer.
Jinnah clearly believed that he could exploit a slogan he had once warned
against, ‘Islam in danger’, and then dispatch it to the rubbish bin reserved for the
past when it had outlived its utility. In his first speech to the Constituent
Assembly of Pakistan, Jinnah made a case for a secular Pakistan that would have
been applauded in the Constituent Assembly of India. The kindest interpretation
of Jinnah’s politics is that he wanted a secular state with a Muslim majority, just
as Gandhi wanted a secular state with a Hindu majority. The difference was,
however, crucial: Gandhi wanted an inclusive nation, Jinnah an exclusive state.
When, on 13 June 1947, Gandhi was asked whether those who called God Rama
and Krishna instead of Allah would be turned out of Pakistan, he answered only
for India: ‘We shall worship God both as Krishna and Karim [one of the names
of Allah] and show the world we refuse to go mad.’1 Gandhi’s commitment to
religion never meant commitment to a single religion.
Both Jinnah and Gandhi died in 1948, the first a victim of tuberculosis and
the second to assassination. India had clarity about the secular ideology of the
state, completed work on an independent Constitution by 1950, and held its first
free, adult franchise elections in 1952. The debate in Pakistan, about the role of
Islam in its polity, began while Jinnah was still alive. The father of Pakistan was
challenged by the godfather of Pakistan, Maulana Maududi, founder of the
Jamaat-e-Islami, and accurately described as the architect of the Islamist
movement in South Asia and the most powerful influence on its development
worldwide. Islamism did not, and does not, have much popular support in
Pakistan, as elections prove whenever they are held; but its impact on legislation
and political life is far stronger than a thin support base would justify. Maududi’s
disciple, General Zia ul Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1976 with an autocratic
fist for a decade, crippled liberals with a neat question: if Pakistan had not been
created for Islam, what was it, just a second-rate India? Zia changed the motto of
the Pakistan army to ‘Jihad fi sabil Allah’ (Jihad in the name of Allah) and
worked to turn governance into ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ (Rule of the Prophet)
through a rigorous application of the Sharia law, as interpreted by the most
medieval minds in the country. But the ‘Islamization’ of the Constitution
preceded Zia, and efforts to reverse his legacy have not succeeded, because a
strain of theocracy runs through the DNA of the idea of Pakistan. The effort to
convert Pakistan into a Taliban-style Islamic emirate will continue in one form
or the other, at a slow or faster pace.