Islamism and the Pakistani State

Unlike most Muslim-majority countries, the state of Pakistan has consistently tolerated and even maintained positive relations with Islamist groups. Pakistan’s approach to Islamism differed greatly from the policies of other Muslim countries, which were led to independence in the twentieth century by secular elites. Islamists were deemed by these elites as an obstruction to their modernizing aspirations. The state apparatus was used either to suppress Islamism (Iran under the Shah, Turkey, and Tunisia) or to coopt it within a secular framework (Indonesia and Malaysia). Although Pakistan’s founding elites were also secular, their call for partition of British India along religious lines made it necessary for them to adopt Islamist ideas as part of their nation-building effort.

At a time when the newly-written constitutions of other Muslim countries emphasized the secular character of their states, Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly adopted the ‘Objectives Resolution’ in 1949, declaring the purpose of the state to be to enable Muslims “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 the Sunna.”

Although the functionaries of the Pakistani state remained largely secular until the 1980s, the state helped create a Pakistani sense of self as the citadel of Islam, which in turn enabled Islamists greater freedom of organization and movement than in other countries.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistan remained the center of Pan-Islamist activity. Leaders of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, including Said Ramadan, travelled to Pakistan for conferences proclaiming the unity of the Muslim Ummah. The Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, led the Motamar al-Alam al-Islami (World Muslim Congress), which maintained its headquarters in the then-Pakistani capital, Karachi. Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami evolved as a cadre-based organization that proclaimed itself the vanguard of the global Islamic revolution.

By the time General Zia ul-Haq seized power in a military coup in 1977, Pakistan’s constitution and laws already had elements of Islamic law grafted on to the British institutions of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and an Anglo-Saxon legal system. Zia went farther than other Pakistani leaders in flaunting his own piety and initiated deeper Islamization of the educational, the legal and even the financial systems. The Islamists, who had repeatedly failed to win votes from Pakistan’s masses, were able to influence the state without fully controlling it.

Relatively weak efforts, by Pakistan’s secular politicians elected to office after Zia’s death in 1988, to modify or roll-back Zia’s Islamization have not succeeded partly because of the rise in militant Islamism resulting from Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan (1979-1989). In addition to the political Islamists using agit-prop to advance their cause, Pakistan has now become home to tens of thousands of armed men, initially trained as guerilla fighters to face the Soviets. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continued Pakistan’s own jihad in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir as well as in Afghanistan.

The jihadis have, since 1989, been an instrument of Pakistani policy for regional influence. Pakistan, under the leadership of military dictator General Pervez Musharraf, joined the U.S.-led global war against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, complicating the Pakistani state’s relationship with the jihadis. At least some jihadi groups declared war on the Pakistani state because of its selective cooperation with the United States.

Pakistan’s status as an ideological state has resulted in the proliferation of Islamic political groups of all kinds. Several of them have received state patronage or at least tolerance at one time or another. Others have operated independently or with the support of fellow Islamist groups outside the country. Now, Pakistan’s Islamists are divided not only by their varied theological approaches but also by their views of and attitudes toward the Pakistani state.

Pakistan’s Islamists can now be categorized into three broad groupings: 1) Islamist groups working with the Pakistani state; 2) Islamist groups trying to take over the state through political means; and 3) Islamist groups fighting the state.

 

Working with the State

Even after Pakistan’s post-9/11 partnership with the United States, several Islamist groups continue to enjoy close ties with the state apparatus. This includes Deobandi Ulema of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) who participate in electoral politics while also describing jihad as a sacred right and obligation. The Deobandis have encouraged students of madrasas toward militancy. The Afghan Taliban, students of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan who held power in Afghanistan before 9/11, are still seen as allies by Pakistan’s military and the ISI. But a new generation of the Taliban has emerged that is not willing to work within the complex confines of Pakistani realpolitik, which requires modification of the jihadist ideology with occasional compromise.

Maulana Fazlur Rahman, head of the JUI, has tried to manage a balancing act by remaining active in parliamentary politics, alternately aligning himself with various political factions and claiming that he is the only one capable of dealing with the Taliban.  According to American journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who interviewed him for the New York Times, “Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening.”[1]

Rehman claims that the Taliban have been driven to extremism “because of America’s policies” and insists that he is trying to bring them back into the mainstream. Thus, he and others in the JUI do not see as inherently wrong the Taliban’s policies against women and religious minorities or Shia Muslims. Their objection seems to be to their decision to continue fighting while the Pakistani state needs to protect itself by working with the world’s sole superpower, the United States.

As a result, the JUI has become an influential political player with only a handful of seats in Pakistan’s parliament. It was a coalition partner of the Islamist Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which ruled Pakistan’s northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province from 2002-2008 and of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which governed from 2008-2013. It contested the 2013 elections on the promise of “stabilizing the Islamic system in the country in accordance with the constitution.”[2]After the election, it opted to join the government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif even though Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) has a clear majority in parliament and does not require coalition partners.[3]

A trickier ally of the Pakistani state among Islamist groups is the Wahhabi Lashkar-e-Taiba (The Army of the Pure) founded in 1989 by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) became the military wing of Markaz al-Dawa wal-Irshad (Center for the Call to Righteousness) and has been officially banned for several years. The United States froze the organization’s assets, saying that it had been involved in several acts of international terrorism. The November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India were also attributed to LeT.

Saeed now heads his organization with the name Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the Society for Preaching) from a large campus and training facility at Muridke, outside the Pakistan city of Lahore. Pakistani authorities have repeatedly refused to move against either Lashkar, which continues to operate in Kashmir, or Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which operates freely in Pakistan. In return, Saeed has urged Islamists to defend the Pakistani state and to spare it from terrorist attacks even if the state’s policies appear to contradict the global Islamist agenda. LeT and Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s policy seems to be to secure the support of the Pakistani state for organizational survival while limiting criticism of Pakistan.

The result is calibrated support for armed jihad, focused on fighting battles outside Pakistan first. In a recent speech, Saeed said that, “the Muslim Ummah is in a big problem right now with India, Israel and America using all their technological advancements against us and they are attacking Pakistan. The Muslim Ummah needs to reduce all the conspiracies of the disbelievers to dust. The problems in Burma, Kashmir, Palestine, and Afghanistan can only be resolved by making sacrifices in the battlefield.”[4]

In January 2012, Jamaat-ud-Dawa joined several Islamist formations in the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC, or the Defense of Pakistan Council), which was also joined by former ISI chief, Lt. General (ret.) Hamid Gul.  The Council described its purpose as defending Pakistan against “Zionist” conspiracies. “It’s the US desire to leave India in a position where it can dominate the region and serve the interests of Zionist Controlled world,”[5] the DPC declared. It expressed support for Pakistan’s armed forces and its hardline stance against India mirrored the views of the Pakistan deep state and the ISI.

Soon after the U.S. government posted a $10 million reward in April 2012 for information leading to his successful prosecution, Saeed called on the people of Pakistan “to wage Jihad against America in order to save Pakistan and Islam. “Come to us. We will teach you the meaning of jihad… The time to fight has come.” In a sermon ahead of Friday prayers in Lahore, he said that jihad had “caused the USSR to break and now America is failing because of it.”[6] But by June 2013, Saeed was focusing on his fatwa that described “extremist activities within Pakistan” as not being jihad. “Militant activities in Pakistan do not fall in the category of Jihad,” he argued, appealing to “all jihadi organizations not to carry out attacks inside Pakistan.” He claimed that America and India were benefiting from terrorist activities inside Pakistan. But he insisted that Muslims would have to “continue Jihad to maintain their freedom.”[7]

These declarations of support for the Pakistani state have been accompanied by a hardline theological vision that rejects inter-faith dialogue, modern ideas of religious tolerance and an emphasis on Islamic exclusivity. In his speeches, Saeed continues to exhort Muslims to understand that Muslims must maintain a strict distinction from unbelievers. “It is the faith that distinguishes a Muslim from a Kafir [infidel],” he explains. “The real fault is that today’s Muslims, despite believing in Allah, commit the same errors that a Jew will commit, that a Christian will commit; the lacuna which exists in the faith of Hindus will be reflected among today’s Muslims too,” Saeed lamented.

The Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader recommends that Muslims “cut off from the Hindu, the Jew, the Crusader” so that “after the end of Jew-ism, after the end of Christianity, after the End of Obscenity… Islam will Rule the World.”[8] Saeed reserves his greatest criticism for Hindus and advocates jihad against India. This makes him an ally of the Pakistani state, which for years has described Hindu-led India as an existential threat to Islamic Pakistan. According to Saeed, the Prophet Muhammad described those waging jihad in Hind (India) as “superior” to all other jihadis and “among the greatest martyrs.”[9]

Like Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Afghan Taliban groups operating out of Pakistan have also been often at pains to draw distinctions between attacking Pakistan and targeting foreigners or unbelievers. The network of Afghan jihadis led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj Haqqani are considered deadly enemies by the United States because of their frequent attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But the group maintains good ties with the Pakistani state. At one point, it went so far as to publicly demand that Pakistani Taliban should support peace deals in Pakistan’s tribal areas backed by Pakistani authorities.[10]

The main formation of Afghan Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, also announced plans to oppose jihadi groups that attacked Pakistan’s military.[11]But the complex dynamic among jihadi groups resulted in multiple clarifications and denials that eventually led to the replacement of the Pakistani Taliban’s public face, spokesperson Ehsanullah Ehsan.[12] Pakistan’s government continues to work on arranging direct talks between the United States and the Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan.

 

Trying to Take Over the State

While groups such as JUI, Jamaat-ud-Dawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Afghan Taliban continue to work alongside the Pakistani state, other Islamists adhere to the original Islamist goal of incrementally capturing state power. Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Society) is closest in ideology and organizational methods to the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, with which it maintains ideological and cooperative links. Established by Abul Ala Maududi in 1947, it has operated over the decades as a political party, a social welfare organization, a pan-Islamic network and a sponsor of militant groups fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Jamaat-e-Islami received significant amounts of Saudi assistance until its leaders refused to support the Kingdom in the 1991 Gulf War. Jamaat-e-Islami leaders have since repaired their relations with the Saudis and support from private Saudi individuals continues to flow in to the group. But the Saudis have diverted support from Jamaat-e-Islami toward other Deobandi and Wahhabi groups since the 1990s, which reduced the Jamaat-e-Islami’s standing as the dominant Islamist group in South Asia.

The Jamaat-e-Islami states its objective to be the establishment of “a Divine Government,” which it defines as “that universal revolution in the individual and collective life of man which Islam calls for.”[13] Although it engages in politics it refuses to be identified solely as a political party. Jamaat-e-Islami’s manifesto insists that it will “try to bring revolution and reformation through constitutional ways.” It emphasizes molding of public opinion and categorically declares that it “will not implement its manifesto through underground movements; instead, it will do everything openly.”[14]

The Jamaat-e-Islami has not always lived up to its claim of engaging in an open, constitutional struggle for an Islamic government replicating the Rashidun caliphate. It was accused in the Pakistani Supreme Court of receiving money from the ISI for its campaign for the 1990 elections, which the Court said had been influenced by the intelligence agency to block the PPP from winning. The Jamaat-e-Islami denied the charge even though former ISI officials confirmed the allegation.[15] The covert funding did not improve the Jamaat-e-Islami’s electoral performance significantly. The party’s vote bank has remained consistently stagnant and it has never been able to win more than a handful of seats in parliament.

In recent years, Jamaat-e-Islami has aligned itself with other religious and political parties to secure a share in power in the northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. It has taken a staunchly anti-American stance even though it was one of the major conduits of CIA funding for the Afghan Mujahideen during the 1980s. The group’s strategy seems to be to increase its influence within Pakistani society by aligning with hyper-nationalists. Some of its members have gained influential positions within Sharif’s PML-N and the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice, PTI) of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan.

Jamaat-e-Islami now acts as the unofficial arbiter of Pakistan’s status as a nation founded on the grounds of its Islamic identity. The party’s current Amir or President, Syed Munawwar Hasan, represents the second generation of Jamaat-e-Islamic cadres, having joined it in the 1960s through its student wing, Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba. Hasan was once a communist and his early training is reflected in his “United Front” approach that characterizes the movement’s recent strategies. Jamaat-e-Islami leaders now speak of threats to Pakistan from the United States, Israel and India and call for the unity of “patriotic and religious parties.”[16]

Jamaat-e-Islami contested the May 2013 election with the scales of justice as its election symbol and with calls for re-establishing a state similar to the one led by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina.[17] Its slogan, “Change of System is the hope of the nation,” was remarkably similar to that of Khan’s PTI. Jamaat-e-Islami’s manifesto claimed that it would end “US slavery to restore Pakistan’s independence and sovereignty,”[18] and promised self-reliance against western-led globalization.

Jamaat-e-Islami’s tie-up with Khan has enabled it to translate its organizational capability into serious political influence, without actually having to win votes. Although Khan is portrayed in the west as an Oxford-educated former cricketer, in Pakistan he articulates views clearly influenced by Jamaat-e-Islami. During the election campaign, he spoke of jihad as “war for my freedom” and said that “Sharia is what makes us human.” [19]  According to Khan, “Sharia brings justice and humanity in society” and “it is the name of a welfare state.”[20] Khan’s PTI and Jamaat-e-Islami formed a coalition government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa after the elections, enabling the Jamaat-e-Islami to put its “United Front” strategy into practice in government.

While the Jamaat-e-Islami seeks to take over the state through constitutional means and political stratagems, Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Islamic Liberation, HT) has an exactly opposite approach for establishing the caliphate. The movement, founded in 1953 by Palestinian Taqi-ud-Din Nabhani is legally banned in Pakistan but its members have been active in their covert struggle to transform Pakistan into the starting point for a global caliphate.[21]

According to HT’s ideology, “The Islamic countries are Muslim Lands that were divided by the agents of Kafir colonialists, as part of their plan to abolish the Khilafah. According to Sharia unifying them into one state is obligatory.”[22] The movement targets Pakistan as a country that is particularly ripe for its vision of global Islamic revival. Its anti-western rhetoric and calls for abrogation of military cooperation with western powers have resonated with the harder-line anti-western sections within Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.

Hizb ut-Tahrir operates clandestinely and has been involved in several coup plots in other Muslim countries. In 2011, Pakistani authorities arrested Brigadier Ali Khan and four other officers for working with HT to establish an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan. Pakistani officials believe that HT is “often overlooked because it is not always visible and does not conform to stereotypes” and were surprised by its ability to attract senior officers within the military. [23] HT was once linked to a plot to assassinate Pakistan’s then-President, General Pervez Musharraf, and “has been persistently targeting Pakistan Army officials for enlisting” as members. It has made at least three known attempts to penetrate the Pakistani army.[24]

 

Fighting the Pakistani State

Just as the Pakistani state’s dichotomous stance towards Islamist groups has resulted in its sponsorship and support of some groups, there are other Islamists who consider Pakistan’s state apparatus as their principal target. While Americans see Pakistan’s efforts against jihadi groups as inadequate, Al-Qaeda in Pakistan sees them as too much. According to Al-Qaeda’s spokesperson for Pakistan, Ustad Ahmad Farooq, “If [there is] a force that is fundamentally responsible for throwing this entire region into bloodshed and war, it is the Pakistani army.”[25]

In an interview released by Al-Qaeda’s media wing Al-Sahab, Farooq argued that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan were “inseparable.” According to him, the division between Afghanistan and Pakistan was not natural and those who can understand jihad in Afghanistan against the Americans “should also be able to understand the jihad in Pakistan.”

Al-Qaeda and its associated groups, including Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the virulently anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) have been responsible for several terrorist attacks inside Pakistan, including those on Pakistani army headquarters, several ISI buildings, the Mehran naval air station in Karachi and the Kamra Air Force base. It has been reported that former ISI functionary, Ilyas Kashmiri, leads what he calls the 313 Brigade as the operational arm of al-Qaeda.[26]He is often able to tap into Islamist sentiments within Pakistan’s military and intelligence services for information that enables him to plan and conduct attacks on well-protected military facilities.

After the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad, Al-Qaeda issued a video urging rebellion in the Pakistani army.[27]

The video showed four TTP members recording their statements before their suicide attack in May 2011 on the Mehran Naval base in Karachi and described it as revenge for the killing of Osama bin Laden. One of the militants in the video said, “Everyone knows that the Pakistani Army was alongside the American army in the operation in which Sheikh Osama was martyred.”

Although Al-Qaeda and its associated groups have been unequivocal in their opposition to the Pakistani state, the state has responded to their threat with equivocation. Pakistan’s media often plays down attacks by these groups, especially the LeJ, as “sectarian terrorism,” and every attack is followed by conspiracy theories linking attacks within Pakistan to Pakistan’s external enemies. “Pakistan has been seemingly trying not to fight the terrorists attached to al Qaeda for various reasons and has been relying on other national hate objects like the US, India and Israel, to deflect attention,”[28] observed an editorial in the liberal Express-Tribune newspaper.

The Pakistani state’s embrace of some extremist Islamists makes it difficult to create national consensus or even discipline within the military and intelligence services about fighting the terrorists. It is difficult for many Pakistanis to understand why Hafiz Saeed, who advocates terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, is a hero, while Osama bin Laden or Hakeemullah Mehsud, leader of the TTP, is not. Pakistan’s national discourse encourages Islamists to wield influence disproportionate to their numbers. It also allows militant groups to organize, recruit, train and fight from Pakistani soil.

The Pakistani state lacks clarity in its approach to militant Islamism; Pakistan’s politicians are often part of expedient political alignments with Islamist groups; and Pakistan’s media allows Islamist views, including conspiracy theories, to prevail without allowing arguments against their beliefs to be amplified. As a result, Islamists with different strategies for acquiring political power continue to flourish in Pakistan while the writ of the state continues to weaken.

 


[1] Nicholas Schmidle, “Next-Gen Taliban,” The New York Times, January 6, 2008.

[2] JUI-F, election manifesto, 2013.

[3] “Fazlur Rehman Meets Nawaz Sharif: JUI-F To Sit On Treasury Benches In NA, Senate,” Express Tribune, June 9, 2013.

[4] “Hafiz Saeed’s Advice for Pakistan to Emerge as a Leader of the Muslim Umma,” July 5, 2013 http://jamatdawa.org/hafiz-saeeds-advice-for-pakistan-to-emerge-as-a-leader-of-the-muslim-umma/#sthash.VTINysWy.dpuf.

[5] Difa-e-Pakistan Council website, “About Us,”http://www.difaepakistan.com/about-us.html.

[6] “Hafiz Saeed calls for Jihad Against America,” AFP, April 6, 2012.

[7] “Attacks in Pakistan are no jihad: Hafiz Saeed,” Express Tribune, June 17, 2013.

[8] Hafiz Saeed on the difference between Muslims and non-Muslims, 5-part video series on You Tube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqkX-P0VrdM.

[9] Hafiz Saeed on jihad in Hind, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whFmjEfwS6w.

[10] “Kurram Agency: Haqqani warns Hakimullah not to ‘sabotage’ peace … deal,”The Express Tribune, May 2, 2011.

[11] “Mullah Omar-led Afghan Taliban ready to attack Pakistani Taliban,” Dawn, June 8, 2013.

[12] Mushtaq Yusufzai, “TTP sacks its spokesman over threats to Afghan Taliban,”The News (Pakistan), July 10, 2013.

[13] Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan website, http://jamaat.org/beta/site/page/4.

[14] Ibid.

[15] “JI denies receiving ISI fund,” The News (Pakistan), March 4, 2012.

[16] “JI urges patriotic parties to foil conspiracy against democracy,” Business Recorder, January 3, 2013.

[17] “JI will make Pakistan a state similar to Madina: Hafiz Naeem,” The Nation (Pakistan), April 13, 2013.

[18] Jamaat slogan & election manifesto for 2013 elections,http://election2013.geo.tv/parties/detail/32/jamaateislamipakistan.html.

[19] Imran Khan’s press conference in Peshawar, October 11, 2012,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3waV9r1gxU&list.

[20] Imran Khan’s interview with Shahid Masood,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EpTjf9kFK4, December 15, 2011.

[21] Manifesto of Hizb ut-Tahrir for Pakistan, “Pakistan, Khilafah and the Re-unification of the Muslim World,” http://www.hizb-pakistan.com/hizb/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=837:manifesto-of-hizb-ut-tahrir-for-pakistan&catid=104:books&Itemid=487.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Muhammad Amir Rana, “The Hizb ut Tahrir Threat,” Dawn, July 11, 2011.

[24] Malik Asad, “Hizbut Tahrir made three attempts to penetrate army,” Dawn, October 29, 2012.

[25] “Al-Qaeda’s Official for Pakistan, Ustad Ahmad Farooq, Justifies the Taliban’s jihad Against Pakistan, Says: ‘If [There Is] a Force That Is Fundamentally Responsible for Throwing This Entire Region into Bloodshed and War – It Is the Pakistani Army’; ‘It Was Pakistan that Activated its Airspace, Territory, Airbases, Centers, and Everything…For America,’ Memri Special Dispatch No. 3096, July 14, 2010, http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4451.htm.

[26] Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Al-Qaeda had warned of Pakistan strike,” Asia Times, May 27, 2011.

[27] “New Al-Qaeda Video Urges Rebellion In Pakistani Army, Reiterates: Dr. Warren Weinstein Kidnapped To Secure Release Of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui,” Memri Special Dispatch No. 4570, March 13, 2012,http://www.memrijttm.org/content/en/report.htm?report=6173%C2%B6m=UPP.

[28] “Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the State,” Express Tribune (editorial), November 14, 2011.

Islamists and Democracy: Caution from Pakistan

Husain Haqqani, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor of international relations at Boston University, is the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005). He served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States between 2008 and 2011.
Success in free elections held after the “Arab Spring” protests in Tunisia and Egypt has brought Islamists to power through democratic means, and Islamist influence is on the rise throughout the Arab world. Much of the debate about liberal democracy’s future in Arab countries focuses on the extent to which the Islamists might be moderated by their inclusion in the democratic process. There is no doubt that the prospect of gaining a share of power through elections is a strong incentive that favors the tempering of extremist positions. But until the major Islamist movements give up their core ideology, their pursuit of an Islamic state is likely to impede their ability to be full and permanent participants in democratization. The real test of the Islamists’ commitment to democracy will come not while they are in power for the first time, but when they lose subsequent elections.
Islamists have been a constant feature of the Muslim world’s political landscape for almost a century. They have proven themselves to be resilient under even the most repressive political orders because of their ability to organize through mosques. Secular-nationalist leaders in countries such as Egypt and Jordan have alternately used and crushed Islamists to avoid losing power. Secular autocrats and their apologists have often cited the threat of Islamists taking power as a reason why democracy might be hard to practice in Muslim societies. Such societies, it has been argued, may have either secularism or democracy but not both, as the latter could lead to the erosion of the former under the influence of Islamist ideology.

The opposing argument was that the absence of democracy and freedom strengthened the Islamists since they were the only dissenting force that could covertly organize—by dint of their access to places of worship— at times when political opposition was banned. According to this argument, the absence of democracy made it difficult for Muslim societies to embrace secular pluralism and thus handed the Islamists a political advantage. Islamists have cashed in that advantage during most of the elections held after the overthrow of authoritarian secular regimes. The question now is whether the Islamists will accept pluralism and give up power in the event of an electoral defeat or will insist on pursuing their notion of an Islamic utopia at all costs, thereby preventing the emergence of secular democratic alternatives. Even if Islamists play by democratic rules while in power, there is reason to doubt that they—or at least their more fervent followers—will give up their power if they lose an election. The world still has not seen any examples of governing Islamists being voted out of power, but Pakistan does present an example of what can happen when an Islamist (or at least partially Islamist) government is succeeded by a non-Islamist democratic party. Pakistan has never elected an Islamist party. In fact, Islamist parties have never won more than 5 percent of the vote in Pakistan in any year except 2002, when a coalition of Islamist parties won 11 percent.

Yet the country did have a partly Islamist regime under the military rule of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Zia amended Pakistan’s constitution and decreed that some provisions of shari‘a would be included in Pakistan’s penal code. He also made blasphemy punishable by death and made it possible for police to arrest individuals accused of blasphemy immediately upon the filing of a complaint. After Zia’s death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, new elections brought to power the secular Pakistan

People’s Party (PPP), but a quarter-century later the country continues to be plagued by the extreme Islamist policies introduced under Zia—policies that have proven very difficult to reverse. The Pakistani experience, to which we shall return later in this essay, suggests that there is reason to fear that legislation passed under Islamist influence may be similarly hard to undo in the Arab countries where Islamists have been elected to power. For now, the Islamists are not averse to acquiring power through the democratic method of free elections even if they remain hostile to Western ideas of individual liberty and pluralism.

The Islamists’ idea of democracy usually consists of majority rule, which is easy for them to accept when they are in the majority. Elected Islamist leaders in Egypt and Tunisia have said that they are willing to embrace what Alfred Stepan terms “the twin tolerations,”1 including the notion that elected officials can legislate freely without having to cede to claims that all human laws can be trumped by laws that God has directly revealed. Full acceptance of the twin-tolerations concept would allow future elected governments to change laws rooted in Islamic theology that might be introduced by Islamist-controlled legislatures during their current tenure. If the experience of countries such as Pakistan is any guide, however, Islamists who lose elections nonetheless tend to resist the secularization of laws, with this resistance often taking the form of violence or threats of violence.

The current willingness of Arab Islamists to moderate their stance while taking part in the democratic process appears to be directly tied to the sheer tentativeness of the Arab democratic experiment. The emergence of democratic governance in the Middle East is undoubtedly a positive development, as is the inclusion of Islamists in the process. It would be unrealistic to suppress the Islamists forever, as the fossilized

Arab dictatorships had sought to do, and still hope for secular democratic values to evolve. But it is equally important to guard against the prospect of Islamist dictatorships replacing the secular ones, even if Islamists have initially come to power through free and fair elections.

Suspicion of Democracy and Secularism

Most Islamist movements, including the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and its South Asian analog the Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Assembly), have a history of questioning Western democracy as well as the basicprinciples of secularism. Radical groups such as the pan-Islamist Hizbut Tahrir and the British group al-Muhajiroun have gone so far as to describe Western democracy as sinful and against the will of God. Several jihadist movements have taken a similarly extreme position. Other Islamist groups, however, have offered their own versions of democracy that allow for the election of officials but limit the authority of legislators. Disagreements also exist over whether non-Muslims and women are entitled to exercise the franchise or to hold public office on the same terms as practicing Muslim men.

The views of various Islamist factions are important because they provide the context for anticipating the path of Islamist politicians. Many Western observers want to project the future trajectory of Islamist political parties solely on the basis of recent pronouncements by Islamist political leaders. This approach is flawed because Islamists have a strong sense of history; their political behavior cannot be easily comprehended or predicted without taking history into account. The group most relevant to the contemporary Arab political scene is the Muslim Brotherhood. Most Islamist groups in the Middle East, ranging from political parties hastily assembled after the Arab Spring to the terrorists of al-Qaeda, trace their roots to the Brotherhood and its ideology.

At its founding in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood described itself as an organization dedicated to Islamic revival. Two years later, it registered under Egyptian law as a welfare organization, a legal status that (formally at least) precluded its direct involvement in politics. Its founder Hassan al-Banna (1906–49) gradually unveiled a strategy of political participation and even mounted an abortive run as a parliamentary candidate in 1942. To this day, however, the Brotherhood sees itself as an ideological movement dedicated to the cause of Islamic revival rather than as a political party.

Banna declared that the Brotherhood’s aim was the “Islamization” of Egyptian society through an Islamic revolution that would begin with the individual and extend throughout the community. He identified four stages of this process: first, to make every individual a true Muslim; second, to develop Muslim families; third, to Islamize the community; and finally, to establish an Islamic state in Egypt. In some ways, Banna’s view of this historical progression is reminiscent of Marx’s stages of history. It is based on the belief that events will move in one direction and that Islamization will eventually be attained. But implicit in this revolutionary expectation is the notion that different historical stages require different kinds of strategies. Once a critical mass of Islamized individuals is present, a more directly political strategy—including but not limited to contesting and winning elections—can be adopted.

Unlike Marx, Banna did not lay out the details of the historic progression called for by his theory of inevitable Islamization. This has led Islamists into incessant internal debates regarding the stage that their organization (or society at large) has reached, and which strategy is best suited to it. For this reason, the Brotherhood’s position on democracy and party politics has not been consistent. At one time, Banna opposed the very idea of political parties and advocated a political system that would eschew them. But since Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak opened parliamentary elections to multiple parties in 1984, the Brotherhood has taken part in polls save for two occasions on which it chose to boycott the voting. Although it was not allowed to form a party, it participated as one in all but the most formal sense (its candidates would run as nominal independents, with everyone knowing their real affiliation). After Mubarak fell in early 2011, the Brotherhood formed the Freedom and Justice Party, which dominates Egypt’s parliament and whose chairman Mohamed Morsi won election to the presidency in June 2012.

Like other ideological movements that seek to change the entire sociopolitical order, the Brotherhood has often debated and shifted its strategies. Its objectives of Islamizing society and establishing an Islamic state, however, have remained constant. The question for those trying to gauge the prospects of democracy in the Arab world is whether the Muslim Brotherhood’s acceptance of democratic norms is permanent or is just another strategic shift meant to serve the higher ideological goal of establishing an Islamic state. In this connection, it is worth noting that the Brotherhood’s decision to contest elections by setting up a party—avowedly separate and distinct from the main movement—allows the Brotherhood to maintain a stance of ideological purity while placing some of its members in a position to undertake political compromises.

Banna’s speeches and writings about Islamic revival were exhortatory rather than descriptive. For example, he declared that the Muslim

Brotherhood wanted “the foundations of modern Eastern resurgence” to be built “on the basic principles of Islam, in every aspect of life.” The task of describing “the precepts of Islam” on which this revival was to be built would fall to others. 2 Mawdudi, Qutb, and the Islamic State One of the most detailed accounts of an Islamic political theory was offered by Sayyid Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi (1903–79), the founder of the

Jamaat-e-Islami in the Indian subcontinent, who is considered the seminal

ideologist of global Islamism. Mawdudi elaborated the idea that in

an Islamic state sovereignty belongs explicitly to Allah (God), and thus

that the principal function of an Islamic polity must be to enforce the

rules laid down in the Koran and early Islamic traditions.

“A more apt name for the Islamic polity would be the ‘kingdom of

God’ which is described in English as a ‘theocracy,’” Mawdudi said in

a 1948 lecture. But he clarified that Islamic theocracy is “something

altogether different from the theocracy of which Europe had a bitter

experience.” The theocracy that Islam would build, said Mawdudi,

[Is] not ruled by any particular religious class but by the whole community

of Muslims including the rank and file. The entire Muslim population

runs the state in accordance with the Book of God and the practice

of His Prophet. If I were permitted to coin a new term, I would describe

this system of government as ‘theo-democracy,’ that is to say a divine

democratic government, because under it the Muslims have been given a

limited popular sovereignty under the suzerainty of God. The executive

under this system of government is constituted by the general will of the

Muslims who have also the right to depose it. 3

According to Mawdudi’s theory, “every Muslim who is capable and

qualified to give a sound opinion on matters of Islamic law, is entitled

to interpret the law of God when such interpretation becomes necessary.

In this sense the Islamic polity is a democracy.”4 But it is a limited democracy,

as not even the entire Muslim community has the authority to

change an explicit command of God. Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Egyptian

writer and radical Brotherhood ideologist, claimed that jahiliya (the

state of human ignorance that preceded the Koran) continues to exist in

all times. Qutb further asserted that all those who resist the notion of

the Islamic state, or who seek to dilute it with contemporary ideologies,

are in a state of jahiliya. The Qutbists would be willing to denounce as

10 Journal of Democracy

unbelievers (takfir) any who refuse to acknowledge the sovereignty of

God as embodied in a state ruled by Islam. 5

These ideological roots of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied

movements have not disappeared and could resurge if their dominance

within fledgling Arab democracies falters.

Even now, Islamists serving in the

governments of various countries are

divided over the extent to which they

should push what they consider to be

Islamic laws. Some Western commentators

have expressed the hope that Islamists

might be content with dispensing

patronage to their supporters and

providing relatively just and decent governance.

But this optimism is misplaced.

It is unlikely that Islamists can avoid pressure from their ideological

core to push for a greater role for Islam in the public sphere.

The brunt of Islamization in contemporary times has been borne by

women and religious minorities, and debates over what Islam does and

does not allow have been endemic in all countries that have attempted

even partial Islamization. Cultural issues such as bans on alcohol,

changes to school curricula, requirements for women to wear head

coverings, and restrictions on certain images or even on music have

always been major Islamist rallying points. There is no way that Islamists

in government can completely ignore their movement’s promises

regarding all these matters, even though the implementation of

Islamist measures is sure to divide society and create a backlash. The

problem would become especially acute when Islamists, after partially

legislating shari‘a while in office, lose their majority.

If “the law of God” is reversed after being implemented for a few

years, violent opposition is inevitable. Such a situation began in Pakistan

after General Zia, who came to power in a 1977 military coup and

remained as president till his death eleven years later, partially enforced

shari‘a. The winner of the first election following Zia’s death was the

secular PPP. The Islamists had only a few seats in the new parliament.

Yet by using Islamist “street power,” issuing fatwas, and pronouncing

condemnations from the pulpits of mosques, they refused to allow any

new legislation that they viewed as contravening shari‘a, which they

said can never be reversed once it has been written into the legal code.

To this day, secular legislators trying to amend Pakistan’s blasphemy

laws, for example, do so at the risk of death threats and assassination.

Upon gaining independence from the British Raj in 1947, Pakistan’s

secular founders had spoken vaguely of creating a state inspired by

Islamic principles. But Islamist agitation forced Pakistan’s early leaders

to expand the relationship between religion and the country’s legal

It is unlikely that

Islamists can avoid

pressure from their ideological

core to push for

a greater role for Islam

in the public sphere.

Husain Haqqani 11

structure. Unlike neighboring India, which was able to agree on a constitution

less than thirty months after independence, Pakistan’s Constituent

Assembly remained bogged down with working out the details of its

country’s fundamental law for nine long years. In an effort to placate

Islamists, the Assembly in 1949 adopted an Objectives Resolution that

outlined the underlying principles of the constitution. This resolution

declared that “sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah

Almighty” and that “principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance

and social justice as enunciated by Islam shall be fully observed.”

Moreover, it pledged the Pakistani state to ensuring that “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 the Sunnah.”

These principles were incorporated into the Pakistani constitutions

of 1956, 1962, and 1973, but secular Pakistanis expected them to

amount to nothing more than lip service to the religious sentiments of

the country’s vast majority. The Islamists, however, had other ideas.

They invoked what they termed the nation’s foundational principles to

seek changes in laws based on their beliefs—and they did this without

winning elections. In 1974, for instance, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali

Bhutto’s elected secular government (1973–77) found itself forced by

violent street protests to amend the constitution to declare members of

the Ahmadiyya sect non-Muslims. Three years later, more protests—

this time under the pretext of disputed elections—resulted in legal

bans on alcohol and nightclubs, plus the shift of the weekly holiday

from Sunday to Friday. These Islamic measures did not suffice to keep

Bhutto in office. Zia’s coup, which made him Pakistan’s third military

ruler, had the support of Islamists and may have been planned as the

culmination of the anti-Bhutto protests.

Zia was personally religious and deeply influenced by Mawdudi’s

writings. He spoke publicly of the need to implement fully what had

hitherto been a vague promise of government based on Islamic principles.

This led to the deepening of Islamist influence in education, academia,

the bureaucracy, the media, the military, and the law. The state

became an instrument for trying to achieve the Muslim Brotherhood’s

version of good Muslim individuals and families within a fully Muslim

society. In a 2 December 1978 speech, Zia spoke of the need to create a

Nizam-i-Islam or Islamic system, which he described as “a code of life

revealed by Allah to his last Prophet (Peace be upon him) 1400 years

ago, and the record of which is with us in the form of the Holy Quran

and the Sunnah.”6

This announcement was followed by the establishment of shari‘a

courts and the passage of several drastic laws. Among these was the

Hudood Ordinance of 1979, which banned alcohol, forbade theft with

punishments that could include the amputation of a hand, and forbade all

12 Journal of Democracy

sexual contact outside marriage with penalties that could include death

by stoning. Also controversial were the blasphemy laws of 1980, 1982,

and 1986. The state took it upon itself as well to mandate the timing of

prayers, the observance of the Ramadan fast, and the collection directly

from citizens of zakat, the annual charitable contribution that all Muslims

who have the means to do so are required to make as one of the

“five pillars” of Islam.

With respect to the blasphemy laws, Pakistan’s Penal Code and

Criminal Procedure Code were amended so that various religious offenses

would be punishable at a minimum with imprisonment and at a

maximum with death. The “use of derogatory remarks in respect of holy

personages” is an offense punishable by three years’ imprisonment and

a fine. Defiling a Koran is an offense that results in life imprisonment,

and the “use of derogatory remarks against the Prophet” is punishable

by death. Between 1986 and 2010, more than 1,200 people—over half of

them non-Muslims—were charged under the blasphemy laws. In 2010,

the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy,

gained international attention (she remains in prison as of this

writing in March 2013).

In early 2011, at the height of the controversy over the Bibi case,

Governor Salmaan Taseer of Punjab (Pakistan’s largest province) and

Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti were assassinated

(Taseer by one of his own bodyguards) for requesting leniency for Bibi

and publicly supporting a review of these harsh laws. The murder of

secular reformers democratically trying to reverse previously decreed

Islamization measures in Pakistan makes one wonder whether something

similar might happen in Arab countries if Islamists lose an election

after having been in power. 7

Until recently, fears that radicals and jihadist groups would gain influence

were cited as a reason for excluding Islamists from the political

process, especially in the Arab world. Now that the Islamists are dominant

participants in fledgling democracies, it remains to be seen whether

they will seek to marginalize the radicals or to maintain them as insurance

against future attempts to reverse Islamist ideological gains.

Hard Secularism and Soft Islamism?

Optimists often cite the example of Turkey’s Justice and Development

Party (AKP), which has Islamist roots yet has ruled Turkey since

2002 without imposing a theocracy. But the AKP emerged in the context

of Kemal Atatürk’s hard secularism, which since 1924 had imposed

upon Turkey la¦cité in the French Jacobin tradition. The Turkish Republic

was not just secular in the U.S. sense, according to which the state

must not impose a religion; rather, the Kemalist state actively opposed

any public manifestations of religiosity, which it saw as preventing

Husain Haqqani 13

Muslims from attaining full modernity. The AKP presented itself as a

conservative party, Islamic only in the sense that the Christian Democratic

parties of Europe are Christian.8 Even its Turkish forerunners, the

National Salvation Party and the Welfare Party, which were disbanded

by the Kemalist army and judiciary, were hardly comparable to ideological

movements like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Turkey’s Islamists were circumscribed in their ability to demand Islamization

by the strong secular foundations of Atatürk’s republic. The

AKP has never described itself as a movement to establish an Islamic

state. It has focused instead on rolling back the restrictions on public

manifestations of Islam that Atatürk and his successors imposed. There

are many Turkish citizens, however, who remain worried that after the

rollback of some of the harshest aspects of la¦cité, an Islamist movement

resembling the Muslim Brotherhood might yet emerge in their country.9

The constraints of living under hard secularism in the past may also

help to explain why the Ennahda (Renaissance) party in Tunisia stands

out among the post–Arab Spring Islamist groups in being able to claim

closer kinship with Turkey’s AKP than with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

The Tunisian party’s ideologist, Rachid Ghannouchi, has made

what can be understood as an argument against the concept of rule by

a vanguard Islamist movement claiming to exercise God’s sovereignty.

As Ghannouchi said in a widely publicized speech:

Throughout Islamic history, the state has always been influenced by

Islam in one way or another in its practices, and its laws were legislated

for in light of the Islamic values as understood at that particular time

and place. Despite this, states remained Islamic not in the sense that

their laws and procedures were divinely revealed, but that they were

human endeavors open to challenge and criticism. . . . The primary orbit

for religion is not the state’s apparatuses, but rather personal/individual

convictions.10

According to Ghannouchi, the state’s duty above all is to provide

services to people—to create job opportunities, provide education, and

promote good health—and not to control the hearts and minds of its

citizens.

But the mainstream of the Islamist movement—including the Muslim

Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami—has yet to revise its ideology as

drastically as Ghannouchi appears to have revised that of Ennahda. And

it remains to be seen what Ghannouchi and his “soft” Islamists will

actually do in practice. Most Islamists continue to view the authoritarian

experiments undertaken to Islamize Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and

Sudan as legitimate. Mawdudi’s concept of “theo-democracy” and the

Islamic Republic of Iran’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih (guardianship by

the supreme Islamic jurisprudent) are examples of the truncated view of

democracy held by Islamists. Just as communists advocated a “dictator14

Journal of Democracy

ship of the proletariat” that in practice meant domination by communist

parties in the name of the proletariat, there are legitimate grounds to

suspect that what mainstream Islamists actually seek is a dictatorship

of the pious

NOTES

1. Alfred Stepan, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy

23 (April 2012): 89–103.

2. The quoted words are from Banna’s essay “To What Do We Invite Humanity,”

available at www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=804.

3. Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, The Islamic Law and Constitution, 7th ed., trans. and ed.

Khurshid Ahmad (Lahore: Islamic Publications Ltd., 1980): 139–40.

4. Maududi, Islamic Law and Constitution, 140.

5. On Banna, Mawdudi, and Qutb, see Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, “Terror,

Islam, and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 5–20.

6. The English text of Zia’s speech may be found in Pakistan Horizon 32, 1–2 (First

and Second Quarters 1979): 277–280. On the Nizam-i-Islam, see John L. Esposito, Islam

and Politics, 4th ed. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 175–76.

7. The problem of “blasphemy” in Pakistan is much more than just a juridical matter of

excessive prosecutions or even a matter of lethal attacks on a few high-profile ministers.

Mere informal allegations of insults against Islam can trigger mass violence, as occurred

when numerous homes in a Christian quarter of Lahore were burned in March 2013 after

two local men, one a Muslim and one from Pakistan’s Christian minority (which forms

about 1.6 percent of the population), fell into a personal quarrel and the former accused the

latter of saying something—reports did not specify precisely what—that was disrespectful

of Islam. See Andrew Buncombe, “Muslim Mob Burns 150 Homes over Christian ‘Blasphemy,’”

Independent, 10 March 2013, available at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/

asia/muslim-mob-burns-150-homes-over-christian-blasphemy-8528231.html.

8. Vali Nasr, “The Rise of ‘Muslim Democracy,’” Journal of Democracy 16 (April

2005): 20.

9. On the AKP’s behavior so far, see Berna Turam, “Turkey Under the AKP: Are

Rights and Liberties Safe?” Journal of Democracy 23 (January 2012): 109–18.

10. Rachid Ghannouchi, “Secularism and Relation between Religion and the State

from the Perspective of the Nahdha Party,” trans. Brahim Rouabah, Center for the Study of

Islam and Democracy–Tunisia, 2 March 2012, available at http://archive.constantcontact.

com/fs093/1102084408196/archive/1109480512119.html.

Religion is a touchy subject

Gulf News, September 20, 2007

Relations between the Muslim world and the west have seldom been good since European nations replaced Muslim empires as the dominant power in the Middle East, South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.

But there is no need for western leaders to take the bait offered by extremist jihadists who wish to revive the tensions originally created during the course of medieval crusades.

The only way the West can win the global war against terrorism is with the marginalisation of extremist jihadis within the Muslim world and by widening of the circle of Muslim moderation and reform.

In this context, Pope Benedict XVI made a serious blunder when he cited a medieval Christian source to wonder aloud whether Islam’s message was inherently violent.

The Pope has now expressed regret over his remarks and explained that he did not intend to cause offence. But the damage is done.

Perceived attacks on Islam and on Muslims as a whole tend to galvanise the cause of Islamist hardliners who seek to gain new recruits for their ranks with calls of “Islam is in danger”.

Islamist sensibilities cannot and should not lead to self-censorship within the West. At the same time, Christian leaders such as the Pope should be sensitive to the likely impact of their words.

This sensitivity is all the more important in the context of the global war against terrorism and the need to convince the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims that the effort to root out the crescentade of people such as Osama Bin Laden is not, in fact, a thinly disguised plot to revive the European Christian crusades that attempted to overwhelm the Muslims between 1095 and 1291.

Any student of history knows that none of the world’s major religions have a monopoly over bigotry, prejudice and violence in the name of God.

Followers of all religions have killed heretics, apostates and followers of other religions at different times and justified their actions on the basis of their own religion.

Antagonise

To paint Islam alone as the religion of the sword and to insult Islam’s Prophet has been one of the ways in which the predominantly Christian West has managed, in the past, to antagonise large numbers of Muslims.

But at this juncture, when Western Civilisation is meant to represent secular pluralism and includes a growing number of Muslims within its fold, reviving old stereotypes is certainly not a good idea.

By all accounts, the Pope’s offending speech titled Faith, Reason, University at Regensburg University need not have contained the reference to Islam at all.

The speech was meant to elaborate the nature of reason from the Christian perspective.
Pope Benedict seeks to be the restorer of Europe’s ethical values and his primary concern so far has been the excessive secularism he sees as having seeped into the lives of western Christians during the 20th century.

The mention of Islam in the Pope’s speech came only to try and compare what he thought is the Muslim concept of God (as the Almighty above human reason) and the Christian view that equates God with reason.

Only a sense of prejudiced superiority could have encouraged Pope Benedict XVI to venture into such a comparison at a time when inter-faith dialogue with Islamic scholars and reform within the Muslim world are considered vital for global peace and security.

Direct attacks

Muslims have historically always reacted to direct attacks on their faith by embracing fundamentalist theology. Literalism in interpreting religion and admiration for defiant militants has followed whenever Islam’s ummah (community of believers) has been humiliated by non-Muslims.

With over one billion Muslims around the globe, the swelling of fundamentalist ranks poses serious problems for the major western powers.

If only one per cent of the world’s Muslims accept radical ideology and ten per cent of that one per cent decide to commit themselves to a militant agenda, we are looking at a one million strong recruitment pool for terrorism.

In the interaction with the West, especially since the end of the 19th century, Muslims have found themselves in the midst of successive defeats and repeated humiliation. Widely publicised pronouncements about Islam’s early history, coming from leaders such as the Pope, contribute to the sense of weakness of contemporary Muslims that plays straight into the hands of religious radicals.

Winning Muslim hearts and minds, inviting Islam’s theologians to adopt new ideas of religious tolerance and encouraging larger numbers of the world’s Muslims to embrace modernity without seeing it as a threat to their faith are important elements in any strategy to combat the extremist streak.

Under such circumstances, the world cannot afford comments by the Pope and other religious leaders that provide grounds for renewed religious extremist frenzy in the world of Islam.

The militant interpretation of Islam has usually failed to penetrate the thinking of over-whelming numbers of Muslims, especially in recent times.

But this could change if leading personalities in the West themselves provide the grist for Islamist propaganda mills by insulting Islam’s Prophet or by suggesting that Islam is inherently flawed and violent.

Why the World Must Look at Turkey

Indian Express , August 22, 2007

Turkey’s forthcoming presidential election offers an opportunity to define secularism in the Muslim world as a political system ensuring separation of theology and state rather than as an anti-religious ideology.

For almost a century, secular elites in Muslim countries have equated progress and modernity with renunciation of Islamic symbols and practices. Now Turkey, the first secular republic with a majority Muslim population, is expected to elect a president who prays in public and whose wife wears a headscarf as a manifestation of her religious convictions.

Anti-religious secularists see this development as a threat to Turkey’s laicite. Those who realise that separating religion from matters of state does not necessarily mean taking religion out of people’s lives, see Turkey as choosing a path away from radical Islam as well as radical secularism.

The Adalat va Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) or Justice and Development Party, led by Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan, won July’s parliamentary polls with 47 per cent of the popular vote and a clear majority of seats in the Grand National Assembly. This was a significant improvement on AKP’s 34 per cent vote share in 2002 that first brought the conservative party with Islamist roots to power.

The polls were called earlier than scheduled because of an inconclusive presidential election in April. Then, AKP’s nominee for president, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, faced severe opposition from Turkey’s secular establishment led by the country’s army. Gul’s election was blocked by technical maneouvres backed by the outgoing president and top army generals, notwithstanding AKP’s majority in Parliament.

This time around, AKP has again nominated Gul for president and, given the recent resounding popular mandate for AKP, the army might not be able to block his election short of an improbable military coup.

Although AKP grew out of a succession of Islamist parties banned by Turkish courts, it describes itself as a moderate conservative party rather than an Islamist one. It does not seek the enforcement of Islamic law, and its performance in office during its first term confirms its claims.

Although both Erdogan and Gul are practicing Muslims who were once active in the Islamist movement, their first stint in office reflected an effort to distance themselves from Islamist politics. Under Erdogan, Turkey pursued European Union membership, kept close ties with the US and Israel, and attained new levels of economic prosperity.

The AKP government did not curtail civil liberties and observed secularism by keeping religion out of its political decisions. But in the post-9/11 world, Islamist parties and leaders in several countries have become instant converts to pluralism, tolerance and moderation.

AKP’s critics insist that the Turkish party, too, has changed its direction only strategically and that it would revert to demanding Sharia rule if and when it gets a chance. Such fears must be weighed only in light of available evidence and so far the evidence favours AKP’s credentials as a religiously conservative party willing to operate within the broad principles of secularism. Gul’s personal observance of Islam and his wife’s wearing a headscarf as a symbol of piety does not necessarily threaten the ideal of separation between faith and state.

For too long the Muslim world has been polarised between secularists who want all public manifestations of Islamic religion banished from their countries and Islamists who insist on reverting to obscurantist theocracy.

This polarisation cannot come to an end without at least some secularists becoming more tolerant of religious practices and some Islamists moving away from radical Islam to a middle where the individual remains Islamic but the state is secular.

If the conversion of every former Islamist to believing in separation between religion and state is looked upon with suspicion, even in the absence of evidence of dissimulation, there would be no hope of finding a middle ground for the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. The election of a born-again or Church-going Christian as president of the US or prime minister of Britain does not raise the kind of spectre that the prospect of Gul’s election as president has done in the case of Muslim-majority Turkey.

Unlike the US, where secularism evolved from a commitment to religious tolerance, secularists in the Muslim world were interested in westernising their nations in a hurry and were not particularly bothered by niceties of individual freedom. In Muslim states — from Morocco to Indonesia — westernised elites have denied democratic change, arguing that it would compromise secularism. These fears are based on the history of attempts by religious groups to impose their narrow version of Islam by force.

But in reality, religious intolerance, and not individual piety, is the enemy of secularism. If governments in the Muslim world open themselves to democratic change, there might be other political movements like AKP, which combine tolerance with tradition. Otherwise, the Islamic world will remain embroiled in the power struggle between authoritarian westernisers and retrogressive Islamists.

Turkey Shows the Way

Gulf News, August 22, 2007

Turkey’s forthcoming presidential election offers an opportunity to define secularism in the Muslim world as a political system ensuring separation of theology and state rather than as an anti-religious ideology.

For almost a century, secular elites in Muslim countries have equated progress and modernity with renunciation of Islamic symbols and practices.

Now Turkey, the first secular republic with a majority Muslim population, is expected to elect a president who prays in public and whose wife wears a headscarf as a manifestation of her religious convictions.

Anti-religious secularists see this development as a threat to Turkey’s Laicite. Those who realise that separating religion from matters of state does not necessarily mean taking religion out of people’s lives see Turkey as choosing a path away from radical Islam as well as radical secularism.

The Adalat va Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) or Justice and Development Party, led by Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan, won July’s parliamentary polls with 47 per cent of the popular vote and a clear majority of seats in the Grand National Assembly.

The polls were called earlier than scheduled because of an inconclusive presidential election in April. Then, AKP’s nominee for president, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, faced severe opposition from Turkey’s secular establishment led by the country’s army.

This time around, AKP has again nominated Gul for president and, given the recent resounding popular mandate for AKP, the army might not be able to block his election short of an improbable military coup.

Although AKP grew out of a succession of Islamist parties banned by Turkish courts, it describes itself as a moderate conservative party rather than an Islamist one.

It does not seek the enforcement of Islamic law or Sharia and its performance in office during its first term confirms its claims.

Practising Muslims

Although both Erdogan and Gul are practising Muslims who were once active in the Islamist movement, their first stint in office reflected an effort to distance themselves from Islamist politics.

Under Erdogan, Turkey pursued European Union membership, maintained close ties with the United States and Israel, and attained new levels of economic prosperity.

Gul’s personal observance of Islam and his wife’s wearing a headscarf as a symbol of piety does not necessarily threaten the ideal of separation between faith and state.

For too long the Muslim world has been polarised between secularists who want all public manifestations of Islamic religion banished from their countries and Islamists who insist on reverting to obscurantist theocracy.

This polarisation cannot come to an end without at least some secularists becoming more tolerant of religious practices and some Islamists moving away from radical Islam to a middle where the individual remains Islamic but the state is secular.

If the conversion of every former Islamist to separation between religion and state is looked upon with suspicion, even in the absence of evidence of dissimulation, there would be no hope of finding a middle ground for the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims.

The election of a born-again or Church-going Christian as president of the US or prime minister of Britain does not raise the kind of spectre that the prospect of Gul’s election as president has done in case of Muslim-majority Turkey.

Unlike the US, where secularism evolved from a commitment to religious tolerance, secularists in the Muslim world were interested in westernising their nations in a hurry and were not particularly bothered by niceties of individual freedom.

In Muslim states from Morocco to Indonesia, Westernised elites have denied democratic change, arguing that it would compromise secularism.

These fears are based on the history of attempts by religious groups to impose their narrow version of Islam by force. But in reality, religious intolerance, and not individual piety, is the enemy of secularism.

If governments in the Muslim world open themselves to democratic change, there might be other political movements like AKP, which combine tolerance with tradition.

Otherwise, the Islamic world will remain embroiled in the power struggle between authoritarian Westernisers and retrogressive Islamists.

US Volt-face on Democracy

Gulf News, May 23, 2007

The US government appears to have changed its course away from where it stood in November 2003. Then, in a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, President George W. Bush promised an American “forward strategy” to promote democracy in the greater Middle East.

Now, the Iraq war seems to have sapped the Bush administration’s energies. Democracy has advanced very little in most Muslim countries over the last three years.

And some US officials are choosing to shamefully redefine the authoritarian status quo as democracy and freedom.

The world is not perfect. Most of us understand the difficulties and limitations faced by the US as the world’s sole superpower. Notwithstanding perceptions to the contrary, the US does not control the world.

American leaders and officials must deal with constant divergence between their ideals and the strategic compulsions of the moment.

Even then, US officials do not need to lie publicly in an effort to curry favour with authoritarian rulers useful for current American strategic objectives.

Consider recent comments by the American ambassador in Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, and Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Richard Boucher.

Ricciardone recently told Egyptian television, “Here in Egypt as in the US, there is freedom of speech.” Boucher told Voice of America, “I think the Pakistani government is moving forward; they’re moving toward elections.”

Ricciardone’s comments were not a slip of the tongue and the transcript of his television interview was posted on the website of the American embassy in Cairo.

When asked by CNN International recently to comment on the torture and continued detention of Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour, an embassy spokesman refused to be drawn into criticism of President Hosni Mubarak’s government. Instead, the spokesman insisted that the US believed Egypt was “making prog-ress” towards democracy.

The ambassador’s proc-lamation and his spokes-man’s description of a regime that arrests and tortures dissidents as reflecting progress is far from reality.

Even the State Department’s annual human rights report, prepared by its Democracy and Human Rights Bureau and released in March 2007, pointed out that the Egyptian government’s “respect for human rights remained poor, and serious abuses continued in many areas”.

Boucher’s characterisation of Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf is even worse. To say that the “Pakistani government is moving forward” so soon after the government-orchestrated massacre of opposition supporters in Karachi is nothing short of an insult to Pakistanis marching in the streets of the country’s cities for rule of law and restoration of democracy.

Boucher tried to cover his tracks by saying, “I recognise that tensions do exist” in Pakistan but his bottom line was an unequivocal endorsement of a military regime that is clearly undoing whatever little good it might have done in the past seven years.

 

Important question

An important question is why does Boucher feel compelled to praise a client regime at a time when its actions merit criticism, whether public or private?

If the purpose is to reassure Musharraf that the US is still with him even if the people of Pakistan are not, then that purpose is better served during private meetings.

Why must Boucher risk his credibility, and that of the US government, by saying on radio or television what is already being communicated to Musharraf with large sums of money?

The Bush administration has already provided and budgeted $5.174 billion in aid for Musharraf’s regime for the period 2001-2008. Some of this amount has admittedly gone towards projects benefiting the people. But an additional $80 to $100 million is given each month as Coalition Support Funds and the total under that head until August 2006 was over $4 billion.

That amount goes almost exclusively towards Pakistan’s security services. There are no publicly available estimates for covert transfers of funds to Pakistan’s army and intelligence services but it can safely said that total US aid for the Musharraf regime over the last five years is $10 to $15 billion.

If after such largesse, Musharraf’s regime cannot maintain security and create even the illusion of stability in Pakistan, Ambassador Boucher’s false praise for the teetering Pakistani government is unlikely to strengthen it.

During the cold war, the words of US officials served to encourage Soviet bloc dissidents suffering imprisonment and torture.

Now, US diplomats don’t even have words of comfort to offer prisoners of conscience such as Egypt’s Ayman Nour or supporters of the democratic opposition in Karachi who were killed by pro-government gunmen.

Can’t Ricciardone and Boucher at least keep quiet if strategic compulsions of the moment prevent them from speaking out in favour of tortured advocates of democracy?

American Waffle

Indian Express , May 23, 2007

The US government appears to have changed its course away from where it stood in November 2003. Then, in a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington DC, President George W. Bush promised an American “forward strategy” of promoting democracy in the greater Middle East.

Now, the Iraq war seems to have sapped the Bush administration’s energies. Democracy has advanced very little in most Muslim countries over the last three years. And some US officials are choosing to shamefully redefine the authoritarian status quo as democracy and freedom.

The world is not perfect. Most of us understand the difficulties and limitations faced by the US as the world’s sole superpower. Notwithstanding perceptions to the contrary, the US does not control the world.

American leaders and officials must deal with constant divergence between their ideals and the strategic compulsions of the moment. Even then, US officials do not need to state falsehoods publicly in an effort to curry favour with authoritarian rulers useful for current American strategic objectives.

Consider recent comments by Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Richard Boucher, who told Voice of America, “I think the Pakistani government is moving forward; they’re moving toward elections.”

Ambassador Boucher’s characterisation of Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf is terrible. To say that the “Pakistani government is moving forward” so soon after the government-orchestrated massacre of opposition supporters in Karachi is nothing short of an insult to the Pakistanis marching in the streets of the country’s cities for rule of law and restoration of democracy.

Boucher tried to cover his tracks by saying, “I recognise that tensions do exist” in Pakistan but his bottom line was an unequivocal endorsement of a military regime that is clearly undoing whatever little good it might have done in the past seven years.

An important question is, why does Boucher feel compelled to praise a client regime at a time when its actions merit criticism, whether public or private?

If the purpose is to reassure General Musharraf that the US is still with him even if the people of Pakistan are not, then that purpose is better served during private meetings. Why must Ambassador Boucher risk his credibility, and that of the US government, by saying on radio or television what is already being communicated to General Musharraf with large sums of money?

The Bush administration has already provided and budgeted $5.174 billion in aid for General Musharraf’s regime for the period 2001-2008. Some of this amount has admittedly gone towards projects benefiting the people. But an additional $80 to 100 million is given each month as Coalition Support Funds and the total under that head until August 2006 was over $4 billion.

That amount goes almost exclusively towards Pakistan’s security services. There are no publicly available estimates for covert transfers of funds to Pakistan’s army and intelligence services but it can be safely said that the total US aid for the Musharraf regime over the last five years is between $10 to 15 billion.

If after such largesse General Musharraf’s regime cannot maintain security and create even the illusion of stability in Pakistan, Ambassador Bouc-her’s false praise for the teetering Pakistani government is unlikely to strengthen it.

During the Cold War, the words of US officials served to encourage Soviet bloc dissidents suffering imprisonment and torture. Now, US diplomats don’t even have words of comfort to offer supporters of the democratic opposition in Karachi who were killed by pro-government gunmen.

Reasons for Decline of the Muslim World

Gulf News, May 2, 2007

The Muslim world seems to be in the grip of all kinds of rumours. The willingness of large numbers of Muslims to believe some outrageous assertions reflects pervasive insecurity coupled with widespread ignorance.

The contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories limits the capacity for rational discussion of international affairs. For example, a recent poll indicates that only 3 per cent of Pakistanis believe that Al Qaida was responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the US, notwithstanding Osama Bin Laden and his deputies have taken credit for the attacks on more than one occasion.

The acceptance of rumours and the readiness to embrace the notion of a conspiracy does not apply exclusively to the realm of politics. Villagers in rural Nigeria are refusing to administer the polio vaccine to their infant children out of fear that the vaccine will make their offspring sterile.

Some religious leaders in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal areas bordering Afghanis-tan have also voiced concerns about a “Western-Zionist conspiracy” to sterilise the next generation of Muslims as part of what they allege is an “ongoing war against Islam”.

Mobile phones and the internet, the pervasiveness of which is often cited as a measure of a society’s progress and modernity, have become a means of spreading fear in the Muslim world. Text messages, originating from the Pakistani city of Sialkot, recently warned people of a virus if people answered phone calls from certain numbers. The virus would not hurt the phone, the messages said, but would rather kill the recipient.

The panic caused by the rumours forced the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to issue a denial. Phone companies sent out text messages urging people to be calm. A newspaper rejected the rumour but featured the headline, Killer Mobile Virus.

Text message

A text message widely circulated in an Arab country claimed that trucks carrying a million melons had been smuggled across the country’s northern border and the melons were contaminated with the HIV virus, which causes Aids. No one paid any attention to the fact that the HIV virus cannot be transmitted by eating melons.

The Muslim world has a high rate of illiteracy but ignorance reflected by the readiness to believe unverified (and sometimes totally outrageous) claims is not just a function of illiteracy. It is a function of bigotry and fear. Literate Muslims, such as those involved in the text message rumour-mongering, are as vulnerable to ignorant behaviour as illiterate ones.

Conspiracy theories have been popular among Muslims since the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire as a way of explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader.

The erosion of the leadership position of Muslims coincided with the West’s gradual technological ascendancy.

The Persian, Mughal and Ottoman empires controlled vast lands and resources but many important scientific discoveries and inventions since the 15th century came about in Europe and not in the Muslim lands.

Ignorance is an attitude and the world’s Muslims have to analyse, debate and face it before they can deal with it.

The 57-member countries of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) have around 500 universities compared with more than 5,000 universities in the US and more than 8,000 in India. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an “Academic Ranking of World Universities”, and none of the universities from Muslim-majority states was included in the top 500.

The Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Western nations spend around five per cent of GDP on producing knowledge.

The tendency of Muslim masses to accept rumours as fact and the readiness to believe anything that suggests a non-Muslim conspiracy to weaken or undermine the Muslims is the result of the overall feeling of helplessness and decline that permeates the Muslim world.

Most Muslim scholars and leaders try to explain Muslim decline through the prism of the injustices of colonialism and the subsequent ebb and flow of global distribution of power.

But Muslims are not weak only because they were colonised. They were colonised because they had become weak.
Conspiracy theories paper over the knowledge deficit and the general attitude of ignorance in the Muslim world. It is time for a discussion of the Ummah’s decline in the context of failure to produce and consume knowledge and absorb verifiable facts.

The Victimhood Trap

Indian Express, February 7, 2007

The world’s 1.4 billion Muslims seem overwhelmingly enraged by the war in Iraq and the suffering caused by US military intervention. But there appears to be little outrage against the sectarian bloodletting that has led to more Iraqi casualties than war directly involving American troops.

Muslim leaders and intellectuals find it easier to criticise outsiders for the harm inflicted on fellow Muslims. When it comes to recognising the suffering caused by fellow believers, there is a tendency to fudge the issue.

The lack of democratic space in much of the Muslim world has prevented the emergence of mass non-violent protest movements, especially aimed at the conduct of other Muslims. It is common for demonstrators in Muslim countries to protest against the actions of Israel or the US. But one seldom hears of protests against the wrongs committed by Muslim regimes or, in Iraq’s case, sectarian militias. The violence perpetrated by Sudan’s regime in Darfur, for example, has gone by and large unprotested in much of the Muslim world.

Muslim thinkers and leaders have been preoccupied with the question of “how to reverse Muslim decline, especially in relation to the west.” There is still little effort to recognise the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness.

Islam’s early generations produced knowledge and wealth that enabled Muslim empires to dominate much of the world. But now almost half the world’s Muslim population is illiterate and the combined GDP of the member states of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) hovers near the GDP of France alone. More books are translated every year from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the last century.

In the year 2000, according to the World Bank, the average income in the advanced countries (at purchasing price parity) was $27,450, with the US income averaging $34,260. Last year, the US income went up to $37,500. Israel’s income per head stood at $19,320 in 2000 and was $19,200 last year. The average income of the Muslim world, however, stood at $3,700. The per capita income on PPP basis in 2003 of the only nuclear-armed Muslim majority country, Pakistan, was a meagre $2,060. Excluding the oil exporting countries, none of the Muslim countries had per head incomes above the world average of $7,350.

National pride in the Muslim world is derived from the rhetoric of “destroying the enemy” and “making the nation invulnerable.” Such rhetoric sets the stage for the clash of civilisations as much as specific western policies. It also serves as an opiate that keeps Muslims riled against external enemies with little attention paid to the internal causes of intellectual and economic decline.

The Muslim world needs a broad movement to review the material and moral issues confronting the Umma (the community of believers) and an introspection of Muslims’ own collective mistakes.

Muslims must peacefully mobilise against sectarianism and the violence and destruction in, say, Iraq. But for that, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on Muslim victimhood and towards taking responsibility, as a community, for our own situation.

The Quran describes Prophet Muhammad as the prophet of Mercy. Muslims begin all their acts, including worship, with the words, ‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.’ The Quran also says ‘To you, your faith and to me, mine,’ which removes any theological basis for sectarian violence. But unfortunately these mercy-focused and peacemaking ideas are lost in the overall discourse in the Muslim world about reviving lost glory and setting right the injustice of western domination.

Once Muslims convince themselves that the sectarian violence is a Zionist or American conspiracy or that it is the result of American occupation, their rage gets diverted. There is little rage and resentment against fellow Muslims who are actually engaged in that meaningless violence and little room for a Muslim Martin Luther King to stand up and say “We are responsible for this and we need to put an end to it.”

Blaming the West won’t solve Muslims’s woes

Gulf News, February 7, 2007

The world’s 1.4 billion Muslims seem overwhelmingly enraged by the war in Iraq and the suffering caused by US military intervention. But there appears to be little, if any, outrage against the sectarian bloodletting that has led to more Iraqi casualties than war directly involving American troops.

Muslim leaders and intellectuals alike find it easier to criticise the outsiders (in this case the US) for the harm inflicted on fellow Muslims. When it comes to recognising the suffering caused by fellow believers, there is a tendency among Muslims to fudge the issue.

The lack of democratic space in much of the Muslim world has prevented the emergence of mass non-violent protest movements, especially when the protest needs to be aimed at the conduct of other Muslims.

It is common for demonstrators in Muslim countries to protest against the actions of Israel or the United States. But one seldom hears of protests against the wrongs committed by Muslim regimes or, in Iraq’s case, sectarian militias. The violence perpetrated by Sudan’s regime in Darfur, for example, has gone by and large unprotested in much of the Muslim world.

Since the emergence of Western nations as the world’s dominant powers, Muslim thinkers and leaders have been preoccupied with the question, “how to reverse Muslim decline, especially in relation to the West.”

The colonial experience, in particular, has had a deep-rooted impact on Muslim psyche. There is a rush to condemn the foreigners and the colonisers, coupled with a general unwillingness within the Muslim world to look inward and to identify where we may be going wrong ourselves. There is still little effort to recognise the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness.

Dominate

Islam’s early generations produced knowledge and wealth that enabled Muslim empires to dominate much of the world. But now almost half the world’s Muslim population is illiterate and the combined GDP of the member states of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) hovers near the GDP of France alone. More books are translated every year from other languages into Spanish than have been translated into Arabic over the past century. Fifteen million Greeks buy more books every year than almost 300 million Arabs.

In the year 2000, according to the World Bank, the average income in the advanced countries (at purchasing price parity) was $27,450, with the US income averaging $34,260.

Last year, the US income went up to $37,500. Israel’s income per head stood at $19,320 in 2000 and was $19,200 last year. The average income of the Muslim world, however, stood at $3,700. The per capita income on PPP basis in 2003 of the only nuclear-armed Muslim majority country, Pakistan, was a meagre $2,060. Excluding the oil exporting countries, none of the Muslim countries of the world had per head incomes above the world average of $7,350.

National pride in the Muslim world is derived not from economic productivity, technological innovation or intellectual output but from the rhetoric of “destroying the enemy” and “making the nation invulnerable”. Such rhetoric sets the stage for the clash of civilisations as much as specific Western policies. It also serves as an opiate that keeps Muslims riled up against external enemies with little attention paid to the internal causes of intellectual and economic decline.

Review

The Muslim world needs a broad movement to review the material and moral issues confronting the Umma (the community of believers). But so far calls for removing the vestiges of colonialism and setting right historic injustices have prevailed over a more realistic effort to combine condemnation of wrongs committed by others within introspection of Muslims’ own collective mistakes.

Muslims must rise and peacefully mobilise against sectarianism and the violence and destruction in, say, Iraq. But before that can happen, Muslim discourse would have to shift away from the focus on Muslim victimhood and towards taking responsibility, as a community, for our own situation.

The Quran describes the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) as the prophet of mercy. Muslims begin all their acts, including worship, with the words, “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.”

The Quran also says “To you, your faith and to me, mine,” which removes any theological basis for sectarian violence. But unfortunately these mercy-focused and peacemaking ideas are lost in the overall discourse in the Muslim world about reviving the lost glory and setting right the injustice of Western domination.

Once Muslims convince themselves that the sectarian violence is a Zionist or American conspiracy or that it is the result of American occupation, their rage gets diverted. There is little rage and resentment against fellow Muslims who are actually engaged in that meaningless violence and, therefore, little room for a Muslim Martin Luther King to stand up and say “We are responsible for this and we need to put an end to it.”