Imran Khan's Faux Patriotism And Religious Populism Has Done Pakistan Severe Damage: Yasser Latif Hamdani
His Rhetoric
Of Riyasat-E-Madina And Single National Curriculum Has Taken Pakistan Decades
Back
Main
Points:
1. Jinnah never
wanted Pakistan to be a theocratic state.
1. 2.Muslim
clerics had largely opposed the idea of Pakistan.
2. Ziaul Haque
popularised the idea that Pakistan was created in the name of Pakistan.
3. 4.Nawaz
Sharif also tried to make Pakistan a theocratic state.
4. Imran Khan
contributed to the spread of religious fanaticism in Pakistan.
------
By New
Age Islam Staff Writer
18 April
2022
Yasser
Latif Hamdani takes an analytical look at the religious politics played by the
successive governments of Pakistan since Ziaul Haque. He was the first leader
to popularise the idea or the myth that Pakistan was create in the name of
Islam. Jinnah had never spoken about his dream to make Pakistan a theocratic
state and he distanced himself from communal politics at that time. The fact is
that some Muslm leaders including poet Mohammad Iqbal were concerned with jobs,
political representations of Muslims in Assemblies and their educational rights
in new India. Islam was not at the root of Pakistan. It was created for Muslim
minorities and since, Hindus and Christians had also been accepted in Pakistan,
Jinnah wanted a secular Pakistan where Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities would
have equal rights. But gradually, clerics and some political leaders repeatedly
asserted that Pakistan was made to be a theocratic state.
When Nawaz
Sharif came to power, he continued this trend and tried to make Pakistan a full
blow theocratic state. Islam became a ploy both for the dictators and political
leaders to win public sympathy. The dictators did it because their occupation
of power was illegal and illegitimate and so to create the impression among the
people, that though they have occupied power illegally, they are serving Islam
better than the legitimate rulers of Pakistan, they hid behind Islam. The
legitimate rulers know that they can any time be toppled by dictators or the
army, and so they try to garner the support of the people as well as of the
religious leaders, madrasas and of militant religious parties so that they can
prolong their tenure.
Musharraf
halted the trend of Islamisation which had grown under Nawaz Sharif. He in fact
tried to reverse the trend. He did not need the support of religion because he
was confident of his hold on the sear of power. During his tenure, liberal and
progressive ideals and values gained acceptance. This trend was taken forward
by the PPP
government
which took some practical steps to make Pakistan a liberal and modern secular
state. It brought the 18th amendment to the Constitution which granted
minorities cultural rights and identity. It also ratified the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Due to the
liberalisation and secularisation of Pakistani polity, Nawaz Sharif in his
second term did not see the need to play religious politics and instead
extended the voting rights to the oppressed Ahmadiya minority community though
it stirred a vociferous campaign by the religious section.
But all the
good work done by the previous governments was undone by the PTI government
headed by Imran Khan that came to power in 2018. Since his was a minority
government, he took the help of religious parties and the religious rhetoric to
stay in power and to keep the army at bay. He surrendered totally to the TTP
and allowed them to hold violent protests on various issues even killing police
personnel. During his tenure, terrorist attacks on Shias and minorities went on
a rise and still he said that he wanted to make Pakistan like the state of
Madina of the prophet's time. Imran repeatedly said in his speeches that
Pakistan was founded on the fundamental creed of La Ilaha Illallah.
Jinnah never supported the idea of Pakistan as a theocratic state and distanced
himself from such slogans.
Wielding
another blow to Pakistan's already messy education system, in August last year
Imran Khan introduced the Single National Curriculum under which the holy Quran
and hadiths would be taught as compulsory subjects in secular schools.
Educationists feel that religious studies should have been left with madrasas
and secular schools should be made to focus on modern sciences. Merging two
systems of education which have radically different objectives will only prove
counterproductive. In short, Yasser Latif Hamdani feels that the ghost of faux
patriotism and religious populism of late Imran Khan government will haunt
Pakistanis for a long time to come.
-----
Imran
Has Damaged The Idea Of Pakistan. Don’t Expect It To Turn Into A Normal Country
Soon
By Yasser
Latif Hamdani
13 April,
2022
Much has
been written about Imran Khan’s departure from power. It is still early, but,
at some point, Pakistanis will have to come to terms with the damage that
Khan’s four years of misrule did to the country. As someone who has been keenly
interested in the debate around Pakistan and its genesis as a modern
nation-state, I fear that the damage that Imran Khan has done to the country’s
national narrative will take decades to fix.
Consider
that in 2015, Venkat Dhulipala, a relatively unknown Indian-American professor,
who let his nationalism and personal antipathy towards Pakistanis get in the
way of academic honesty, wrote a book titled Creating a New Medina to paint
Pakistan as a ‘millennial theocratic dream’ that harked back to Medina. This is
despite the fact that some of the biggest opponents of the ‘Pakistan idea’
during Partition were Muslim clerics.
The truth
is, at no point did the All-India Muslim League or its president Mahomed Ali
Jinnah invoke Medina or speak of a theocratic State of any kind. The entire
idea of Pakistan had to do with a Hindu-Muslim counterpoise on secular issues
such as representation, jobs, and so forth. Religion was just not the point.
This is the only narrative that explains the enthusiasm for the ‘Pakistan idea’
among modern Muslims in the 1940s and the almost universal disenchantment with
it of the Muslim clerics. The latter, in fact, saw the new nation-state as a
Kemalist coup against their hegemony, and many of them called Jinnah
‘Kafir-e-Azam’ (the ‘great infidel’) and Pakistan ‘Kafiristan’ (the ‘land of
the infidels’).
More
importantly, this is the only narrative that can help Pakistan come out of the
theocratic abyss it has fallen into since the 1970s.
Thwarting
Gen Zia, Sharif’s ‘Islamic’ Project
In the
1980s, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, left no stone unturned
to prove that the nation was founded in the name of Islam. The difference is
that Pakistan was founded for the Muslim minority of India, not Islam — you may
disagree with it as many Indians do, but the distinction is a significant one.
The logical extension of this was that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in
his second term, tried to transform Pakistan into a full-blown theocracy. He
would have succeeded, given his two-thirds majority in parliament, but General
Pervez Musharraf’s coup put an end to it.
Unconstitutional
as it was, the by-product of the coup was that the new regime tried — in
earnest — to undo some of the damage done by the General Zia government.
Columnists and authors began to rediscover the ‘modern Muslim’ project.
Ardeshir Cowasjee, a Zoroastrian and Pakistan’s great journalist and
philanthropist, famously coined the term ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ as the byword for
a modern, liberal, and progressive nation-state.
The
Musharraf regime fell as all unconstitutional projects do, but the changes it
had introduced meant that the civilian political parties once again
recalibrated their ideological calculus. The Pakistan Peoples Party government
from 2008 to 2013 took several strides toward a socially liberal Pakistan.
Other than the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, this period also saw a significant change through the 18th
Amendment of the Constitution. It promised minorities in Pakistan the right to
freely develop their cultures — a constitutional language that had previously
been omitted by General Zia’s tinkering in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif,
who, in 1999 tried to turn Pakistan into a theocracy, was greatly chastened in
his third term and did not press further with any particular conservative
agenda.
Indeed, in
2017, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) government became the target of vociferous
campaigning by religious parties because it tried, quite feebly, to extend the
right to vote to Ahmadis who had been denied that right since the 1980s.
Nevertheless, a broad political consensus was in the offing on the issue of the
interaction between State and religion before it was shocked to the core by
Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) in 2018.
Backtracking
On Modern Pakistan
Taking a
leaf out of Creating a New Medina, Imran Khan ratcheted up the rhetoric of
‘Riyasat-e-Medina’. Even if we put aside the Muslim modernist view and look at
it from a purely religious lens, could Pakistan become a new Medina without the
Prophet’s guidance? Modern nation-states are temporal entities, not spiritual
or otherworldly ones. Pakistan is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and
multi-religious State. Given the sectarian divisions among Muslims, there can
be no consensus on what the idea of a ‘Medina-state’ entails.
It is this
rhetoric that has now metamorphosed into a grand conspiracy narrative. Imran
Khan’s loyal followers are now painting him as a great Islamic leader who was
targeted by the US because he was working to create a true Islamic State,
modelled on Medina, with an independent foreign policy. In his numerous
addresses to the nation, Khan made it a point to state that Pakistan was
founded on the fundamental Islamic creed of ‘La Ilaha Illallah’, that
‘there is no God but Allah’.
The truth
is that Jinnah had specifically distanced himself from the famous slogan “Pakistan
Ka Matlab Kya? La Ilaha Illallah” (What is the meaning of Pakistan? And so
on). He said that he and the Muslim League had nothing to do with it and that
some people may have used it to “catch a few votes”. Yet, such is the potent
appeal of this manufactured slogan that in the midst of a grave constitutional
crisis, Imran Khan doubled down on it. In Pakistan, it is religion, not
patriotism that is the last refuge of an autocrat.
Even before
it found itself in hot waters, in August last year, the PTI government
introduced a retrogressive educational curriculum called the ‘Single National
Curriculum’, which included compulsory recitation of the Quran and teaching of
hadith in schools. Contrary to popular belief, the Constitution of Pakistan
speaks of the State’s responsibility to enable Muslims to lead religious lives
but not enforce it. Much like his ideological predecessor General Zia, Khan was
out to remake Pakistan’s future generations in his own mould — the ideal
Pakistani Muslim who carries prayer beads with him everywhere and is gripped
with superstitions and irrational fears. This is the antithesis of the Jinnah
ideal — a modern thinker who does not wear religion on his sleeve and is
unfettered by meaningless rituals.
Imran Khan
was an immensely popular figure, and his remaking of the Pakistani identity is
likely to be more enduring than that of General Zia. Do not expect Pakistan to
turn into a normal country anytime soon. This heady mix of faux patriotism and
religious populism will plague the country for decades.
-----
Yasser
Latif Hamdani is an advocate of the high courts of Pakistan and his biography
of Jinnah will be published by Pan Macmillan India soon. Views are personal.
(Edited
by Humra Laeeq)
Source: Imran
Has Damaged The Idea Of Pakistan. Don’t Expect It To Turn Into A Normal Country
Soon
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/imran-khan-patriotism-religious-populism/d/126815
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