A Pakistani Modernity
By Rafia Zakaria
March 07, 2012
IT was supposed to be
easy; it had been spelled out in lengthy treatises and frequent speeches in the
heady, feverish years leading up to 1947.
Pakistan was to be a
modern Muslim state, a country where democratic and Islamic values gelled to
produce a polity that felt no discomfort with either its religious identity or
its democratic one.
The generation that
awaited it with hushed anticipation saw no confusion in the recipe; their
leaders were the likes of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Maulvi Chiragh Ali, Nazir Ahmed
— brave men with a clear vision for South Asian Muslims.
They had fought the
decrepit ignorance that kept Muslims submerged in old ways in the name of
tradition; they believed in the necessity of making inroads with modern
education and scientific knowledge. The modern state they pined for in those
early and middling decades of the 19th century did not yet exist, but they
could see it, imagine it with great accuracy as the repository of free minds
that would engage the novel, promote the revolutionary.
In the balmy August of
1947 the probable became a reality and Pakistan was created. With its birth the
hybrid of a modern religious identity and robust respect for pluralism had to
be put in motion.
As many of that
dwindling generation would remember, those were euphoric times when even the
massive tragedies of trains full of bodies and bloodied neighbourhoods could
not extinguish the hopefulness of those embracing a new nation. Where first
there had been only an idea, there was now a country on the map. With the
founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the men and women who had devoted their lives to a
vision set about making it real.
Much has been said
about the post-Partition years and the idea of Pakistan that guided them.
Critical historians have pointed out the structural challenges faced by the
nascent nation, the dithering bits of administrative incapacity and the
disconnected ends of British bureaucracy that were handed to Pakistan.
Others have pointed to
the catastrophes — a dying Jinnah leaving a newborn nation without a leader and
menacing neighbours at the borders always willing to pounce at the tiniest
chinks in the country’s newly grown armour.
The new Pakistan was
indeed vulnerable, both in terms of resources and leadership. There was,
however, another, less-noticed affliction waiting in the shadows.
The idea of Pakistan
as coined by the reformist Muslims who fought for Pakistan and took on the task
of organising South Asian Muslims were informed by a distinctly South Asian
idea of modernity. Their consciousness of being Muslim relied on their
experience of being a minority ruled by a foreign power.
While they realised
that they would be a majority in the new nation, this was an abstract idea, not
an experienced one. Their own lives were lived in a state where a democracy
unmediated by the law would leave them outnumbered and vanquished.
The South Asian recipe
for developing a hybrid of Muslim identity and democratic governance relied on
the use of the law as safeguarding the interests of those who could never win
at the ballot box; having been the ‘little guy’ for long, they now sought
protection for the underdog. For them, Islam was part of a political identity,
deserving requisite space in the political sphere, but never a means of
exclusion.
The assault on this
Pakistani identity stemmed not only from the mediocre realities of governance
against the passion of revolution. It came also from two distantly related
realities of the new Pakistan.
The first was
demographic; while the Muslims who migrated to Pakistan brought with them the
memory of having been a minority, many of those that welcomed them remembered
only the brute injustice of being a Muslim majority ruled by an imperial power.
If the newcomers,
remembering the slights they had felt in a united India where they had been
outnumbered, wanted to take care to create a tolerant Pakistan, those awaiting
them, finally freed from the yoke of imperial rule, wished now for their chance
at making the rules and being the boss.
A second assault came
from the location of the new Pakistan and in upcoming decades its emergence as
a labour-exporting nation. If the ideologues of Pakistan had looked around and
within themselves and had been intellectually rooted in South Asia, the men
leading Pakistan in the first 50 or so years of its creation looked to the
Middle East.
As memories of
Partition waned, being Pakistani began to mean being a lesser Muslim — the plural
religious landscape of South Asia becoming a taint on purity. The Zia years
made this burgeoning crisis of authenticity visible and reimagined the
Pakistani identity as one whose central tragedy was not being Arab.
The wounds deepened as
economic pressures in the 1980s and 1990s sent hundreds of thousands of
Pakistanis to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. They returned with stereos,
VCRs and a robust hatred for themselves; in their migrant logic being Muslim
and being Arab became intertwined.
Working on
construction sites and as cab drivers in Dammam and Riyadh, they learned from
their Arab bosses’ oil-fuelled exchanges with modernity that skyscrapers and
Ferraris were permissible but women’s rights and democratic governance were
not. The current crisis of identity of
Pakistanis today, a long 65 years after the triumph of Independence, is a
product of this historical trajectory which discarded indigenous South Asian
ideas of modernity developed during the Independence movement for a hodge-podge
of inferiorities brought home by would-be scholars and expatriate workers
yearning to be Arab.
If the first ideas of
being Pakistani had been erected on a moment of achievement and a defeat of
British imperialism, this second is submerged in inadequacy and servility and
in self-hatred in which being Pakistani means being always less and always
wanting.
The writer is an attorney teaching political
philosophy and constitutional law.
Source: The Dawn, Karachi
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