Pakistan Sponsored Processes Of ‘Islamisation’ led to Religious Radicalisation Challenging the Deep-Rooted Sufist Creed of Sindh
By
Nadeem F. Paracha
09 Aug 2020
During the
last decade or so, the topic of religious extremism in Sindh (outside its
metropolitan capital Karachi) has attracted the attention of various academics
and political commentators. This topic enjoys a special significance because of
a narrative which explains the Sindhi majority of the region as being immune to
non-state as well as state-sponsored processes of ‘Islamisation’ which were
initiated from the mid-1970s onwards. Ever since the 1980s, these processes
mutated and permeated society in the shape of religious radicalisation and
militancy.
Illustration by Abro
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According
to Huma Yusuf and S. Shoaib Hasan, in the 2015 edition of Peaceworks, extremism
in Sindh is largely centred in the northern areas of the province, such as
Ghotki, Shikarpur and Jacobabad. These regions are closest to Southern Punjab
and the province of Balochistan. The studies also agree that compared to rest
of the provinces, where cases and episodes of sectarian violence, violence
against non-Muslim communities and terrorism by Islamist and sectarian outfits
can be traced back 30 to 35 years, extremism is a relatively recent phenomenon
in the Sindhi-majority areas of Sindh.
Those who
insist that Sindhis were largely immune to the impact of the afore-mentioned
processes provide geographical and even theological rationales to support their
claim. For example, the political scientist Mansoor Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, in
his 2016 book Karachi in the 21st Century: Political, Social, Economic &
Security Dimensions, writes that Sindh is not contiguous to Afghanistan or
Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), which have been ravaged by years of
religious militancy and radicalisation. According to Al Nahyan, Sindh’s
distance from conflict zones in this respect has spared it from the fall-out of
such conflicts. Secondly, Al Nahyan states that Sindhis have historically espoused
Sufism and rejected orthodoxy.
Recently, a
member of a Sindhi nationalist organisation discussed similar views with me.
When I asked him about the history of religious and sectarian violence in
Sindh’s capital, Karachi, he replied by saying that the city had no such
history till 1950, or till the Sindhis were in a majority there. This
observation is not that off the mark.
Rita
Kothari, in Unbordered Memories: Sindhi Stories of Partition, writes, that
during the days of the 1947 Partition and the communal violence that it sparked
in regions such as Gujarat and Punjab, Sindh did not suffer from any virulent
fanaticism. Whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully
influenced by Sufi thoughts. But once there was a mass exodus of non-Sindhi Muslims
from India, especially towards Karachi, communal violence did erupt here as
well. However, by then, Sindhis had become a minority in Karachi.
Since the
1980s, Sindh has seen radicalisation and militancy challenging the deep-rooted
Sufist creed of the province
So, what is
happening in the rest of Sindh today, with rising cases of religious extremism
and violence, especially in its northern areas?
To this
question the Sindhi nationalist was quick to claim that it was the state which
was attempting to reshape Sindh’s religious texture, by allowing extremist
outfits to set up shop here. He said the state is trying to defuse Sindhi
nationalism in the manner in which it did Pashtun nationalism (in the 1980s)
i.e. by introducing young people to radical religious and sectarian ideas.
This
narrative behind the recent rise of extremism in Sindh is not restricted to
Sindhi nationalists. Some prominent political commentators too subscribe to it.
However, I could only find scant evidence of this during my trips to central
and northern Sindh from the late 1980s onwards. But this does not mean it is
entirely incorrect. Because there is now enough evidence to substantiate that
the state did indeed use militant religious indoctrination in KP — from the
days of the anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan — to displace the Pashtun
nationalist sentiment and remodel it as something that the state believed it
could control. So why shouldn’t it do the same in Sindh? As we saw in KP, the
state couldn’t control what it encouraged, because it mutated into becoming
something a lot more problematic.
The factors
behind the rise of religious extremism in some major Sindhi-majority regions of
the province are a lot more complex. For example, names of parties such as PPP,
MQM and Sindhi nationalist outfits dominate discourses on the politics of
Sindh. But the name of another important political player in the province
always goes missing: the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI).
The JUI has
strong political roots in many northern areas of Sindh. In his article for the
July 18, 2017 issue of The News, Mushtaq Rajpar writes that JUI, despite having
a Pashtun Deobandi character, was able to root itself in the largely Barelvi
Sindhi-majority areas when, in the early 1980s, it played a major role in the
often violent PPP-led MRD movements in Sindh against the General Zia
dictatorship.
Khalid
Mahmood Soomro, a Sindhi from Larkana, became JUI’s main man in Sindh. He
appropriated Sindhi nationalist interests in his rhetoric, for example
exhibiting opposition to the Kalabagh Dam and accepting the ‘shrine culture’ of
the region, which is often criticised by the Deobandis. During the second
Benazir Bhutto regime (1993-96) JUI became part of the ruling coalition. It was
during this period that JUI began to build madressahs in northern Sindh.
According to Rajpar, by the mid-2000s, JUI in Sindh started to sound more
conservative. In some areas, it also began to lose its mosques and madressahs
to the more radicalised former members of JUI, many of who had merged with or joined
banned militant outfits, especially after 2010.
But if it
is these elements who have been behind recent bomb attacks on Sufi shrines in
Sindh, are they also the ones kidnapping Sindhi Hindu girls and ‘forcibly’
converting them? Not quite. In the 2016 anthology Islam, Sufism and Everyday
Politics of Belonging in South Asia, the French political scientist Julien
Levesque writes that those doing this actually belong to Sufi orders.
Levesque
takes a similar route that my 2020 book, Soul Rivals takes i.e. Sufism in
Pakistan is a contested space. This contest in Sindh, as Levesque points out,
is between the idea of Sufism constructed by the revered Sindhi nationalist
ideologue G.M. Syed — which sees it as a secular expression of Sindhi
nationalism — and the Sufism of some Qadri and Naqshbandi Sufi orders in the
province, who are critical of Syed’s notion of Sufism, calling it atheistic and
anti-Islam.
The Sindhi
politician Mian Mithu, who has been accused of forcibly converting Sindhi
Hindus, does not belong to any religious party. In fact, not only is he a Sufi
spiritual figurehead (pir), but was once a member of the PPP. In the 2018
elections he ran as an independent candidate from a National Assembly
constituency in Ghotki. He lost, but received 91,752 votes.
According
to Levesque, till the 1980s, the battle of the Islamic narratives in Sindh was
mainly between the Sindh nationalists’ concept of Sufism and the more
federal-friendly idea of Sufism of the state and the left-liberal PPP. But from
the mid-2000s, the battle has been about these two concepts struggling to stop
being overwhelmed by the more reactionary ideas of Sufism held by the likes of Mian
Mithu, and the Deobandi militants who would rather have any idea of Sufism
entirely eliminated.
Original
Headline: SUFISM'S CONTESTED SPACES
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan