The Ideological Meltdown of Pakistan

The betrayal

After the conquest of Delhi in late 12^th century by Muhammad Ghouri, the creation of Pakistan is the most important event in the Muslim history of South Asia. The inspiration for such a great achievement came from no other source or individual but from the holy Qur’an –the fundamental source of all inspirations of the Muslims. It was another great leader like Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah who could successfully lead to another great victory for the South Asian Muslims. After a long colonial occupation, the degenerated and demoralised Muslim Ummah could find a ray of new hope in the creation of this new country. It went like thrills of astounding victory all over the Islamic world; and was indeed a remarkable achievement of the Indian Muslims. While the Muslims of other parts of the world were awfully disintegrated and the Arab heart land got fragmented into 22 pieces, the Indian Muslims showed astonishing spirit of pan-Islamic brotherhood and unity. It wasn’t any tribal, racial, geographical or linguistic affinity or any secular ideology that helped create this largest Muslim country in the contemporary world. It was only Islam that galvanised the Muslim population of the whole South Asia to unite against the British colonialists and the majority Hindu to establish an Islamic state. The Muslims can’t attain such success on their own; it was indeed a great blessing from Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la that was bestowed on them for their pan-Islamic unity.

But the immense opportunity that came with the creation of Pakistan also started quickly disappearing. Now the country stands as a land of ugly betrayal. The betrayal is against Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la, His sharia and the philosophy of pan-Islamic brotherhood. The ideology that helped create Pakistan is no more welcome in its political and intellectual circles. The country is making another history. It is the history of disunity and hatred based on ethnic, linguistic and regional affinity. The pre-1947 pan-Islamic brotherhood is almost dead; Islamisation of state is no more a priority. Rather, secularisation has taken its place. The people are more interested in material gains; and more focussed on provincial matters, local tradition, feudal politics and the party interests. They want more foreign money and investment only to enhance their own pleasure; and implementation of sharia or Islamisation is perceived as an obstacle to that. Hence to impress the country’s foreign stakeholders, the de-Islamisation and secularisation have achieved a new level of intensity and has largely eroded the binding glue of pan-Islamism from people’s life. So the country is politically divided along the provincial borders as was in 1971 –with the only difference that the Indian Army invasion hasn’t yet taken place. So the opportunity of an Islamic renaissance which was in high hype in 1947 is now on deep recession. Instead of following the Qur’anic road map, the country’s political leaders and the army generals are more eager to be the partners of the US-led coalition of war on Islam. So the US drones are invited to the Pakistani air to kill the innocent Muslims. The US drones have so far launched more than 400 drone attacks on Pakistani soil and killed 1300 people. Of them, 90% are innocent. (Source: Al-Jazira English TV, 24/10/2015). The US Cobra helicopter can violate the border and kill anybody they wish –as they did in Abbottabad; the huge Army only stand as the bystander.

The evils of colonial occupation

The long rule of the colonialists in South Asia helped generate a huge army of ideological and cultural converts. The project of religion conversion of the European invaders failed badly, but the ideological and cultural conversion worked tremendously. These converts proved no less inimical against Islam than the religious converts. They worked as mercenary to prolong the colonial rule in Indian subcontinent. They even fought wars in Iraq and Palestine to bring those Muslim lands under the British occupation. The colonialists have withdrawn their own army but not the army of these ideological and cultural converts. As a result, although the colonial occupation formally ended; but their ideological and cultural occupation continued. The country’s cantonments, the judiciary and the bureaucracy still remain the occupied territory of these cultural and ideological converts. Islam with its fundamental concepts like sharia, hudud, jihad, shura, khilafa had little access to these occupied territories. The drinking of wine in officers’ mess in the cantonment was only stopped by General Ziul Haq in late seventies. The kuffar law of the British still rule the Pakistani judiciary; hence illicit sex (jinna) is not legally punishable if done with the consent.

Such occupation of Pakistan by the ideological and cultural converts restricts the practice of full Islam; and thereby prohibits the local citizens becoming complete Muslim. Whereas to please Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la, a Muslim needs to have full submission. “Udkhul fis silm’e ka’affa” is the Qur’anic decree. Hence incomplete submission is not a sign of full belief in Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la, rather a marker of rebellion. Such a rebellion makes it difficult to save one’s souls from the hellfire. Therefore how a Muslim dare oppose the implementation of sharia? It is indeed the greatest and the ugliest calamity of kuffar rule that sharia stays unpractised in a Muslim country. Like many obligatory rituals, it is also an Islamic obligation that a Muslim must live under the sharia law. Any noncompliance with sharia makes a person kafir (nonbeliever), zaleem (oprressor) and a fasiq (sinner) -as revealed in holy Qur’an in sura Maida in verses 44, 45 and 47. Can a Muslim ever take that route? Therefore, before the advent of the colonial rule, all the Muslim countries had sharia law. Apart from sharia, the Muslims were not familiar with any other law. For more than six hundred years of Muslim rule, therefore the Indian judiciary used to run on sharia law. The famous Fatwa-e-Alamgiri is the collection of such laws. But the colonialists dismantled the whole system; not only they took away the political liberty, but also put an embargo on the practice of sharia. Thus the colonial occupation of India caused the ugliest catastrophe for the Muslims. Hence the Muslims didn’t have any choice but to end the kuffar occupation and create an Islamic state. For an Indian Hindu, freedom of India was a subject of his political freedom. But for the Indian Muslims, creation of an independent Islamic country was a religious obligation. Mere end of the colonial rule wasn’t the solution of the Muslims’ problem there. Today’s India is a clear proof of that. India got freedom; but the Muslims didn’t get the freedom for the full practice of Islam. They can’t even dream of practising sharia there. Even a false rumour of slaughtering a cow brings death to the Muslim. Even their secular worldly progress is severely restricted. The number of doctors, engineers, scientists, industrialists and other professionals that live in only one city of Karachi, that couldn’t be produced by the 200 million Muslims living in India!

The life and death issue

In fact, with the imminent end of the British colonial rule, it was quite obvious that the Muslims of South Asia would face more sinister danger of becoming the perpetual hostage in the hands of more aggressive foes like the Hindu chauvinists. Many of these Hindu bigots are not ready to give survival rights to the Muslims on Indian soil; they openly plead for full cleansing. Such project of the extremist Hindu came into execution just after the end of British rule. The Hindu extremist parties like RSS (Rashtiya Sebak Sangh), Shib Shena, Bishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal and many others didn’t hide such intention. It is no secret that RSS and Shib Shena openly runs arms training camps in Indian cities to train its hundreds of thousands of young male and female members with such an anti-Muslim bigotry. Through wholesale massacre of the Muslim men and women and destroying their houses and shops in thousands of anti-Muslim riots, these extremist Hindu indeed display their murderous hatred against the Muslims. To them, Islamic faith is not the only problem. Since the Muslims kill and eat their goddess cow are taken as the unforgivable offenders. Hence they consider the Muslims as the irreconcilable enemies. The Hindu mob doesn’t bother killing Muslim on such pretext –such an event recently happened in Haryana State of northern India. A cow has more survival right than a Muslim man, woman or a child. Not only a great Muslim intellectual like Allama Iqbal or a visionary politician like Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah could read such toxic Hindu psyche, even a common Muslim of India could easily see that. They could easily foresee a catastrophic fate of the Muslims under the Hindu rule. Such an anti-Muslim motive was displayed in their culture, literature, social behaviour and in politics. It didn’t need to be an intellectual to understand the imminent calamity of Hindu rule in India. As result, establishing a separate state for the Indian Muslims didn’t remain mere a political matter; became a life and death issue. As the days of freedom from the British rule got closer, the issue of an independent Pakistan went up to an explosion level. The British colonialists were never a friend of Muslims; but they were more concerned for a safe departure from India. Denying the Muslims their survival rights would have seriously endangered such a safe return for them. Hence they were compelled to swallow the truth; and Pakistan –the largest Muslim country on the world map came into being.

The product of ideological war

Pakistan is indeed the product of an ideological war, no one needed to shot a single bullet for its creation. In those days the Indian Muslims were blessed with a good number of intellectual warriors. And they fought a very successful ideological battle against the opponents of Pakistan. Because of them, the Indian Congress failed miserably to sell its concept of an undivided India to the Muslims. However, the secularised ulama of the Jamiat-e-Ulama-i-Hind who divorced the idea of sharia rule from their belief couldn’t feel any need for an Islamic state. They thought that if mosques and madrasas like one in Deoband can survive on Indian soil that is enough for the Muslims’ religious right. Like Indian Congress, the political concept of these secular ulama too was rejected by the vast majority of the Muslims. The Muslims of five major linguistic categories of South Asia like the Bengalis, the Punjabis, the Sindhis, the Pashtuns and the Baluch voluntarily merged together to form this new Islamic country. They took such a decision under no duress or conspiracy or foreign intervention. It is worth noting that each of these constituent linguistic Muslim groups had the geographical area and the population size larger than more than half of the world’s independent states like Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Belgium, Switzerland and many others to form their own independent state. But they moved beyond those narrow parochial considerations and opted for a united Pakistan.

Even the Muslims of the Hindu majority provinces like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujrat, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and others who had no chances to include their provinces in the proposed territory of Pakistan were also in the forefront of the Pakistan movement. In fact, some of the best campaigners of Pakistan Movement, even Muhammad Ali Jinnah –the main leader, came from one of such provinces. They considered it a crucial mission for the betterment of the whole Muslim Ummah. At least they wished the best for the majority Muslims of the subcontinent. The case of the Bengali Muslims –the largest Muslim population in South Asia was special. They were far ahead of other Indian Muslims to foresee a great catastrophe under the majority Hindu rule. The Muslims of Bengal had two oppressive chains around their neck: one of the British occupiers and the other one of the Hindu zamiders (landowners). Moreover, in comparison to others, they had the longer history of suffering under the kuffar rule. While Delhi lost independence in 1857, Bengal lost in 1757 –exactly 100 years ago. Hence, they didn’t need much lecture to understand the need of freedom from both British and Hindu rule. Therefore Bengal became the birth place of All India Muslims League, (Muslim League was born in Dhaka in 1906) and also the formidable stronghold of Muslim politics in the subcontinent. Bengal was the first province where the Muslims League could form its own government and played the role of game changer in Indian politics. Especially the massive sacrifice of the Bengali Muslims by the hands of Hindu thugs put the final nail on the coffin of Hindu dream of an undivided India. It was on Muslim League’s Direct Action Day on 16 August, 1946. On that fateful day, more than five thousand poor Bengali Muslims were slaughtered in the streets of Kolkata. After such a great sacrifice of the Bengali Muslims, the Indian Congress leader Mr Gandhi quickly accepted division of India and creation of Pakistan. Bengali Muslims

The Trojan Horses

But the victory of pan-Islamic ideology didn’t survive long. Pakistan had its worst enemy within. They are the enemy’s Trojan Horses. They are the secularist cum anti-Islamists who were defeated in 1947 but not fully crushed. Hence they got the full opportunity to resurge with full anti-Islamic venom and could fully occupy the country. So it was again proved that who make the half revolution only dig their own graves. As a consequence, the country is lost to the enemies who opposed its creation in 1947. It is now overwhelmed by the politics of betrayal. The betrayal is not only against the ideological concept of Pakistan’s own creation but also against the sovereignty of Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la and His sharia. The ruling elite are so-much secularised that they more compatible with the kuffar imperialists than with the home-grown Islamists. These secularist elites are taken by the US and other imperialists as the trusted partners in their war on Islam. Pakistan was never short of such committed slaves of the imperialists. Those who fought shoulder to shoulder with the colonial imperialists to occupy Palestine or Iraq in World Wars or served their colonial bureaucracy were never sacked from Pakistan’s strategic position. In fact, the Army cantonments, the civil bureaucracy and the judiciary were under the direct occupation of these British trained secularists. Drinking wine –a kuffar practice was never forbidden in the Pakistan’s Army cantonments – the culturally occupied lands of the secularists. It was only stopped by General Zia-ul Haq in the late seventies.

Now their occupation is not confined within those institutional islands, rather they have taken the full control of the whole country. They have been fully successful to dismantle the Islamisation project of Pakistan. Initially, the secularists scornfully ridiculed that the Islamists of different sects will not be able to agree on a single point of Islam. But such a notion was quickly foiled. Not only on one point, the Sunnis, the Ahl-i-Hadith and the Shia ulama could agree on 22 points for full Islamisation of Pakistan. It was on January 21 to 24, in 1951, under the leadership Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, the eminent religious scholar of both East and West Pakistan could produce the historical document called the Basic Objective Points for the constitution. In those crucial days, the secularist Trojan Horses -left behind in key positions by their colonial masters had their own agenda. They could foresee their own political death in those 22 points of Islamisation. So they engineered coups, dismantled constituent assembly and finally put those 22 points in the cold storage. As a result, in 1971, the united Pakistan died of a constitutional crisis. The country still suffers from the same disease and the same crisis; and the same ideological meltdown continues. And such an ideological meltdown doesn’t come alone. It brings moral, cultural and political meltdown too.

Secularisation doesn’t have the glue to bind people together, rather makes them greedy, power-hungry and divisive. Why a Baluch or a Sindhi secularist should trust his Punjabi or Pashtun competitors? Rather they will consider each other as the incompatible enemy. Pakistan’s atomic bombs, large army and air or road links are not going to solve this problem. It needs strong linkage between people’s heart. Only with such strong linkage, the Muslims of the whole South Asia could create a united Pakistan with huge India in the midst. Hence for creating Pakistan, they need not any army. And same is true for its sustenance. Army is needed only to protect its border, not to occupy its own country. But the Pakistan Army repeatedly showed its priority to occupy the country and failed to defend the border. Still, the Army is bombing their own people with their American partners. The Muslims can forge the cementing glue only by strengthening Islamic ideology. On the contrary, through de-Islamisation, the secularists could successfully dismantle the pre-existing Islamic linkage and politically dismember the country in 1971 -long before the full Indian invasion.  Now their next target is the surviving Pakistan. Thousands of atom bombs and ballistic missiles couldn’t save Soviet Union; that will not work in Pakistan either. Bombs are not made to do that job. On the contrary, these can aggravate the problem irreparably. An ideological country must fix its problem ideologically and not militarily. But it looks, the country’s leaders have lost the focus; they are more focussed to aggravate the disease. If the consensus 22 point prescription of the ulama was incorporated in the constitution, Pakistan could have solved its problem more than 60 years ago and survived its 1971’s debacle.

The unending war

The ideology of the secularists is diagonally opposite to that of Islam. In a Muslims country, they restrict the entry of Islam into state institutions. Rather they use the state institutions to take the people away from Islam. Hence starts the conflict between the secularists and the Islamists; therefore a war is inevitable wherever the secularists occupy a Muslim country. A believer in Islam cannot reconcile such secularists’ occupation of a Muslim land.  As a result, wherever there exist Islamists, the country enters into an unending war. Pakistan is not an exception. The Islamists call it a war against secularists’ occupation and the secularists call it war on terrorism. As if, Islam has no war; only has terrorism! Hence Pakistan is indeed divided into two warring nations.

Establishing an Islamic state is a Divine obligation on every Muslim so that state institutions can work with the Islamic mission of enforcing the right and eradicating the evils –as ordained by Allah Sub’han wa Ta’la in the holy Qur’an. It is not a prophetic tradition to keep state and its institutions -the most powerful institutions on earth outside Islam’s domain. To fulfil such a Divine obligation, the prophet of Islam Muhammad sallAllah alaihis salam had to establish an Islamic state; and needed to fight many wars to defend its border. In fact, most of his companions had to sacrifice their lives to fulfil the vision. The Muslims in all ages have an obligation to follow this prophetic tradition. Pakistan was indeed created to fulfil such an obligation. But the secularists were not compatible with such a vision; hence turned arch enemies of its conceptual basis and its existence from the inception. So, the real enemies of Pakistan do not lie outside, they in fact exist and works inside its own polity. They lost their war in 1947, but they quickly take over the whole country. They could easily find many friends and patrons outside the borders too. Hence whenever they made any coup, those international patrons stood behind them. Their main power base is in the Army, the judiciary and the bureaucracy –the most secularist institutions in Pakistan and the perfect legacy of the colonial era. Former Governor General Gulam Muhammad, former President General Ayyub Khan, former President General Yahiya Khan, Former Chief Justice Munir and many bigwigs of Pakistan’s politics came from such secular institutions. They started their carrier as the perfect servants of the kuffar colonialists. They didn’t serve a single day in the Pakistan movement; hence didn’t have any love for its Islamic identity. The Islamists failed to identify and fight back these enemies. As a consequence, Pakistan became the helpless hostage of these Trojan Horses. Because of them, Pakistan didn’t need any external enemies to dismantle its ideological bedrock.

The moral meltdown

The creation of Pakistan has a special significance in the whole Muslim history. It was for the second time in the history that a state was created in the name of Islam; and the Muslims of a huge territory voluntarily moved beyond their narrow ethnic, linguistic and tribal boundaries. Such an ideological state was created for the first time by the early Muslims under the leadership of the prophet Muhammad sallAllahu alaihi wa sallam -the last prophet of Islam. It wasn’t mere a state building, rather a huge civilisation building mission. As result of such prophetic mission, the Arab, the Kurdish, the Turkish, the Iranian, the Moore and the Islamic converts of other ethnic and linguistic identities could form a single Ummah. But later on, due to ideological meltdown, the Muslims went back to the old days of pre-Islamic jaheliya (ignorance). They degenerated into pieces around their old tribal, racial, linguistic and other narrow parochial identities. The Arabs of one land, one religion, and one language become divided into 22 states. Although unity is obligatory in Islam, the Muslims thus proved to be unfit to live with a unified political and ideological identity. In such a degenerating context, the creation of Pakistan was indeed a great achievement. It showed a ray of great hope not only to the Muslims of the South Asia, but also to the whole Muslim world. Although the secularisation process is going much deeper and more faster, it is noteworthy that the major political parties of the dismembered Pakistan like Muslim League, People’ Party, Tahrik-e-Insaf and the Islamic Parties like Ja’amat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Islam and many others still oppose taking secularism as a state policy. But the disease doesn’t need any state policy to spread its virulent virus among the people; it only needed some treatment strategies and active intervention to stop its menace. On the contrary, it enjoys all promotive support from all governmental and non-governmental institutions.

It is also a historical reality that the humans are highly susceptible to moral meltdown; hence keeping the ideological identity remains the greatest challenge in all ages. To prevent such a moral meltdown, Islam has its own prescription. It makes obligatory the religious rituals like five times prayers, fasting, haj, and zakat; and also emphasises to study the holy Qur’an. In absence of the Divine guidance, any human can quickly degenerate and turn not only to animals, but also much inferior to that. Animals form herds with selective affinity specific only to their own species; other species are not compatible in their midst. The wolves thus welcome cattle only for dietary consumption, not for peaceful co-existence. Humans too, form states on their own tribal, racial, linguistic and regional identities. With the similar animal instinct, the imperialists can’t be humane with the weaker people; they consider the occupied subjects as the legitimate targets for occupation, subjugation, exploitation and even ethnic cleansing. In such moral deprivation humanity, morality and other values do not survive; rather promotes racism, nationalism, tribalism, colonialism, imperialism, fascism and other toxic ideologies that justify exploiting, torturing and even slaughtering the people of other race, religion or belief. In such moral meltdown, wars, World Wars, military invasions, occupation, ethnic cleansing, gas chambers, and dropping atom bombs get massive political support in the land of the perpetrators. So Pharaoh, Halaku Khan, Chengiz Khan, Hitler, George W Bush and other genocidal killers were never the solo performers; millions of people voluntarily joined their mission. The US led war on Islam thus could generate a global coalition, too. Humans thus prove to be the wildest species on earth; all the wild animals of all ages couldn’t match their carnage.

In presence of moral meltdown, the toxic ideologies like nationalism, racism, tribalism, racism, fascism can turn even the best scientists and the best university graduates incurably genocidal. So, those who ran the World Wars or operated gas chambers or dropped atom bombs were not the illiterate people of a third world country. The people of the so-called developed world could kill 75 million only in two World Wars. Their killing machines still operate non-stop. Aristotle noticed such a conspicuous animal instinct in humans more than two thousand years ago; so he emphatically used the narrative “political animals” for defining the humans. But there is a difference. The wild animal does not do politics, neither does any war or World War; but the humans do. The animals do not do waterboarding, nor run Abu Gharib or Guantanamo Bay prisons to torture people, but humans -the political animals readily do. For such people, the All Knowing Allah Sub’hana Ta’la has an illustrative description in the Qur’an: “Ula’ika ka’al anam, bal hum adal”; which means: They are like cattle; rather infer to the cattle. But the secularists have a different narrative; they call it modernity.

The same western moral disease has also spread in Pakistan; and it has in fact expedited the moral meltdown.  Pakistan receives a lot of western money and weapons. Is it to strengthen Islam and the Muslims? Such collaboration with the imperialists itself tells a lot. They do not make any mistake to identify their own comrades. They spend every dollar with a strategic objective. They don’t run a charity either. Such help from the US-led imperialists comes to a Muslim country with a clear precondition that there shouldn’t be any effort of Islamisation; rather de-Islamisation should get the priority. Any step of Islamisation instantly stops all western helps. They rather encourage a coup to unseat any Islamist –as happened against President Muhammad Morsi in Egypt. They love people like General Abdul Fattah Sisi of Egypt who does massacre against the Islamists. They use Pakistani soil too to bomb Afghanistan. The US money and weapon have taken Pakistan far away from Islam; and made it impossible to implement sharia. Fear of losing American help is so pervasive that even the Islamists do not talk about 22 objective points of the ulama. Pakistan has failed to discover the real source of its strength. It is not the western ideology or weapons that helped its creation. Nor such help will help sustain its existence. It was Islam and the blessing of Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’al that helped create this unique country.  And if Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’al helps, who else can do the harm?  What is the benefit of mere sustenance when it fails to please Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la? 31/10/2015