Daily Times

The amendment to the Ehtram-e-Ramazan Ordinance 1981 is worrying on many counts. To most secular-leaning people, the state’s attempt at enforced piety is worrying because it violates the basic principle of the separation of religion and the state. To me, the original law and the amendment to it are deeply troubling, but not because it violates secular principles. The laws, like blasphemy law, is troubling because it is symptomatic of the power grab bordering on despotism through religion by the religious right.

Secularism is a fiction. But it is a useful fiction. But like all imported fictions that do not have the roots in the cultural ethos of the receiving society, to my mind, it has limited efficacy in our context. Secularism as a political force has its origins in specific European historical experience of the excesses of the Church. It found its most potent political articulation in the aftermath of the French revolution. Over the last 200 years, secularism has come to hold a canonical status amongst the liberal bourgeois classes, as a foundational principle governing relations between religion and state.

Secularism is also a fiction in its home soil of Europe. But it is more efficacious there than it could ever be in South Asia. To suggest that somehow the Europeans managed to extricate themselves from more than a thousand years of cultural, political and social development, which was deeply intertwined with the Christian spiritual traditions is utter nonsense. Practically every law in every European legal tradition, upon a closer reading, will resonate with the underlying Christian historical ethos from which they arose. Denying that historically grounded origins of modern European societies lead precisely to the type of silly perversities, like the headscarf ban in France, or mosque architecture regulations in Switzerland.

In Pakistan, needless to say, Islam, along with pre-Islamic Hindu and other traditions is a part of the genetic source code of our society and world view. It is no coincidence that the political right in our country with its organisational face of Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, PML (all factions), PTI and other minor fellow travellers, behaves in almost identical ways in the matters of religion as the Hindu fundamentalist right. The lynching of Mashal Khan in Mardan is comparable in its details and perversity to the lynching of people for eating or storing beef by Hindu fundamentalists in India. The indefinite incarceration of Asia Bibi in Pakistan is comparable to the persecution of Dalits in India. We are no different than our purported enemies because we draw upon the same cultural matrix as they do. Try as we may deny any Hindu infections, just as they try to deny the Islamic infection in their fatuous pure Hindu framework, our actions tell us we are no different.

By becoming the arbiter of deciding what God’s will is — the government of Pakistan is engaging in an act of despotism

All contemporary right-wing movements and schools of thought are deeply pro-market capitalism. Their common conundrum is how to make such an odious, anti-poor worldview palatable to people who have a deeply different historical understanding of the state and society’s obligation to the individual and the weak. The answer they all seem to have come up with is universalist, misogynistic religiosity. The wonderful and empowering diversity of religious experience across history and geography must be boiled down to vapid uniformity sanctioned by, say, the Saudi government, Abu A’la Maududi, Farhat Hashmi, or Ayatollahs in Iran. It is a power grab, pure and simple. As Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at University of California Los Angeles reminds us about Islamic law:

“In formulating Islamic law, it has become common in the modern age to use the authority of the Author (God) to justify the despotism of the reader. In effect, by claiming that the only relevant consideration is the Will of the Author, the reader is able to displace the Author and set himself as the sole voice of authority: the reader [in committing the ultimate shirk (blasphemy)] becomes God, as it were. The replacement of God’s authority with that of the reader is an act of despotism and a corruption of the logic of Islamic law.”

By becoming the arbiter of deciding what God’s will is, the government of Pakistan is engaging in the act of despotism. Religion and state cannot be separated, just as an individual cannot be separated from the historical, emotional and sentient self. Instead of talking secularist fantasies, it would perhaps be wiser to contest this act of despotism on the part of the state and its enablers and apologists. Let the relations between state and religion be negotiated on more inclusive and egalitarian grounds than the despotic register that is the norm right now.

The writer is a Reader in Politics and Environment at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London