Everything is on sale in Pakistan. Human beings and their souls, their bodies, their loyalties, their honesty, their commitments, their professionalism, their ideas and even their faith has a price. The only prerequisite to get a good deal is the amount of dough that one is willing to put in, more the dough better are the results. Lately, this phenomenon of selling our principles and fidelity at a fair price — which in all likelihood is our national heritage — has received worldwide recognition and appreciation. Even the Americans, who we love to hate, could not ignore it anymore and have started acknowledging our talent publicly. After all, they have decades long business relationship with us, and one day or another they had to figure out the reality themselves. Nowadays, some of them say: “Pakistanis can sell their mothers for a few thousand dollars.” I wish it was untrue, but unfortunately, it is a hard allegation to vindicate when we have put our domestic and foreign policies on sale on multiple occasions.
Among all the commodities on display, religion, for all its sensitivities and passions by far has the best prospects to attract the customers. Moreover, we have acquired a tremendous amount of experience in dealing with it both as an import from the Arab countries and as an export to Afghanistan, China, Iran and India. To be self sufficient, we also have learnt to process it in many of our madrassas, mosques and even in public schools for national consumption. As an ideology on sale, experience tells us that religion is highly potent, dangerously appealing and remarkably violent, a perfect combination to win any war. Nonetheless, it is too inflammable to maintain peace. If used imprudently by the state without taking strict cautionary measures, as we have done in the last 35 years, it can turn out to be the ‘femme fatale’ for the nation and wreak havoc in the basic framework of any modern society. This, in itself, can be the reason why many countries have refused to use it as a tool to promote patriotism.
After the invasion of Afghanistan, we, as a matter of policy, thought it was the only rhetoric that could unite our deeply fragmented nation to go into someone’s else’s war and still believe at the same time that it was their own. Without having an exit strategy in place to undo its consequences, we sold Islam to the gullible and innocent people of Pakistan. Heedlessly, we kept on sowing the seeds of a plant whose fruits were inevitably going to be poisonous. Ultimately, the poison grew all over our bodies and infected every organ as extremism, sectarianism, and fundamentalism. Retrospectively speaking, perhaps our problem was not as much going into the war against the Soviet Union as much as it was our lack of a comprehensive strategy on getting out of it once the ‘mission was accomplished.’
One decade was more than enough to bring a radical shift in the whole society. Religion, beyond the domain of politics crossing into the borders of public service, seeped into every aspect of our daily lives during that period. Ubiquitous and pervasive, we could increasingly find it in the shopping plazas, glamorised in the government offices, displayed in the restaurants and even publicised in the entertainment business. Slowly, it become an integral part of our thought process, a yardstick with which we would evaluate honesty, professionalism, talent, character and even personal integrity. There was no escape.
Somehow, the whole society was transformed and its values redefined. We discussed the piety of the ruler instead of the legitimacy of his tenure and instead of the public mandate we relied upon his religiosity. Ignoring every clause in our own unanimously approved constitution, we turned around and began to value personal virtues over national service. And questions like, if he offered prayers five times a day or more, if he fasted in Ramadan, if he woke up in the middle of night to supplicate, if he regularly paid Zakat in full (even if he missed to pay taxes) and if he went to perform pilgrimage (at the government’s expense) took over the national discourse instead of the right to rule and the importance of democratic process.
To make a long story short, in a matter of a few years, Islam became the most powerful tool to compensate for professional deficiencies, to overcome the lack of talent, and fulfil the absence of creativity. This culture still persists today and may actually be growing faster than we can imagine. For a journalist, a few verses of Quran can make him a distinguished scholar, an honest expert working only to please the Creator, a messenger of sufis who ‘rarely’ break their silence about the future of Pakistan and an insider who knows about the most ‘powerful’ living mystics in the world.
An incompetent retired military officer can become a well respected defence analyst with the knowledge of some Ahadees from Sahi Bokhari, a commander who can negotiate both with the hardliners and the west effectively. A bureaucrat with some knowledge of Islamic traditions and partial information about the life of Prophet can become a renowned historian. An architect can be qualified as a sufi if he knows some facts about some mystics; a cricketer can be transformed into a preacher; a singer can host an inspirational religious show if he grows a beard; a student of mysticism is promoted as the ‘Mehdi’ after he has spent few years in training with a man who thought could be a prophet; and an ‘Islamic’ show host can be on his way to become world famous Howey Mandel of Deal or no deal by acquiring some religiously motivated overtones.
The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at [email protected]