It is interesting to see that the Pakistan Army has initiated a de-radicalisation effort in Swat and in this regard recently a seminar was held in the city that was given wide media coverage in Pakistan. Is de-radicalisation a real effort to bring about change in society? One would like to appreciate it, but it seems to be too little and above all too non-serious. A radicalisation plan also needs to focus on the rest of Pakistan, especially Punjab — the most populous province. Punjab is the heartland of Barelvi Islam, which is supposed to be a peaceful version of South Asian Islam due to its strong links with the Sufi traditions rooted in the pre-Islam past of the region. “Ever since Pakistan was created, the Barelvis have been the Islamic radicals’ most effective obstacle,” writes the journalist Owen Bennett Jones in his book, Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm (page 10). This may have been true in the past, but not anymore.
Barelvi clerics as well as lawyers elevated the killer of Governor Punjab Salmaan Taseer to the status of a hero. Most of Pakistan’s fabricated blasphemy cases against religious minorities keep coming from the Barelvi-dominated Punjab. Reportedly, a few days ago on the eve of Shab-e-Barat, a Muslim festival, the Sikh community in Lahore was stopped from conducting their religious rituals on the grounds that “celebrating Shab-e-Barat was more important than Sikh rituals”. Shia Muslims and other religious minorities, especially the Ahmedis, are often targeted. An irrational anti-Americanism pervades, especially among many urbanite Punjabis. The Punjab University campus is suffocating under the control of the student wing of the extremist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). Since General Zia’s time, religious groups have made a transition from the periphery to mainstream education, politics, media and state institutions in Punjab.
Radicalisation has become part and parcel of the political economy. The radical madrassa business is well spread out in Punjab. There seems to be a vicious alliance between the people who make money through illegal means like smuggling, corruption, abuse of authority, and Islamist institutions. As Muslims, the law-breakers believe that God will hold them accountable for their deeds in the life hereafter. Thus they make generous donations out of the ill-gotten money to madrassas and Islamic charities to ‘please’ God. Radical Muslims do not mind donations coming from ill-gotten wealth. I do not know of any Islamist organisation that has refused to take donations from people who are publicly known for corruption. The two feed on each other. One placates a guilty conscience and the other entrenches his power and control through the expansion of the political Islamist economy.
Radicalisation has also become an important part of the businesses run by multinational companies and other small and big enterprises in Pakistan. Mobile phone companies are earning millions of rupees from religious text messages that people communicate to each other every single day. The hospitality industry in Pakistan is earning a lot by providing services for religious gatherings. Islamic banks have been established. There are mobile phones with religious ringtones. There are soft drinks with religious names. There are shops selling symbols of Muslim religiosity, such as a range of crockery with Islamic symbols and inscriptions.
The current radicalisation in the Barelvi heartland, just as in the rest of Pakistan, is the fruition of the state policy of using religious bigotry for foreign policy objectives. This must change for real de-radicalisation to take effect. There are no signs of it happening. In April the chief of army staff, General Kayani, claimed that the terrorists’ “backbone has been broken” but some days after this statement Osama bin Laden was located and killed by the US commandos in a military area in Abbottabad. Military spokesmen have been pointing towards cross-border militant attacks on Pakistani troops from the Afghan side. Pakistan’s defence minister ‘threatened’ the US that Pakistan will pull back its troops from the Pak-Afghan border if it suspended military aid to Pakistan. Nobody knows what the military plans to do with terrorists in its custody, like Muslim Khan from Swat. Our courts have released well-known sectarian terrorist Malik Ishaq. Personally, I may not agree but let me say that I keep hearing from people in the military’s strategic space, FATA: why does the army not eliminate famous terrorists like Muslim Khan and Malik Ishaq? Controversial Hadith literature, like the Ghazva-e-Hind hadith whose authenticity is questionable in Muslim scholarship, continues to be promoted in the dominant pro-security establishment media to perpetuate hatred.
No plans of de-radicalisation will produce any effect on the ground unless a strategic shift takes place in the country’s India-centric policy paradigm based on promoting radical religious forces inside Pakistan and exporting violent jihad to neighbouring Afghanistan and India. Unless that happens, any de-radicalisation programmes will not change the mindset of the purposely-radicalised sections of our population. In the absence of a paradigm shift, de-radicalisation programmes like the seminar in Swat will be hardly anything more than PR exercises for foreigners, several of whom participated in the seminar. I am afraid that foreign participant writers of such events might ultimately end up producing misleading literature on the de-radicalisation process. This will only add to the already existing body of misleading literature on FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa produced by western authors since 9/11.
The writer is a PhD Research Fellow with the University of Oslo and currently writing a book, Taliban and Anti-Taliban