Daily Times

“Can the moderate Muslims in Pakistan stop complaining about Islamophobia in the western world and focus on calling out these Islamo-fascists for what they are doing in our country? I want to believe that they don’t have popular support from within the Muslim community but we need to demonstrate some strength!”

This is one of those statuses that appeared on my Facebook newsfeed written by people who clearly do not align with the clerics and their followers who hijacked the federal capital in the name of religion for weeks and claimed to be the representatives of sentiments of Muslims in Pakistan. Another example is Imaan Mazari’s video condemning the whole scenario especially the role played by military. The video went viral on almost all social media platforms following her disappearance from social media raising many questions about social media autonomy and freedom of expression.

Nevertheless, it is not the first time Islamabad has witnessed this bedlam. The dharna has become a norm since 2013. Following the general election that year, Imran Khan has set up a precedent to show resistance and a way to protest by demonstrating in the capital. However, the states inability to maintain peace and failure to uphold law and order remained equally unaffected in all sorts of circumstances.

I want to recall an incident which happened in 2013 when an armed man with his family had driven into the middle of Constitution Avenue where he fired on the police and started a standoff that continued for almost eight hours. The incident had a dramatic end after a politician grabbed the attacker. Almost the whole time police failed to negotiate with or capture the armed men named Malik Sikander Hayat while all big media channels were telecasting the saga taking place in the red zone, live. Again it was not an agitated mob or a political party with massive public support marching into the capital city, rather it was just a one-man army that paralysed a section of Islamabad for hours.

It is important to realise that a few hundred people participating in a protest do not represent the sentiments, practices and priorities of all Pakistanis. The country doesn’t follow a monolithic version of Islam and hence there are people who disagree with the demands and the methods of extremists

Imran Khan kicked of a long series of sit-ins for months demanding electoral reforms and later for the prime minister’s resignation in 2014. These sit-ins which closed the federal capital, didn’t bring as any closer to ‘Naya Pakistan’ as Khan claimed. Instead, the elected government of the PML-N used this chaos as an excuse for its malpractices in many ways and consistently remained incompetent in bringing these sit-ins to an end by finding a solution. The media gave uninterrupted coverage to Imran Khan’s sit-ins, almost turning them into a daily soap opera.

Learning from these stupendous dharnas and capital hijacking shows, this November, clerics used the same means to pressurise the government to protect the finality of Prophet Muhammad by accepting their demands. These included the resignations of the federal Law minister and some other state officials. As expected, the government failed to tackle the issue and turned it into a drama which came to its end with the heroic entry of the military. The only ‘progress’ made by government this time was the media blackout, which followed an unsuccessful attempt by the police to crackdown on the clerics.

Finally, the government made a completely one-sided compromise which calmed the protestors but raised many legal, constitutional and judicial questions. In addition to that, the country also seemed to be divided on the issue and many people are trying to condemn such radical demonstrations of religious rage and people are worried about the government’s failure to withstand resistance.

It is important to realise that a few hundred people participating in the protest do not represent the sentiments, practices and priorities of all Pakistan. The country doesn’t follow a monolithic version of Islam and hence there are people who disagree with the demands and methods of these fundamentalists. Zahid Hamid called the Faizabad protesters ‘extremists’ in his tweet, to which the Pakistani state surrendered as the only way to resolve this issue. Release of the Islamic militant leader Hafiz Saeed from house arrest and the government’s submission to cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi and his followers says much about the increasing power of the clergy and state’s incompetency to deal with religious matters as a sovereign and supreme body which is a matter to worry about for moderate and liberal Muslims living in Pakistan.

This situation can be seen as a triggering point of islamophobia inside the country along with the ever increasing global wave of islamophobia. This situation, if not controlled soon, is very likely to take us back to the time of Zia’s Islamisation which will not only lead to severe internal divisions and national catastrophe but also will act as another push away for Pakistan preventing its integration in the global community, consequently leading to horrendous isolation, global stigmatisation and elevated vulnerability to non-state actors and foreign encroachment.

At a time when the global torch bearer of Islam, Saudi Arabia is hosting concerts and granting honorary citizenship to a robot, where is Pakistan headed in terms of its approach towards religion?It seems that Pakistan is regressing to conservative Islamic ideologies as the state is unable to handle religious bigots and has failed to create a balance between religion and politics.

The writer is Falak Sufi Scholar at Hagop Kevorkian Centre for Near Eastern. Currently pursuing a Masters degree at New York University

Published in Daily Times, December 4^th 2017.