Daily Times

The time has come to take the bull of religious extremism by the horns. Mere placebo solutions and anodyne prescriptions have badly entangled us in a knotty morass of policy inaction that has helped extremists and their vile agenda thrive. Extremism as a sociological phenomenon has its roots in social, economic, and political inequities but its religious roots lend it a supra temporal insidiousness that transcends all normal explanations and remedies. The more religious a society the more virulent the effects of the extremism. Extremism itself is a departure from the healing message of peace propounded by most religions and normally grips a segment of society in the awe of clerics arrogating that they are the ultimate authority on religion. One of the chief causes of religious extremism is the clergy’s hold on the socially defined channels of religious practice. Every religion has had its fanatic fringe that justified violence as a legitimate means to achieve salvation.

The history of extremism goes back to antiquity. During 66-73 AD a highly organized Jewish sect of religious zealots called the Sicarri committed acts of terrorism against Romans in Palestine to protest against the denial of their political rights. Since the early days of Islam, the extremist menace has reared its ugly head with metronomic regularity. First it was the extremist message of ‘Al Khawaraj, the excluded ones that resulted in fratricidal conflict between Muslims even under the reign of the rightly guided Caliphs. Saljuk Muslim rulers also faced the ire of Hashisheens who were a Muslim sect in Northern Persia subscribing to assassination as a tactic to achieve political ends. The term assassin is derived from this cult that was led by their fearsome leader Hasan bin Sabah. A similar problem was faced by Mamluke Sultans, where Ibn-e-Taymiyyah, a religious scholar of radical leanings challenged the prevalent religious interpretation of Muslim scholars of Mutazila or rationalist school of thought. He attacked Mutazila’s Aristotelean concept of ‘first cause’ for envisioning God and rejected Ibne Sina and Al Farabi’s Wahdatul Wajood concept of oneness of God.

He was the first jurist to issue a religious edict or Fatwa sanctioning Jihad against a newly converted Mongol Muslim sect on the request of the beleaguered Mamluke Sultanate. It were his ideas that later spawned a purist religious revolution in Nejd — present day Saudi Arabia — where Muhammad Ibn-e-Wahab, a willing disciple of Taymiyyah’s put his ideas in practice with the help of Ibn-e-Saud. Twentieth century Egyptian writer Syed Qutb invoked Taymiyyah’s second Fatwa to instigate rebellion against Jamal Abdul Nasir. Later Osama bin Ladin and Ayman Al Zawahiri also got inspired, citing Taymiyyah and Syed Qutb’s message of theological correctness leading to their own distorted interpretation of the concept of a postatisation or Takfir that justified violence against errant Muslims. Even during the times of strong Ottoman rulers, there were uprisings led by religious preachers like Jalali rebellion of 1529 that used religion as a rallying cry, though the underlying cause of disaffection lay in social and economic deprivations. One interesting fact that emerges from these internecine Islamic conflicts pitting extremists against the governments of the day is the use of armed force to quell these rebellions. Apparently, the virulence of the faith inspired violence could only be countered through equally violent reprisals.

In Pakistan, extremism has never been dealt with holistically as a pathology. Only symptomatic treatment has been meted out to this malady

According to Bernard Finel — contemporary extremism in the Islamic world can be divided into four generations. The first wave was a sequel to Anwar ul Sadat’s assassination in 1981, and concentrated on internal reforms in Muslim countries relying on Syed Qutb’s interpretations and teachings. The focus on internal reforms was replaced by the second generation warriors baptised in ideological conflicts like the US inspired Afghan Jihad against the Soviets in the eighties, lending them a transnational character. The third generation was the generation of men like Osama bin Laden, who had been radicalized in the Afghan Jihad and had later turned against the US and what he considered apostate Muslim states. States like Pakistan that withdrew support after initial sympathy with these transnational extremists were declared among these ‘apostate’ states. The fourth generation of the religious extremism in Islamic society emanated from the remnants of the transnational Jihadis and their sympathizers who nurse latent grievances against the West as well as their own governments for social and economic injustices. Fifth generation warfare is nothing but a perpetual war fought through narratives and random acts of terror by disaffected extremists is in fact the war waged by the fourth generation of extremists in Islamic societies.

According to Paul B Stares and Mona Yacoubian, extremism’s epidemiological model consists of an environment that includes social, political, and economic conditions acting as a potential breeding ground of conflict, an agent that includes militant ideology, a vector that includes social networks, religious seminaries, and communication tools, and finally a host that might include individual terrorist cells or extremist organizations. Now if one were to treat extremism as a pathology, and violence as its symptoms should one resort to targeting the root cause or the symptoms? In Pakistan, extremism has never been dealt with holistically as a pathology. Only symptomatic treatment has been meted out to the malady. The reasons for this inaction are rooted in our distant as well as recent history. Ever since the inception of Pakistan, the country has oscillated between military rule and pseudo-democracy, resulting in denial of social and economic justice. The use of religion as a palliative to keep people in a fatalistic embrace by autocrats like Zia and the propensity of the early rulers to use religion as a sop to the clerics pressed into government service to justify non-inclusive politics considerably reduced the state’s ability to rein in extremism.

The Afghan Jihad and the Iran-Saudi sectarian ferment in the eighties added a militant dimension to religious politics, where the US trained Jihadi foot soldiers, morphed into permanent warriors, defying states as well as their own sponsors. Post-Soviet withdrawal upheaval in Afghanistan and its potential spill over in Pakistan combined with some sympathy for the Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom limited Pakistan’s options for an effective whittling down of the religious militant infrastructure. The hallowed status sedulously nurtured through joint US-Pakistan psychological operations during Afghan war had sunk so deep into popular imagination that all subsequent attempts at countering the menace of religious extremism were met with popular disdain. A series of happenings, including the Lal Masjid operation and the Peshawar Army Public School (APS) massacre brought to the fore the true face of extremism that had lain hidden so far from public view. A public clamour for action goaded the government into precipitate action, but without political will the endeavour appears to be withering on its wine.

What we have now in Paul Stares words is an ideal environment for extremism, with preachers and fiery clerics still spouting fire and brimstone from the pulpit. A poor populace at the mercy of political carpetbaggers constantly chafes at the unjust political and economic treatment while the state colludes with the looters. The agents of extremism subscribing to the takfiri ideology are present in every religious party and amongst mainstream preachers catering to the elite as well as the poor. The pulpit, mosque and madrassah has been appropriated by firebrand clerics and the government makes excuses for its inaction vis-à-vis regulation of these institutions that have been effectively regulated in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Egypt and Turkey. Without madrassah reforms, control of mosques, discouragement of extremist preachers, and a ruthless crackdown on all forms of religious militancy, the state will never win a war against extremism. As such, it is necessary for our nation as a whole to reject extremist ideology, while tackling its root causes instead of tinkering with the symptoms.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST;e mail rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, April 1^st 2018.