Daily Times

US President, Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration has been dubbed the Muslim ban and this might well have been the intention behind it. After all, during the campaign, Trump had promised a Muslim ban but some people refused to believe him.

The Executive Order, however, has been couched in the language of the danger posed by nationals of certain Muslim majority countries rather than an outright Muslim ban. Nor is it a perpetual ban because it envisages only a 90 day period of a ban on the travel to the US of nationals holding non-immigrant visas from these countries, which were chosen not by the Trump administration but the Obama administration under “Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015”, which originally, and subsequently, listed the seven countries travel to which would mean additional scrutiny for visa applications. This explains why Pakistan, mercifully, avoided being placed on the list but just barely. This is also the reason why the so-called “Muslim ban” is ultimately likely to be deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court of the US.

There is another passage in the executive order that should give Pakistan’s Foreign Office an occasion to pause. The EO states: “In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.”

For long now, we have seen some of the most rabidly fanatical elements from our country, including anchors of TV shows which persecute religious minorities, gain easy access to Washington. Some of them have even done their TV shows while sitting in Washington. Many religious clerics who repeatedly call for beheadings of “blasphemers” and killing of religious minorities in Pakistan have even been invited to fully paid trips to speak on “interfaith harmony” in Washington D.C. These people harbour some of the most misogynistic, bigoted and fanatical views. Many of these people were engaged by the previous two administrations in the naive hope that doing this would mean better engagement with the Muslim World.

In Pakistan, a great deal was spent on bolstering up the Barelvi sect, which was seen as the softer traditional side of Islam. This coincided with a curious index floated in the early years of this century, which has very conveniently divided around a billion Muslims neatly into the set categories of fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists and secularists without taking into account that these categories are never as clear cut. This stroke of genius was the brainchild of one Cheryl Bernard, whose credentials apparently boasted of her marriage to Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American hawk, identifying himself as a Sunni Muslim. Amongst other things, it sought to resolve the “Muslim problem” by promoting traditionalists over fundamentalists. What we have seen in Pakistan is that these “traditionalist” Muslims can be just as fundamentalist as anyone else when it comes to rights of minorities and women. In any event, this apparently was adopted as policy by the then administration and subsequently followed by President Obama’s government as well.

As much as one admires former US president, Barack Obama, for being the dignified leader that he was, it is a fact that he also saw the Muslim World through this prism. Much of this was clear in his choice of Cairo to deliver his famous Muslim World reset speech. He chose to address the Muslim World from the capital of a predominantly Arab nation, forgetting that the majority of Muslims live outside the Arab World. On the pages of this newspaper, I had warned against this tendency to view the Muslim World as a Sunni Arab monolith, especially with relation to the disastrous Arab Spring and the events that unfolded in Syria. The Muslim world is not a monolith as it is divided horizontally and vertically along many lines.

By abandoning this idea of engagement with so-called “traditionalists” in the Muslim World and instead of making the US’ founding principles the touchstone upon which to accept or reject travellers, the US is finally wiser, one would hope. The Muslim World is undergoing a reformation and reformation historically has been a messy affair. Whether we wish to deny it or not, the fact remains that a great majority of the Muslims around the world have still not come to terms with modernity and the idea of individual rights that the west is based on. Persecution on the basis of religion is rife all throughout the Muslim World and to our lasting shame in Pakistan, more so since General Zia’s 11-years in government which saw the country take several steps backwards in terms of the rights of minorities and women. Speaking of persecution, almost all of us who identify as Muslims in this country have also signed off on a horribly discriminatory and bigoted statement abusing the Ahmadi community. If the EO is implemented in letter and spirit, most Pakistanis would be liable not to be admitted in the US on account of the Zia era amendment to our passport forms.

This is where I think the greatest merit of the EO lies. Measures such as this might finally awaken governments such as ours into doing something about the horrible Zia-era laws and processes which have left Pakistanis vulnerable to facing travel bans. President Trump may indeed turn out to be a blessing in disguise, if he can bring pusillanimous regimes such as ours, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Perhaps we might just do the right thing at long last if only to stop ourselves from facing travel bans.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via Twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com