Daily Times

Expressing his reservations over the Women’s Protection Bill passed by the Punjab assembly, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) declared that they would stop all attempts to make Pakistan a secular state. Ironically the same week, across the border, Maulana Arshad Madni of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind (JUH) while attacking the Modi government declared that they would not hesitate in dying for secularism in India.

Why this disparity over the idea of secularism between likeminded religious divines of the same Deoband school? It must be remembered that Fazl-ur-Rahman’s JUI-F is not the ideological successor of the JUI of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, which had broken away from JUH in 1940s to support the creation of Pakistan. Fazl-ur-Rahman’s father Maulana Mufti Mahmood remained the strident opponent of the creation of Pakistan and threw in his lot with Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad. He merged the remaining JUH left in Pakistan with the JUI in 1949 and by 1956 controlled the party. In 1971, when the East Pakistan separated, Mufti Mahmood famously declared that he was not part of the ‘sin’ of making Pakistan. Therefore, it stands to reason the ideologically JUI-F is the successor party of the JUH in Pakistan, completely aligned with the latter’s religio-political ideology.

There is only one plausible reason. These religious priests with a divine mission have different standards for places where Muslims are in a minority (like in India or the U.S.) and where Muslims are in a majority (as in Pakistan). The JUH and JUI are not alone in this. The Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam was perfectly sanguine with the idea of a united and secular India ruled by a Hindu majority calling the very idea of Pakistan “Kafiristan”. After the partition, however, the same Ahrar pressed for a theocracy in Pakistan and attacked Shias and Ahmadis. Of course, one must also pierce the veil and understand what kind of secularism is acceptable to these religious divines? In th pre-partition India, starting with the Khilafat Movement, the Sunni Ulema found Gandhi more acceptable to Mohammad Ali Jinnah for the following reasons: first, Gandhi was ready to give the Muslim religious clergy a role in mobilising the masses, which Jinnah was trenchantly opposed to. The second reason was that Jinnah was a Shia and a secular minded lawyer. Gandhi’s politics afforded the Muslim clergy an opportunity to lead the flock of the faithful in a sea of kufr. For their part Gandhi and Nehru were ready to accept any Muslim who agreed to play second fiddle to them and not challenge their leadership of the Congress. The Ulema, starting with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Maulana Hussain Madni, were more than ready to play that role. In other words sectarian and doctrinal disputes within the Muslim community over leadership and the role of religion in politics determined Deoband’s wholehearted support to — paradoxically — the secular ideal of Indian nationalism. Their attitude may be summed up as: better Hindus to lead us than Shias or secular minded lawyers.

Therefore, it is clear that Deoband’s allegiance to a secular ideal in India is purely tactical in nature. In India, secularism for them means absolute dominance over the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the officially recognised and sanitised representative Muslim civic body, which determines matters of personal law and influences the government on its policies pertaining to Muslims. Shias and Ahmadis are excluded from this board. It also means the perpetuation of injustice to Muslim women, which that was done in the aftermath of the Shah Bano case in India. To recap, the Supreme Court of India had ordered alimony for a 62-year-old Muslim divorcee. The secular Congress-led Indian parliament overturned the decision through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. So when secularism in India means denial of rights to Muslim women, and Islam in Pakistan means precisely the same, is it any wonder that in India, the JUH supports secularism and in Pakistan, the JUI supports Islam? The consistency here is that the JUH opposes the rights of Muslim women divorcees in India and the JUI opposes the right of women to be protected against domestic violence in Pakistan.

The battle, therefore, is not between Islam and secularism as ideals but between those who want to use or misuse these ideals to keep a systematic institutional control over the populace and those who want their societies to live peacefully and develop as progressive societies. The objective of the Deoband ulema in particular and ulema in general around the Muslim world is to control the thoughts and actions of Muslims and to keep them slaves to the diktat issued by medieval and reactionary religious leaders. This keeps their religious shop a going concern. All voices calling for reform and progress are therefore denounced in harshest terms possible. In Pakistan, those who want to protect women against domestic violence are berated as ‘secular’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ by the JUI-F. In India those voices calling for equal rights for Muslim women are denounced as ‘anti-secular’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ by the JUH. Such are the ironies of the subcontinent’s religious politics.

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