Another year stumbles towards its close. A better year than the last or a worse one? There are still two or three weeks to go, and much could yet happen. Age — and the bitter pills of experience — has bred in us a deep cynicism, which is itself a mask for pessimism. Our collective pasts are too scarred with unhealed wounds to suggest much hope of change for the better.
As I write this piece, two faces dominate cyberspace and personify this year’s closing. One is the face of a young Pakistani woman. It is an intelligent face. Her jawline is strong, suggesting firmness of will, although there is a sense of uncertainty in the set of her mouth. But her eyes are cold. She is of Pakistani origin (and could resemble your nextdoor neighbour) but has lived in Saudi Arabia and was now living in San Bernadino, California, which is located in one of the most prosperous parts of the richest country in the world. The other face is that of a big-built, orange-haired man, with tiny eyes almost hidden in the creases of his extremely heavy jowls. His mouth is small, lost between those jowls, but his lips are thick and blubbery. He is one of the wealthiest of men in thisrichest of countries.
Despite the enormous differences of origin, ethnicity, and proclaimed beliefs that lie between these two persons, there is much that is similar between their respective political ideologies.Now, do not get me wrong. I am not suggesting that there is the remotest similarity between the political principles of a would-be president of the US and a woman accused of cold-blooded mass murder.However, both their viewpointsproclaim a desire to create irrevocable divisions between groups of human beings to turn them into hate-driven enemies.
The first question that comes to this commentator’s mind relates to the issue of why this man believes that his rhetoric will enhance his chances of gaining the presidency, indeed, will even be acceptable to American voters. There must be Muslims working in his companies and, as we know, he has significant business interests in the Middle East. Yet,Donald the Dangerous is prepared to jeopardise all that. Clearly, he feels that, notwithstanding anything written in the US Constitution, there is a powerful tide of anti-Muslim opinion rising out there for him to exploit. And it is this that is most worrying.
The second question relates to the violently deranged beliefs on which Tashfeen the alleged terrorist is said to have acted. In Pakistan, we have seen far too many examples of such horrific points of view. We need to understand the source of this affliction for affliction it is, a most dreadful disease of the mind and soul.These ideas have not suddenly sprung into being, although they are far distant from the elegant simplicity and gentle humanity of the beliefs most of us Muslims were brought up on. But there always hasbeen this odd, aberrant strand of a strutting, macho pseudo-Islam that paraded as orthodoxy. But it has not hitherto been part of the mainstream, at least not in our subcontinent.
As the poet Auden wrote, in another context:
“Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
that has driven a culture mad.”
History, I would suggest, seen straight on and without ideological blinkers, has much to show us. But why look far back? Let us look back to only the close horizon of our last six-plus decades. Almost immediately after the massive bloodletting and anarchy that consecrated our independence and that of India, a Basic Principle Committee was appointed by the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. On the advice of this committee, the assembly passed a resolution called the Objectives Resolution, which defined the aims and objectives of the new Constitution. Under heavy pressure from religious-political elements (that, unsurprisingly, had notably failed to get elected to the assemblies), the then Prime Minister (PM),NawabzadaLiaquat Ali Khan, included certain provisions in that resolution that would in the years to come provide the wormholes through which extremist ideologies would gain acceptance in the political system of Pakistan.Innocent as they may have seemed at the time, these particular provisions were expanded and extended in meaning by our successive rulers and by the religious-political parties until the country eventually reached the crippling ideological sickness from which we are suffering today.
Since, under the Objectives Resolution a Muslim citizen clearly held a superior civic status to a member of the ‘minorities’, it became significant enough to determine who was or was not a Muslim. This set of ideas led to the anti-Ahmedi agitation, which broke out in the city of Lahore in 1953. The hoodlums of the movement went around Anarkali and Punjab University cutting off the hair of unveiled women not to mention other, much more heinous acts of violence: 2,000 Ahmedi citizens of Pakistan were murdered. Quashed at the time by General Azam Khan and legally resolved by Justice RustamKayani, who authored the report of the Munir Commission, this issue was to surface again in 1974.PMZulfikar Ali Bhutto, under pressure from radical Islamists, and himself having lost his left-wing democratic moorings, supported anti-Ahmedi legislation that greatly strengthened the hands of religious-political elements.
In 1977, Bhutto was faced with major urban agitations relating to his alleged rigging of the elections. Thinking of throwing a sop to Islamist elements, he proclaimed prohibition and changed the weekly holiday to Friday. These actions did not save his government, his Constitution or his life. Bhutto was assassinated on the gallows at the behest of the fanatical General ZiaulHaq.
The year 1988 brought the 11nightmare years of General Zia to an end, which have left our society abysmally degraded and brutalised, our Constitution mangled and our legal and ethical standards transmuted to gross bigotry. The country has sincebeen awash with guns, drugs, dacoits and sectarian and ethnic violence.
More directly relevant to our present plight, the Zia years brought the hypocritical Afghanistan jihad and all that has followed. A special reference needs to be made to General MirzaAslam Beg, in the immediate post-Zia years, for his extraordinary concept of ‘strategic defiance’ and to the actions of the late General Hamid Gul, as the then head of the Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI), in developing and unleashing the Taliban. The shelter the Taliban gave to a loosely knit international terrorist grouping known as al Qaeda would lead directly to the dramatic 9/11 atrocities.
In the course of time, the Taliban and al Qaeda elements mutated virus-like through various forms, of which Islamic State (IS)is the most recent. The black stain of pseudo-Islamist terror has been spread through the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and now across the oceans to California. This is a new Black Death, a deadly plague of extreme malignancy. It is a matter of utmost urgency to look deep into the minds and hearts of would-be terrorists in order to understand the source. And eliminate it. In the meantime, aberrations like Mr Trumpdo not help matters. Neither do interior ministers who insist on denying the deadly realities that stare us all in the face.
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet