Maulana Tariq Jamil is probably Pakistan’s best-known religious ideologue. He is welcome almost everywhere, from mosques to madrassas (seminaries), from colleges and universities to the corridors of power, cutting across sects and ideologies. Resultantly, what he says is what matters.
While listening to one of his old speeches delivered on Independence Day, aired by the state-run television channel, the Maulana claimed that in his study of world nations, two countries came into being in the name of Islam. These were the state of Medina and the state of Pakistan respectively. He added a special religious significance to the fact that Pakistan came into being on August 14, 1947, which according to him was not a mere coincidence as it concurred with the 27th of Ramzan, the most sacred day of the most sacred month according to the Islamic calendar. “The intention of Allah was involved,” Maulana Tariq Jamil claimed.
There are some serious objections to Maulana Jamil’s assertion. Contrary to popular misconception, Pakistan and India came into being on one and the same day: August 15, 1947. The Indian Independence Act, 1947 is instructive in this regard. Clause One of Article One, titled “The new dominians”, of the act reads: “As from the 15th day of August, 1947, two independent dominions shall be set up in India, to be known respectively as India and Pakistan.” What lay bare was the fact that the Maulana’s statement is in serious want of authenticity. Put differently, if we were the first state to be created on the 27th of Ramzan, it does not make us unique because India also obtained independence on the same day. However, if the 27th of Ramzan did not coincide with August 15, 1947, then none of the two states was founded on Islam’s most sacred day of the most sacred month. To the confession of the Maulana, 27th of Ramzan was on August 14. In order words, Pakistan did not come into being on the 27th of Ramzan. My contention is that Pakistan’s emergence before the 27th of Ramzan does in no way discredit our existence! The clergy’s association of Pakistan with Ramzan is meant to give a religious colour to the country’s existence.
It is the knock-on effects of Maulana Tariq Jamil’s speech that merit serious considerations. Associating Pakistan’s creation with the 27th of Ramzan gives a purely religious connotation to the country’s otherwise mundane independence. In fact, religion was a rallying cry to mobilise a diverse lot of Muslims to found a country where Muslims would constitute numerical majority and where the community’s socio-economic and political interests — supposedly threatened in united India from Hindu domination — would be secured. The Maulana’s assertion harks back to age-old debate: was Pakistan meant to be either an Islamic polity or a Muslim majority state? For the religious right, Pakistan was meant to be an Islamic state with sharia being the supreme law of the land. Even if the claim is accepted for the time being, then the question arises of whose sharia will prevail. The flip side of Maulana Tariq Jamil’s claim is that it impinges upon the liberties of religious minorities. A religious Pakistan means excluding the official three percent of non-Muslims in the first place. Being exclusionary, the cleric’s notion of religious polity excludes Pakistan’s 20 percent Shia population. Of the remaining 77 percent Sunni Muslims, the majority is of the Barelvi persuasion followed closely by the Deobandis. These two sects of Sunni Islam have further divisions along various sub sects.
Nevertheless, since the said Maulana subscribes to the Deobandi school of thought, his notion of religious Pakistan means that the clerics representing some 30 percent or so of the Deobandis would dictate the country’s religious discourse. Such a precarious scenario imposes perpetual minority status on the 70 percent majority, an irony of staggering proportions! What one figures from this is that the relationship between politics and religion is problematic. Our near seven decades of existance stand as a testimony to this effect.
On this Independence Day, revisiting the whole religious discourse surrounding Pakistan’s emergence is of immense importance. The misuse of religious imagery with active official patronage and connivance has cost us more than any other issue in our 68-year-old history. May we prove Friedrich Hegel – “We learn from history that we do not learn from history” – wrong by understanding that in our case the politicisation of religion has not provided for a viable state. Making religion an affair between the infallible Allah and the fallible individual instead of the fallible government and fallible individual remedies men from the wrongs they commit in the latter case. This is the essence of secularism, which we erroneously call as ladeeniyat or no religion at all.
The writer is a freelance journalist based in Quetta. He can be reached at [email protected] or followed on Twitter @mughtian