Daily Times

Islam’s unique egalitarianism, remarkable habit of critical — nearly Aristotelian — deductive thinking to solve contemporary problems and massive thirst for knowledge were the master propellants that carried its followers on the ever-ascending trajectory of a dominant world power for close to 700 years. The ascent was so splendid that it took another 500 years to retouch the base line. Thereafter, we are where we are with little to show for a honourable place among sister nations. Just look at the contemptuous manner in which Muslims are held today. A spark of great knowledge, substantive humanitarianism, social uplift or good governance in Muslim countries is dismissed as a freak happening rather than something credible. Contemptible abominations like Islamic State (IS), al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al Shabab and Abu Sayyaf, most unfortunately, have become the pockmarked face of blistering Islam today. Apathy towards the tragic plight of Rohingyas is a direct consequence of this unfavourable global sentiment towards Muslims.
Radicalisation, murderous extremism and sectarian militancy, along with pervasive moral erosion, are not the causes in themselves but the symptoms of a deep rot that has slowly and gradually percolated amidst Muslim societies all over the world. The downward slide has been further accelerated because of an urge out of nostalgia and imperfect analysis for reversion to their roots via the puritanical/fundamentalist track, a strategy that was the brainchild of the same class of crusted mainstream mullahs who were responsible, in the first instance, for the destruction of reason and tolerance in the fast decomposing Muslim thought. Loss of Muslim power and prestige was being erroneously ascribed to deviation from true Islam whereas Muslim intellectual silting had been a major function of shifting of focus from scientific research and innovation to worthless and circular debates over wasteful theological issues, just like in Pakistan.
With the exception of Mughal Delhi and Istanbul, Muslim capitals like Baghdad, Damascus, Fez, Granada and Cairo all degenerated one by one into shouting pits of vociferous mullahs over some of the most ridiculous issues in Islamic practices. At the time of the sacking of Baghdad by Helagu (1258), reportedly, there was a roaring debate in progress in the city square about whether or not a crow was halal. The Mongols decided the issue with the point of their sword, massacred them regardless of who believed what and let the crows and other scavengers have a field day. Delhi suffered a different sickness: a fatal attraction to poetic pastimes rather than hard affairs of the empire. Mughal Delhi too was sacked nonetheless. Peculiarly, the opportunist mullah with his pestilential fellow prowlers appeared in Delhi just when it was surrounded by besieging forces (1857) and tried to sow the seeds of communal discord true to his vile nature. Punjabi merchants from Lahore were the main financiers of the mullahs’ mischief. This rabid but typical alliance of the lowly and the scruffy was mainly responsible for the eventual sacking and massacre in Delhi. Muslims in undivided India never recovered from their resultant fall from grace.
Istanbul was different in the sense that the role of the ulema (clergy) had been institutionalised and they were constrained to act as the de facto third pillar of the power canopy. The other two were the sultan and the judiciary. Had the Ottoman sultan not been discouraged by the court’s clergy from patronising Gutenberg ‘s invention of the mechanical printing press (1435), the Muslim world, particularly Turkey, could have been in a different league today. Such is the debilitating influence of the hidebound mullah. The impact of the Gutenberg press on the spread of knowledge and technology was so great that within a decade the mass printing of books in Europe went up from less than a million to 1.5 billion copies affordably available, and then we had the introduction of newspaper. An unstoppable revolution in information dissemination had been kicked off.
With the onset of capability degeneration in Muslim power centres alliances were being formed by the likeminded and shoddy segments of society, and elements of the splintering state structure to retain their turf and take under their wings what was left unprotected by failing state institutions. Public welfare, education, merit, justice and security were the first casualties as states began to melt. Informal rival power centres were set up by those who were either on the fringes of the state’s power or were themselves the instruments for articulation of central authority. Mullahs, security forces and petty shopkeepers from the traditional bazaar, fundamentally an evil coalition, came together to share the spoils. Of these three, shopkeepers, or the bazaaris, were the ones who provided necessary finances to this power-seeking band of crooks to sustain themselves in the rising tide of anarchy all around. This predatory trio invariably appears at the time of the downfall of an established Muslim state and inflicts irreparable damage. Pakistan has suffered from just such an alliance of the petty and the perverse for the last 50 years and, ominously, is headed towards disintegration but for the armed forces, which has been refusing to become a full scale partner by and large except for a few temporary co-locations.
Bazaari is a Persian term denoting petty traders and merchants of small profit in the market place, in other words the bazaar. These men, unlike major traders, are highly opportunistic, believe in quick gains and make no long-term undertakings or investments. Their pliant morals are firmly anchored to profit only and, therefore, character, culture, education and legality mean nothing to them; a thick wad of money does.
These bazaaris and their collaborators are the ones who have had a chokehold on our national life for decades. Truly reflective of our regretfully criminalised society, our bazaaris keep equally devious company, which represents a wider variety of the skunks populating the sinking ship than merely the nebulous threesome. Alongwith bazaaris we have even more unethical sub-species hitched to the plunder wagon, which among others comprise the vulgarly rich real estate manipulators, bribe marinated bureaucrats, fake contractors, smuggled autos dealers, Ephedrine pushers, parasitic pirs and the sleazy scum of the petty market. This scum hangs around the fringes of the partly defunct cinema halls selling tickets in black, theatre tea stalls, obscene roving circuses, dilapidated fruit and vegetable markets, filthy bus stands, bulk storages, abandoned rusty railway yards and stinking back alleys of hotel clusters looking for chance booty. The abundance of these bands of thugs indicates the extensive rot that has set into our entire national structure, society and more importantly in the way we think and regard ourselves.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com