In the aftermath of the 1857 War
of Independence, when Muslim quarters at Delhi were razed to the ground and the Mughal royalty and nobility faced the wrath of British colonial power, some of the eminent Indian ulema moved out of Delhi and established madrassahs in qasbahs (small towns) of Deoband, Saharanpur, Gangoh, Bareilly and Piliphit. The bloody encounter with the British drove the ulema of India to develop an internal debate on Muslim identity. Deoband, Ahl-e-Hadith and Barelvi schools were led by eminent ulema but their scholarship was directed at refutation of the ethos and belief system of other schools and of proving the correctness of their own schools. Deoband and Ahl-e-Hadith were against Shia and customary practices while the Barelvi school was only against the Shia belief system. Therefore, the tradition of apostatising Muslim sects became entrenched, supported by the institutional infrastructure of madrassahs and religious texts.
With the creation of Pakistan, the issue of the identity of the new state loomed large on the horizon. As the separate state had been demanded for the Muslims of India, also to enable them to lead their lives in accordance with the injunctions of Islam, the basic contours of the vision for the state were not entirely secular and conjured up two identities of Muslims and non-Muslims. The flag of Pakistan was portioned off into green and white parts to reflect the aspirations of Muslims and non- Muslim minorities.
However, this opaque vision was disconnected from the complexities of Pakistan, and an ideological and ideational contest ensued on the identity of Pakistan. Islamic religious parties that had not supported the demand for Pakistan and sided with the Indian National Congress, as their leaders believed that Muslims would eventually acquire a separate religio-cultural space in united India, were placed in a difficult position after the establishment of Pakistan. Religious parties began reinventing their role in the newly independent Muslim state, and some of the parties brought along with them the baggage of sect particularism. These schools of Islamic thought had inherited the pre-Partition literature on refutation and apostatising of other sects and infrastructure of madrassahs. For instance, the fatwa circulated in the early 1950s for the apostatising of Ahmedis, had been issued by Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani in 1937.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the framers of the Objectives Resolution had promised equal rights to minorities, but as time progressed, the pretence underlying the rhetoric about the secular vision of Pakistan began unravelling. On the one hand, the non-Muslim minorities were required to vote separately, and, on the other, the Islamic parties, led by Majlis-e-Ahrar and Jamaat-e-Islami, began agitation against the Ahmediyya community, culminating in the riots of 1954. After a long campaign channelised by Islamic parties, and funded by Wahabiist and petro-dollar rich Saudi Arabia, Ahmedis were declared non-Muslims in 1974 by parliament. Khalid Ahmed writes in Sectarian War that the apostatisation of Ahmedis as non-Muslims was not an ordinary event for the community because, suddenly, they became pariahs in their country of birth and it also led to their persecution at the hands of vigilante mobs.
As the Islamic parties were rolling out their agenda of Islamising Pakistan and spreading their tentacles in Pakistani society by establishing educational institutions and charity organizations, concurrently, the Pakistani governments of various denominations, be they military or civilian, were gradually edging the state towards religious extremism through their confused meanderings about the national identity of the country. To buttress nationalism on the basis of the ideology of Pakistan, the state began revising textbooks in the 1950s. New textbooks highlighted the contributions of Indian Muslim historical personages, blithely ignoring that most of these personalities were not only patently anti-Hindu but also anti-Shia, and to a certain extent, also against pirs and saints. Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi, credited for giving birth to the separate Muslim identity, was the author of the infamous anti-Shia treatise Radd-i-Rawafiz, where he had declared Shias as non-Muslims. Similarly, Alamgir Aurangzeb, touted as an exemplary Muslim king, had ordered the compilation of Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, which had apostatised the Shias as heretics. That fatwa was used by Sipah-e-Sahaba after nearly 300 years to declare Shias as apostates. Similarly, Shah Waliullah, who is usually described as a great uniting force of different faiths in India, had written anti-Shia texts, and had invited the Afghan king, Ahmed Shah Abdali, to kill Shias and Marathas in Delhi. Abdali massacred the Shias of Delhi brutally along with the Marathas.
Some experts argue that General Ziaul Haq’s 1977 coup had been a watershed event that pushed the country towards the abyss of religious militancy. On the contrary, the military dictator’s ascension to power had coincided with certain geo-political developments, and in reality his opportunistic exploitation of those developments to strengthen his grip on power had begun the whirlwind storm of religious violence in which we find ourselves today.
Firstly, the Afghan war raging on the western borders of Pakistan established a nexus between the Deobandi and Salafist madrassahs of Pakistan and the Wahabi brand of Islam prevalent in the Gulf countries, under state patronage. New madrassahs were set up in the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Quetta to teach and train Afghan refugees who were living in refugee camps. Secondly, the Iran-Iraq war deepened sectarian divisions in Pakistan, a country with a sizeable Shia population. Sectarian organisations such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba founded in the 1980s, created sectarian warfare in the country and scouted for funds from foreign countries. Finally, the Islamisation policies of Zia strengthened the power base of the ulema. He incorporated into the constitution long standing demands of the ulema, and many prominent ulema, trained by religious seminaries, were appointed as judges of the Federal Shariat Court.
The confluence of these events led to the assertion of Sunni religious identity and the gradual exclusion of minority religious sects, such as Shias, from the official definition of Muslim. After the restoration of democracy in Pakistan in 1988, the democratically elected governments did not reverse the Islamisation measures of Zia, and on the other hand, some of the sectarian outfits got themselves registered as political parties and made localised electoral gains.
The elected government of Nawaz Sharif had taken action against the Sipah-e-Sahaba in the late 1990s. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the militant groups, when banned by the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf, changed their names, joined hands with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and started targeting Shias in Quetta and Karachi and Barelvis all over Pakistan. That noxious alliance is still injecting poison into the body politic of Pakistan in large doses.
Therefore, in order to adequately respond to the monstrosity of violence, we need to look at the problem in a historical continuum and start the wholescale revision of the discourse and measures that have gone into making our national identity. The state as well as the people of Pakistan must realise that the identity of Pakistan should be built on non-religious lines otherwise the vigilante mobs and the sectarian organisations would keep on vandalising, killing and harassing the minority sects and non-Muslim communities. To separate religion from politics, a number of interim steps can be taken. In the first place, the teaching of religion in schools and colleges should not focus on Islam only and must include study of other religions too. Secondly, the curricula, administered to students in madrassahs, must also be revised. Our policy makers have largely failed to understand the intellectual nexus between madrassahs and Islamic religious parties. Typically, an Islamic political party in Pakistan is part of a religious organisation that engages in multifarious activities, ranging from political to philanthropic and from intellectual to instructional. The doctrinal preference of that religious organisation is intellectualised and vetted at madrassahs; therefore, this institution is at the core of the entire network of the religious organisation. Arguably, reforming madrassahs would considerably reduce the lethal unleashing of extremist ideas in the society.
(Concluded)
The writer is conducting research on Deobandi madrassahs and can be reached at [email protected]