Public Sentiment
Despite the impression you get from a lot of the rhetoric in the Western media, I’m happy to report that most Pakistanis are not fanatics. On April 4th Karachi had its biggest rally ever, and it was against religious extremism. Lahore quickly followed suite. I wonder if the West even reported on this. It’s curious that one of the parties involved, the MQM, sponsored a campaign of banners hanging around major areas of the city which state “we want a modern, enlightened Pakistan,” considering their own history of violence and intimidation. Nonetheless, I agree completely with the sentiments conveyed, and it’s good to see that many parties and interest groups were involved.
Fortunately, it seems that most people here don’t buy the MMA’s victim stance. Their latest trick is to take over land to build mosques and madrassahs in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, and then claim that the government, who is way too lenient on them already, is attacking them when it tries to confiscate back the land and demolish the illegally built structures. It’s not just men who lash out either. Gangs of danda-wielding women clad in full chadori and niqab stand guard ready protect their stolen property and march the streets, bullying local shops to give up their deviant Western CD’s and magazines, whence they will be dumped into a trash heap and lit ablaze during a dramatic rally. Females who drive alone are stopped and pressured into abandoning their cars unless accompanied by a male relative, and some women have taken the law into their own hands and have forced brothels, or alleged brothels (there have apparently been false charges of prostitution against some women) to close down.
Pakistanis in general are savvy enough to recognize this crude political move, the “Thief! Thief!”technique. In order to get away with a crime, simply misdirect public attention to alleged crimes elsewhere. There are real victims of the Musharraf regime, of course; I happened to know some. But excuse me if I don’t feel any sympathy for coddled extremists. This coalition claims to be defending religious values in this society. Never mind that most Muslims, whether Sunni, Shiite, or Ahmedi (yes, they’re Muslims too) don’t agree with their interpretation of Islam. And never mind the rights of religious minorities, whom the MMA doesn’t even pretend to care about as they try to set up an “Islamically pure” state. They even protested because Justice Bhagwandas, a Hindu judge who is an expert in both Islamic and constitutional law, became head of the Supreme Court. The significance of the first non-Muslim to have this much prominence in the Pakistani government was certainly not lost on them.
Don’t give me this pat explanation that the recent drive to fanaticism is all due to the secular elite preventing the poor from getting an education; that only exacerbates it. There are free madrassahs for the poor in the country that aren’t factories for jihadists or revolutionary bandits (though just how many there are, and how moderate they really are, is debatable). If socio-economic oppression were the sole cause, then why aren’t the Christians or Ahmidis, who are on the whole rather poor and heavily discriminated against, becoming radicalized? Indeed, Maududi, the al Wahhab of the subcontinent, was from the educated elite class. On a similar note, if the impetus for the creation of this “state within a state” is police corruption and government indifference to the crimes and complaints of locals, again I would ask why other areas with similar problems don’t turn to extremism. I would cite another factor – an inbuilt sense of moral superiority and a demand for obeisance that is an old and all too familiar pattern of mullahs.
The Lal Masjid has been an epi-center of hateful venom for decades. Simply demolishing it up won’t work; its inhabitants are expecting it, waiting for it even. (Paranoia, which explains a lot of their behavior, can lead to self-fulfilling prophesies. Fear breeds hatred, which breeds violence, with a response in kind, and there, the accusations against the enemy ring true – they are out to get you after all. See, you just can’t trust infidels!).
Expelling the militants might shift the problem temporarily, but it won’t solve it. Imprisoning the fundamentalists will leave open a government already known for human rights abuses to charges of oppression, siding with Bush in the War on Terror by doing his evil bidding (recruitment time). Killing them will have the same effect. But something must be done. Education will take generations to have an effect. Perhaps there should be more authentic, Islamically correct masjids/madrassahs in the heart of
Islamabad that would be a center of true “enlightened moderation.” More importantly, they should be independent of both the government and Lal Masjid, which would give them necessary street cred and symbolic opposition.
