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The rise of Islamists in Pakistan
View Point Online - January 24, 2013
It is becoming clear that religious and jihadi forces in Pakistan and its neighborhood are taking a leaf out of, proverbially speaking, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's book on Islamism. They sense a political opportunity emerging ahead of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014 and nurse a dream of Islamic revival in South Asia in its wake. Pakistani religious scholar Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri's so-called million-man march on Islamabad from January 14 and his failed bid to unseat the elected government through a mass uprising is rooted in this new thinking. He has millions of followers in Pakistan and India.
In the past, Islamic scholars have sought to interpret Islamic literature in order to make Islam relevant to contemporary times. However, their hopes for Islamic revival have generally been unsuccessful. Their path to Islamic revival has also been complicated since America became the first democracy in 1776. Over the course of past centuries, democracy has gained currency in people's minds throughout the world, making it difficult for Islamic scholars to come up with an interpretation of Islam's conception of power that could also be acceptable to masses in current era. However, this is changing.
Islamism was boosted by the 1979 Iranian revolution and since then the Islamic scholarship has closely studied the changing notions of power in modern times. The Islamists also note the case of Turkey where an Islamist government has been slowly removing secular influences from the country's political and cultural life and significantly in a manner acceptable to the West. Morsi's successful experiment with power in Egypt is revealing a new path for Islamists in other parts of the world, motivating them to use elections and other means of channelizing people's energy to first capture power and begin a gradual enforcement of Islamic shari'a laws.
Mistakenly however, the Islamists are equating elections with democracy, disregarding its key organizing principles, notably individual liberty and equal rights for minorities, human-enacted legislation, freedom of the press and belief, and right to form political parties. Qadri, who claims to have authored 1,000 books on Islam, is known for using people's religious sentiments to advance his cause and is keenly aware of the dynamics of power in modern times, especially the use of people's uprisings in the wake of Arab Spring to advance the religious cause. He is also a deeply orthodox figure. In a video address to his followers, Qadri sobs, cries and repeatedly wipes his tears as he delivers a lengthy interpretation of a dream in which Prophet Muhammad arrived in Pakistan and urged him to be his host and to set up his organization Minhaj-ul-Quran.
Qadri adheres to the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam, whose followers express unconditional love of Prophet Muhammad. The Barelvis, who are present throughout India and Pakistan, are no less intolerant than the Taliban. In January 2011, a follower of the Barelvi group Dawat-e-Islami who was deployed as a member of an elite commando force to protect liberal Punjab governor Salman Taseer assassinated him for advocating reforms in Pakistan's blasphemy laws. Videos of Qadri saying that Pakistan's blasphemy laws are not applicable on non-Muslims, and also of those in which he argues that Muslims or non-Muslims, Jews or Christians should be killed for blaspheming the prophet, are available on the internet. Qadri is also emboldened by his growing acceptance in the West after he issued a fatwa against suicide bombings in Pakistan in 2010.
Qadri is not alone in sensing an emerging political opportunity. The jihadi forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan are also emboldened by Morsi's success and are clamoring to fill in the vacuum emanating from the US troop drawdown. In Afghanistan, militant commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has shown willingness to share power through elections to establish Islamic rule. Afghan Taliban representatives recently participated in talks in Chantilly, France, where they discussed a path to power if the Afghan constitution is rewritten to their Islamist taste. Recently, the Taliban militants also issued a statement saying that Afghans will start living under Islamic rule from 2014 as the US leaves.
In a January 6 video, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, indicated that it is broadening the jihadi battlefield to include Kashmir and India. Almost acting in tandem, Pakistani military whose Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) shares the Taliban's jihadi objectives entered a border conflict with India around the same time. In the same video, TTP emir Hakimullah Mehsud described his group as an international organization, offering aid to militants in the Arab world and stressing that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar is also the emir of Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, and that Omar's policies after 2014 will be implemented by them. Significantly, Mehsud recently offered to hold talks with Pakistan and asked his fighters not to attack Pakistani security forces, showing willingness for an understanding with the Pakistani military.
In the past, Pakistan's military and judiciary have often removed elected governments. Qadri's call that the military and the judiciary should have a say in an interim government in Islamabad reinforced the speculation that he was assisted by the ISI. Pakistani masses were not ready to support his call to remove the elected government just weeks before it is set to complete, for the first time in Pakistan's history, a full term. Inspired by the Islamists' success in Egypt, Qadri thought he could turn Islamabad into a second Tahrir Square and transform Pakistan into an Egypt-like democracy with an Islamist face under a new constitution. Such a move was bound to fail, as his timing was wrong. As the US leaves Afghanistan, it is still possible that Qadri-like Islamists and jihadi forces may rise to destabilize Pakistan and extend their reach to Kashmir. For now, let's hope that the ISI, their main backer which thinks of itself as the ideological guardian of the state of Pakistan, does not prop up Qadri-like forces.
[Tufail Ahmad, a former journalist with the BBC Urdu Service and Press Trust of India, is Director of South Asia Studies at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Washington DC.]
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