Article by Dr Naheem Jabbar, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth: correspondence email: naheem.jabbar@port.ac.uk.
On Easter Sunday last year, in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, a dehshat gard or suicide bomber killed 72 people, including 29 children in the city of Lahore. The message by Jamaat-ul-Ahra (Assembly of the Free), one of Pakistan’s numerous terrorist groups, to the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was directed both to Pakistan’s approximate 2% Christians in a nation of 180 million and locally, to Lahoris, in the Punjab, the ruling party’s home province: “We have carried out this attack to target the Christians who were celebrating Easter. Also this is a message to the Pakistani prime minister that we have arrived in Punjab.”
The park where both Muslim and Christian Pakistanis lost their lives is named after the nation’s revered poet-philosopher and son of the Punjab, Sir Muhammad (Allama) Iqbal (1877 – 1938). There is a bitter irony not lost on most of the subsequent critics in political science of the original men who imagined the country into existence, for whom Islam was, at best, a noble lie, the best means to build the ‘Muslim Zion’ after the violence of Partition. Twelve million were forced to migrate in the maelstrom of communal violence to either side of the divide. Pakistan was to provide a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims in India, then a minority under the British Raj. For Iqbal, second only to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, or Great Leader who wrested Pakistan from Congress, Islam also offered some unique sociological advantages over Christianity.
In a lecture from 1930, ‘On the Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam’, Iqbal contrasts the anarchy into which Muslims were cast under Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’ and Turkish nationalists after the abolition of the Caliphate six years earlier; in his reformist mode of thinking Iqbal claimed that the message of equality in Christianity, ‘long before Islam,’ could only have a realistic chance of actualisation in a faith that wasn’t fundamentally world-renouncing and yet at the same time complicit with the status quo:
Primitive Christianity was founded, not as a political or civil unit, but as a monastic order in a profane world, having nothing to do with civil affairs, and obeying the Roman authority practically in all matters. The result of this was that when the State became Christian, State and Church confronted each other as distinct powers with interminable boundary disputes between them. Such a thing could never happen in Islam; for Islam was from the very beginning a civil society, having received from the Qur’an a set of simple legal principles which, like the twelve tables of the Romans, carried, as experience subsequently proved, great potentialities of expansion and development by interpretation. The Nationalist [sic] theory of state, therefore, is misleading inasmuch as it suggests a dualism which does not exist in Islam.
If only Muslims could reach and read back into their glorious past to recover the simple message of fundamentally equal citizenship, which unlike the use of antiquity by the philosophes and statesmen of European modernity, lead only to violence between warring states. Moreover, Muslims in South Asia could improve on the traumatic and essentially foreign experimentation which the Young Turks were conducting at the time. The conquering aspect of Islam militant, since Mahmud of Ghazni’s raids in the Punjab in 997 CE, for the reformist agenda of Iqbal is a guarantee of peaceable cohabitation of people of different faiths throughout history. The subtle influence of militarism is discernible as a second atavistic recourse to the idea of nation, in order to solve once and for all the problems of capitalist expansion by competing states, gathered momentum. Iqbal casts his interpretation in respectably Republican mould but Iqbal’s intellectual training in Munich rather than Cambridge is to the fore. The imaginative staple of Cold War warriors who see ‘Muslim Rage’ at the grassroots amongst unemployed youth from lower middle-class families in the aftermath of secular pan-Arabism, or more expansively, in a clash of civilisations – which the west will inevitably lose – was first adopted by members of the Muslim elite like Iqbal to tutor their British colonial masters. In Iqbal’s famous Allahabad address in 1930, the Muslim nation was immanent in Islam itself:
Indeed the first practical step that Islam took towards the realisation of a final combination of humanity was to call upon peoples possessing practically the same ethical ideal to come forward and combine. The Quran declares: “O people of the Book! Come, let us join together on the ‘word’ (Unity of God), that is common to us all.”
Islam as gifting civil society to peoples, its pragmatic resolution of Church and state, who would give these notions credit today? Despite Milbus, or ‘military capital used for the personal benefit of the military fraternity’ in Ayesha Siddiqa’s account, for most Pakistanis, the army remains the abiding institution in which Iqbal’s ideal of an ecumenical Islam can survive the predations of a civilian governing class. This populist appeal to Spartan values beyond the cadres of Pakistan’s army transcends all sectarian divides in the country and it gives Pakistan its peculiar character; it is the sole reason why Pakistan at least historically has an enduring appeal to the warlords who dictate the shape of the world in Washington in the Age of Terror; it is why ordinary Pakistanis continue to believe that the Army will protect them from Jamaat-ul-Ahra and other Pakistani Taliban groups which afflict civil society.
Usman Ali (University of Management and Technology, Lahore) and I decided to explore Christian minority experience in Lahore and some of the questions we were interesting in finding explanations for concerned the situation on the ground for Christian Pakistanis who have no choice but to live in a country facing a marked rise in intolerance for their co-religionists. For many Pakistanis, a new battle front is opening up about the future of the country since Iqbal and Jinnah, the line is drawn between secularists and the masses. Ordinary citizens learn to adapt to the endless checkpoints dividing urban spaces. The usually exceptional deployment of armed paramilitary ‘Rangers’ to combat unrest is now increasingly normalised as media alerts the Pakistani public to risks to shopping malls, schools and railway stations. The transformation of public space into militarised zones in order to combat the danger of suicide bombers is taken for granted, many check underneath their cars for bombs before the drive home from work. Usman Ali is a Lahori, he has lived amongst the communities he researches. As an academic with a critical view of development initiatives, he and I were both aware that the predominantly secular and liberal bias through which aid is funnelled by foreign donors will reach specific explanatory limits once we listen to the voice of Christians in Pakistan. The country’s baroque NGO bureaucracy often serves to reinforce simplistic notions about the victims of violence: the policy solutions available to traditionally marginalised minorities; the specifically economic modes of ‘self-empowerment’ which the ‘agents of social change’ are charged in bringing about in their own communities; the great goal of recruiting special individuals who can lead and so change group consciousness. These are all myths. And they are political myths. Where does this myth derive from? ‘The nationalists,’ Gyandendra Pandey states in The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) ‘recognize communalism as a problem of recent origins, as the outcome basically of economic and political inequality, and as the handiwork of a handful of self-interested elite groups (colonial and native), with the mass of the people remaining largely unaffected.’ This was the idea we wanted to test in our research.
We conducted interviews in enclaves or, as they are known, in Joseph and Youhanabad colonies. One of the most surprising findings to emerge from our research was the way in which Christians, poor and relatively well-off alike, depart from this view as an explanation for why they are subjected to what Pandey elsewhere calls ‘residual’ violence; this is the name he gives to all acts of aggression which cannot be characterised with ‘an approved scientific name’ which are a by-product of development: ‘war, mutiny, punishment, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations.’ In other words, Christian Pakistanis, seasoned activists, as well as their constituencies of poor classes – men, women and children over whom Section 295c of Pakistan’s Penal Code, in the words of Bashir Emmanuel, a rickshaw driver, is like a sword dangling over their heads – do not single out their socio-economic predicament because of Muslim elites. We talked to Bashir Emmanuel because he lost his son Akaash in one of two attacks on Christ Church on 15th March, 2015. Akaash had tried to prevent the suicide bomber from entering the church to murder the congregation. In his moving account, Bashir Emmanuel told us how proud he was and how Akaash’s martyrdom as symbol has inspired Christian youth in the neighbourhood to defend their community against terrorist attacks. But what was unusual was the account by Akaash’s mother who told us how her son, objecting to his parents’ concerns over his decision to do security duty at church, wanted to go into Pakistan’s army, and ‘if we do not do security [in English] for God’s house, who will?’
sharing memories of his son in Youhanabad colony, Lahore
Christian villages, founded by Jesuit priests and Capuchin friars under the British Raj, preceded the birth of Pakistan. Jinnah’s strong message of secular inclusion after secession from India to a new nation continues to resonate: ‘You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that is nothing to do with the business of the State.’ Moves are afoot to include Jinnah’s speech in the national curriculum. And Pakistan is in dire need of this lesson. For Major Michael John of the Salvation Army, the son of a padre, lifelong activist and provider of welfare to the most indigent, the appeal of Iqbal’s message for unity would take a specifically civic form: he told us how ‘Iman mazhab se zyaada hai,’ faith is greater than religious creed. Michael John had personally witnessed the immediate aftermath of communal violence in the village of Koriyan in Gojra in 2009. As is often the case, a rumour that a copy of the Qur’an had been desecrated started to be spread by those intent on restoring social status after a local dispute concerning wedding celebrations by a Christian family during the period of mourning for the death of a Muslim local notable had arisen. The mob violence left at least nine dead, Michael John describes how he was the first to arrive. Despite the violence of this depressing scene, Michael John declares that ‘He who opens his tongue against the Prophet and prophets [nabi paghambar] must be mad, he cannot be normal [in English],’ referring to Section 295c which punishes with death anyone found guilty of using ‘derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet.’ The BBC recently reported the posthumous uses being made of Mumtaz Qadri amongst religious parties in Pakistan, including a grand mausoleum. Qadri, a police bodyguard murdered Salmaan Taseer, Governor of Punjab in January 2011 because the politician had publicly defended the right to due process of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi. She had been alleged to have committed the crime of blasphemy.
On 24th Match, 2016, a shopkeeper Asad Shah, a member of the Quadiani or Ahmaddiya sect was killed by Tanveer Ahmad, a member of the Barelvi sect. Aamer Anwar, in his capacity as Rector at the University of Glasgow said that “A very small minority of the community may think it’s OK to meddle in the cesspit of violent extremist politics in Pakistan, but we are united in saying that we do not want to import sectarian violence that has caused so much division and so much bloodshed to our community or to our streets.” The lawyer’s forceful message to local Muslims significantly underestimates the nature and impact of communalism in Pakistan. Why is religious sentiment in the C21st still a potent force for those who seek radical change in the social order? The capacity of governing elites to respond to any violence against minorities, residual or otherwise, is not just an issue of frontline societal significance for security analysts who want to find a way of modelling the policy response to ‘jihad’, for academics like me or for the public in South Asia.
The Shawlands shopkeeper in Glasgow paid with his life for asserting on social media that he was a prophet, that from an early age, he too like the founder of Islam, in emulation of the ‘the beloved’ of God, was called on to fulfil the promise (or ‘mission’, Shah says in English) of Islam. The Messianic character of the Quadiani faith as vow or pledge, with its subtle influence of Christian doctrine in imitatio Christi, is apparent here. In the wake of the popular shopkeeper’s murder, Aamer Anwar, also a prominent lawyer, was responding to allegations that another community leader, Sabir Ali, the head of religious events at Glasgow Central mosque, was the local president of the Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP), a militant political party that the Pakistani government has failed to proscribe. In addition to Section 295c of Chapter 15, Section 298c of the Pakistan Penal Code punishes any blasphemous act by a ‘Person of Quadiani group, etc., calling himself a Muslim or preaching or propagating his faith.’
On the one hand, we still have a lot to learn about the social impact on ordinary lives of these often complex dynamics of residual violence between minorities and Muslims. Are we going to ignore the evidence which promises to tell us more about these apparently spontaneous eruptions of violence? Shall we dismiss these conflicts as typical of societies with corrupt postcolonial states? The Quadianis or Ahmadiyya community was founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian who believed that his message of peace, in contrast to Muslim militancy against the British Raj at the time, was consistent with the prophecy in the Qur’an of a Messah or Mahdi who will usher in Judgement Day. Leaving aside the SSP, Secunder Kirmani for the BBC alleges that Tanveer Ahmad’s brutality in the UK was inspired by his faith as a Barelvi. For many like Ahmad, the Pakistan Supreme Court’s decision to execute Mumtaz Qadri could only be the subversion by judicial means of the norms of a society where love and devotion to the Prophet as an immortal and living presence in the world falls upon all Pakistanis as a religious duty in order to combat the dark forces of jahiliyya or ignorance fostered by western emulation. Since Iqbal and Jinnah’s day, the world has shrunk considerably and if all Pakistanis are to unite as People of the Book, we first have to re-examine how the Muslim Zion can constitute a national culture beyond the abstract universality of religion.
Dr Naheem Jabbar is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth: correspondence email: naheem.jabbar@port.ac.uk.