When leaders of countries mix religion with politics, they say and do outrageous things which often have far-reaching consequences
S IFTIKHAR MURSHED
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he founding fathers of the US were remarkable statesmen whose vision is relevant to our times. The fourth president of that country, James Madison wrote: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.” The lessons from this norm have still not been learnt.
When leaders of countries mix religion with politics, they say and do outrageous things which often have far-reaching consequences. Nine years back, US President George Bush is reported to have told the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas: “I am driven with a mission from God. God tells me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorist in Afghanistan and I did; and then God tells me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.” The hideous fallout is all too apparent.
In Iran on January 16, 1979 the tyrannical rule of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who preferred to be known by the grandiloquent ‘Shahanshah Aryamehr’, came to an end. Two weeks later on February 1, the aircraft carrying Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran’s Mehrabad airport and thus began the Iranian revolution. The long night of oppression in the guise of religion has still not ended.
India, which unfailingly projects itself as the biggest democracy of the world, also has a sordid history of religion-motivated violence. Its current leadership is in the habit of making statements based on absurd interpretations of the country’s ancient religious texts. Recently Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the Hindu scriptures demonstrated that genetic science and plastic surgery were prevalent in India thousands of years ago.
India, which unfailingly projects itself as the biggest democracy of the world, also has a sordid history of religion-motivated violence. Its current leadership is in the habit of making statements based on absurd interpretations of the country’s ancient religious texts. Recently Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the Hindu scriptures demonstrated that genetic science and plastic surgery were prevalent in India thousands of years ago.
In his keynote address at the inauguration of the Reliance Foundation Hospital and Research Centre on October 25, Modi declared: “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at the time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.”
He then alluded to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, also known as Ganapati or Vinayaka, one of the most worshiped deities in the Hindu pantheon, and claimed that, “there must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who put an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began practice of plastic surgery.”
But it is the story of Pakistan that is utterly ghastly. The leaders of the country, past and present, supported by clerics have distorted the teachings of the sacred Quran. The consequence has been that Jinnah’s Pakistan was transformed into Coleridge’s depiction in his 1797 poem Kubla Khan of Xanadu as “A savage place! as holy and enchanted as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover!”
Scholars interpret the verse as representing the dark side of the soul, the dehumanizing effect of power and dominion. This has been the experience of Pakistan after the adoption of the Objectives Resolution by the constituent assembly on March 12, 1949.
The resolution was shepherded by the non-elected first prime minister of the country, Liaquat Ali Khan. Some members of the constituent assembly feared that it portended the birth of religious fanaticism and they were proved right. Non-Muslims suffered the most.
An analyst recently recalled that in 1950 non-Muslims in Pakistan numbered 11 million out of a total population of 76 million. He claimed that there are now only seven million even though the number of people in the country has soared to 180,000 million.
The statistics are probably inaccurate because there has been no census since 1998. The first was in 1951, and later in 1961, 1972, 1981 and then in 1998. In the 16 years since then, the current population is likely to be around 200 million.
Against this, the sharp decline in the number of non-Muslims is a gruesome indicator of their plight. They live in perpetual fear and are victims of a systematic pogrom more hideous than the Inquisition in post-Reformation Europe. The difference is that in Europe those condemned for heresy were burnt at the stake, here they are tortured in front of their children and then incinerated in the raging flames of brick kilns.
This is what happened the other day at Kot Radha Kishan and such incidents keep recurring with alarming frequency. Instead of moving decisively against religious extremists, successive governments have gone the extra mile to appease them for political gains.
Thus Zulfikar Ali Bhutto excommunicated Ahmadis and enforced prohibition. Ziaul Haq went many steps further by promulgating the blasphemy laws and the Hudood Ordinances. He then incorporated the Objectives Resolution as an operative part of the constitution but only after deleting the word ‘freely’ from the original formulation, “Minorities can freely profess and practice their religion.”
The country has drifted far into the turbulent waters of fanatical religious obscurantism. But there is still time to navigate its way back to the safety of the shores. The remedy lies in the correct interpretation of the Quran.
It is in pre-partition India, and, not in the vast desert expanses of the Arab regions that reformists such as Shah Waliullah (1703-1762), acknowledged as the founder of modern Islamic thought, blazed the trail.
He fearlessly rejected taqlid (the thoughtless imitation of early scholars), supported ijtihad (independent reasoning), and insisted on the application of new ideas in interpreting the Quran. By moving away from blind adherence to tradition, Shah Waliullah administered a crippling blow on widely accepted notions relating to the principles of exegesis.
But perhaps one of the most radical attempts to reinterpret the Quran was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s (1817-1898) six-volume work which was published in 1879. He staunchly believed that Muslims had to revisit their traditions, discard fossilized dogma, and, in the words of Pervez Hoodbhoy, “make Islam compatible with post-Renaissance western humanistic and scientific ideas.”
So powerful were his thoughts that more than a hundred years later the Aligarh Muslim University, according to The Times of India (November 26, 1988), decided against publishing an English translation of his Quran commentary for fear of provoking a fundamentalist backlash.
Maulvi Cheragh Ali (1844-1895), a leading Islamic scholar of 19th century India and a close associate of Sir Syed, also took it upon himself to correct the misperceptions among Muslims about Islam. In his 1885 work, A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad, he concluded: “The Mohammedan common law… mostly consists of uncertain traditions, Arab usages and customs…”
These words are relevant to our times. The blasphemy laws as they exist in Pakistan should be drastically altered to bring them into conformity with the actual injunctions of the sacred scripture. Till that happens there will be no end to religion-motivated violence, particularly against non-Muslims.
These laws are not sacrosanct – they are man-made. More than 50 years before the promulgation of the blasphemy laws and the Hudood Ordinances, Allama Iqbal (1877-1938) wrote in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, “We should bear in mind that from the earliest times, particularly up to the rise of the Abbasides, there was no written law of Islam apart from the Quran.”
Iqbal thus envisaged a Muslim state in which Islam was shorn of the dross that had accumulated over the centuries. He dreamt of a state where liberal thought would coexist with the true spirit of the faith.
But the poison of religious extremism has spread far and wide across the fabric of Pakistani society. On Friday a prominent PTI parliamentarian felt the need to declare on television that all non-Muslims were ‘kafirs’. One shudders at the thought of what the ‘new Pakistan’ that Imran Khan keeps talking about will bring.