Attacks on Churches and Mob Violence in Lahore

TRANSCENDING THE US VERSUS THEM PARADIGM

Maryam Sakeenah

My parents chose to send me to a Christian missionary school- a decision I have always been grateful to them for. The Convent’s ‘Character Building’ programme instilled in me values which, owing to the essential kinship of the Abrahamic faiths, facilitated my appreciation and practice of my own faith as a Muslim later in life.

Incidentally, all serving staff in my household happen to be Christians. In Ramazan they prepare the Iftar, and at Christmas and Easter we give them an extra something to partake of the family festivity. Through all my extensive and longstanding interaction with Christian friends, colleagues, subordinates, there is no unpleasant or uncomfortable memory I have. And I know I am no exception.

In fact, when I condoled with my Christian domestic help about the unfortunate recent events targeting churches in Lahore, I sensed in their comments the same sentiment I have gleaned from my experience as a Pakistani Muslim. ‘We have been brothers and sisters living together for decades- there was never a problem. And now some unknown enemies wanting this country’s destruction want to create hate. We have nothing against each other- Muslims too are under attack from the same people. We need to be together’, said my illiterate Christian kitchen helper- (translation my own).     

There was an understanding even within these unlettered members of a less privileged minority community that something had gone wrong in recent years; that violent religious hate was not the ethos of this land; and that there was a common enemy out there whose triumph was in sowing discord and hate between the two communities.

And yet ironically I find a complete absence of this simple understanding in the opinions of vociferous social media commentators both from the secular-liberal and conservative perspectives. In fact, the polarity in their views is striking whenever I browse through my newsfeed. While sadness over the attack on the churches was palpable among all shades of opinion, there was a callous lack of sympathy for the innocent Muslim victims of the post-bombing mob-lynching by Christians, and a brazen attempt to paint the ensuing violence by Christian mobsters as ‘but natural.’ This selective sympathy shows our own deeply rooted prejudices. On the other extreme there are outrageous calls for indiscriminate reprisal against the Christian community of Youhannabad where the lynchings happened.

The problem with the narrative that emerges from these polarized, clashing perspectives is that it sees the recent events through the blood-stained lens of ‘Us versus Them’; as a ‘Christian versus Muslim’ issue which is both inaccurate as well as dangerous. In fact, the terrible mob violence that occurred in the wake of the church bombing was also a tragic result of dangerously viewing the attack on the church as ‘Muslim’ violence against ‘Christian’ victims. More accurately, it was violence by an extremist militant minority group for whom all who do not share their violent ideology are potential targets.  This is why the anger was directed at Muslims who had been engaged in routine business in the Christian locality. The two innocents picked for the barbaric lynching were lighter skinned (a characteristic of the Pashtuns) and at least one of them bearded. The mob violence was hence fired by ethno-religious stereotyping and the blind hate born of such prejudices.

In response to the ensuing violence by the Youhannabad locals there is brewing anger amidst neighbouring Muslim communities which sets the stage for potential clashes waiting in the wing. In the climate of fear and anger many families in Youhannabad are planning to relocate or have done so already. This is the triumph of the real enemy as it fulfils the malevolent agenda perfectly. The victory of the enemy is when its victim turns into a savage perpetrator like itself, continuing the cycle of violence.

Violent incidents targeting the Christian community in Pakistan in the recent past certainly fuel the anger by creating genuine and understandable grievances. However, it has to be understood that such targeting of the Christian community has always been resented and rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population of this country; and that the extremists involved in terror attacks on Christians are a fringe element rejected by the mainstream public opinion. Terrorist outfits are all out to exact vengeance that spares none- mosque, imambargah, church- Muslim, Christian, Shiite- all are fellow sufferers in this great calamity that has gripped us as the terrible cost of owning the US’s Great War on Terror.

The Christian community of Pakistan never has been, is not and should never be an oppressed minority hated and targeted by Pakistan’s Muslim majority. Those trying to reinforce this idea- whether extreme rightwingers, conservatives or the secular liberals- are utterly wrong. This is a false picture that will fuel more rage and blind hate.

What is required in the wake of this frenzied violence is a communal introspection by both communities. The Christian community needs to examine why its young members descended into such rank savagery, and must take responsibility to curtail simmering violence that utterly betrays the Christian spirit of forbearance and compassion. The Muslim community must also engage in a serious endeavour to root out the ire and vengeful streak building up in its ranks in this charged atmosphere.       

The pulpit and the minbar both must take up their vital roles to defeat this false ‘Us versus Them’ narrative. Both religions contain voluminous and powerful content on tolerance and compassion which needs to resonate to drown this madness in the name of faith. Faith must be the healing, the mending and the force inspiring peacemaking. The Quran questions the validity of a faith that justifies and inspires evil. "Say: "Worst indeed is that which your faith enjoins on you- if you indeed are believers." (2:93) It reminds us with a vital message that has never been as relevant as it is today. “Let not the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just: that is nearer to piety... Verily, Allah is Well-Acquainted with what you do.”  (5:8)

In the midst of this senseless melee of wrathful hate, the words of Islam’s blessed Prophet (PBUH) for his Christian citizenry from Najran become a beautiful encore played to a deaf audience.

"This is a message from [Prophet] Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.
Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.
No compulsion [in religion] is to be on them.
Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries.
No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses.
Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate...
...Their Churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.
No one of the nation (of Muslims) is to disobey this covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)." (Text of the Charter of Privileges, Treaty of Najran)

Pakistan's Response to the Peshawar Attack

LOSING HEAD AND HEART

Maryam Sakeenah

Tragedies like the one in Peshawar are litmus tests for any nation- either bringing out the best, or exposing the bare bones. Pakistan’s response is curiously similar to the U.S response to 9/11. The fact that the U.S’s counter-terror strategy accounts for the genesis of a much more brutal TTP and ISIS is lost to us. In the same manner as the US filled up prisons contravening law and depriving suspects and inmates of fair judicial process in its paranoia after 9/11, Pakistan is all set to establish special military courts in contravention of constitutional procedure, for swift conviction of ‘terrorists.’ The horrors that were unleashed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the name of national security are a forgotten narrative in the new Pakistan post 16/12.

Our collective response to the tragedy shows a febrile national demand for vengeance. Ironically, we are baying for the enemy’s blood just like the enemy is baying for ours- in the process, we lose the moral high ground we think we possess. In the process, ‘the faces change from pig to man and man to pig, and pig to man again- and already it is becoming impossible to say which was which.’

At present there are two extremist discourses in the country: the first, of course, is personified by the likes of the clerics at Lal Masjid and other fanatical groups, invoking religion to justify fanatical militancy. This religious extremism has come handy for movements like the Taliban who hide behind it for moral cover of their actions. There is, however, another extremist discourse: it comes from the liberals who have joined the chorus for an unrelenting militarist approach in response to the Peshawar attack. This high-pitched chorus decries any counter narrative or stirring of dissent. In the new Pakistan post 16/12, no one can take a different approach to dealing with the problem of terrorism in Pakistan, and have their opinion respected.

Anyone who does not take sides in these extremist discourses and believes in giving a chance to stable peace through justice and effective longterm peacebuilding is termed unpatriotic at best, and a terrorist-sympathizer, even supporter more commonly. There is no room for dissent. In this extremist furore, all hardline stances seem to have suddenly been vindicated. The iron-fisted policies of Musharraf that helped create the TTP are now being interpreted as farsighted wisdom. Frenzied calls for razing madrassahs to the ground or burning down mosques no longer sound outrageous in the spirit of febrile jingoism.

The strongly militarist strategy  gives overweening powers to the army to deal with an issue that requires a more variegated longterm approach. It is likely to turn the country into a military state. The policy is uninsightful as it aims to do more of the same that created this monster, in order to eliminate it. The TTP emerged as a much more brutal and militant force than the original Taliban movement as a result of Pakistan’s disastrous decision to support the US in Afghanistan and sending its forces in the tribal areas to stop support for the anti-US Afghan resistance. This made the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes turn their guns against the Pakistan army and state. A renunciation of this ill-advised national policy is necessary as a first step to heal and rebuild, even as we take necessary firm action against the unrelenting perpetrators. Besides, the clandestine channels of support and funding to these militant groups must be traced and exposed before the nation. The enemy is not just the gun-toting Taliban militant, but his trainer, financier and facilitator. These vital connections have always been the state’s well-kept secret. And now, questions cannot be asked as we give a free rein to the military to ‘exterminate all brutes.’

In the tide of this nationalistic fervour to exterminate the brutes, drone operations in Pakistan suddenly and silently receive endorsement by national consensus. Questions are no longer welcome about civilian casualties or other fallout of the operation in the tribal areas. Answers are no longer deserved by the nation. The supreme ultimate goal is invincible national security, and ‘to this end, all means must give way.’ While the need for security is vital and understandable, bypassing all that is legal and rational and moral ought to be taken with a pinch of salt.   

The deeper problems have to be dealt with through a wider, more insightful non-military approach: combating extremist discourse that misuses religion to justify terrorism and creating an effective counter discourse; listening and understanding, dialogue, mutual compromise and reconciliation; rehabilitation and peacebuilding. There are numerous examples in the past- even the recent past- of how war-ravaged communities drenched in the memory of oppression and pain, seething with unrelenting hate, have undertaken peacebuilding with some success. Possibilities to create the conditions that had led to ceasefires that brought temporary respite to the nation during this war, should have been explored with sincerity.

The series of executions after the Peshawar tragedy is also regrettable on many counts.  Many of these convicts were juveniles when they committed the crime, brainwashed and swayed by passions. Many had confessions extracted through torture. These were the small fry, while the big fish have escaped the noose. So many high profile murderers and criminals go scot free, whereas these brainwashed juvenile offenders from an ethnic minority, a disadvantaged background are picked out selectively for blind 'justice.' Selective justice is injustice. Two such cases which have been highlighted by human rights groups are that of Shafqat Hussain convicted at the age of 14, and Mushtaq Ahmed who was tortured into a confession without being given access to a fair trial.

Our uninsightful reactionary policies reflect a loss of head and heart in the wake of the Peshawar tragedy. In this feverish frenzy of extremisms baying for each others blood, voices of moderation , justice and peace are dying out.  And the rest is Silence.    

ISIS: the need to understand

THE AUDACIOUS VENTURE TO UNDERSTAND

 Maryam Sakeenah

A good deal has been said about ISIS being a grotesque travesty of Islam and a defiant rejection of all that is commonly held to be moral and humane. Islamic scholars from a variety of denominations have come forward with a single voice to condemn it as a grave wrong, and this of course was vital and timely. However, condemnation alone misses a vital point; it flatly rests on the surface of a much deeper phenomenon.

It is more helpful to engage in an effort to understand- because when groups like ISIS emerge, we are warned that something about our collective humanity has gone terribly wrong. When human beings take up ruthless violence against one another, it shakes our faith in humanity. And yet the perpetrators and oppressors are not any less human than the rest of us- so what disfigured our humanity that we became capable of systematically inflicting pain on others and then celebrating it in the name of ideology?

Phenomena like ISIS are not rare in human history. But to begin to solve a recurring problem we do not need to just condemn, but to understand. A serious and honest effort at understanding is essential because when we engage in it we identify the deep-seated grievances and pent-up feelings of being wronged without redress that fuel the vicious cycle of reactionary violence.

But understanding becomes difficult when we ‘otherize’ and then condemn the ‘other’ whom we have created in our morally superior self-perception. The interconnectedness of a globalized world shows the error in viewing phenomena in isolation from contexts and other events- contemporary or historical. So much of what we see happening today can somehow or the other be traced to events that took place in the recent or not-so-recent past.

It certainly adds a deeper dimension to our understanding to remind ourselves that ISIS was born in the detention camps of the US in Iraq, and got recruits from refugee facilities during and shortly after the US invasion. This gives the context to the radicalization of many of the human beings who now associate themselves with the group.

Lest we forget, Iraq was invaded in 2003 on an utterly false pretext of the threat of what was virtually a dysfunctional and impotent weapons programme. The official strategy of the invasion was ‘Shock and Awe’, which explicitly called for ‘paralyzing the country... destroying food production, water supplies and infrastructure’; the strategy involved the use of chemical weapons- white phosphorus, to name one- in civilian areas which has so far led to hundreds of thousands of stillbirths and birth defects other than instant fatalities. 740,000 women are war widows, 4.5 million were rendered homeless. Hundreds of thousands were made refugees during the brutal invasion of Fallujah alone that left 70% of the town’s buildings completely destroyed. Prison abuse and torture by US soldiers in Iraq has been brought to light, but so much remains still shrouded in history’s oblivion. But while mass deception may hide this narrative from public perception, it lives and rankles in the memories and consciousness of the victims and the witnesses. As the African proverb goes, 'The Axe forgets what the Tree remembers.'

When disempowered human beings are subjected to ignominious occupation and oppression, they will seek redress in militant, often frenzied ways; they will cling on to ideologies that legitimize and glorify the revenge which they believe is the vent. The direct experience of torture and killing desensitizes sensibilities from the use of violence on others, and routinizes it.

The mistake we make is when we locate the root of the problem with violent groups in the ideology they associate themselves with. In doing so, we fail to see the roots that run deeper. Violent ideologies triumph in violent contexts.

When we condemn such groups and vow to strike back with force against them, we again miss the point that to stem violence we need to understand what fuels it- and in most cases, what fuels it is not ideology but the ignominy of defeat and oppressive occupation. Ideology helps later to corroborate, legitimize and sanctify. Hence military operations against such organizations have not yielded stable and enduring peace.

At the terrible risk of being judged as the devil’s advocate, I dare to understand  that it may at times and in part be the work of our own hands that nurtures extremist violence . As long as such wrongs continue to be done to human beings by the powerful, violent groups seeking lost pride will continue to proliferate in multifarious forms- sometimes as Khmer Rouge, sometimes as ISIS or as the undiscovered many who may just be in various stages of their genesis that contemporary global politics fosters.   

Tableeghi Jamat Targeted in Pakistan...

A QUIET GRANDEUR: A CRITICIAL (read ‘Sympathetic’) APPRAISAL OF THE TABLEEGHI JAMAT

Maryam Sakeenah

My attempts at landing upon an official Tableeghi Jamat statement on the attacks on a Tableeghi centre in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) and on Tableeghi Jamat members in Karachi fell in vain. I ceased to wonder when I chanced to meet a lady who was an acquaintance of one of the victims of the mosque target-killing in Karachi. With remarkable serenity and a muted delight on her face that was almost transcendental, she mentioned how the deceased from South Africa had always harboured the hope to die in Pakistan- the place where the work of Tableegh had been revived after the first generation of Muslims (salaf), and upon the same model.

It was one of those moments one feels so foolish, one does not have anything to say as one tries to grapple with a sublime yet humbling understanding. I understood why my attempt to look up Tableeghi Jamat’s ‘official statement’ on the targeting of its associates was incredibly unintelligent and utterly in vain.

In my search for an anchor and handhold in this Roller-coaster Ride to Nowhere that life sometimes seems to become, I had been in and out of a dizzying variety of religious groups and organizations: big and small, spiritual and political, militant and pacifist, sectarian and pluralist... yet it never seemed a final Homecoming, and I was always an unsettled, restive maverick- desperately seeking, perpetually and hopelessly unfulfilled. But the long, exhausting and frustrating journey was never in vain_ because I read the pointers all along the way. I experienced, I learnt, I understood... 

Travelling on life's winding ways eventually afforded a rare opportunity for close, firsthand observation of a phenomenon I had always had a blind spot towards: the silently grandiose project of the Tableeghi Jamat. The work of Tableegh hinges on fundamental Islamic ethics and values, and demonstrates great spiritual discipline. The Tableeghi Jamat operates with mindboggling organization and efficiency which becomes even more awe-inspiring given the fact that it is entirely autonomous with no source of external funding or even any necessary financial contribution from workers. In fact, there does not even exist any rigid organizational structure, any formal administrative hierarchy or even a membership procedure. This is also why there is no official record of the number of workers in Tableegh- Wikipedia estimates it at 120 million, but it is highly likely for the numbers to be much vaster- the footprint of the work of the Tableegh is literally everywhere- from the remotest areas in rural Pakistan to nations abroad- with workers ranging from every social class, group and ethnicity, striving for personal spiritual purification and that of fellow beings. A tableegh associate from the US observes: ‘Unlike Christian missions with millions of dollars of funding these people include the likes of people I have heard about who polished shoes in a bazaar in Pakistan, sold their clothes and walked on foot in East Africa with barely any food-  to call people to Allah.’

During my years of self discovery and my informal study of Islam I had often wrestled with obstinate questions for which answers often remained elusive. The stunningly simple, incredibly straight, quiet and consistent way of the Tableegh addressed and even resolved most of those.

I used to wonder why I, having been raised in Islam should have a privilege over those raised in other faith traditions, when my choice to be born with the Islamic faith handed down to me was not a witting one. So how can eternal salvation depend upon an inherited faith or a privilege of upbringing as we self-righteously damn those denied the same.  I began to see faith less as a privilege and more as an enormous trust and responsibility that had to be shared_ and that mankind’s deprivation from the sweetness of Eeman is the burden of those entrusted with it. Tableeghi Jamat, with its simple emphasis on ‘Dawah’ (Invitation to Faith) and reinvigoration of faith through sharing and including concedes to the idea that faith is a responsibility towards mankind and the world, and that the misguidance and evil of this world is our problem; and that for the purgation and salvation of mankind every iota of individual effort must be spent. This intense spiritual drive is not born out of religious chauvinism or self righteous, narcissistic proselytism, but out of a sincerity that is inherently humane and compassionate (khalis) towards fellow beings; a selflessness that beautifies. The characteristic humility and heartwarming gentility of those working in the path of the Tableegh thus stands explained.

Many who proclaim religious association use it for a comfortable sense of self-righteousness that lulls and dulls the self-reprimanding conscience; or for other selfish purposes, since religiosity is highly venerated in this society. Yet the demand and the right of religion on us is that it be submitted to; that we give ourselves to it and in the process learn to give up all that is profane and degenerate. The essence of faith is submission, which is attained when we learn to let go of the self and forego its selfishness. The highest expression and evidence of this submission is sacrifice. The work of Tableegh in the path of God and His people is essentially a sacrifice every step of the way, requiring precious time, energy, financial contribution and distance from one’s nearest and dearest. It requires dealing with adverse and hostile circumstances and with all kinds of people while keeping one’s poise and spiritual largesse for the sake of Allah. This is in the footsteps of the first generation of Islam. Walking in this blessed path means that in turn one receives spiritual bounties, rising to a higher station of spirituality.

The Tableegh brings together a rare and perfectly blended mix of individualist and communitarian approaches. While the prime focus is the tazkiyah (inner purification) of every individual, and individuals rather than groups are reached out to, yet there is a strongly communitarian dimension. The work involves connecting and bonding with others for naught else but compassion and a shared faith and vision. The purity and selflessness of this bond gets people together indissolubly. The beauty of the connection can only be experienced.

A particularly interesting regular Tableegh activity is the weekly ‘Gasht’- walking on foot door to door to invite others to pray in the neighbourhood mosque and to stay for a short religious sitting afterwards. A Pakistani-American approached by some participants of a Tableeghi Gasht says, ‘The knock of a few simply dressed men asking me to come pray in the mosque right across my house may have been the very way to the corridor to change I wished for...’ He goes on to add: ‘In all major cities in the US they do some work- very humble, peaceful and honest people who have doors slammed on their faces but do not get discouraged. May Allah protect the sisters and brothers associated with it.’

But while the Tableegh is primarily a spiritual enterprise, it strongly bears upon society and politics with its characteristic quiet persistence. While many contemporary religious groups prioritize political ascendancy and power, making all else conditional upon that, the Tableegh has a sounder basis more in tune with the Prophetic method.

The understanding is based upon the  idea that our collective affairs are a sum of our individual states, therefore the means to purge and mend society is through spiritual purification at the personal level. Through this individual spiritual revival all levels of society can be impacted and dented into. With this bottom-up approach, individual moral purification radiates towards the echelons of power and authority as the work of tableegh quietly pervades.

Restraint from direct involvement in the business of power politics also brings the additional advantage of safe operation without raising suspicion and alarm. Some months ago when the Interior Minister Rehman Malik accused the Jamat of harbouring terrorists, prominent politicians from a number of parties with no religious associations denounced the statement and defended the activities of the Jamat as purely a moral-spiritual project. The widespread support from all sections of society that the Jamat garnered in the wake of the recent heinous attack at its centre in Peshawar is overwhelming and something to speak of, as no other contemporary religious group in Pakistan can match this level of deep-rooted acceptance and appreciation among the masses. 

The Tableegh’s enthusiastic renunciation of ideological/political associations or any sectarian posturing and its exclusive emphasis on basic religio-spiritual values make its approach an antidote to virulent sectarianism gnawing into this society. It even serves as an effective antidote to militant Salafism which rejects traditional Islamic scholarship in favour of a literalist, inflexible and revisionist interpretation. By holding on to traditional sunni Islam interpreted by the Hanafi school of thought, the Tableegh dissociates itself from contemporary Salafism. The Hanafi madhab is largely followed in the subcontinent, which is why the Tableegh has become well-entrenched in the society, owned by the generality of the population, and capable of the mass appeal it has garnered.

On the question of Jihad, the Tableeghi Jamat believes the option of using military means cannot be used when the spiritual and social project of Islam has not been taken up effectively and the mission to convey the Message completely and universally (itmam ul hujjah) not yet fulfilled. Moreover, with the prevailing moral degeneracy in Muslim societies, Jihad in the field is irrelevant and self-defeating. Ignominy and oppression will crush Muslim subjects as long as there is no genuine effort at moral and spiritual uplift, as Allah says: ‘God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves.’ Contemporary Salafist Jihadism (other than in isolated instances of self-defence against direct oppression) is thus in vain. This understanding is also inspired by a humane concern and compassion.  Jihad against the infidel without having tried to present the Message in its entirety and pristine character is a poor substitute for the more compassionate overture towards the enemy_ that is, winning him over to faith through upstanding moral conduct, sincerely reaching out and striving for the establishment of peace and justice. A senior of the Tableegh is said to have remarked something to this effect to someone seeking clarification on the Jamat’s stance on Jihad: ‘You Jihadists help fill up the hellfire with infidels while we change hearts to get candidates for paradise.’ Contemporary Jihadists, according to the Tableeghi Jamat, betray the gradualism of the Prophet (SAW)’s way.

Yet the Tableeghi Jamat is part and parcel of the societies it is engendered in and operates in. The patriarchal social structure of society in this part of the world has sought religious cover in the ranks of many religious groups, the Tableeghi Jamat being no exception. The work of Tableegh primarily involves and addresses men_ their wives, daughters, mothers and sisters are provided with a ‘parallel universe’ in which selected tableegh activities are replicated within a strictly closed, segregated environment. The mainstream fieldwork of Tableegh as well as the mass instruction is dominated by men, with their women relegated to a subsidiary role. Besides, the gender segregation to an extreme degree deprives women of a holistic and wholesome experience of life and the world and limits their sphere to the domestic and familial alone. This has resulted in a narrowness of perspective and superficiality of insight characterizing women of the Tableeghi Jamat. This is particularly so in second and third generation Tableeghis who have had cloistered upbringing and few opportunities for self development through education and experience. Besides, second and third generation tableeghis inherit the religious lifestyle without having the liberty to make personal choice, often taking up Tableegh and religious practice as habit and ritual rather than as actions of the heart. 

The literature used for religious instruction and tazkiyah (purification) as well as the methodology with which it is delivered is dated from the earlier half of the previous century. While it has inspired millions and continues to do so, the outmoded language and style limits its outreach and appeal to the younger generation and fails to address their dilemmas and questions about religion, modernity and secularity in this day and age. There is an absence of content that can present an alternative discourse to respond to or even recognize the innovations and challenges of the current milieu.

An insurmountable problem with Muslim education in the subcontinent is the disconnect between ‘maqulat’ (the rational sciences) and ‘manqulat’ transmitted knowledge). Religious education has entirely jettisoned the ‘maqulat’ as secular and profane, and this in turn has sharpened the artificial cleavage between ‘Deen’ (the religious worldview and way of life) and ‘Dunya’ (the secular/worldly domain) in society. As a result, the religiously educated are consigned solely to the business of the seminary and pulpit whereas those with a modern secular education become the movers and shakers of society- a sort of privileged elite. The disconnect between the religiously educated conservative Muslims and the secularized therefore runs along the lines of social class. As a result, the religious are generally viewed as a lower social group deprived of social prestige, disengaged from decision making and opinion leadership, pigeonholed into the narrow realm of strictly religious affairs with little to do with the business of the world. Unless groups take up militancy to shake this off, most do begin to reflect this relegation of ‘deen’ to the unworldly and otherworldly. In the process they become insular, islandic and static utopias in a rapidly changing, complex world. The malaise infects all religious groups and its repercussions are visible in the rank and file of Tableeghi Jamat in Pakistan.

The Gulen Movement in Turkey shares with the Tableeghi Jamat its non sectarian, non ideological spiritual and social project. It shares the all-embracing mass appeal and loose structure giving individual space and freedom, as well as the refusal to politicize and confront. Very insightfully, both movements refuse to ghettoize religion under a narrow, exclusivist, parochial banner. However, the Gulen Movement has chosen to do some things differently. It has taken on modernity and its exigencies, risen to its challenges while ensuring the relevance of religious ethics as the panacea for the evils of materialistic, permissive, libertarian secular societies. The Gulen Movement promotes social activism and rights advocacy as religious causes and is dedicated towards healing, harmonizing, building bridges and problem-solving. It makes issues of social justice, rights and liberties the business of religion- a sacred calling of the faith. This, alongwith the contemporaneity of language, style and content has given the Gulen Movement a progressive outlook and an incredible popularity among Turkey’s younger population_ a monumental achievement for any essentially religious movement in this day and age. It is an example we have much to learn from.

Given the Tableeghi Jamat’s vision, direction, spiritual appeal, inclusiveness and wide outreach, it has tremendous potential and promise. It can and ought to lend itself to the project of chiselling faith-inspired minds in positions of leadership and decision making in the academia, public administration, economics, media and politics. For this it must engage itself with the intellectual challenges that impede the spiritual journey of many bright young minds privileged with education in institutions for the English-speaking urban elite who are trained into critical inquiry. Any religious movement aiming for the establishment of Islam and its values in society which feels that it owes a  debt to the future must prioritize leadership development among Muslim youth. For this, the concerns and questions of young minds with leadership potential need to be explicitly and directly addressed.

An unwillingness to adapt to the exigencies of the times is symptomatic of stagnation and regression which characterize the length and breadth of modern Islamic movements in the Muslim world, with few exceptions. This leads to an intellectual stuntedness that repels our brightest and most promising minds as these groups fail to answer their questions about the role and engagement of religion with the world, life and society. Dr. Muhammad Iqbal resented this stasis as a result of a stubborn refusal to win space in the medley of competing ideas. He sees it as a harbinger of perpetual irrelevance. He writes, ‘The claim of the present generations of Muslim liberals to interpret the foundational legal principles in the light of their own experience and the altered conditions of modern life is in my opinion perfectly justified. The teaching of the Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation- guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors- should be permitted to solve its problems.’

  

On the Woolwich Incident and responses to it...

RECLAIMING THE JIHAD: A RESPONSE TO TAREK FATAH

Maryam Sakeenah

To condemn the Woolwich incident, spine-chilling and disgusting as it may be_ is pointless. Not because it may by any stretch of imagination be justified, but because the haste and anxiety with which this is so promptly done both by spokespeople of Western nations and by Muslim leaders denotes the uncritical acceptance of the predominant narrative on terrorism on the terms of the powerbrokers and the media that tell us who to condemn, how and how much. It is also inadequate to only condemn these instances when they occur while failing to understand and take on the deeper dynamics that set them off. For, terrorism and the usage of the term are far more nuanced than these facile proclamations make us believe.

While Tarek Fatah has rightly pointed out this inadequacy in his article ‘UK Beheading Shows It’s Time to Fight the Doctrine of Jihad’, and reminded Muslims of the need to take on such criminal elements within their ranks, the rest of the article teeters on presumptions that are ignorant at best and dangerous a worst: ignorant because of a complete inability to understand the ground realities of contemporary international politics and dangerous for the ideologization of terrorism that lends credence to the idea that Islam is inherently violent and Muslims inherently predisposed towards violence.

The writer makes the same error many neoconservatives calling for a ‘War on Terror’ made, with disastrous consequences: accepting the motives and objectives of terrorism as interpreted and explained by American rhetoric. He tells us that such elements wish to ‘sow fear into the soul of British people’ and are ideologically motivated ‘by one powerful belief of the doctrine of Jihad against the kuffar...’ Readers are asked to make some leaps of faith here as this denies any possibility that such dastardly acts may be a crazed protest out of desperation and frustration, driven by vengeance over what is seen to be unfair and brutal, such as unfair occupations, drone strikes and brutal torture in illegal detention camps. By ideologizing the motives, attention is deflected away from the policies that provoke extreme and desperate reaction. Moral culpability is ruled out and the inaccurate and dangerous idea that the problem is with the ideology believed in by these people is given credence. Hence an image is conjured up of a clash between Islam and the West: a false and pernicious idea that makes the world madly careen towards a clash of civilizations.

The fallacy of the premise of this ideologization of terrorism and whose interests it serves, need to be exposed. Terrorism, in fact, is a tactic used by disaffected individuals and communities, not an ideology. It is not inspired by a hatred of all that the West stands for, but is a reaction to policy and actions of Western nations. Michael Scheuer states: “There is no record of a Muslim urging to wage jihad to destroy democracy or credit unions, or universities. What the US does in formulating and implementing policies affecting the Muslim world is infinitely more inflammatory.” The smokescreen of rhetoric, however, keeps a dispassionate analysis of the real grievances that fire such acts at bay.

Fatah goes on to state that Muslim terrorists have been ‘emboldened’ by the West’s ‘passivity’ towards terrorism, implying that Western nations are victims too infirm to take on the horrifying, audacious enemy consolidating its ranks in the wings. There clearly is in this a criminal oversight of the glaring and undeniable reality that wars, occupations, kidnappings, tortures, detentions have been carried out by Western nations on the pretext of pre-empting and countering terrorism; that Guantanamo still detains thousands without charge, that only 2% out of the many thousands killed in drone operations against terrorists have any suspicion against them.

While what happened at Woolwich was grotesquely inhuman, refusing to acknowledge similar grotesque wrongs at the hands of powerful occupying armies in other parts of the world is diabolical. While Woolwich is unjustifiable, one cannot lose sight of the connection between the actions of armies abroad and the psychology of vengeance. In all honesty, one may also be reminded of the fact that barely weeks ago an unarmed seventy-five year old was similarly hacked and butchered to death in Birmingham while on his way home. The reason no one heard of it was because the victim being a Muslim on his way back from the local mosque made the story not newsworthy enough. Islamist terror is the in-thing- other acts of violence and terrorism are relegated to individual criminality or insanity.

The writer reminds us that the tactics used by the Woolwich attackers were ‘straight from medieval times’, recklessly making a direct link with Islamic doctrine and tradition. Anyone with a basic understanding of terrorism would know that desperate tactics like this one are used when the might of perceived enemies is too great and invincible, defying conventional tactics. Reading more than that into it and connecting it to medieval Islamic doctrine is grossly irresponsible for the devastating social and inter-subjective consequences in an atmosphere of great prejudice and hostility against Muslims and Islam. The UK Muslim community is already targeted for hate-speech by white supremacist groups like the English Defence League, and Mr. Fatah’s proclamations serve to keep this atmosphere of hate and suspicion charged.

It is vital and urgent that Muslims take responsibility for such elements and tendencies within their community and the writer did well to highlight this, but to interject ‘Islam is the enemy!’ when the religion and its practitioners already stand much stereotyped and pigeonholed, misunderstood, mistrusted and maligned is highly irresponsible and reckless.

However, such reform has to come from within the Muslim community from authentic representatives and spokespeople of Islamic tradition. The gusto for ‘fixing Islam’ from the West is misplaced, insincere, uninsightful and comes loaded with malafide agendas and political interests.  Tarek Fatah’s exhortation to Western leaders to take on the Jihadic ideology and defeat it, is fatal nonsense.

Having said that, Fatah’s disappointment with liberal Muslims rubbing in the fact that ‘Islam is Peace’ and keeping mum about the doctrine of physical Jihad as part of Islam, is valid- but for different reasons. Liberal Muslims desperately try to deny and eclipse this aspect of Islam and in so doing, implicitly accept the ignorant allegation that physical Jihad is a violent doctrine. Mr. Tarek Fatah too shares this inability to understand and appreciate the concept of Jihad with its contemporary ramifications in a holistic and insightful manner. This explains his enthusiastic call for rejecting Jihad altogether, and his great disappointment that Islamic scholars are not too excited about jettisoning the murderous idea once and for all.

Liberal Muslims often either deny or denigrate Jihad, as if it was an embarrassment. Jihad, standing for struggle spanning all means to resist injustice, evil and falsehood is to safeguard and protect the sanctity of human life, not to violate it. It aims at protecting the weak, the suffering and the sinned-against. Jihad purged the concept of war from excesses. The first Quranic exhortation to fight came with the emphasis to ‘be not aggressive.’

The Quran and the example of the Sunnah clearly and categorically lay down the conditions when Jihad should be resorted to. Simply, all is not fair in war, and rulings for protecting non combatants and those not directly engaged in confrontation are explicit. Besides, its objectives are clearly laid down: it is neither for territorial aggrandizement nor national power nor spreading the faith, but for resisting oppression and injustice and helping in the establishment of a just and peaceful social order. Fatah makes an ignorant and misleading connection between the senseless butchery at Woolwich and the concept of Jihad: the same criminal mistake that the perpetrators themselves made.

Mr. Fatah makes a pathetic attempt to validate his claim that Jihad is a savage expansionist ideology by quoting an inaccurate and false definition of Jihad from A Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam which makes the unforgivable error or defining Jihad as ‘the spread of Islam by arms’, a claim unsubstantiated by any Islamic text or source of authority.

The need of the hour, contrary to Mr. Fatah’s prescription, is to rediscover and elucidate the concept of Jihad in contemporary context and expose its distortion, misperception and abuse by those hostile to Jihad as well as those claiming to wage it. The silence on this from Muslim scholars leaves the misconceptions and confusions to proliferate and hence provide justification to fringe extremist and criminal elements like those who carried out the brutal display at Woolwich in the name of Jihad.

This said, Mr. Fatah needs to be reminded that resistance to wrong and defence of the weak and marginalized against oppression and injustice is a basic virtue attested to by all spiritual and moral doctrines, hence the Jihadic philosophy is not an invention of Islam even though it may be a culmination of this universal idea. Stripping Islam off this beautiful crowning glory is a preposterous and revolting idea he can never find any support for. Both Mr. Fatah and his ilk as well as sheepish Liberal Muslims need to be reminded of the fact that Islam extols and idealizes peace but also accepts the idea that when the rhetoric and pretense of peace hides the demons of injustice, it must be exposed and rejected and resisted. Farid Esack writes, “When peace comes to mean the absence of conflict on the one hand and when conflict with an unjust political order is a moral imperative on the other, then it is not difficult to understand that the better class of human beings will be deeply committed to disturbing the peace and creating conflict.”

What is important to realize, however, is that in the absence of this understanding of Jihad and the spineless, fragmented state of the Muslim world, resistance to the great wrongs by Western nations at present is febrile, maniacal and as vicious as the actions of the powerful perpetrators. Yeats lamented, ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.’  Esack writes, ‘The problem with Muslim fundamentalism is that it is as totalitarian and exclusivist as the order that it seeks to displace. It seeks to create an order wherein they are the sole spokespersons for a rather vengeful, patriarchal and chauvinistic God.’ That is a judicious and vital understanding we as Muslims must acquire in order to reclaim the Jihad for our time.  

Incidents like Woolwich as well as the great wrongs that engender such sickness: stemming from both Western policy as well as Muslim degeneracy- are to be rejected and actively opposed. The underlying logic of wars of powerful Western nations against “terrorism" and terrorist attacks provoking or provoked by them is the same: both punish human beings for the actions of their governments or of individuals or groups sharing religious or ethnic identity. We are left with an important question: If terrorism is the direct and intentional killing of innocent people with the purpose for achieving a greater goal they are not directly linked with, are not both terrorism? While we correctly acknowledge Woolwich as savage terrorism, why are similar instances in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Iraq also not recognized as equally unacceptable, intensely provocative and deeply damaging? As long as contemporary politics continue to operate on the premise of ‘some are more equal that others’, such ugly outrages will keep happening at the hands of the psychologically vulnerable. The need is an all-out struggle- a progressive ‘Jihad’ if you will- against all wrongs that fuel the vicious cycle, regardless of who the perpetrators may be.

The Stasis of the Muslim Mind

THE STASIS OF THE MUSLIM MIND

Maryam Sakeenah

“Lost in the loneliness, we turn inwards- with a knife in our hands and a lump in our throats”, writes Muhammad Fadel describing the deep crisis in contemporary Muslim consciousness. The loss of the Khilafah has imbued Muslim sensibility with a deep and haunting nostalgia for a bygone glory. The direction of foreign policy taken by Western nations vis a vis the Muslim world has not helped assuage the raw sentiment, leaving Muslims to harbour the supposition that the ascendant West is locked in a crusade against the Muslim world in the throes of despondency imposed by a malevolent external enemy. The frustration this engenders often makes itself felt in spasmodic bouts of violence like the gasps of an etherized patient laid across on the table.

The experience of long-drawn colonial rule across Muslim lands intensified the nostalgic longing for a lost glory as well as the need to hold on ever more strongly and exclusively to religious fundamentals as a means of self-preservation and protection of religio-cultural identity. This exacerbated the disconnect between ‘deen’ and ‘dunya’ in Muslim consciousness in general and education in particular. Aurangzeb Haneef notes in his article, ‘Learning from the Past’, that one of the most important effects of European imperialism in Muslim society was that the pursuit of rational sciences (maqulat) was abandoned in favour of transmitted sciences (manqulat)in the spirit of preservation in an attempt to re-center and standardize the traditions of religious knowledge. Madrassas ceased to be the training grounds for the intellectual and cultural elite and increasingly came to be identified with religious education only, which was an aberration from the tradition.

The rising popularity of Salafism is a reactionary response out of a prevailing sense of defeatism, victimhood, vulnerability and insecurity over what is seen as the encroachment upon Muslim identity and culture by an ascendant Western civilization. The call for a puritanical ‘return to the sources’ down to the letter shunning the accretions of theology and jurisprudence over centuries is distressingly ahistorical, uncreative and mimetic. It refuses to recognize the need to creatively and rationally respond to the exigencies of the times. Ironically while it claims fidelity to authentic Muslim tradition, it actually betrays the essential dynamism of the same. This dynamism is the defining trait of Islamic jurisprudence which traditionally accorded space to diversity. Muslim jurists were remarkably tolerant of ‘ikhtilaf’(difference of opinion), and were adept at the ‘adab’ (etiquettes) of ikhtilaf. Towering jurists of the sunni school like Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Malik discouraged blind following (taqleed) of their opinions, encouraging critical thinking and research.

These Muslim groups demonstrate all or most of the traits of fundamentalism, that is: ‘a sense of chosenness tied to the demonizing or damnation of all others who refuse to get behind the truth subscribed to by the subject himself.’ (Farid Esack) By refusing to defer to historical understandings of Islam in theology and law, these Muslim groups place themselves at the fringes of Islamic tradition they claim to be guardians and restorers of.

Due to a radical subjectivism that confers quasi-divine authority to a certain set of literalist opinions these innovation-resistant groups refuse to subject their opinions to rational inquiry. In so doing, they implicitly refuse to recognize intrinsic human diversity as well as the status of individuals as rational subjects imbued with the Divinely-bestowed gift of intellect and free will. “Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto, you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works! Unto God you all must return; and then He will make you truly understand all that on which you were wont to differ.” (5:48)

At a subconscious level, the deep realization of the untenability of opinions that refuse to defer to critical examination has resulted in an inward-looking stasis characterized by an uncompromising exclusivism and exceptionalism.

Muslim exceptionalism betrays the Quran’s universal embrace of humanity with its consistent appeal to mankind as the creation of God, a single family. ‘O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all knowing, all aware.” (49:13) The Quran attaches sanctity to all humankind when it narrates how God blew of His own spirit into the first created person. Muslim exclusivism refuses to recognize the fact that our well-being as a species on a finite planet is tied to the well-being of all others we share it with, and that in the face of this reality, all labels and artificial boundaries are secondary. It is only the extremely narrow-minded and short-sighted who would refuse to recognize the fact that our well being is inextricably tied to the well being of all others.

A further corollary of such exclusivism is the tendency to view ideas as mutually exclusive, with an either/or approach. The middle ground, the many grey areas of overlap are lost sight of. This generates a characteristic intellectual extremism that infects Muslims en masse. It is not understood that neither of the extremes is an acceptable alternative to the other, hence the world appears all black and white, like an arena for a clash of ideas. The ‘Us versus Them’ psyche translates into ‘Islam versus The West.’ This is dangerous as it understands both Islam and the West as monoliths and glosses over the many instances both historical and contemporary, of coexistence, intercultural exchange, common grounds and shared values. It denies the universality of commonly held values, viewing them as ‘Western’ or ‘Islamic.’ The actual confrontation as recognized by Islam, is between Haqq and Baatil (Truth versus Falsehood), and before deciding if anything that passes for Islam is the whole truth, we need to ask ‘whose Islam?’, given the fact that the Quran and sunnah are open to diverse readings and interpretations and the self-appointed spokespeople of Islam are as many as the possible interpretations. Nor is Falsehood equivalent to all that the West is about, given the fact that the military-industrial complex and the clique of influential policy-making elites are responsible for the highhandedness of foreign policy decisions and the injustices that have wreaked havoc and provoked backlash among Muslim populations.

Muslims often invoke the ideal of Islam comparing it to the reality of Western society which often betrays its own values such as freedom and liberty, to show the degeneracy of the latter as compared to the Divine system they have been denied- unmindful of the many ways Muslim societies consistently betray the values of Islam.  

The myth of ‘Islam versus the West’ also denies the collective heritage of Islamic and European civilizations and the instrumental role Islam had in making the Enlightenment possible. “Arab science altered medieval Christendom beyond recognition. For the first time in centuries, Europe’s eyes opened to the world around it- Arab science and philosophy helped rescue the Christian world from ignorance and made possible the very idea of the ‘West.’” (Jonathan Lyons, ‘House of Wisdom’) Aime Cesaire beautifully and powerfully reminds us of this collective human heritage and that attempts to claim a monopoly over the achievements of human civilization are a form of intellectual dishonesty, whether done by scholars in the West or the Muslim world. "But the work of man is only just beginning, and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of our passion, for no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force. And there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory." - Aimé Césaire 

In the same vein, there are other binaries like ‘Islam versus Democracy.’ In the recent Pakistan elections numerous religious groups propagated that casting a vote was an act of ‘kufr,’ because democracy is based on the sovereignty of the masses over the sovereignty of God. While the system of electoral politics in Western societies has elements that are incompatible with Islam, the values of democracy are universal and are part and parcel of Islamic governance. Following the majority opinion a standardized practice in Muslim tradition (‘Ijma’ has many forms, the last of which sanctions general voting by the public to settle questions that bear upon the interests of the general masses and can be put to a public vote). Moreover, respecting popular sentiment and being accountable to the public are fundamental Islamic political values. The procedural rules of electoral politics can and should be reformed to conform to Islamic standards and shari’ rulings made exclusively the job of a panel of qualified ulema, beyond the purview of general voting- and it no more is ‘an affront to God’s sovereignty.’ Numberless Islamic scholars have talked of the compatibility between democratic principles and Islamic politics. Sameen Sadaf notes the irony in ‘The Dynamism of Islam”: The alternative, they say, is ‘Khilafat’ (which in many ways is democratic in its ethos). However, since there is no comprehensive system and candidature for khilafat at the time, one can suppose that all we can do is wait for a savior while the forces of actual ‘Kufr’ take over and ruin us.” Pro-Sharia activists seem to assume that mainstreaming the Islamic way of life through dialogue and dawah can be discounted without any loss and they can march straight to an Islamic Khilafah state that will somehow miraculously tame the Muslim masses into believing slaves of God. 

The binary thinking pattern and exclusivism has made Muslim consciousness be preoccupied with narrow, parochial concerns considered ‘Islamic.’ It is forgotten that being slaves of Allah means being good human beings first and that as Muslims everything in the universe is our business. Zaid Hassan writes of the need to ‘reclaim our relationship to the whole’ in his wonderful article, ‘Notes towards an Incomplete Manifesto for Liberating the Muslim Mind.’ The growing distance between ‘deen’ and ‘dunya’ in Muslim consciousness has made Muslims unconcerned about aspects that belong to the secular domain as profane and unworthy. Hence there is an intellectual degeneracy, and a clear absence of contemporary Muslim discourse in science, philosophy and the humanities, a near-absence of Muslim contribution to research.  In the recent elections, Islamic parties in Pakistan exclusively talked of the need for a return to rule by Islam, invoking Shariah, the Islamic identity and ethos of Pakistan. Talking of issues that resonate with the masses like poverty or the energy crisis was considered redundant given their ‘Islamic’ credentials. The growing unpopularity of these parties and their less-than-expected performance comes as no surprise.  

This ghettoization of Muslim thought threatens to make us dwindle into a cult at the margins of civilization. Religious discourse that fails to take account of the modern mind and appeal to the youth with their voracity for rational argument cannot be shoved down people’s throats. It is condemned to survive as no more than a fringe-cult.  

Still more lamentable is the fact that Muslims are failing to realize the need to introspect in these critical times. Any manifestation of the deep crisis in Muslim consciousness is dismissed as ‘unrepresentative of Islam’ at best, and ‘propaganda against Islam’ at worst. Self-criticism is noble, highly needful and the essential trait of the faithful. Muslims have abandoned it altogether, and any voice helping us to examine ourselves critically or calling for a reform is disdainfully rejected with suspicion and sneering self-righteousness. The belief that terrorists or criminals or misogynists ‘use’ the name of Islam to justify their deeds is comforting but unhelpful because it does not recognize the fact that many interpretations of the Quran and sunnah actually give some grounds to sanction such acts and that therefore there is great responsibility on Muslim thinkers to expose and oppose the textual basis of such arguments.

The stasis of the Muslim mind is a daunting project before us. Muslim society is terribly fragmented and polarized between the extremes of the secular and the religious. So much of Muslim scholarship today is pitiably out of touch with the vicissitudes of contemporary society, rationally indefensible, in a language far removed from and inaccessible to the mass man and incognizant of the psychology of modernity and post-modernity. ‘Maqulat’ must be brought at par with the ‘Manqulat’ as central to a holistic Muslim education, precisely because that is how it had always been and was supposed to be before things went awry. The need today is for Muslim scholars to negotiate between entrenched extreme positions, address issues of the here and now in a language that appeals to the common man, and to appeal to modern sensibility in a manner that is faithful to the ethos of Islamic tradition. Such voices need to collate, organize and rise to a crescendo that can drown out the clamour of extremisms. It is a grand project and an urgent one, but cannot be begun until we first realize the need for such effort today and cease to live in denial of the terrible crisis that threatens to rob our faith of its very soul and reduce it to perpetual irrelevance.

The Need for Empathy in these times...

THE MURDER OF HUMAN EMPATHY

Maryam Sakeenah

Following the reprehensible attack on Christian homes in Lahore, a spine-chilling, grotesque image of an arsonist cheering over the burning flames went viral. One wonders what sort of man thumps his chest over destroying innocent lives and how human beings can become capable of such naked, audacious sadism that seeks justification in a faith that decrees ‘Whosoever harms a non Muslim citizen of a Muslim state, I shall be the complainant against him on the Day of Judgement.’ (Sahih Bukhari)

Throughout history human beings have shown themselves to be capable of wreaking terrible destruction and causing great suffering- from burning ‘witches’ at the stake, crucifying God’s noble messengers, butchering refugees in sacred precincts, gassing Jews at Auschwitz, to the nationalistic wars of the twentieth century, the liquidation of millions in nuclear destruction and poisoning of the biosphere through relentless commercial-industrial activity.

Yet Jeremy Rifkins in his phenomenal book ‘The Empathic Civilization’ insists that human beings are ‘Homo Empathica’, that is, defined and distinguished for the ability to empathize. He writes, ‘Human beings are soft-wired to experience others’ plight as if we were experiencing it ourselves.’

Empathy allows us to stretch our sensibility to another so we can cohere into larger social groups. It is curbed and limited by defining these social groups through narrow, parochial banners of ethnicity, nationalism, race and creed so that the empathic drive does not extend to the out-group. The Prophet (SAW) said: "He is not one us who calls for `Asabiyah’, (prejudiced, parochial association)" (Abu Daud.) The out-group is then ‘otherized’, made out of the reach of our empathy. This creates indifference and apathy towards the suffering of people belonging to a different classification. However, a more severe form of limiting and deflecting the empathic impulse is dehumanization of the other ‘as flies to the wanton boys’, often institutionalized by the social superstructure: state and government, media, education, religion. Through stereotyping, essentialism, ethnocentrism, prejudice and propaganda as well as censorship and selective relaying of information to the public, minority groups and those whose interests clash with or threaten one’s own are systemtically dehumanized  and even demonized to appear less than human despicable, lower-order bestial ‘others’ whose eradication may not be of any great loss to human civilization. In the process we forget that as members of the human family, we all share a common, precarious existential predicament- our ‘little lives rounded with a sleep’- on a little finite planet in the mystifying universe.

Der Spiegel carried a report last year on the psychology of American drone operators whose button-clicking while reclining in plush chairs in air-conditioned offices decrees death to anonymous distant targets. The method of modern technological warfare seems to be designed to keep empathy at bay- the victim is invisible and remote, represented by a red dot on a laser screen, annihilated by a light, single click. Drone pilot Vanessa Meyer said, “When the decision had been made, and they saw that this was an enemy, a hostile person, a legal target that was worthy of being destroyed, I had no problem with taking the shot." (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’) Gitta Sereny writes of Fratz Stangl, the annihilator of thousands at a Nazi camp: “Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” (Chris Hedges: The Careerist)

Few and far between, there may be those whose empathy grows militant and unkillable. Brandon Bryant was able to humanize his victims in his drone operations_ he noticed the details of their lives and patterns of behaviour akin to his own. "I got to know them. Until someone higher up in the chain of command gave me the order to shoot." He felt remorse because of the children, whose fathers he was taking away. "They were good daddies," he says. He felt ‘disconnected from humanity’ while at his job, going through terrible unease and remorse. Having quit his job, he wrote in his diary, "On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot." (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’)   

Perhaps the most integral parts of this institutionalized dehumanization embedded in the superstructure of modern industrial society are the ‘Careerists’- the good men and women efficient at their jobs that make the system function. Chris Hedges describes them as ‘...armies of bureaucrats serving a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected... They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic... They feel nothing. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.'

In Pakistan religion is increasingly used as one of the most powerful means of deflecting empathy from those outside the faith and sectarian affiliation. Religious intolerance in a culture of violence and anger is a fatal mix and has gone on a bloody rampage.  While the causes, factors and agents responsible for the ongoing madness are complexly intertwined, the resistance, rejection, counternarrative and healing that ought to have come from the representatives of religion in this part of the world has been inadequate, half-hearted, ambiguous and equivocal. The voice of condemnation from the pulpit is faltering, and this has been extremely damaging in a number of ways. The contemporary discourse of political Islam in Pakistan is heavily lopsided, selectively highlighting the plight of victims of American, Israeli and Indian misdemeanours (which certainly are important human rights issues), while keeping mum or issuing periodic enfeebled and rhetorical statements of condemnation over the plight of minorities and other innocent victims of those committing violence in the name of religion.

For Islamist groups, the cost of this silence has been and will be crushingly enormous. The disappointment felt by members of the civil society and educated youth over a criminal silence and inability of the religious leaders and scholars to rise to the occasion and give clarity to the public with a single voice has been shattering. This has not only alienated scores of good, intelligent people belonging to Pakistan’s educated urban middle and upper classes from Islamic groups and organizations but in many cases from the faith itself.  A colleague posted the picture of the gleeful arsonist with the comment, ‘Happy mob rightfully burns down Christian homes. Another great day for Islam. Another victory against the forces of evil.’ While this is an extreme reaction showing inability to draw a line between despicable, crazed fanatical elements and the faith itself, but it increases the onus on spokespeople of religion to address the burning issues that blur the lines.

Going to college in Pakistan shortly after the U.S declared all-out ‘war on terror’ and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, I witnessed scores of young people around me turning to Islam, primarily out of empathy for the Muslim victim, the underdog. In this country, the Islamist persona has now understandably metamorphosed into a perpetrator devoid of compassion, rationality and empathy, and this has alienated and repelled hundreds of thousands, resulting in a completely opposite trend that I, now an educator, see around me: a clear de-Islamization of Pakistan’s urban educated youth. While there also is a swing in the opposite direction, but the de-Islamization trend is clearly on the rise, understandably fuelled by the aforementioned.

Islamists in Pakistan are not cognizant of this terrible loss as they perceive themselves to be locked up in a crusade against the onslaught of the West, the secularists, the Zionists et all. Any voice calling for the need to provide clarity, answers and solutions is dismissed as ‘Westernized’, ‘secularized’, ‘liberalized,’ hence misguided and insincere, unworthy of serious consideration.

The narrative in Pakistan needs a rethink: the ethos of the Quran is the extension of identity to embrace the human race as fellow sojourners held together by a common human nature and destiny: ‘Mankind is but a single nation, yet they disagree.’ (2:213) Secondarily, we are taught to understand our responsibility towards those outside the faith fraternity not merely through divine directive but lived example and established paradigm.

In 628 C.E. Prophet Muhammad (s) granted a Charter of Privileges to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai:

“This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.
Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.
No compulsion is to be on them.
Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries.
No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses.
Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.
No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight.
The Muslims are to fight for them.
If a female Christian is married to a Muslim it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray.
Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.
No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).”

Empathy humanizes and civilizes. Its suppression intensifies secondary drives like narcissism, materialism, violence and aggression. The task of religion, education and the media must be to bring out the empathic sociability stretching out to all of humanity and prepare the groundwork for what Rifkins has called an ‘empathic civilization.’

Mercy and gentleness, said the Prophet (SAW), are defining traits of believers: ‘Allah is gentle, and He loves those who are gentle.’ (Sahih Muslim)   Mercy and gentleness beautify the spirit: "Whenever kindness is in a thing it adorns it, and whenever it is removed from anything, it disfigures it." [Muslim]

Empathy is engraved into the core of our consciousness as human beings- that softest part inspired from the Divine Ruh (Spirit). Those who confine or deflect it are on the wrong side of humanity and history. In the long run, their narrative will lose out and history’s merciless verdict against them shall be ineradicable.