In the month of Ramadan, Muslims renew their faith by fasting, participating in family and community dinners, and congregational prayers. This Ramadan is unique, however, because of COVID-19, which in most Muslim-majority countries as well as in India has led to the shutting down of mosques and banning of congregational prayers. The holiest sites of Islam in Mecca and Medina have been subject to lockdowns as well. Most Muslims have adjusted to the new reality justifying it with reference to the Prophetic tradition that human life is more important than the performance of religious rituals.
Defying orders
The most visible exception to this rule is Pakistan where reactionary mullahs have defied government orders and insisted on performing congregational prayers even against the powerful military’s preferences. Imran Khan’s government has buckled under this obscurantist pressure and allowed congregational prayers to continue. It has attached certain social distancing provisions that are unenforceable in the Pakistani milieu.
This is a signal that the most obscurantist elements in Pakistan are now capable of calling the shots even in defiance of the country’s powerful military brass as well as putting at risk thousands of lives because of lack of physical distancing. These elements, including some religious parties and jihadist organisations, have been gaining ground politically over the years. It is commonly assumed that their political clout has amplified since General Zia-ul-Haq’s programme of Islamising the country and Pakistan’s participation in the Afghan “jihad” in the 1980s that, it is argued, changed the political culture of the country. While there is a good deal of substance to this argument it ignores the basic fact that while the movement for Pakistan’s creation was led by a largely secular elite it was undertaken in the name of religion, and Islam was touted as the raison d’etre for its establishment.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was from a peripheral Shia community, became the Qaid-e-Azam of the predominantly Sunni Pakistan movement. He and his lieutenants viewed Islam in instrumental terms. To them it was the most effective tool to mobilise Muslim masses to aggrandise power while leaving Muslims in the minority provinces, who they considered dispensable, far more vulnerable than they would have been in undivided India. All they were interested in was creating a Muslim-majority state over which they could rule since they could not compete with the Indian National Congress for influence and power in a united India after the British withdrawal.
A slippery slope
Pakistan’s founders were not interested in creating an Islamic theocracy. However, less than two years after Pakistan’s independence religious leaders pressured Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to include in the Objectives Resolution (which later became the Preamble to Pakistan’s first Constitution) that sovereignty belongs to Allah who had delegated his authority to the state of Pakistan.
This was the first step on the slippery slope towards making Pakistan an ideological Islamic state. It is clear from hindsight that despite a few bumps on the way there was a linear development from the Objectives Resolution to Zia’s Islamisation and the entrenchment of the most reactionary and jihadist elements, the latter encouraged by the military for its own ends, in Pakistan’s body politic.
The message that India should imbibe from the Pakistani experience is that once religion is employed, even for instrumental purposes, as the principal component of a nation’s identity, it is inevitable that the most bigoted religious elements will end up defining the dominant ideology of the nation’s polity. The experience of Israel teaches the same lesson. Established by a secular elite that used religio-ethnic identity for instrumental purposes, it has ended up empowering Jewish fundamentalists who now hold the political balance.
Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Michigan State University
