A Letter to Pakistan by Karen Armstrong

(First published 2011)

Karen Armstrong attended the Karachi Literature Festival 2011 and spoke on themes of religious harmony and inter-faith dialogue. Her speeches were largely based on her latest book “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life“. She took the opportunity to write a compressed version of her book with particular reference to Pakistan. Being a den of terrorists and their large support among the religiously demented people, Pakistan’s socio-cultural mess was the obvious choice for the special attention.

Reading the book, or rather booklet, I was reminded of something a Muslim guy said while listening to a non-Muslim about how peaceful Islam was. “We Muslims love to be told that our religion is one of peace.”

Her efforts are well meant and she raises some very important aspects of our religion which Muslim societies have either forgotten or stopped believing that they make up the core of their religion. It is about the ethics of being human and about compassion. She takes the reader through 12 steps to lead compassionate lives; of how we should look at ourselves and the world and try to form a response which is in line with Islam as well as our humanity. The purpose is to improve things through self reflection and action rather than condemning the other and resorting to acts of violence.

She makes an interesting point about Jahiliyah, the primal condition of mankind. She argues that jahiliyah is very much alive today in every society in the world. She says she see jahilyah in her native Britain, recognises it and makes an effort to engage with jaahils to change their attitude. There is also jahiliyah in Muslim world and that we Muslims should also make an effort to correct it at home. Her point is that we should start correcting ourselves at home before we can point fingers to others.

Some of the twelve steps to compassionate life is learning about ‘compassion’, ‘looking at your own world’, ‘compassion for yourself’, ’empathy’, ‘mindfulness’, ‘action’; it ends at ‘recognition’ and ‘understanding your enemies’ so you don’t hate them for hate’s sake but for the sake of justice. I don’t like the term she uses because it sounds characteristically Christian and is open to misunderstanding, i.e. ‘loving your enemies.’

In short, it is an attempt by a renowned scholar of religions to make Muslims practice the core of their religion instead of succumbing to the view of religion as a demarcater of difference and as a political tool to wrap up all grievances in. My book rating 3/5

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Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia by Ayesha Jalal

(First published 2008)

It is a brilliant exposition of the concept of Jihad in Islam, its theological origins, various manifestations and the way the concept was understood and acted upon by the believers with particular reference to the Muslims of the Subcontinent

It is not one of those feel-good apologia for Jihad that try to hammer out the “true” meaning of the concept in Islamic scriptural canon. It is more an attempt to put the concept in its proper context and explain how Muslims of South Asia throughout history have understood and implemented it.

Jalal argues that Jihad is a concept central to Muslim theology. It forms the basic core of Islamic ethics. She called Jihad “a struggle to be human”. She identifies the trends that led to different understandings of Jihad expounded by different Muslim theologians and rulers with reference to the reality of time and place they lived in.

The Indian Subcontinent, says the author, presents an interesting case study because here the power rested in the hands of Muslims but the population which they ruled was, and is, overwhelmingly non-Muslim. So in order to coexist successfully with the “infidels” and to rule the land in relative peace, Muslim rulers and theologians understood the concept of Jihad on a different level than by their counterparts in predominantly Muslim regions such as Arabia, Persia and Central Asia.

The social and political conditions in the Subcontinent before and during the British Raj form the background of this study. Muslim rulers and theologians, owning to the difficulty of ruling a non-Muslim population, tended to understand Jihad as ethical struggle to be good rather than putting the non-Muslims to constant warfare. There had been divergences in this approach with disastrous consequences. For instance in the case of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and theologians like Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi, both of whom leaned toward harsher measures against the non-Muslims.

The policies of Muslim rulers of the Subcontinent, in general, since the days of Delhi Sultanate, were in contrast to the Muslim rulers of Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia who emphasized the more militant aspect of Jihad, and launched military attacks on non-Muslim lands. This behaviour can be seen in the various incursions of the Muslim lords into the Subcontinent. Jalal holds that all of them conquered India under the pretext of Jihad though their real purpose was money and land (For instance, the devastating attacks of Mahmud Ghaznavi, Nader Shah, Ahmed Shah Abdali etc all were labelled Jihad). This the author sees as subversion of the concept of Jihad and a departure from its theological meanings. Rightly so.

The book then moves on to the subject of Jihad in colonial India. There is a detailed chapter on what is now being called the first incident of modern Jihadist terrorism. A group of Muslims led by Sayyid Ahmed and Sayyid Ismail waged an armed struggle against the “infidels” during the years 1826-1831. All of them were killed. These men were deeply affected by the theology of Shah Waliullah Dehlavi, who spent some years in Makkah when Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab was still alive, and got acquainted with the rising Wahhabi ideology in the peninsula. Thus the Jihad of Sayyid Ahmed and his followers is seen as the first manifestation of modern Wahhabi jihadist extremism in the Indian Subcontinent.

The next section details the lives and works of some Muslim intellectuals who understood and explained their anti-colonial nationalism in the colours of Jihad. For them it was a noble thing to do and perfectly in line with Islam. Figures like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Ubaidullah Sindhi, Muhammad Iqbal, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Jamal al-din Afghani (though Iranian but the one who left a deep mark on the thinking of some Indian Muslims during his sojourns in India) is discussed in detail.

Finally, the last section, which is instructively titled “Islam Subverted: Jihad as Terrorism?”, gives a lot of pages to the man who is rightly called the architect of modern Jihad: Sayyid Abul ‘Aala Maududi; His philosophy of Jihad, his antics and his politics are analyzed in great detail. Almost all modern Jihadi groups and their mentors intellectually go back to Maududi and before that, to Shah Waliullah.

On the scale of 1 to 5, I will give this book 5.

AMAZON LINK

Sectarian War: Pakistan’s Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East by Khaled Ahmed

(First published 2011)

This book is one of the most comprehensive and impartial accounts of sectarianism in Pakistan. It evaluates the development and solidification of Pakistan’s religion-based nationalist discourse through the decades and charts the origins and politics of Pakistani sectarian organisations and explains how the Sunni-Shia schism in the Middle East was shifted to Pakistan in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, and how it turned into a proxy war between Iran and Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia with the connivance of Pakistani military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. The book further links recent sectarian violence in and out of Pakistan with the shift in Al-Qaida’s focus to include Muslim targets which were perceived to be “collaborating” with the West in the so called War on Terror. Read below for details:

After gaining Independence from Britain, the Pakistani leadership attempted to divide people on the basis of religion, into Muslims and non-Muslims, under what the they termed as “the ideology of Pakistan”. This attempt at carving a uniform and homogenous identity in an otherwise extremely diverse country, with a mosaic of different Islamic sects, cultures, languages, ethnicities and, indeed, religions, was bound to turn the society into a cesspit of sectarianism. This not only led to the exclusion of non-Muslim religious minorities, who were practically delegated to the status of second class citizens, it also led to the chastisement of minority Muslim sects who were seen by some sections of Sunni majority as deviant and therefore, outside the pale of Islam.

The first practical expression of this ideology reached its crescendo in anti-Ahmadis riots of 1952 (a sect considered heretical by mainstream Muslims). The lack of meaningful state policy to deal with the outlandish demands of mainstream Islamic parties led, in 1974, to the declaration of Ahmadis as “heretics” and therefore “non-Muslim” by the democratically elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It was just the beginning. It was only a matter of time before sectarian groups turned on other minority Muslim sects. Shia Muslims, by logical extension, became their next target.

The book then focuses on the history and dynamics of anti-Shia politics in Pakistan. The most vehement opposition against Shia community came from the Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is ideologically closer to the puritanical Wahhabi sect (the official religion of Saudi Arabia) than Barelvi branch of Sunni Islam, which happens to be the largest Islamic sect in Pakistan. Three major factors contributed to the systematic targeting of Shia.

First, the success of the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the perception that it supported Pakistani Shia against that country’s Sunnis. The Arab Sunnis, fearful of Iran exporting its Revolution to countries like Pakistan, moved in to counter Iran by arming anti-Shia sectarian groups in Pakistan. Second, the rise to power of Islamist Zia-ul-Haq, a Deobandi army general whose religious sympathies lay with Saudi Arabia. And third, the US-Saudi backed Jihadi resistance to Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which further strengthened the Deobandi sectarian-cum-jihadi groups.

Anti-Shia edicts were already pouring in from certain Deobandi seminaries of Pakistan in the 50s, 60s and 70s but with little appeal. Pakistani politics and the society were not yet polarized to the point of these edicts having any larger, practical effect. However, in 1986, when the afore-mentioned three major factors were in full swing, an Indian Deobandi scholar called Manzur Naumani, fearful of the Islamic Revolution of Iran and its outreach, published a collection of religious edicts from classical Sunni jurists to the contemporary scholars with the singular aim of apostatising the Shia Muslims. It had a profound effect on sectarian politics in Pakistan.

Naumani’s anti-Shia credentials were already established with the publication of a polemic against Ayatullah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran. An organisation funded by Saudi Arabia, Rabita al-`Alam al-Islami, tr. Muslim World League, commissioned the said polemic to be translated, among other languages, into Arabic and English. Some Pakistani Deobandi scholars lauded Naumani’s anti-Shia anthology and circulated it widely among their seminaries and general public. Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the flagship Shia-killing politico-sectarian outfit, was created just a year ago, in 1985, with the tacit approval of General Zia-ul-Haq who was fearful of Iranian Revolution spilling into Pakistan. Naumani’s anthology couldn’t have come out at a better time.

The mayhem started.

The book documents major Shia massacres committed by Saudi funded Deobandi outfits during the ‘80s, including the Parachinar massacre and the Gilgit massacre of Isma’ili Shia. The Shia Turi tribe of Parachinar (concentrated in border regions with Afghanistan which was then a major supply route of so called Mujahidin fighting the Soviets) did not cooperate as they naturally looked toward newly formed Islamic Shia government in Iran. For instance, the famous Allamah Arif Hussain al-Hussaini, later assassinated, was a Turi Shia with intimate ties with Iranian leader Ayatullah Khomeini. This did not sit well with the Saudi-backed jihadi groups.

The sectarian conflict was, in large measure, one-sided. The Sunni sectarian groups killed Shia without discrimination. On the contrary, the Shia militant group, Sipah-e-Muhammad (SeM), created specifically to defend Shia properties and lives didn’t participate in the killing of ordinary Sunnis. Instead it targeted those Sunni elements which were responsible for inciting the killings of Shia and took part in it. In effect, the sectarian conflict of the ‘80s, thanks largely to the policies of General Zia-ul-Haq, was politicised to such an extent that it become a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who supported their respective loyal groups with arms and money, turning Pakistan into a cesspool of sectarianism.

The last section of the book takes a critical look at the sectarian shade in the politics of Al-Qaida. The author links Shia killing in and outside Pakistan post 9/11 with Al-Qaida’s policies. Not many view Al-Qaida as having a sectarian nature, which, according to the author, is a view based on limited information.

So long as Al-Qaida, lead by Osama bin Laden, remained under the influence of its ideologue, Abdullah Azzam, it prime focus was to target and harm Christian and Jewish “infidels”. However, an important shift took place within the terrorist organisation when it fell under the influence of Ayman al-Zawahiri. He expanded the target base to include Muslim “collaborators” and made them the prime target of attacks. Henceforth almost all Muslim countries and Muslim minorities unsympathetic to Al-Qaida became potential targets. The Shia Muslims, who did not share Al-Qaida’s view of Jihad, were viewed, in the case of Iraq, as collaborating with the United States and therefore legitimate targets. Al-Zawahiri allowed the rabidly anti-Shia Al-Qaida operative, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to attack the Shia in Iraq.

Even before this development Al-Qaida accepted within its ranks those jihadist militants who doubled as part-time Shia killers in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Thus the author concludes that Al-Qaida and its militant allies, unlike previously believed, have a distinct sectarian nature. The book also includes a study of inter-Sunni violence between Deobandi/Ahl-e-Hadith and Barelvi schools. Most attacks were aimed at Barelvis who were viewed by hardline Deobandi sectarian groups as not being “Muslim enough” and therefore legitimate targets.

This book is a scathing indictment on the role Deobandi militant nexus played in turning Pakistan into a cesspit of sectarianism and terrorism. A big share of blame lies with the Pakistani establishment which fostered ties with those groups in pursuit of strategic advantage in Kashmir and Afghanistan at the cost of great social instability at home and abroad. It’s a must read for those who want to acquaint themselves with the intricacies of sectarianism in Pakistan and Islamist terrorism in the region.

My rating definitely 5/5. Look it up on AMAZON.

God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad by Charles Allen

(First published 2006)

This is one detailed work not so much as on the origins of Wahhabism in Nejd (present day Saudi Arabia) but on its spread in the Indian Subcontinent. For that matter, the title of the book is quite misleading. Only a chapter or so talk about the “Wahhabi Cult” and its relationship with “modern Jihad”. Rather, it is a book which extensively charts the introduction and spread of Wahhabism in British India.

Shah Waliullah and the founder of Madrasah Naeemiya of Delhi [whose name slips my mind!] were instrumental in propagating early versions of what they claimed was “pure Islam of the salaf”, italics meaning the first Muslims. In India, at that time, this movement had not yet been identified as Wahhabism. It was with the rise of Syed Ahmed and his influential close aides, including famous names in Indian Muslim nobility, who stood up and fought against British rule in the name of Jihad, that Indian Wahhabism was officially thrown into limelight.

Charles Allen charts Syed Ahmed’s all uprisings and battles, especially in NWFP – now in Pakistan – and makes an interpretation that those battles cannot be categorised solely as national struggle of the indigenous people against hegemonic imperial rule. They were, in most part, religiously motivated. The underlying rationale with which those battles were fought was something new to Indian Muslims. No other Muslim sect carried out their struggle against British Raj in the name of Jihad per se, save this group of budding Wahhabis.

The author makes an interesting point that Syed Ahmed and his followers were already fighting the British before the Rebellion of 1857  but,  interestingly, they did not join forces with the “mutineers”, which included people of all religions, Hindus as well as Muslims, when they rebelled against the British and symbolically gathered under the banner of the nominal Emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. It is because Syed Ahmed’s Wahhabis saw their Jihad as exclusively as a religious duty and it could be only waged if special criteria were met. Only a God-inspired Imam could declare Jihad and Indian Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was not a qualified Imam; for Wahhabis, the Imam was Syed Ahmed.

A book worth reading if you have patience for long and confusing Subcontinental names and don’t mind reading extensively detailed accounts of each and every battle fought between the Wahhabis and Britishers in the mountain passes situated at the extreme edge of the then British India.

The title of the book should be: “The Wahhabi Jihad: It’s Origins and Spread in British India”.

My rating 4/5. Here is the link from AMAZON