Taking on the Founders

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2016/01/28/comment/debunking-the-founders-of-two-nation-theory/

Umer Ali:

Ever since its inception, many efforts have been made to justify the creation of Pakistan. Based on Two-Nation Theory, one that defines both Muslims and Hindus as different nations, the said purpose of its creation was to safeguard the rights of Muslims.

The theory itself is full of glaring paradoxes and has been questioned innumerable times in the past. To counter these questions, many state-sponsored historians, most of them belonging to far-right, have tried hard to prove the authenticity of the theory by relating it to Muslims rulers from the past.

From Muhammad Bin Qasim to Mahmud Ghaznavi, we have named the foreign invaders as the founders of this theory.

One such ‘historian’, Dr Safdar Mahmud, wrote last year that Ghauri was in fact the founder of Pakistan.

Debunking this vile claim, Dr Mubarak Ali wrote, “It is customary to be proud of our invaders such as Muhammad Bin Qasim, Mahmoud of Ghazna and Muhammad Ghori and to denounce other invaders who looted our country from time to time. In fact, all these invaders were mass murderers and should be treated as criminals in history.”

Many such historians trace the spiritual link of Two-Nation Theory to the likes of Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Shah Wali Ullah. In our textbooks, the foundation of the idea of two different nations has been credited to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.

When reading through the original text from these personalities, one comes to conclusion that their ideologies were as contradictory and paradoxical as the theory itself.

Pakistan's CNIC: cannot exit Islam

Pakistan has a national identity card (CNIC - Computerized National Identity Card).

A checklist for applicants for the card, or for those who have a card but need to make changes, is available here from a Govt. of Pakistan website.  (PDF)
https://www.nadra.gov.pk/docs/cnic_checklist.pdf

For a modification in CNIC, due to change in religion, there is a note:

Note: Change of religion from ISLAM to any other religion will not be entertained.

Why blame Zia alone?

Salman Zafar has a newspaper blog article that points out that the rot in Pakistan long precedes General Zia-ul-Haq, whom it is fashionable nowadays, to blame for Pakistan's ills.

These include the Objectives Resolution, 1949, which bound state and religion together; the Doctrine of Necessity, 1954, that enabled constitutional processes to be broken at will; the One Unit program, 1954, that made West Pakistan into one province to try to match East Pakistan; the Constitution of 1956, that made Pakistan into an Islamic Republic, and gave the President the right to declare emergency; the first coup of 1958; the Constitution of 1962 that set up the Council of Islamic Ideology; the unequal treatment of East Pakistan that created massive unrest 1965-1970; the denial of the right of the East Pakistan based Awami League to form the government after it won the elections; the genocide during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971; the second amendment to the Constitution of 1973 that declared Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

A letter of Faiz

The Friday Times

In the early 1950s, poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, along with several left-leaning civilians and military officers, was jailed for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government. The trial became known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. A new book showcases for the first time some of the letters he wrote from Hyderabad Jail to his wife Alys, who was working then at The Pakistan Times.

Passed by the censor 7/3/52

Excerpt reproduced here might indicate the creeping Islamization of Pakistan even in 1952.

Life has its surprises, however, even here. The other evening I switched on the Radio to listen to some Indian music from Delhi (what our own Radio calls music is no more than a collection of amateur screechings because real talent like Rafiq, Pukhraj, and Anwar etc: seems to be banned) and do you know what I got? You can never guess. Yehudi Menuhin, perhaps the greatest violinist of all times, playing Bach and Pagannini in the auditorium of the Indian Film Festival. It made me angry and jealous and sad when I thought about it later. This country is now nearly five years old and in five years we have not given the people one real exhibition of anything of beauty, of culture, of ennobling pleasure. And yet there has been no dearth of 'tamashas'. But all that we can think of is to collect some silly old grey-beards from all over the world, make them talk a lot of bilge that no one cares a damn farthing about, give a few people an opportunity for lots of eating and lots of shouting and then forget all about it. India may be a bigger country but culture is not a matter of size but of the ways of living and thinking, and why should the people of this country not be given a chance at least to look at culture even if they can't live in it. Anyway it will all come some day perhaps and perhaps I shouldn't be talking about it.

Munir Report 1954

One should read the 1954 report of the judicial inquiry into the anti-Ahmedi riots of 1953. A key lesson for administrators in any of the nations of South Asia is that the public purveyance of hatred directed at any group of people needs to be firmly nipped in the bud. In this case, the police on the scene kept recommending action against rabble-rousing mullahs, but kept getting overruled by higher-ups.

As a grim aside, the precipitating event for the riots was the arrest of the leaders of the anti-Ahmedi movement. Why were they arrested? Because they had threatened a Direct Action Day. (the previous one being the August 16, 1946 Direct Action Day called by the All-India Muslim League). Who but the leaders of Pakistan to know better what Direct Action entails?

Reply to Political theology and literature

A.A. Khalid expands on his essay on Religious Liberalism,

The argument is that in Pakistan (and in the Muslim world) realistically, liberalism can exist only as religious liberalism.

For Pakistani liberals to have a truly transformational effect, they need to speak in the religious idiom and bring to the table a rigorous and charismatic theology of liberality. It is critical to talk about the arts, Urdu literature and the humanities but not as a hope that it will act as a creative buffer against radicalisation. The real buffer against terrorism with a religious impulse is a culture of religious tolerance and pluralism borne out of a unique theology of liberality in combination with these aforementioned disciplines.

Examples of liberal theology, the use of the religious tradition to cultivate democratic sensibilities and cherishment of tolerance and diversity do exist among Muslim intellectuals. Unfortunately, their presence is being felt mainly in traditionally non-Muslim societies in the US and Europe. There is an issue of outspoken religious liberals being exiled or forced out from their own countries due to their writings such as Nasr Abu Zayd in Egypt, Abdul Karim Soroush in Iran or the late Professor Fazlur Rahman in Pakistan. These are the theologians and religious intellectuals who call for greater democracy, tolerance and pluralism, but do so from within the religious tradition which is why their voices are more potent than say the secular left who try and locate these same concepts but in a foreign idiom. That is not to say that one should reject an idea on the basis of its origin. However, this is the reality of social and political discourse in Muslim societies.

Reply to Force, Fear keep Iran Together

PTH draws conclusions for Pakistan from Iran's experience of religious rule.

Reply to Religious Liberalism - Our Greatest Hope?

A.A. Khalid argues that

1. There is a long-existing Liberal Islam.
2. There is no discourse of Liberal Islam in Pakistan.
3. Pakistani liberals could have connected with this tradition of Liberal Islam. They haven't.
4. The idea of removing religion from Pakistani politics is purely theoretical and unpractical. However, in the pursuit of this idea, Pakistani liberals have ceded the interpretation of Islam to the fundamentalists.

Hence liberals and secularists should stop asking the question if there is too much or too little religion. The question which should be asked is what type of religiosity do we need in order for Pakistan to flourish? What type of religiosity supports democratic governance, human rights, pluralism and tolerance? How can such a religiosity be constructed? The liberals and progressives need to bring to the table a genuine political theology of liberality which can find its legitimacy not only in civic reason but in religious reason in terms of establishing a link with the Quranic text.

Mosques and Temples

On CHUP, Kalsoom writes in support of the planned mosque at 9/11's Ground Zero.

In his spare time, perhaps he can write in support of Hindus being able to repair their existing temples in Pakistan?

A necessary, but not sufficient condition, and a hypothesis.

The Pew Research Center had a public opinion poll in 2009 in Pakistan.

Q62b Do you favor or oppose the following: b. the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion?

Favor 78%, oppose 13%, DKK/Refused 9%

Why does the Pakistani public support so overwhelmingly the death penalty for people who leave Islam?

A necessary condition for forced conversions to be a viable strategy for spreading the faith is a severe penalty for reversion.  Of course, penalty for leaving the faith could be high for other reasons as well, so we cannot infer from the fact of this penalty that forced conversions occurred.

Nevetheless we can pose a hypothesis: the geographical areas with the most forced conversions would have had stiff penalties (like the death penalty) for leaving the Muslim religion; and it has since ossified into tradition even though it is not very applicable today.   Areas where conversion took place voluntarily will not insist on these type of penalties so overwhelmingly, they were less necessary.

Of course, the reason that I bring this whole topic is that as we speak, forced conversions are going on in rural Sindh in Pakistan.

Moderate?

Shiv had this argument

Pakistani and Western media have made it a point to say that only 12.5646789% of the electorate (or some similar cooked up figure) voted for Islamic parties. This is repeated in report after report after report almost as though people are reassuring themselves that Islamic parties have little support in Pakistan. And this statistic that has been converted into fact by repetition is subtly used to convey the impression that Pakistanis are not “fundamentalists”.