Silver lining or false dawn?

Caused by an assassin’s dagger or a hangman’s noose, a death should never be celebrated and a murderer should never be extolled. Many people who expressed their satisfaction last week over the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri felt that justice had finally been done to the family of the slain governor, Salmaan Taseer. However, the thousands who thronged the funeral of convicted murderer were angry because they felt that justice had been done earlier, by Qadri himself who had emptied his official rifle into the man he was on duty to protect.

Understanding these two ideas of justice is important to make sense of the development of human civilisation, the revolution that Islam brought to the Arabian Peninsula one and a half millennium ago and the senseless violence that is raging in Pakistan and large parts of the Muslim world.

Let’s start with the period when there were no states. This was not very long ago considering the time we have been on the planet. The first states emerged some five thousand years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia (roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq) and slightly later in the Indus valley. Almost all human population was tribal; and in the absence of a state, they regulated their affairs at the tribal level through tribal mechanisms. All tribal societies had, as they have till today, comparable institutions for seeking justice.

As Francis Fukuyama explains in ‘The Origins of Political Order’, these included: “obligations on kinsmen to seek revenge or restitution for wrongs committed; a nonbinding system of arbitration for helping to settle disputes peacefully; and a customary schedule of payments for wrongs.” Since immovable assets, particularly cattle and precious metals, were most important belongings, there was a serious risk of losing everything overnight and it was not uncommon to lose women and children alongside other property. Fear of revenge created the most credible deterrence against transgressions to one’s person, family and property. One’s best defence was his persona of an honourable person, or a tribe that knew how to avenge a wrong.

Since tribal institutions can sustain only when the population density is low and people know each other, chiefdoms and states emerged; central authorities replaced the tribal system of justice when agriculture made large population centres possible, though tribal institutions never ended and continued on the margins. This turn also marks the birth of the human civilisation because, in Fukuyama’s words, “civilization can only take place in the context of ‘states’ – that is, societies in which decision-making takes place, not within small family or clan groups (although these may remain important), but within centralized power-structures exercising authority over a much larger grouping involving several thousand, mostly unrelated, people.”

As Thomas Hobbes explained in ‘Leviathan’ in 1651 and Max Weber in the early part of the last century, the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, also known as the monopoly on violence, is the defining conception of the state and a core concept of modern public law. The state upholds its authority over legitimate use of force through a criminal justice system that, in the words of Jared Diamond, “exists primarily to promote goals of the state: to reduce private violence, to foster obedience to the state’s laws, to protect the public as a whole, to rehabilitate criminals, and to punish and deter crimes.”

Islam, soon after its revelation, also turned an anarchic tribal society into a state based on rule of law. This is how Fukuyama explains the role of our Prophet (pbuh): “He (pbuh) was asked to mediate among the squabbling Medinan tribes, and did so by drafting the …Constitution of Medina that defined a universal umma[h], or community of believers, that transcended tribal loyalties. …it made a break with kinship-based systems not on the basis of conquest but through the writing of a social contract underpinned by the Prophet’s (pbuh) charismatic authority. After several years of fighting, the new Muslim polity gained adherents and conquered Mecca, uniting central Arabia into a single state-level society.”

Islam’s revolution was based on making its followers transcend tribal loyalties and quest for tribal revenge – termed as jahiliya (ignorance) and seen as antithesis of Islam. Every individual was made accountable for his own action to state through institutions of justice; no one could take the law into his own hands and no one could be made accountable for someone else’s actions.

The worst mistake Muslims have made in understanding their religion is equating Islam with tribalism. Islam ended tribal tyranny and anarchy by giving law and forming a state. This confusion perhaps arises when the culture of the Arabian Peninsula is equated with the message of Islam. Globalisation has created anxiety about identities, giving birth to a new form of tribalism. Many Muslim individuals and groups, as a result, have stared behaving in tribal ways reminiscent of the pre-Islamic period. They try to wreak revenge for real or perceived grievances on groups of ‘enemy tribes’ without care for individual guilt, rules of war or discriminating between combatants and non-combatants. The speech of the TTP leader, Khalifa Omar Mansoor, after the massacre at the Bacha Khan University is worthy of a pre-Islamic Meccan chief.

Violence against women, honour killing and the murder of Salmaan Taseer all fall in the category of tribal revenge, which may be provoked partly by religious sentiment but is not based on the message of religion. Religious leaders who try to justify such actions can be seen using the language of individual or tribal (national) honour or their own version of social sciences. Here we do not have a clear-cut division between liberals and religious people. A number of leading religious scholars have explained in religious terminology what I have tried to elaborate in the language of social science.

The Muslim world is facing such violence because social development was stunted and states remained weak due to prolonged dictatorships making people fall back upon tribal loyalties and tribal ideologies. Pakistan is a unique modern state that that went a step further by promoting tribal ideologies and violent non-state groups, thus inflicting a grave self-injury. The state chose to make a distinction between a good murder and a bad murder as well as between a good murderer and a bad murderer. This created an enabling environment for religious violence and honour crimes.

Sectarian terrorists with a sound track record of massacres and murders were allowed to roam free and infect others. Qadri’s supporters are under the impression that the murder committed by their beloved hero also falls in the category of good murder and he should have enjoyed impunity. His hanging comes as a shock to them and a surprise to us all.

Here we should not confuse the debate on capital punishment with a larger and more urgent debate on uniform application of law and end of impunity for those who commit violence in the name of honour and religion. The senseless violence of the last decade has made people crave for an effective and efficient state. It is time for the state to step forward and take charge of its responsibilities. Many of us have seen a silver lining on the horizon recently; we can only hope that it is not another false dawn.

The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan