Holy fathers…the search for relevance

Islamabad diary

The assorted alliance of holy fathers – various religious outfits subscribing to their own brands of irrelevance – have held out a threat to the Punjab government to withdraw or suitably amend the women’s protection law recently passed by the Punjab Assembly or face the consequences.

Some clerics, more imaginative than their colleagues, smell a conspiracy to turn Pakistan into a secular republic. If only this were true this would be something to celebrate. But said clerics are allowing their imaginations to run wild. No such conspiracy is likely to arise for the next hundred years.

The late Maulana Kausar Niazi had it about right when he said that this was a nation of sinful Musalmans, staunchly faithful to the outward tenets of the faith, and brooking not the slightest deviation from them, but carrying on with their lives in a practical manner.

This precisely is the problem of the holy fathers and their religious parties. The pulpit is theirs as is the loudspeaker, once spoken of as an invention of the devil, now an indispensable part of their spiritual apparatus. But try as they will – and their nuisance power is not to be underestimated – their voting power remains laughably limited. So to discover relevance for themselves they are reduced to championing not just lost causes but causes that no one in his right mind can take seriously.

If I am permitted an aside, what is the cleric without his loudspeaker? A fish out of water, a soldier without his rifle, a scorpion without its sting…a creature bereft of his power of nuisance and therefore of no account. So the holy armies make use of the loudspeaker to its maximum extent, the consequences of which we are familiar with.

Of the many excesses from which the Islamic Republic suffers two are noteworthy: an excess of sound, and an excess of plastic. Sooner than anything to do with misplaced religious zeal, it is the plastic shopper that will do Pakistan in.

The Islamic firmament’s only nuclear power has its nukes in safe custody. But it lacks control over the loudspeaker and it has absolutely no control over the plastic menace threatening to overrun its rivers, its water courses, its open fields and its valleys. From the Himalayan glaciers to the sea there is no place, no hidden corner, safe from the loudspeaker’s assault on the senses and the plastic shopper’s destructive invasion of the environment.

There is a national command authority for our nukes and missiles. More useful would be a national command authority to deal with the sound and plastic menaces.

We say without an iota of embarrassment that this is God’s own republic, its creation ordained by divine command. We also say that cleanliness is half of faith, and is next only to godliness. The plastic shopper and its ubiquitous presence mock this pious claim.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif woke up to the shame of so-called ‘honour killings’ after watching Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary which went on to win an Oscar award. Maybe if Ms Obaid-Chinoy gets to make a film on the shopper someone in a position to make a difference will wake up to the plastic threat that Pakistan faces.

Returning to the holy fathers…their March 27 ultimatum is not a call to arms. It is a cry of anxiety, a desperate plea to be taken seriously. This was a gathering – at the Jamaat-e-Islami headquarters, Mansoora – of not angry but anxious flag-bearers who are seeing seminal events occurring in Pakistan and passing them by…and leaving them out in the cold.

Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the military’s all-out assault on religion-fuelled militancy, is the defining event of Pakistan today, not that the armchair samurai who are democracy’s stoutest defenders would readily admit this. If it hadn’t happened Pakistan was on its way to becoming another Iraq or Syria. If we recall how Pakistan stood in trembling fear of the Taliban just two years ago, this seems not too fanciful a conclusion.

The holy fathers were not for Zarb-e-Azb just as most of the political parties were not. But when the public mood turned aggressive against terrorism and its perpetrators, especially after the attack on the Peshawar Army Public School, the holy fathers had no choice but to keep their real feelings to themselves.

They went through the motions. But they could never bring themselves to openly denounce the Mullah Fazlullah-led Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan for that would have gone against their grain. Zarb-e-Azb after all was not just a physical attack on the TTP but by implication an assault also on the ‘jihadi’ ideology underlying the TTP’s insurgency against the Pakistani state.

The religious parties had no more electoral support in Gen Zia’s time than they have now. But in those days when ‘jihad’ was the rage and the ruling passion, the religious parties, depending on their importance, were taken into confidence and made part of the ‘jihad’ effort underway in Afghanistan. Even when Zia was gone religious parties, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami, remained relevant in the anti-PPP fronts, such as the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, which the ISI fostered.

All that is over. The army is fighting its own jihad, one in which the ‘jihadis’ of the Afghan ‘jihad’ are now its enemies. And the PPP no longer counts. Once upon a time in the ISI’s hall of fame it was considered a national security threat. Hence anything done against the PPP was considered akin to a religious duty. History and the passage of time have taken care of those considerations.

So the holy fathers despite their numbers and their powerful loudspeakers suddenly find themselves unemployed, so to speak. The great themes around which they coalesced – ‘jihad’ and the supposed danger of the PPP – have disappeared. Instead of being courted and made much of they are reduced to manufacturing relevance for themselves.

This they are doing by such events as the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri, the pie-in-the-sky declarations that Pakistan is being turned into a secular state and by such non-events as the women’s protection law which desperate clerics are trying to paint as an attack on Islam.

Another thing has also changed. When the PPP was the enemy and the ISI was fulltime into political scheming, the religious parties made common cause with the PML-N. Both stood after all on the same platform. Nawaz Sharif needed the political parties, just as the ISI needed them. Nawaz Sharif has moved on. He is self-sufficient politically and no longer needs the anti-PPP fire-breathing of the religious parties…because times have changed and political needs have changed.

Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman is humoured by the PML-N leadership because the Maulana leaves no one in any doubt that his overriding desire is to be humoured.

So there is really no call for the PML-N to back down on the issue of the women’s protection law. If it does it will only be construed as a sign of weakness.

One distinction amongst the religious parties has to be made. Professor Hafiz Muhammad Saeed is different from the rest of them. His concerns are not those of the other holy fathers. His calling is different…of which perhaps some other time.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com