Clash of ignorant armies

Unless you have switched yourself off from the world outside, it should be difficult for you to keep your cool at this time. The focus now is on the power show of Imran Khan’s party to be launched today.

But there is so much more that rings alarm bells in the mind of thinking Pakistanis. For instance, there was this horrifying bloodbath in Lower Kurram on Thursday when a convoy of about 200 vehicles, on its way from Parachinar to Peshawar, was ambushed by gunmen. More than 40 persons, including women and children, were killed.

However, this great tragedy was totally overshadowed by the impending showdown between the PTI protesters and the administration. Not only that, a Pandora’s box opened on Thursday when a recorded video statement of Bushra Bibi was released – and it did have some incendiary stuff to ignite a bonfire of controversy.

In the rush of events that have a bearing on this country’s social order and well-being, there was one statement made by a politician in power that, in my view, could serve as some kind of a parable of the existing state of affairs. In a recent interview with BBC Urdu, Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti said that it was now not possible to distinguish between friends and enemies. He used the word ‘namumkin’ – impossible.

Yes, that is how the situation in his province has developed. Actually, the interview had been prompted by that suicide bombing at the Quetta railway station on November 9 in which at least 25 persons were killed and many more were injured. The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group, claimed responsibility.

This conundrum of not being able to distinguish between friends and enemies makes me recall a quotation from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ which is one of my frequent citations to illustrate the situation in Pakistan. This is how the poem ends: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night”.

One can imagine how this confusion would affect the psyche of not just observers but also of the participants of the various conflicts that are raging in this country. If it is the PTI protest that has grabbed the attention of the entire media, imagine the bewilderment of an ordinary activist of the party, after being called to join a movement rather frequently.

Incidentally, a credible panelist on a talk show on Friday said that today’s protest is the 17th the party has mobilised. The PTI has termed this to be a ‘do or die’ encounter – the final match, so to say. But Imran Khan’s hordes, facing the might of the state, cannot obviously storm the Bastille, though the likes of Ali Amin Gandapur have repeatedly promised a social revolution.

As for the mood of the people at large, I would like to take my cue from an interview I saw on CNN on Friday. A psychologist said that the Americans were “exhausted” by the political division in the United States. This is a time of turbulence and a crisis of governance.

Our situation may also be very disorienting for a large number of people. While they are perturbed by the political confrontation between the PTI and the authorities, the bigger problem that unfortunately gets sidelined is that of violent extremism and religious intolerance. The Kurram bloodbath – a sectarian clash – is something that is repeated again and again and again. You may call it business as usual.

Actually, even without this outrage, there has been a new wave of terror attacks, mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, during the past two weeks. I do not have enough space here to list them. What is significant is that our security personnel have been the main target. The tally of casualties is shocking. We are so engrossed in our political squabbles that we tend to ignore the high levels of extremism and religious intolerance in our society.

Why is the state unable to control militancy, hatred, violence, extremism and terrorism in Pakistan? Has it something to do with how religious passions are invested in our daily lives? Look at how contenders on both sides invoke religion to justify their cause.

The questions that arise in this context are not easy to answer or even state in simple words. But I have often felt enlightened by analyses and interpretations that are possible in private conversations. And so much of it relates to how Pakistan was conceived and created and then governed. What we have made of it is the quandary we have to wade through.

In one such conversation this week, a reference was made to Akbar Zaidi’s book titled ‘Making a Muslim’, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2021. We know Akbar as a leading political economist. Hence, his serious academic interest in investigating contending Muslim identities in 19th-century North India, where the story begins, seems interesting.

Since he was present in that small group of erudite interlocutors, I was able to grasp some salient features of his study. It allows us to rethink notions of ‘the Muslim’ in its numerous, complex, and often contradictory forms which emerged in colonial north India after 1857.

One feature of North Indian Muslim intellectual history in the latter half of the 19th century was the extent of vibrant and often violent debate and argumentation which took place amongst Muslims talking to each other. The notion of who a Muslim was and how s/he was defined was central to the understanding and needs of both the Muslims and the British. Many issues challenged the idea of there being a single Muslim community.

Not being able to fully comprehend all of that, I was left with this forbidding thought: did we need Pakistan to earn the freedom of fighting among ourselves?

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com