Reinventions of 2013

2013 had been predicted to be a year of change, transition and even closure in Pakistan. Apart from new chiefs for the judiciary, army and religious militants, there were significant changes in the political landscapes of the provinces. Yet, despite the illusion of change, progress remains suspended and policy on everything continues to be contradictory. Nothing has changed but much has been reinvented.
The legacy of an unresolved civil-military relationship, insidious religio-sociological upheavals and simmering sub-nationalist thrusts that no one seems to want to discuss anymore, continues. Instead, all of Pakistan’s issues have been reduced to and reinvented as the drone vs dollar debate, thanks to the low-level, unimaginative capture of national politics by the PTI/JI duo.
Earlier in the year, even the promise of change soon relapsed into reinvention. Elections 2013 saw the impressive interruption of the PPP-PML bloc with the emergence of the PTI. Unfortunately, they soon realised that ‘Naya Pakistan’ makes a better slogan than practical policy. especially when you’re carrying so much old baggage in your own party.
It seems cyber space is far easier to control than ilaaqa ghair so the next best thing is to redefine ‘change’ and just go back to old politics of hysteria and dharnas. Meanwhile, smelling victory out of their own defeat, the wily opportunist that is the Jamaat-e-Islami has decided to usurp the PTI anti-drone, anti-Nato politics with a vengeance that it didn’t show even during in its own MMA ruling days.
This brings us to the Jamaat-e-Islami’s own reinventions. Their ameer’s recent epiphany that qualified the Taliban as real Muslim martyrs compared to the spurious American-serving Pakistani soldiers has caused moral injury to the military. The ISPR registered their hurt and objections through press statements and Twitter feeds. Interestingly, the ISPR’s statement revealed its own political compass when it expressed disappointment at the departure of the current Jamaat from the Maudoodian formula (to serve the cause of Islam in alliance with the military).
Those who seek to reinvent the Islamist parties argue optimistically that this is, in fact, a post-Maudoodi Jamaat-e-Islami. Others reinvent its history arguing that under the leadership of the late Qazi Hussain Ahmad, it was a ‘moderate’ party. I guess the military didn’t realise when these promotions and fluidity took place.
Critics have commented on the recent volte face as simply a blowback of the military’s own strategic use of anti-Americanism when it suited them and the convenience of having the Jamaat as their mouthpiece. Now there’s another ally in the circus of conservatives, offering a more rightist and righteous platform to the Jamaat.
Hence, Munawar Hasan’s patriotic defence of the Taliban has confirmed the closure between the Jamaat, the Taliban and Imran Khan’s ideological convergence that views Pakistan’s governance, laws and policies as outsider-determined. But their own politics remain doggedly determined by, and reactionary to, external events and meta-narratives.
Bangladesh hangs the Butcher of Mirpur, (Abdul Quader Molla of their Jamaat-e-Islami), in an attempt at closure of its own fractured history and Pakistan mourns another martyr in his person. Such is the reinvention of nationalism, patriotism and Muslimness that allows a conversion of men of violence and hate, murderers of children and state functionaries, bombers and persecutors of minorities, into heroes and spiritual models. And 16-year-old girls remain the subject of suspicion and hate, betrayal and apostasy.
But the conservative political parties are not the only ones invested in such reinventions and flattening out of the complex layers and politics of hate, sectarianism, misogyny and nexus between militants and mainstream religious politics.
Over the last decade, academic work on Islamists in Pakistan has been desperately searching for redeeming factors. Islamist groups and their charity work; their impressive embracement of technology and media; their contributions to ‘democratisation’ through electoral participation; their engagement with capitalist economies and creative adaptations of ‘Islamising’ consumerism and the classic evidence that Islamist women reject western notions of empowerment and willingly and freely embrace the veil and piety.
In this exotica of farshee interviews with reluctant fundamentalists and multiple theses on the hijab as a tool of conservative emancipation, the reinvention of Islamist politics allows their actual politics and conservatism to be rendered irrelevant. It distracts us from their decimation of universities that have become camps of gender apartheid and persecutorial religious politics. It ignores the theocratisation of bar associations all over the country.
It deliberately deflects from how religious politics has crushed class identity in the country, as it has reduced all affiliation exclusively along religious, not class lines. It argues that public space must accommodate religion as a genuine aspiration but refuses to see how the public is purely religious and a narrow Sunni majoritarian space that seeks to push into the margins if not eliminate the Other in a sectarian bloodbath.
Such reinvention makes journalists scoff when they recount their own, slightly less romantic encounters of recruitment sessions of the Sipah Sahaba that they covered for a story or the hate politics that they have been privy to while reporting on various madressahs or ijtimas or even their unwritten accounts of tea-parties between militants, mullahs and the military.
In the clinical world of academia, particularly in the creative laboratories of Harvard, Cambridge and Milwaukee, you can weave practically any sexy story of the hijab-clad Al-Huda firebrand who refuses to remove her veil despite her husband’s pleas and blame orientalism and colonialism for everything.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, a new generation of chattering classes have reinvented the proverbial drawing room into their own chat rooms. Catapulted into relevance due to technology and not actual labour or embedded experience, fresh graduates and social networkers can now tweet out their ‘resistance’ through one-liner political wisdom. Moreover, social media tools allow them to be self-referential and self-defined analysts.
These merchant-activists can reinvent themselves as experts on development, trade, military, India, foreign affairs, jihad, gender, Af-Pak and US relations, even literature (bilingual no less) and whose total qualification is that they are ‘known’ to each other and in Islamabad as jacks of all trades.
It’s not just the Islamist groups who reinvent their identities and nomenclatures, shift their alliances and betrayals any time it suits them. It’s the age of reinvention and 2013 has been a good year. It is also why 2014 doesn’t hold much promise.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com