Conundrum of religious violence — I
By Sameera Rashid

After the establishment of Muslim rule in India, the Muslim saints spearheaded a movement for religious syncretism

The ferocity of religious violence is shattering the confidence of even optimistic souls, who keep on assuaging their shaken belief that the strife ripping apart Pakistan can be mitigated and eventually be overcome. Apart from the ghastly nature of attacks, the violent episodes are also appalling for their targeting of diverse communities: Barelvis, Shias and Christians have been attacked by the extremist Sunni paramilitary organisations and vigilante mobs, whose participants also tend to view minorities from a narrow angle of religious exclusivism.

Let’s have a look at some acts of violence and vandalism perpetrated against different religious communities in the year 2013: Shrine of Ghulam Shah Ghazi was bombed in Shikarpur, Sindh, killing Pir Syed Hajan Shah, a spiritual leader and Gaddi Nasheen (spiritual descendant) of the saint honoured at the shrine, and scores of devotees; a bomb ripped apart residential flats in Abbas Town, Karachi, causing massive mayhem and bloodshed; hundreds of Hazaras were targeted with bombs and sniper shootings in Quetta; and a residential colony of Christians, Joseph Town, was reduced to cinders because one of its Christian residents had allegedly made blasphemous remarks against Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

International and local analysts have mapped out certain factors that are spawning religious violence in Pakistan, which are as follows: Barelvis are being attacked by Deobandi militant organisationa; legalisation of the Islamic provisions in the Zia era has emboldened extremist elements that are using violence to gain legitimacy for their narrow ideological agenda; foreign powers are playing their dirty geo-strategic game on Pakistan’s territory, exploiting its sectarian tensions and its proximity to the badlands of Afghanistan; and certain banned religious organisations have the support of civil and military security agencies.

All of these factors might be true in different circumstances, but, if divorced from the larger historical picture, they give a fragmented picture of reality. The fact of the matter is that the politics of religious identity, which developed over the centuries in the Indian subcontinent, with the process taking horrendous twists and turns after the creation of Pakistan, has gradually bludgeoned to death the tradition of religious tolerance indigenous to this land. In a series of three articles, I intend to show that the genesis and growth of religious violence is deeply embedded within the process of redefinition of Muslim identity in India, as it unfolded in the Indian subcontinent, over the past 300 years.

The areas comprising Pakistan have been a melting pot society since centuries. Aryans, Huns, Afghans, Turks, Mongols, Iranians, Europeans were enchanted by the land of many rivers, settled in it, and patterned a patchwork quilt of different religious and cultural traditions. After the establishment of Muslim rule in India, the Muslim saints spearheaded a movement for religious syncretism. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal write in Modern South Asia that the Sufi saints “facilitated India’s accommodation with its environment.”

Sufis were able to sift through different cultural and religious strands and weave unique religious patterns at the shrines because they were anti-heroic, challenged the status quo, and aligned themselves with the underdog of society. People from diverse religious communities visited shrines, as saints in their lifetimes did not distinguish amongst them on the basis of caste or creed and listened to their supplications without coercing them to change their way of life. Here are a few examples of religious syncretism that illustrate the religio-cultural mingling of Muslims and non-Muslims at the dargahs (shrines) of the Sufis. Jhuley Lal, also known as Shaikh Tahir, is considered the community saint of Sindh, who performed many miracles to promote love, peace and harmony. His shrine is in Ordero Lal village, Matiari; its walls are inscribed with the Kalima and the names of Hindu deities. Muslim and Hindu devotees, mostly hailing from Karachi, Thatta and interior Sindh, pray together at the shrine. Similarly, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalander is thronged by Hindu and Muslim crowds; one of the spiritual descendants of the saint is a Hindu, who performs the ritual of ghusal on the first day of the opening of the urs.

Religious co-existence was also manifested with the synthesis and borrowing of Hindu and Muslim devotional practices. Dhammal, a devotional dance, which derives its roots from damaru, or drums of Shiva, and is performed at shrines, blends Sufi practice of realisation of God through dance with local instruments and beats. Similarly, during the urs of Madhu Lal Hussain in Lahore, a huge cauldron of fire is burnt in the courtyard and people sing and dance around the raging fire. Dancing around a fire is reminiscent of Lord Shiva’s dance that dances the world into extinction and brings it back to life through dance. The attire of qalanders and Hindu yogis and Nath sadhus is also alike; they wear green and red chogas, godri — a shirt made of variegated cloth — and loincloth with dreadlocked hair and necks covered with metal rings.

Besides the holy men, Muslim rulers also cross-fertilised the secular and temporal domains by running the affairs of state on the basis of both religious and secular laws. As a result, Muslim theologians were kept at bay. That said, the Mughal emperors were considerably more religiously eclectic as compared to the orthodox rulers of the Sultanate dynasties of Delhi. But the religious heterodoxy of Mughal kings had its share of criticism: Mujajdid Alif Sani challenged Emperor Akbar for introducing bidah or innovations in religious law and practice. The gulf between orthodoxy and religious eclecticism deepened in the last days of Emperor Shahjehan; the defeat of Dara Shikoh, a proponent of communal harmony, at Samugarh, and elevation of Aurangzeb Alamgir as the emperor of India, arguably set the initial contours of the destiny of the Muslims of India; it spelt out how they would interpret their past and set the course of their present and future in accordance with those interpretations. Aurangzeb, hailed by orthodox clergy as a Momin for reliving the austere life of the Khulfa-i-Rashdeen, curtailed Hindu practices at court, waged long wars against the Shia kingdoms of the Deccan as well as wars against the Jats and Marathas. These wars were not merely expansionist in nature but had religious overtones, and sowed seeds of religious dissension within the Muslim community as well as between Muslims and the other religious communities of India.

The demise of Aurangzeb not only presaged the crumbling of the mighty Mughal Empire but also began the process of redefining of beliefs amongst the ulema of 18th century India. In the absence of the court as a protector of faith, the ulema took it upon themselves to protect the intellectual heritage of their religion with reformist zeal. An American historian, Barbra Metcalf, has termed this process of reformulating “as ‘rationalising’ in the Weberian sense of making religion self-conscious and systematic.”

Shahwaliullah of Madrassah-i-Rahimiyya, whose father had taken part in the compilation of the Fatwa-e-Aalamgiri — a compendium of fatwas — enunciated that the Mughal power had decayed in India because Muslims had veered away from the fundamentals of Islam. Therefore he emphasised that Muslims should order their lives in accordance with the traditions of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH), and the example of his four rightly guided caliphs to restore the glory of Muslims in India. During his stay in Hijaz, he came into contact with religious scholars bearing Salafist leanings that affirmed his conviction in salvation through fundamentals, and his madrassahs became the centre for the teaching of Hadith in India. His sons carried on his religious philosophy and one of his disciples Syed Ahmed Shaheed went to wage jihad at Balakot against the Sikh rulers.

(To be continued)

The writer is conducting research on Deobandi madrassahs. She can be reached at rashid.sameera@yahoo.com

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...8-4-2013_pg3_5

Conundrum of religious violence — II
By Sameera Rashid

The state as well as the people of Pakistan must realise that the identity of Pakistan should be built on non-religious lines

In the aftermath of the 1857 War of Independence, when Muslim quarters at Delhi were razed to the ground and the Mughal royalty and nobility faced the wrath of British colonial power, some of the eminent Indian ulema moved out of Delhi and established madrassahs in qasbahs (small towns) of Deoband, Saharanpur, Gangoh, Bareilly and Piliphit. The bloody encounter with the British drove the ulema of India to develop an internal debate on Muslim identity. Deoband, Ahl-e-Hadith and Barelvi schools were led by eminent ulema but their scholarship was directed at refutation of the ethos and belief system of other schools and of proving the correctness of their own schools. Deoband and Ahl-e-Hadith were against Shia and customary practices while the Barelvi school was only against the Shia belief system. Therefore, the tradition of apostatising Muslim sects became entrenched, supported by the institutional infrastructure of madrassahs and religious texts.

With the creation of Pakistan, the issue of the identity of the new state loomed large on the horizon. As the separate state had been demanded for the Muslims of India, also to enable them to lead their lives in accordance with the injunctions of Islam, the basic contours of the vision for the state were not entirely secular and conjured up two identities of Muslims and non-Muslims. The flag of Pakistan was portioned off into green and white parts to reflect the aspirations of Muslims and non- Muslim minorities.

However, this opaque vision was disconnected from the complexities of Pakistan, and an ideological and ideational contest ensued on the identity of Pakistan. Islamic religious parties that had not supported the demand for Pakistan and sided with the Indian National Congress, as their leaders believed that Muslims would eventually acquire a separate religio-cultural space in united India, were placed in a difficult position after the establishment of Pakistan. Religious parties began reinventing their role in the newly independent Muslim state, and some of the parties brought along with them the baggage of sect particularism. These schools of Islamic thought had inherited the pre-Partition literature on refutation and apostatising of other sects and infrastructure of madrassahs. For instance, the fatwa circulated in the early 1950s for the apostatising of Ahmedis, had been issued by Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani in 1937.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the framers of the Objectives Resolution had promised equal rights to minorities, but as time progressed, the pretence underlying the rhetoric about the secular vision of Pakistan began unravelling. On the one hand, the non-Muslim minorities were required to vote separately, and, on the other, the Islamic parties, led by Majlis-e-Ahrar and Jamaat-e-Islami, began agitation against the Ahmediyya community, culminating in the riots of 1954. After a long campaign channelised by Islamic parties, and funded by Wahabiist and petro-dollar rich Saudi Arabia, Ahmedis were declared non-Muslims in 1974 by parliament. Khalid Ahmed writes in Sectarian War that the apostatisation of Ahmedis as non-Muslims was not an ordinary event for the community because, suddenly, they became pariahs in their country of birth and it also led to their persecution at the hands of vigilante mobs.

As the Islamic parties were rolling out their agenda of Islamising Pakistan and spreading their tentacles in Pakistani society by establishing educational institutions and charity organizations, concurrently, the Pakistani governments of various denominations, be they military or civilian, were gradually edging the state towards religious extremism through their confused meanderings about the national identity of the country. To buttress nationalism on the basis of the ideology of Pakistan, the state began revising textbooks in the 1950s. New textbooks highlighted the contributions of Indian Muslim historical personages, blithely ignoring that most of these personalities were not only patently anti-Hindu but also anti-Shia, and to a certain extent, also against pirs and saints. Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi, credited for giving birth to the separate Muslim identity, was the author of the infamous anti-Shia treatise Radd-i-Rawafiz, where he had declared Shias as non-Muslims. Similarly, Alamgir Aurangzeb, touted as an exemplary Muslim king, had ordered the compilation of Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, which had apostatised the Shias as heretics. That fatwa was used by Sipah-e-Sahaba after nearly 300 years to declare Shias as apostates. Similarly, Shah Waliullah, who is usually described as a great uniting force of different faiths in India, had written anti-Shia texts, and had invited the Afghan king, Ahmed Shah Abdali, to kill Shias and Marathas in Delhi. Abdali massacred the Shias of Delhi brutally along with the Marathas.

Some experts argue that General Ziaul Haq’s 1977 coup had been a watershed event that pushed the country towards the abyss of religious militancy. On the contrary, the military dictator’s ascension to power had coincided with certain geo-political developments, and in reality his opportunistic exploitation of those developments to strengthen his grip on power had begun the whirlwind storm of religious violence in which we find ourselves today.

Firstly, the Afghan war raging on the western borders of Pakistan established a nexus between the Deobandi and Salafist madrassahs of Pakistan and the Wahabi brand of Islam prevalent in the Gulf countries, under state patronage. New madrassahs were set up in the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Quetta to teach and train Afghan refugees who were living in refugee camps. Secondly, the Iran-Iraq war deepened sectarian divisions in Pakistan, a country with a sizeable Shia population. Sectarian organisations such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba founded in the 1980s, created sectarian warfare in the country and scouted for funds from foreign countries. Finally, the Islamisation policies of Zia strengthened the power base of the ulema. He incorporated into the constitution long standing demands of the ulema, and many prominent ulema, trained by religious seminaries, were appointed as judges of the Federal Shariat Court.

The confluence of these events led to the assertion of Sunni religious identity and the gradual exclusion of minority religious sects, such as Shias, from the official definition of Muslim. After the restoration of democracy in Pakistan in 1988, the democratically elected governments did not reverse the Islamisation measures of Zia, and on the other hand, some of the sectarian outfits got themselves registered as political parties and made localised electoral gains.

The elected government of Nawaz Sharif had taken action against the Sipah-e-Sahaba in the late 1990s. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, most of the militant groups, when banned by the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf, changed their names, joined hands with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and started targeting Shias in Quetta and Karachi and Barelvis all over Pakistan. That noxious alliance is still injecting poison into the body politic of Pakistan in large doses.

Therefore, in order to adequately respond to the monstrosity of violence, we need to look at the problem in a historical continuum and start the wholescale revision of the discourse and measures that have gone into making our national identity. The state as well as the people of Pakistan must realise that the identity of Pakistan should be built on non-religious lines otherwise the vigilante mobs and the sectarian organisations would keep on vandalising, killing and harassing the minority sects and non-Muslim communities. To separate religion from politics, a number of interim steps can be taken. In the first place, the teaching of religion in schools and colleges should not focus on Islam only and must include study of other religions too. Secondly, the curricula, administered to students in madrassahs, must also be revised. Our policy makers have largely failed to understand the intellectual nexus between madrassahs and Islamic religious parties. Typically, an Islamic political party in Pakistan is part of a religious organisation that engages in multifarious activities, ranging from political to philanthropic and from intellectual to instructional. The doctrinal preference of that religious organisation is intellectualised and vetted at madrassahs; therefore, this institution is at the core of the entire network of the religious organisation. Arguably, reforming madrassahs would considerably reduce the lethal unleashing of extremist ideas in the society.

(Concluded)

The writer is conducting research on Deobandi madrassahs and can be reached at rashid.sameera@yahoo.com

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...9-4-2013_pg3_5

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"Nay! man is evidence against himself. Though he puts forth his excuses." Holy Qur'an (75:14-15)