Zubeida Mustafa: Religious Politics

1) Religious politics in Pakistan has led to the toxic misuse of religion for political gains by various leaders over time, fueling sectarian divisions and extremism. 2) Western countries have also exploited religious divisions and intervened in Muslim countries, though their actions are justified as upholding human rights. However, these interventions often undermine sovereignty and do long-term harm. 3) Pakistan currently faces challenges from religious political movements and risks exacerbating tensions, though protecting Kashmir is also a key issue. Overall, religious politics in both Pakistan and international relations have dangerous consequences.

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Zubeida Mustafa: Religious Politics

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Zubeida Mustafa

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Religious politics
October 10, 2019 Administration, Foreign Policy of Pakistan, Guest Contributor,
History, Islamisation Zubeida Mustafa

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Of course Muslims feel that Islam is one as conveyed by its Holy

Prophet (PBUH) in Quranic revelation, and concretized by his exemplary life.
But apart from podium oratory, reality demands the qualification that, as
apparent in contemporary practice, this singleness emerges in the fact of
variously distinct manifold ‘ones’: individual understanding and schools of
interpretation are separate and differ.

Thus in the earliest decades the major Shia-Sunni intra-faith

differentiation began crystallizing with a historical basis in power conflicts as
well as a tradition of preferential political and emotional reverence for the Holy
Prophet (PBUH) of Islam’s family and descendants. There have long been
numerous schools, Fiqh, with variations in interpretation and prescriptive
practice. Each one’s adherents are naturally convinced of its specific rectitude.
Some are tolerant and some more aggressively focused on the ‘wrongness’ of
and in others. There is no official priesthood in original Islam; nonetheless the
mufti, the peshimam, the maulvi have assumed a specialized status and role.
For some within the community this is merely social, to others it may appear
unthinkable to challenge edicts emanating from these podiums.

Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat made a popular English

language cliché of ‘the seventy-two warring sects’. Yet, what actually alarms
and baffles the non-Muslim is that mysteriously vibrant pan-Islamic unity which
intra-squabbling Muslims spasmodically and, from the western crusading point
of view, regrettably, fall into utterly unpredictably. For hegemons, colonizers and
neo-cons alike, that dynamic gives Muslims anywhere – practicing or
somnolent — a potential force. Islam and Muslim nation states happen to be
extensively pan-geographic. Militant Hinduism poses no ‘organizational’ threat
at all to the west’s democratic liberal crusaders, even if former CM now PM
Modi may have been on an international terrorist listing. The West can afford to
rest easy about his aberrations old and new in a way that it could not for
instance with Osama bin Laden; of Saudi origin, operative internationally and
finding safe haven in mobility from points in Africa and Afghanistan until
declared dead by finders and captors in Abbotabad: Contemporary
Islamophobia has justifiable origins — As have Muslim states’ apprehensions of
western conspiracies against their sovereignty and indigenous
democratic/egalitarian aspirations: The CIA didn’t let Mosaddegh be; though
ultimately it couldn’t help the Shah stay. That is just one example; and any
Muslim could cite several more.

The embarrassingly manifest western propensity to manipulate sectarian

schism in targeted countries/areas energizes conspiracy theorizing in Muslim
countries. The post 9/11 doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against perceived
terrorist threat has provided the USA, with or without its NATO allies, a
camouflage to intervene, violating a state’s sovereignty, at will. Western
advocacy of regime change, devastating economic sanctions, may appear
justifiable, aiming to protect and uphold universal human rights. But that
argument evaporates when the application itself becomes inhumane. Economic
sanctions foster failed states. And that can suit the neocon. The inconsistencies
and exploitative intent of western policy and action in the context of the Middle
East and the Gulf are rudely visible. Developing countries, rich in natural
resources, in Africa and Asia have much experience of interventionism, overt
and covert, that turns out more often than not, to the longer-term disadvantage
of the natives (whether or not that term is deemed politically correct). The
despoiling expropriations of western meddling with a view to help or hinder
proxies; and mischievously propagandist media focus in the context of the
Middle East and the Gulf, AfPak and India, are a sad old continuing story.

However, this international meddling and exploitation of religious factors should

not be a pretext for overlooking — speaking of my own nation state of the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan – the willfully toxic use that has been and
continues to be made of religion in power politics by our own leaders and
followers. When Muslim citizens and politicians themselves misuse religion and
misapply religious argument and doctrine the effect transcends the merely
political: It imprints the national psyche and hystericizes social responses and
attitudes, tearing at the cultural fabric. The populist demagogic religious
slogans used at different times by different leaders and ideologues are
emblematic of the cumulative buildup of fanatical zeal and bigotry. Nizam-i-
Mustafa to Islamization to Riyasat-i-Madina . . . Some of the major clerical
parties did not even subscribe to the concept of a Pakistan initially. But
adherents now loudly assert “Pakistan ka matlab kya” and label the secularist
an outlaw in patriotic terms. The charge of treason or heresy may be but a step
away. Mere suspicion or allegation of charges of blasphemy of sacrilege have
incited mobs to arson and deathly violence. The frequency is increasing rather
than diminishing. It makes no sense at all that an avowedly Muslim majority
state should be so insecure of the others in their faith or fear the minority
outside it.

Currently Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the JUI-F is being chided for religious
incendiarism in organizing his Azadi march. There is no evidence of this yet, but
accusatory anticipation can help trigger undesired eventualities or conjure up
unconceived ones. Civil democrats fear the overturning of the civil political
applecart — the Zia-Bhutto paradigm resonates. Nawaz Sharif’s aborted 15th
Amendment and the Amir-ul-Momineem vs Musharraf’s Enlightened Moderation
is another paradigm we have known. Saving our Kashmiri brethren is, however,
indisputably the regime’s current cri-de-coeur. Even corruption and
accountability recede before that clarion call. But before we talk of Jihad for
Indian Occupied Kashmir’s right to self-determination let us pause to recall
what Mujahideen-ism did to us and for us in Afghanistan not that many decades
ago. Religious politics are at their most treacherous when national and
international usage fleetingly coincide.