Saba Mahmood: Questioning Liberalism, Too

Another thought provoking article:

Questioning Liberalism, Too

A response to “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy” by Khaled Abou El Fadl

Saba Mahmood

Source

Khaled Abou El Fadl’s essay is an erudite attempt to explore those principles and values within Islamic political and legal traditions that could be made compatible with ideas of liberal democracy. Abou El Fadl joins a growing number of scholars who have been writing on this theme in the last three decades—some of these writers are located in the Muslim world and others in Europe and the United States. These thinkers represent a wide spectrum of political perspectives: some of them are supporters of the reformist trend within the Islamist movement (such as Tariq al-Bishri in Egypt, the Tunisian scholar Rashid al-Ghannouchi, who lives in exile in France, and Abdolkarim Soroush in Iran), and others espouse a more straightforward secular-liberal line (such as Said Ashmawi in Egypt, Nurcholish Madjid in Indonesia, and Aziza al-Hibri in the United States). The increased attention that the Western media has recently given to these explorations is an indication of the hope that “liberal Islam” has been invested with, following the events of September 11, a potential resource for “saving Islam” from its more militant and fundamentalist interpreters.

What’s curious to me is that in these explorations by Muslim scholars Islam bears the burden of proving its compatibility with liberal ideals, and the line of question is almost never reversed. We do not ask, for example, what would it mean to take the resources of the Islamic tradition and question many of the liberal political categories and principles for the contradictions and problems they embody? Or, how would one rethink these problems by bringing the resources of Islamic political history to bear upon them? For instance, many of the aforementioned authors, including Khaled Abou El Fadl, urge that liberal conceptions of individual autonomy, human rights, and individual freedom be incorporated into Islam. Thus Abou El Fadl argues in his essay that the “Qur’anic celebration and sanctification of human diversity” should be made the ground for incorporating what appears to be a liberal conception of tolerance: “an ethic that respects dissent and honors the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions.” It is striking that the normative claims of liberal conceptions such as tolerance are taken at face value, and no attention is paid to the contradictions, struggles, and problems that these ideals actually embody. As scholars of liberalism have shown, the historical trajectory of a concept like tolerance encompasses violent struggles that dispossessed peoples have had to wage to be considered legitimate members of liberal societies—not to mention the ongoing battles about what it means “to tolerate” someone or something, who does the tolerating and who is tolerated, under what circumstances, and toward what end. Given this fraught history, is it not worth pausing to reflect whether other traditions, such as Islam, might have their own resources for imagining such an “ethic that respects dissent and honors the right to adhere to different religious or non-religious convictions?”

There were different conceptions of religious and communal coexistence, for example, that informed the social and political life of the diverse communities that lived under the Ottoman Empire and even under Mughal rule in South Asia. These conceptions were not organized around the problem of majority and minority populations. In the Ottoman system, for instance, non-Muslim communities were vertically integrated into a hierarchical ruling structure, but had their own independent legal systems. This mutual accommodation enabled different social groups living under a shared political structure to practice distinct ways of life; life-worlds were the preconditions for the individual’s existence, rather than the objects of individual interests as they are conceived within liberal democratic thought. The system did not make non-Muslims the social or legal equals of Muslims, but it did grant them a certain autonomy to practice and develop their traditions in a manner that is almost inconceivable under the present system of nation-states. The reason I bring up this different understanding of coexistence is not because I believe in its moral superiority, or consider it to be an example from the Islamic tradition that could be made commensurable with a liberal understanding of tolerance. Rather I want to use this history to ask what I think is a far more interesting set of questions, such as: how does this history make us rethink the politics of tolerance and pluralism beyond the confines of individualism to include the rights of plural social groupings? Or, for that matter, to ask whether the liberal meaning of tolerance is the best or the most desirable one; what does this understanding preclude, under what kinds of presuppositions, and for whom?

I believe the reason these kinds of questions are seldom pursued is because of the hegemony that liberalism commands as a political ideal for many contemporary Muslim intellectuals, a hegemony that reflects the enormous disparity in power between the Anglo-European countries and what constitutes the “Muslim world” today. Indeed, the idea that the liberal political system is the best arrangement for all human societies, regardless of their diverse histories and conceptual and material resources, is rarely questioned these days. One would think that proponents of “pluralism and diversity” in the world, like Abou El Fadl, would want to explore some of the contrasting ways that questions of difference have been imagined and politically instituted within different non-liberal traditions.

It should also be pointed out that Khaled Abou El Fadl’s essay is largely a philosophical exercise, one that does not take into account the practical impediments to the institutionalization of democracy in the Muslim world. Had he been concerned with practical issues, he would have had to deal with complicated questions such as why some of the worst violations of democracy in the name of Islam have been perpetrated by states (such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan) which have been propped up by liberal democracies like the United States—support without which these states would not have survived in their present form. A more practical engagement would also have had to deal with the fact that the problems of religious and ethnic strife, or the abrogation of democratic freedoms, do not simply reflect the “undemocratic” tendencies within Islam, but characterize most secular regimes in the Third World today. As many scholars have recently taught us, these problems are not unrelated to the liberal forms of government implemented by colonial and postcolonial states. I do not fault Abou El Fadl for his philosophical inquiry. But what I do find problematic is his failure to subject to critical scrutiny our liberal notions of justice, autonomy, tolerance, individual rights and so on, from the standpoint of the Islamic traditions he so clearly holds dear. Rather than ask the question of how Muslims can become better liberals, I believe it is far more pressing to ask how the world is (or can be) lived differently—confronted as we are with a historically unprecedented homogenizing force of modernity that will brook no arguments for an alternative vision.

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Image: Cover of Saba Mahmood's "Politics of Piety" (2005 Princeton)

Description from the University Press Books

Author Saba Mahmood is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

"This very timely book opens doors into spaces of Islamic piety that shatter the stereotypes which dominate thinking in the West. Mahmood carefully unpacks the distortions that common modes of liberalism and feminism impose on the Muslim world. She combines richness of description with theoretical sophistication to provide insight into the struggle of some Muslim women to live their faith, often in the face of not only Western liberal influences but also Arab nationalism and political Islamism. The reader is forced to face dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. This is social science at its most illuminating." --Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University

Edward Said: The Clash of Ignorance

The Clash of Ignorance
By Edward W. Said
October 4, 2001, The Nation

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.

The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.")

But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 22-28, can't resist reaching for the vast generalization, praising Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They're Western too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required to inflict their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "modernity"?

One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."

In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the Islamic--religion, society, culture, history or politics--as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of discourse.

It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now. Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

Eqbal Ahmad: Culture of Imperialism

In the following few posts, I want to share a few of my all time favorite articles. I start with a thoughtful piece by the late Eqbal Ahmad, entitled "Culture of Imperialism."

Culture of Imperialism
By Eqbal Ahmad

The expansions which followed Christopher Columbus' s voyage to the Americas resulted in the destruction of great civilizations the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. The Indians of North America suffered a similar fate. Nearly all of God's creation including land and labour were turned into commodities in the capitalist sense of the word. People were kidnapped, bought, transported and sold. The demographic colour of continents changed with white settlers and black slaves displacing the brown natives in the Americas and the Caribbean.

A world system of unparalleled political, economic and cultural dimension, was created and continually reinforced by new technology. In the industrial age, the expansionist drive moved on to Asia and Africa most of which was colonized. At the start of the 20th century, nearly all of the world's non-Western peoples were under some form of Western domination, and remain hopelessly trapped in structures of extreme inequality which is not merely economic.

"The conquest of earth, which means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much", wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, a novel set in Congo which was colonized by Belgium at the turn of the century. Conrad, who sailed up the Congo river in 1890, witnessed the enterprise that cost an estimated ten million lives. He betrays but little empathy for the African victims and none whatsoever for their history or culture. The "heart of darkness" is situated, nevertheless, in Europe not Africa, in London and Brussels, above all, in Kurtz, the legendary agent of the Belgian company "his mother was half English, his father was half French who symbolizes corporate greed, inhumanity in extremis and the quest of redemption in an idea. "All Europe", wrote Conrad, "contributed to the making of Kurtz." How could an enlightened civilization engage in so "not a pretty thing"?

Conrad's answer is implied in the above quotation: do not "look into it too much." That requires the complicity of intellectuals. From inertia and ignorance no less than active belief in the imperial mission, the intellectuals of the West complied by and large. The fate of the great hemispheric civilizations merited but a rare and eccentric recording. Until very recently, we knew little about the holocaust in the Congo which had gone on right into the twentieth century. We did not hear about the struggles in which civilizations perished and some 200 million people died until a battle occurred in which a Custer was killed or a Gordon was besieged.

The habit of 'not looking into it too much' persists. Since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, not one major work of history, art, or cinema has examined Vietnamese experience of the American intervention. By contrast, America's experience of Vietnam has yielded a significant body of analysis and narrative. Or take a recent instance: as thieves and killers go, Mobuto, who fell from power recently, a likeness of King Leopold I, was sustained for three decades by Washington and Paris. How much did we know of his doings until the spring of 1997? Excavation of continually suppressed truths remains one of the great intellectual tasks of this our information age, a task rendered enormously difficult as governments and the media corporations democratic and otherwise have gained a certain monopoly over historical truths. They distort and bum them freely. I have just learned that the CIA has destroyed the records of its murderous Third World interventions, including its overthrow in 1953 of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh's elected government in Iran.

Conrad suggests another mechanism of rescuing imperial conscience: "What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea something you can set up and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to..." We all know the idea from popularized redemptive phrases White Man's Burden, La Mission Civilizatrice, Manifest Destiny. Like all mobilizing slogans these were merely the lowest common denominator of the imperial consensus. Notions of racial superiority and divine ordination, the contrast between the West's higher mission and the native's humble reality, were not the only ideas that redeemed imperialism. Beginning with Edward Said's Orientalism, first published in 1979, a significant body of works in criticism, history, and cultural studies have excavated the deep roots and complex structures of imperial ideologies. They took many forms which have penetrated deep in our knowledge system and consciousness both Western and non- Western.

Boundaries were drawn to deny our common humanity. An ideology of difference possessed the empires' intellectuals and administrators. They had a mania for classifying people and viewed each as a distinct, necessarily divisible entity. Easy intermingling of peoples was regarded as somehow unnatural. Edward Said points to how the English were astonished to find Muslims, Christians and Jews socializing as though they were not different species. So in the novel Tanered, one of Disraeli’s characters quips that 'Arabs are simply Jews on horseback, and all are orientals at heart.' The policy of divide and rule flowed easily from this sectarian outlook.

While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented." Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights.

Plight of Women in Pakistan

Scholars have suggested a variety of perspectives to explain women's plight in Pakistan. Here is an insightful perspective that considers power, status, and money to be at the roots.

The Social Farce
By Ayesha Siddiqa, Dawn, September 05, 2008

Source

ALTHOUGH Pakistan’s attention seems completely diverted towards the upcoming presidential elections, there are other equally important things happening in the country such as the burying alive of two women.

The words of Baloch Senator Israrullah Zehri has angered a lot of people. The politician believes that such acts cannot be condemned as they are part of the local tradition of not allowing women the freedom of selecting their partners without the consent of their parents or guardians. Those trying to challenge authority, hence, must be punished according to tribal norms.

The feminists, in particular, view it as an issue of women’s rights. However, this problem is a subset of the larger issue of the lack of social and political development and the gradual militarisation of society. It should be viewed in this context.

While analysing the issue, let us differentiate between reality and the response to it. The social reality is what was expressed by the Baloch senator, according to whom honour killing is part of the local culture and traditions. His statement angered many but I would prefer Zehri over others of his kind — like one particularly prominent, foreign-educated and seemingly liberal female politician who many years ago made a similar claim during a private conversation. I was perturbed how she hid her feudal character under the garb of western sophistication. Such elements are difficult to catch and protest against.

Over the years, especially during the past couple of decades, society has become more militarised which means that what is defended as local culture is actually a greater distortion of religion and local traditions to enhance the power of individuals. The power play that we see in the country amongst politicians on a larger scale is actually an extension of a similar game that is played at the micro level in society. Women get punished as well as men because they don’t have a similar power status. This is the norm of a feudal, tribal and militarised society.

Surely, Mr Zehri did not know any better. He, like many others of his kind, has only seen the exercise of naked power. The senator was only trying to defend what he sees as a symbol of power that is his ultimate goal and that of others strutting about in the corridors of power. Balochistan is not alone in this. Such savage acts are presented as custom in other parts of the country as well. Recently, when I expressed my concern to a Sindhi journalist regarding the opening up of new madressahs in interior Sindh as a means to influence the Sufi traditions of the region, his response was that what was a matter of greater concern were incidents of honour killing — all defended in the name of tradition.

Can honour killing stop without debating the structure of society and without wanting to change it? The answer is in the negative. Protests against individual acts of violence will certainly provide relief to a few but will not root out the problem. The religious clerics led by the feudal/tribal leaders (or the other way around) will keep arguing that women have fewer rights than men. But their claims and counter-claims are all a farce until people begin to address the issue of restructuring the culture which is the basis of such crimes.

And one has to be realistic in understanding two critical points. First, feudalism and tribalism do exist in the country. For those, who believe that feudalism is no more in this country, the answer is that the institution has morphed into newer shapes. It might have ended from the perspective of the mode of production, but its socio-cultural forms exist. In fact, the institution has deepened its roots.

Second, the militarisation of society has influenced the process of morphing so that individuals, groups or institutions who represent the non-feudal class behave like them as well. For instance, there is no real difference between Senator Zehri and Pervez Musharraf who not too long ago had claimed that women get raped to get Canadian visas. The underlying sentiment is similar — gender rights or human rights are not possible because it challenges the power of those at the top who will then choose to treat issues of rights as cursory and one to be ignored and brushed aside as minor problems, even non-existent matters.

Let’s be very clear that such acts of brutality have nothing to do with religion or morality, otherwise such brutal rules would be applied elsewhere too. I am reminded of a tragic incident in a village in south Punjab where a young girl, who had sought shelter at a shrine after running away from her stepmother, was gang-raped. Ultimately, she was imprisoned on charges of adultery because the culprits had greater access to the local pir who was a member of parliament as well. The victim did not represent his constituency while the culprits did. The power structure was clearly tilted against her and so was the local standard of morality.

Interestingly, similar norms were not applied to some of the female members of the pir’s family known for morally dubious practices. Even the orthodox mullahs of that area have never ventured to punish the immorality mentioned above or issue fatwas. In fact, moral turpitude is a reality in all closed spaces. Peep inside any closed household, especially those that claim to be the spiritual saviours of the people, and there will be a number of stories, the protagonists of which go unpunished due to their higher social background.

The social system says that money and power determine whether or not one is punished for an act of immorality. These two aforementioned attributes make it convenient for many to hide their sins and escape honour killing or jail sentences. More important, the menfolk of such families are not even expected to hide their immoral acts. In many cases, being a mullah or a pir is sufficient licence for anything otherwise condemnable.

So, while we agree that Mr Zehri has correctly projected honour killing as a local tradition, could we also ask him to see the circumstances in which such practices are born? Burying men or women alive or killing them for honour is not about religion or tribal morality but about the ability of some individuals to exercise naked power.

The question is that is it social imbalance that Zehri and others like him were elected to defend or will he see the real purpose of his and others political existence? Furthermore, closed spaces and unequal power will always breed moral corruption. The current power structures have to be broken if morality is to be restored to our socio-political space.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

In the Realm of Love - Allama Iqbal

I strongly believe that in these words lies the solution to various crises that Pakistan is experiencing today, ranging from corruption and injustice to the crisis of national identity and protecting our sovereignty.

In the Realm of Love

Allama Iqbal

dayaar-e-ishq mein apna maqaam paida kar
nayaa zamaana naye subah shaam paida kar

khuda agar dil-e-fitrat shanaas de tujhko
sukoot-e-lala-o-gul se kalaam paida kar

uthaa na sheesha garan-e-farang ke ehsaan
safal-e-paak se meena-o-jaam paida ker

mein shaakh-e-taak hun, meri ghazal hai mera samr
mere samr se mae-laala-faam paida kar

mera tareek ameeri nahi fakeeri hai
khudi na baich, gareebi mein naam paida kar

Create a place for thyself in the realm of ishq (love, Divine presence);
Create a new age, new days and nights.

If God grant thee an eye for nature’s heart,
Create poetry from the silence of Tulips and roses.

Do not be beholden to the West’s artisans,
Create your wine and glass with the clay thy soil affords.

My ghazal is the essence of my life-blood,
Create thy elixir of life out of this essence.
(I am an small part of a broader view, My poem is my essence;
From my essence, create wine with fragrance of tulip.)

My way of life is poverty, not the pursuit of wealth;
Barter not thy Selfhood; win a name in adversity.

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It is said that Iqbal wrote this poem on receiving the first letter from his son Javed in London.

Watan ki fikar kar - Allama Iqbal

I copy here a poem in view of the numerous crises that Pakistan is facing at the moment. Allama Iqbal wrote the following poem prior to the establishment of Pakistan. But it seems much more relevant today.

watan ki fikar kar

watan ki fikar kar nadaan museebat aane wali hai
teri barbadiyon ke mashware hain aasmanoon main

zara dekh isko jo kuch ho raha hai hone wala hai
dhara kiya hai bhala ahde kuhan kii daastoon main

yeh khamoshi kahan tak, lazzat-e faryad paida kar
zameen par tou ho aur teri sada ho aasmaanoon main

na samjhonge tou miT jaoge hindustaan [pakistan] walo
tumhari daastan tak bhi na hogi daastanoon main

- Allama Iqbal