FROM time to time writers in this newspaper have called for a debate on the direction Islam has taken, and lamented that its teachers have been directing believers away from tolerance, rationalism, and secularism without which, they say, we cannot have democracy.

If the proposed debate is to be real, the participants cannot all be secular-minded modernists, for they are already of the same mind. The other party must consist of those who uphold the traditional, conservative versions of Islam. If that is the case, will the two sides have a common language and a common framework of reference? If not, how will they talk? It will take you nowhere to argue issues with a theologian except on his own ground.

Debates between theologians themselves on issues corresponding to the modernist’s concerns today have taken place in Muslim history, sometime with hazard to life and limb of the participants. Let us refer to one of the more notable of them and see how it went. Traditional doctrine had held that all human action was pre-destined, happening as God had willed it. In the early eighth century Hasan al-Baasri (d. 728) and his disciples — Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748) and Amr ibn Ubayd (d. 762) — launched the argument that God, being supremely just, could not hold humans accountable for actions over which they had had no control, and that all human action must therefore be treated as resulting from the agent’s free will.

The proponents of free will were known as the Qadris. Their advocacy did not please the Umayyad rulers, who preferred the theory of pre-destination, for it enabled them to disown the responsibility for their style of rule on the ground that their acts, howsoever wicked or brutal, had been part of God’s design and willed by Him. Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (r. 685-705) is especially known for his support of the determinists.

Soon the Qadris, some of whom had been put to death, merged themselves in another school of thought, known as the Mutazilites (“Mutazilah”), initiated by Wasil ibn Ata (Basri’s disciple referred to above). Their position not only included the Qadri doctrine of the free will, it also advocated “rationalism” in dealing with issues of right and wrong. Beyond the use of Aristotelian logic in building and evaluating theological formulations, rationalism meant reliance upon sense perception, lessons of experience, and common sense as well as specific pronouncements in the Quran and Sunnah.

While the traditionalists had held that human actions became good or bad because God had designated them as such, the Mutazilites maintained that rightness and wrongness were the intrinsic properties of actions, and that they were good or evil even if God had not spoken on the subject. Human reason could discern their inherent goodness or badness. In other words, human judgment could go beyond the parameters of God’s word.

The most critical, and potentially explosive, part of the Mutazilite doctrine related to the nature of the Quran. In the traditional view, the Quran, being a reflection of God’s mind, and thus a part of His being, was co-eternal with Him. The Mutazilites, on the other hand, contended that the Quran was something God had created and it could not therefore be said to partake of His eternity.

The Mutazilite view won the approval of the Abbasid caliph, Mamun al-Rashid (r. 813-833) and his two immediate successors. Judges and jurists were required to subscribe to it on the pain of dismissal from office or even death. It may incidentally be noted that Mamun often presided over debates between theologians, both Muslim and non-Muslim, at his court, and it was here, in this setting, that the Mutazilite view had come to prevail. Official approval was withdrawn, and the traditional view restored to its earlier authority, when al-Mutwakkil ascended the Abbasid throne in 847. The Mutazilites were now persecuted, killed, or dispersed and, in any case, expelled from forums of Islamic theology, never to surface again except in books of history.

Did this controversy have any functional consequences? Consider a possible train of reasoning: (1) perfection belongs only to God who is the creator of all things; (2) that which is a creation of God cannot claim to partake of His perfection and must admit to a degree of imperfection; (3) the Quran is a creation of God and, consequently, must be seen as containing elements of imperfection; (4) while it cannot be made perfect like God, its imperfections may be reduced through reformulation or reinterpretation. In other words, the Quran might be changed for the better. Who would make the desired changes? The ulema, of course, upon instruction of the ruler at the time. The mere contemplation of such capability would have given Mamun al-Rashid an immense sense of power.

Is the possibility that men may change the Quran really as reprehensible as it might appear to be at first encounter? Men may not change its words, but they may change its meaning by reinterpreting its words. After an exegete (“mufassir”) has written in new or innovative interpretations, he has in effect changed the Quran. If his reinterpretations gain general acceptance, then the Quran is not what it was before.

Needless to say, reinterpretations would have to remain within the overall framework of principles and values that the Quran provides if they are to gain general acceptance.

The “great” Mughal emperor of India, Jalal-ud-Din Akbar (r. 1556-1605), also presided over debates between spokesmen of different religious persuasions. He was led to initiate a new religion that would enable him to combine in his own person the roles of Pope and Emperor in Christendom.

His enterprise got nowhere beyond demonstrating how easily corrupted the Muslim ulema of the time were inasmuch as many of them (not all) thronged to endorse his heresy.

Let us now return to the calls for debate being issued by our Muslim modernists today. Once again, where do they hope the debate will take us? They want Pakistan to go forward as a tolerant, liberal, democratic society but they contend also that it cannot be democratic unless it embraces rationalism and secularism.

There is no dispute among Pakistani intellectuals about tolerance as a professed and desirable value. There is an assertion of concord between Islam and tolerance of other belief systems in this newspaper almost every week. We will leave liberalism alone because it is very airy-fairy, and it will take reams of paper to sort out its various meanings. Rationalism means reliance upon reason for establishing the validity of propositions, including those purporting to be religious truth. Islam poses no serious impediment to the application of reason in this area. As we have seen above, the Qadris and the Mutazilites commended it, and they did not come to grief because of their position on this score. Note also that even Imam Ghazali approved of resort to logic (a vehicle for the exercise of reason) in dealing with theological formulations.

Reaching secularism through Islam would appear to be an exceedingly difficult exercise. Those who undertake it (for instance, the late Professor Ali Abd al-Raziq of Al Azhar, among others) tend to argue that the core and essence of Islam are meant to lead the believer to spiritual fulfilment. In other words, its concerns are primarily spiritual, and it need not therefore be invoked in the management of worldly affairs. This proposition is almost impossible to sustain, and it is certainly outside the pale of mainstream Islam. How can a book (the Quran) which spells out the specifics of a law of inheritance in amazing detail, designates numerous acts as crimes and prescribes penalties for the perpetrator, commends or denounces hundreds of other attitudes and practices in human interaction — how can such a book be regarded as being concerned principally with man’s spiritual well-being? And how many of us know what spirituality means outside the Sufi frame of reference, if even that?

Yet, a case may be made for disengaging the state in Pakistan from the obligation to enforce the sharia. One may argue as follows:

(1) The Quran is virtually silent on the specifics of organizing public authorities even if it assumes their existence to enforce its penal law.

(2) There is no evidence to show that it contemplates the use of the police power of the state to implement its injunctions, recommendations, values, and principles, and it would not be unreasonable to suggest that it leaves their implementation to the initiative of individual Muslims.

(3) Thus, while the state in Pakistan may incorporate the law of God and the major values and principles to be found in His word into its own law, it may in good faith leave the bulk of the sharia to the individual to follow according to his own lights and abilities.

(4) Muslim, as well as western, historical experience supports my case.

Muslim rulers generally professed to have accepted the responsibility for enforcing the sharia and thus created a nexus between political power and the ulema. They authorized the latter to enforce the sharia upon ordinary Muslims but rarely, if ever, did they submit their own personal and political conduct to its discipline. Much worse, they corrupted many of the ulema and persuaded them to reformulate Islamic doctrine and tradition to suit their own political ends.

Instead of acting as an overseer to keep politics on the path of righteousness, Islam became subordinated to politics to the ruin of the Muslim community after the end of the pious caliphate in 661.

A secular orientation in the politics of Pakistan is desirable because it will help save Islam from further distortion, the ulema from the quest for power and corruption, and the community from the scourge of sectarian violence.

IF the perpetrators of the December 13 suicide raid on the Indian parliament were the friends of Pakistan, it couldn’t have asked for the worst enemies.

Unless the raiders were India’s own insurgents, they must belong to that diminishing band of troopers in whom the dream of crescent and star hoisted atop the ramparts of the Red Fort refuses to die. Their unfulfilled dream has become Pakistan’s living nightmare. From a front-ranking fighter against terrorism, the Delhi incident has put it in the dock as a terrorist.

If Pakistan is not yet indicted as such it is only because it is still needed as an ally in the unfinished campaign in Afghanistan. The gains made since September 11 have all but been wiped out. To President Bush the people of Pakistan have once again become “Pakis” even in public pronouncements as perhaps they always have been in private conversation.

Now, Pakistan has come under enormous pressure to tame its militants which is only a milder alias for terrorists. India, on the other hand, is being cajoled by Bush and his roving ambassador Tony Blair to keep its head cool while they discipline Pakistan.

Shimon Peres’s visit to Delhi seems to signify the coinciding policy and collaboration of India and Israel in pursuing and punishing the freedom fighters (terrorists to them) rather than talking to them. The visit also removes any doubt if it lingered that America and its allies would never censure India for atrocity in Kashmir just as they don’t do in case of Israel for persecuting Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the Kashmir freedom movement is falling out of the world view gasping for breath. The Taliban by hosting the Afghan Arabs have not only brought misery and death to their own people but have also subverted Kashmir’s freedom struggle. The occupying force and not the people it represses is now viewed as the victim. Bush’s war against terrorism may not put an end to terror in the world but it will certainly weaken every war against oppression.

For now whatever the cause — right or wrong — America with Britain in trail will determine its course and ultimate fate. The American power, military or economic, is too overwhelming to be questioned or resisted. Its wish, or interest, is the law for the world. It chose to disown unilaterally the Kyoto accord on environment for it would hurt the American industry. The world is thus left to suffer the ill-effects of the black hole caused by gas emissions one-fourth of which arise from America. It has walked out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty as it belonged to a bygone era when the Soviet Union was a rival superpower. It imposes economic sanctions on the countries, Pakistan among them, which do not sign the nuclear test ban treaty but itself refuses to sign it. It wants every nuclear arsenal to be limited but its own. Closer at home, in Karachi, it barricades at will every public path around its consulate to keep the “Pakis” at bay.

In this setting Pakistan would be inviting the fate of Iraq or Afghanistan if its government or radical religious organizations were to persist in supporting the freedom struggle in Kashmir in the form they have done through its various phases over the past 54 years. Abandoning it only to change course should cause no despair or setback for every past intervention had increased the anguish without bringing freedom any nearer to the people of Kashmir.

The tribal lashkars of 1948, Operation Gibraltar of 1965 and the jihadi campaigns since 1990 have all intensified the Indian tyranny and added to the grief and poverty of the people. It should now be left to the people of Kashmir themselves on either side of the Line of Control to plan and decide how best to secure their rights and welfare.

The ideas on Kashmir emanating from Pakistan, whether it is the government or its opponents, are neither new nor helpful nor realistic. With more radical clerics behind the bars or on the run after the Taliban’s humiliating rout, now it is Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani’s turn to declare jihad not in Kashmir alone but against India itself. It has become a religious obligation but the rulers are afraid to launch it, says the Maulana and chastises them for keeping the nuclear bomb on the shelf while the time is to use it. Quite obviously the Maulana believes India would keep its bomb on the shelf.

The government’s answer to the crisis is to revive the Kashmir committee in the belief that Sardar Abdul Qayum would bring the world round to Pakistan’s viewpoint on Kashmir where the equally veteran heads of the previous committees, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan and Maulana Fazlur Rahman couldn’t. Both made the news only for their luxury cars and foreign travels. What the venerable Sardar would be able to do in the field of argument and propaganda what the Foreign Office and the rest of the government haven’t been able to do defies understanding. The cause of Kashmir is, thus, once again falling a victim to boasts and gimmicks.

After a series of agonizing but failed efforts and India’s growing stubbornness the only chance for a united and liberated Kashmir lies in developing the Pakistan administered part of the state into a model of democracy and prosperity. The barrier will then crumble down as the Berlin Wall did 30 years after it was built before the spontaneous urge of the people despite the force of the communist ideology and army. It may take longer in Kashmir but then what has been achieved in 54 years of UN resolutions, mediation, negotiations, wars and insurrections?

Woefully, the state of democracy and development in Azad Kashmir gives no inspiration to the people, however enslaved or oppressed, on the other side to bring down the wall. It is a sad commentary on the politics of power in Azad Kashmir that 53 years after Sardar Qayum allegedly fired the first shot for freedom, a general had to seek retirement from the army to head its government. In between the leaders and ministers of the state have been spending more time in the comfort and intrigue of Islamabad’s numerous Kashmir villas leaving their people to the care of a bureaucrat deputed by the federal government.

What will be the new policy or strategy on Kashmir seems to be known to the senators of America but not to the people of Pakistan or its ambassadors (as Maleeha Lodhi admitted in a CNN interview on Thursday). The senators visiting Pakistan say the “new, bold and principled” measures President Musharraf announces in a day or two will “change the history of the country”.

That leaves one guessing whether the history is changing here in Islamabad or in Washington, but change it must.

BRITISH politicians like to come to India in winter for the weather, and who can blame them? Christmas is a season of joy to the world, peace at home and high spirits all around, but I wonder what they say about the weather before central heating.

Christmas cards have done serious damage to the truth with their serene white snow and bright shining star. The star shone brightly over Palestine two thousand years ago, but Britain in December is a different story. You can’t even see a filmstar in a British winter, except at the airport, heading for Hollywood. It is not widely known that Michael Portillo, the man who might have become leader of the Conservatives, had been holidaying in Delhi this Christmas. (The Tories have a leader now, but I can’t remember his name.)

The India visit of the man who interrupted Mr Portillo’s dreams, is better known. It is a relief to learn that Prime Minister Tony Blair came to India to discuss war, and not goodwill and orders for British industry. We are all big boys in the old Raj now. We want to be taken seriously.

In the good old days, our wars were condemned, indifferently, by responsible governments and applauded, vigorously, by responsible arms-dealers, but no one did anything much to stop a war from happening.

Within some eight weeks of independence Pakistan sent, according to the October 17 and 24, 1947 diary entries of Sir George Cunningham, the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, at least 2000 “trans-border tribesmen... probably 2000 Hazrawals... and many thousands more from West Punjab” to a “jehad” (this is the spelling he uses) against Kashmir. This is before there was any Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, since the kingdom of Kashmir had not acceded to either country till then. Those irregulars did not conquer the whole of Kashmir, but they did make up the Maharajah of Kashmir’s mind for him and start a war that has not ended.

That first one took a long while to pause, fourteen months. There is no evidence that anyone else was too concerned before, during and frankly, even after. Today’s superpowers were busy licking their own wounds after five years of the most appalling devastation (nearly forty million died in the Soviet Union and Germany alone), and a fight between two wings of the just-divided and demobilised British Indian Army must have seemed a distraction after Operation Barbarossa, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus, India and Pakistan were fighting with Enfields and Bren guns.

In 1965 BBC radio seemed more excited about the war launched by Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto than the British government, although Harold Wilson eventually did offer to step in to sort things out. The offer is still open, if less advertised. The 1965 war ran out of gas. BBC ratings improved, enabling Mark Tully to become a knight in 2002.

The 1971 war was not about Kashmir; maybe that is why it came to a conclusion. Mrs Indira Gandhi spent nine months warning the world about her options, and at least six months planning an actual offensive. By the time the United States pretended to bother the war had become just a war of nerves. Indira Gandhi had nerves of steel, so she prevailed and the American aircraft carrier, allegedly ordered up by Henry Kissinger, stayed out of the battle zone. Then came the proxy war through the nineties. No one bothered once again. You need a loud bang to wake up the world. The bangs were heard in 1999.

Now that both India and Pakistan have the capability to spread a nuclear cloud over not only this subcontinent but also the richest piece of real estate in the world, the oil-deserts to our west, the world has taken notice. Nuclear sabres have a particularly nasty rattle, even when they quiver under lock and key. Washington, the capital of the world, has intervened on the telephone and will name an official envoy for this problem. London, the summer capital of the world, is in Delhi.

Tony Blair has mastered the art of saying the wrong thing at the right time, or is it the other way around? His first message to Delhi was sent from aboard his aircraft through the traditional means when you want a denial option open for later, the media. Pakistan’s view on Kashmir deserved consideration, but there could be no space permitted for the abatement of terrorism as a weapon in any dispute, irrespective of the merits of the dispute. This is the Bush-Blair doctrine, post-September 11. Knees jerked all over Delhi.

They were getting perturbed without thought, but that is the manner in which knees tend to jerk. This, in different language, is exactly the position that the government of India took during the talks in Agra. Why did we agree to discuss the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan? Because we accepted that its view deserved the consideration of a dialogue. We were ready for talks that would have begun, if all had gone well, in Agra and continued at intervals of three months until the space between the positions of the two countries began, hopefully, to narrow.

Our only condition was the point made forcefully, and decisively, by home minister Lal Krishna Advani at Agra: that the peace process could not be made hostage to terrorism. The Agra Summit failed over one clause, a common commitment against “cross-border terrorism” irrespective of the merits of any dispute or claim. India argued that terrorism played havoc with the lives of innocents and was unacceptable. Pakistan would not agree. Washington and London sighed, and went on with business as usual. After September 11 they have, thanks to their own pain, accepted that India’s position was right. Terrorism is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Mr Blair, who came to explain the Anglo-American view, could do something effective; he could restore the Indo-Pak dispute to its Agra position by explaining to Pakistan that it must join what has become an international consensus, and give the commitment that it will not give any support to cross-border terrorism. This should be easier to do now that the world has changed. The Taliban existed during the Agra Summit. They do not exist now, because Pakistan has changed along with the world. The yardstick that Pakistan applied to its west should apply equally to the east. The problems of Kashmir can return to the talking table.

It is now inevitable that this discussion table will have more than two sides, whether the third side is kept visible or not. Washington, by indicating that it will name an envoy, has left its card on that table. It may be politic on the part of Washington and London to keep out of the picture when the television cameras roll, but Banquo’s ghost will be at the table.

Paradoxically, the power that raised the status of India and Pakistan, nuclear arms, has also made it impossible for the two of them to keep their war a bilateral matter. A nuclear confrontation cannot, by its very nature, remain a bilateral concern. Even a non-nuclear war is a problem that the United States cannot afford. It is now back in South Asia, and this time it cannot walk away as it did after defeating the Soviet Union. George Bush, who became President after Ronald Reagan, simply left Afghanistan to its own, and Islamabad’s, devices, with tragic consequences.

The confusion of war would once again make the region a breeding ground for terrorism. This war would be long, and there would be no rules. Its tentacles would sting the West with poison. Afghanistan has not settled yet, and it will take some time for the government to establish real authority. No one, moreover, has answered one question satisfactorily: where has the Taliban army gone? At the moment of writing the Americans do not even know where Mulla Omar and Osama bin Laden have gone. Many thousands of Taliban soldiers are somewhere, waiting for another confrontation that might become an opportunity.

War used to be too dangerous to be left alone to generals. Now it has become too dangerous to be left alone to anyone. Terrorism used to be left alone for victims to deal with before September. It has now become too dangerous to be left alone. The end of terror should mean the beginning of what all rational societies seek, peace. The first priority is to define the starting point of peace on this dangerous subcontinent. The second priority is to lay the structure on which the peace process can rest.

President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee have shaken each other’s hand in Kathmandu. They must now have a double-handed handshake to confirm that one hand knows what the other is doing. Tony Blair and George Bush cannot do the handshaking for India and Pakistan. But they can help. The first thing to do is to get terror out of the life of this subcontinent.