FORMER British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in an article published in The Guardian, has compared militant Islam to Bolshevism and advocated massive use of force against it. “Islamic extremism today”, she writes, “like Bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical well-armed devotees. And, like communism, it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.”

Applauding American success against “Islamic terrorism”, Mrs. Thatcher has favoured strikes at “other centres of Islamic terror” in Africa, South-east Asia and elsewhere. Also, she asks the West to cripple Muslim “rogue states” like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan because they are “enemies of western values and interests”.

Mrs. Thatcher’s call for a crusade against militant Islam is almost an endorsement of what Professor Samuel Huntington forecast some years ago in his monumental work, The Clash of Civilizations: the next round would be between Islam and the West.

If the “second crusade” prediction comes true it will be a titanic global tragedy. But the worst sufferers will be Muslims because, unlike the Richard-Saladin crusade, this will be an altogether unequal contest. It is high time religious leaders and intelligentsia in the Islamic world got together to ponder a strategy that nails the lie that Islam is an aggressive, hostile, intolerant and terror-loving religion. It should be clear to us by now that the only way to present the true image of Islam is by getting out of the downward spiral of ignorance and obscurantism, fanaticism and delusion, poverty and oppression, rage and self-pity, hate and spite, violence and suicide bombing.

We have to convince the militants that terrorist attacks have harmed Islam and Muslims more than their enemies. We have to persuade that hijacking planes, bombing shopping centres, burning women and children, slaughtering innocent civilians, killing and getting killed in order to get a ticket to heaven is a most flagrant violation of the Quranic injunctions, Islamic morality and the humane teachings of the holy Prophet.

We cannot get out of the mess in which we find ourselves today unless we first look for the real reasons for our decline. This applies to Pakistan as much as to any other country in the Islamic world.

The prerequisite for an objective analysis is to abandon the prevailing culture of victimhood. Instead of asking “what did we do wrong?” we are asking “who did this to us?” Like the ancient Romans, who put the blame for the decline of their civilization on the outsiders, we have acquired a tendency to create scapegoats and blame others for our problems. First we blamed the Crusades, then the Mongol invasions, then the western imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, and now the American and the Jewish “conspiracy” for the decline of the Islamic world. But the bitter truth is that the success of our adversaries has been not the cause but the consequence of our weakness and decadence.

When Europe was living in dark ages, the Islamic world was a global leader in science, technology, statecraft, culture and the arts. The four great centres of Islamic civilization — Spain under the Moors, India under the Mughals, Iran under the Safavids and Turkey under the Ottomans — flourished as long as they kept pace with the changing times. Their decline began when they turned away from the path of reform and regeneration, resisted change, and stifled intellectual inquisitiveness and creativity.

Just one example will bring home the point. In 1492, after the fall of Grenada, the last outpost of Muslim rule in Spain, the Spanish Jews, because of Christian persecution, migrated to Turkey with their printing presses. They were granted permission by the Sultan to print books in the capital and other cities on one condition: they would not print any books in Arabic characters. Until the 18th century, books were printed in the Ottoman lands in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Syric and occasionally Latin characters, but not in the script used by the Turks and their Muslim subjects.

By losing receptivity to change and being impervious to thought we lost our sense of adventure, our curiosity in the new and the unknown. That was the reason the Renaissance, the Reformation and even the scientific revolution passed unnoticed in the Islamic world. In a nutshell, we fell behind because we failed to come to grips with new ideas and changing times.

The larger crisis of the Islamic world — Pakistan’s in particular — is not political or economic. The larger crisis is of a civilization that has become aware of its inadequacies but is too confused (or fearful?) to walk the path of reason and adopt the intellectual means to move ahead and regain its glory. This largely explains our social, political, economic, cultural and institutional backwardness.

The Muslim intelligentsia continues to live in two different worlds — the medieval and the modern. The Christians, the Jews, and others have adjusted their dogmas to the demands of modernity and science. But we have not resolved the conflict between obscurantism and modernism with the result that we continue to be torn between the contrary pulls and demands of two different worlds — one long dead, the other in full bloom and still evolving.

The Islamic world is faced today with a number of dilemmas. One of them, of recent origin, has attracted little attention. While Islamic zealots are denouncing and rejecting western civilization, a mass Muslim migration to Europe and North America is in full swing for reasons of economic and educational betterment. There are now 1.3 million Muslim immigrants in Britain, 3.2 million in Germany and 4.2 million in France. Figures for other West European countries are not available, but their number is also large. In North America, Islam is the fastest growing religion because of Muslim migration. 600,000 Muslims are living in New York city alone.

According to orthodox Muslim jurists, for a Muslim to live under non-Muslim rule is undesirable, and according to some, even forbidden. The classical jurists laid down that a Muslim could live under non-Muslim rule only under a dire necessity, like the practical need of a trader for a short- or long-term visit to a non-Muslim land or if a Muslim community was conquered by an infidel invader.

But what is happening today is something unique in Islamic history. Great numbers of Muslims are migrating from Islamic countries to non-Muslim lands, of their own free will, willingly subjecting themselves and their families to non-Muslim governments and non-Muslim personal laws and sending their children to be educated in non-Muslim schools, colleges and universities. The mass Muslim migration to Europe and North America will have profound implications for the West as well as for the Islamic world

The surprising thing is that most of these Muslim immigrants come from traditional and conservative societies. Being in an environment, totally alien to their beliefs and ways of life, some of them react by joining the “Tableeghi” ranks and some seek to ease their religious conscience by sporting long beards and wearing ankle-high shalwars or pyjamas to assert their Muslim identity.

After September 11, a serious debate is going on in the West whether Muslim immigrants can fit into the liberal western society. German foreign minister, Joschka Fisher, whom no one would consider racist or illiberal, remarked in May that it was necessary to find out whether Islamic traditions and teachings were compatible with the values of modern western societies. His remarks are all the more significant because most of Germany’s Muslims are Turks whose attitude towards Islam is much more relaxed than that of Pakistanis.

Is Islam an aggressive, hostile, intolerant and retrograde religion, as its opponents and denigrators claim it to be? It is for us to give the lie to this propaganda because the quality of faith depends on the quality of men who practise it. In Pakistan as much as in other Islamic countries, we have to abandon the culture of victimhood and get out of the groove of hate and spite, rage and self-pity. Instead of blaming others for our problems, we should objectively look into the whys and wherefores of our decline. La Rochefoucauld’s perceptive saying — “nature endowed us with pride to spare us the pain of knowing our imperfections” — applies equally to individuals as well as nations.

We are living in an interdependent world of accelerated changes; our times are moving so fast that unless we heed the wake-up call, the world will soon pass us by and treat us as a lost tribe. We have to regain the lost spirit and habit of inquiry and analysis, reform and regeneration to get out of the rut of moral chaos and intellectual stupor and decline.

Our best hope lies in reason, free discussion, receptiveness to thought, openness, synthesis and harmony, pluralism, tolerance, accommodation, and seeing the other fellow’s point of view. If we continue to ignore these virtues, the future will become even more bleak for us than the present.

CONTEMPORARY political chemistry of this Islamic republic of ours defies all standard and established terminology. What is a political party? No political party in the country today can honestly claim to have a constitution worth the name. No political party has a political policy or programme of action in government.

For over two years these political parties have been clamouring for freedom of political activity. Honest political activity begins with intelligent and coherent political thinking. On thinking no dictator has ever been able to place a ban. Poet Ghalib says, “Zindan mein bhi khayal biaban naward tha (Even in prison my thought was roaming across limitless space).”

All political parties have had more than two years in which to think out and work out their political programme, the one that they would attempt to implement if elected to form a government. Or, if not elected to form a government, to work and (if it should come to that) agitate for in the opposition, inside the parliament and out in the field.

From September 1, outdoor political activity has been permitted. What kind of activity has any political party commenced so far? Except for the symbols allotted to them by the Election Commission, no political party has anything of substance to show for its existence. Most of them are still engaged in the sterile exercise of making and breaking alliances or ‘seat adjustments.’

On the one hand we have to accept the undeniable fact that political activity in Pakistan has been rather out of fashion since General Ziaul Haq toppled and hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The longest ruling dictator instituted the culture of “partyless” politics and partyless elections. The irony is that those who were Zia’s first eleven players are today the high priests of democracy.

In a country where party politics has been at a discount, there are more registered and legally recognized political parties than anywhere in the world. We have around one hundred political parties. In the United States they have been trying for a hundred years to have a third party. They have failed. In Britain, there used to be three major parties, now there are two.

Of the more than one hundred political parties, not one has a proper constitution, or policy paper or statement, not to speak of a party manifesto and programme of action. This statement is being made with an absolutely clear sense of responsibility.

While compiling-editing my latest book The Political Parties of Pakistan, I addressed personal letters to the top-ranking leaders of 17 ‘leading’ political parties, requesting them to kindly provide a copy of their party’s policy statement, document or election manifesto.

Only one took the trouble to acknowledge that letter. Air Marshal Asghar Khan wrote back to say he was too busy to oblige. I do not want to embarrass those leaders. But if the readers of this newspaper wish to know the names of those parties and leaders, I shall have no hesitation in revealing their names.

This is not a secret worth guarding. Imagine we have the much sought after general election round the corner. And it is all so quiet. Unbelievable.

Look at it from an earnest voter’s angle. There is no clearly defined programme from any political party. There are not even slogans. All we have is more than a hundred election symbols. How is he/she to decide whom to vote for? One sagely citizen said he had solved half of the problem. He is quite clear about whom not to vote for. From now till the polling day, he may be able to solve, with divine help, the other half of his problem.

It is by no means too soon to try to look beyond the elections. With nothing short of help from the heavens would it be possible to have a National Assembly with one party commanding a clear-cut majority and the strength to form a sustainable government.

Goodness knows the country needs, above all, a sustainable government with the ability to stand on its two feet and command respect.

In a situation like this the common tendency is to invent excuses or look for scapegoats to heap all the blame on for the pervasive political blight. The intelligent citizen must resist this tendency. Blaming others is no relief, let alone the remedy. Let us admit that the country has been let down by those who have over the years tended to accept the unacceptable, without so much as a whimper of resistance or protest.

Time to recall how the ‘intellectuals’ formed the Writers Guild to luxuriate in the good graces of the first military dictator.

That was the ‘original sin’ of the educated citizens. Thereafter, kow-towing to arbitrary authority became an accepted pattern of conduct for the elite. Its educated, senior citizens have betrayed this nation.

Only next in line to be castigated are the twenty-two families of the Ayub era. Today they have proliferated into more than four hundred. These families have prospered at the cost of the country and today they have come to have a weight that they keep throwing around to pervert the political mainstream of the country. Thus the better-placed citizens, who have chosen to tread the path of least resistance, are the ones who have brought Pakistan to this pass.

Of course, the political leaders have been an unrelieved disgrace. Almost all of them. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was no angel. But he did teach us a lesson that he himself was soon to consign to oblivion. That lesson was that if you are with the people, and so long as you remain with them, the people will stay with you. And if the people are with you, nobody can bully you. ZAB shook a Field Marshal and virtually had him grovelling in the dust.

These same people took ZAB’s daughter with open arms when dictator Zia was in full cry. At the first available opportunity they carried her on their shoulders to the highest seat of power. She betrayed the people. When she was thrown out there not a sigh heaved, nor a tear shed. When the dictator was being lowered into the grave, only Nawaz Sharif was sobbing uncontrollably. But when Nawaz was booted out, not a soul felt sorry.

And so, we are where we are — in political wilderness where hardly a face is to be seen that is recognizable or trustworthy. Yet, it is not an entirely unrelieved prospect. As senior citizen has said, we should be pretty clear about whom not to be voting for. But it is only fair to hope that this election will throw up some new faces with untarnished records. That is the kind of hope that keeps faith in democracy alive in the face of dangers.

The election that first brought ZAB to the fore also threw up a number of bright young people. Pity, they withered away because ZAB himself lost his sense of direction and went astray. Even so, there remains something about ZAB’s legacy that is worth returning to in moments of political unease and doubt. The essence of it is that those who respect the people shall be respected so long as they continue to be on the side of the people.

And that is what election and democracy is all about.