THERE is surely affinity between the idea of friendship and that of brotherhood. In each case there are differences of degree as to how deep and encompassing the relationship is. Persons entertaining a moderate amount of good feeling towards one another may think of themselves as friends. But then we encounter the likes of Alexander Dumas’ “musketeers” who are “one for all and all for one,” ready to put their lives in peril to rescue one another.

The idea of brotherhood must also have something to do with the bonds of blood. Rightly conceived, brothers owe one another loyalty and assistance when needed. In actual practice the extent of giving varies from one case to the next. In rare instances a person may give all he has to save his brother from grave trouble. More often, customary expressions such as “my home is your home” or “whatever is mine is yours also” are not to be taken literally. We have all heard of “sibling rivalry,” and we know that brothers will fight over issues of power and possessions.

Friendship and brotherhood in the sense just considered are relationships that exist between persons who know and meet one another. But in some of its versions brotherhood, unlike friendship, emerges as a concept denoting feelings of mutual affection between persons who have never seen one another and perhaps never will. Such, for instance, are the “brotherhood of man” and “Islamic brotherhood.”

I am not sure to what extent the idea of brotherhood of man forms part of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian systems of moral philosophy. In Christendom it derives from the belief in the “fatherhood” of God and the propositions that Jesus was His “son,” that he was a brother to all mankind, and that therefore we are all children of God. Christian missionaries who establish, fund, and run schools and hospitals in non-Christian societies, even when they do not expect to convert many people in the host country, may be seen as motivated by the ideal of human brotherhood. On the other hand, men of affairs both within and outside the Church have acted as if “mankind” consisted exclusively of their own kind of people.

Freemasons specifically include non-Christian persons in their fraternity. Belief in one God is enough to enter their brotherhood and it does not matter what one calls, and how one worships, Him. You love Him and you will be caring, compassionate, and forgiving towards other humans. We can have spiritual unity even without having philosophical uniformity. Theosophists think much the same way, believing that all of God’s messengers brought word of the right way, and they are all to be honoured. The fact of being human makes us all one family.

A mystic poet tells us that there was a time when he did not concern himself with the state of other people. But, now, having awakened to the imperatives of brotherhood of man,”I hear your cries, I see your tears.... No longer can I bear to let you suffer. Your pain cuts me to the bone as if it were my own.” In his old, unreformed self he let others drown in a sea of suffering that flooded this world. He did not love them as the brother that God had intended him to be. But not any more; now “if you stumble, I will not leave you behind to struggle on your own.”

Numerous verses in the Quran and sayings of the Prophet (pbuh) tell us that Muslims, because of their shared beliefs, are brothers. It may be appropriate at this point to ask what Islamic brotherhood means in functional terms. Being brothers, what do Muslims owe one another? In some versions the obligations are not all that exacting. We are to return a fellow-Muslim’s greetings, accept his invitation to break bread with him, be solicitous of his family’s well-being while he is away on an extended journey, and visit him when he is sick. If we have had a quarrel, we must not stay angry or estranged for more than three days.

More demanding obligations may be seen at work when we recall the hospitality the Muslims of Madinah (Ansars) extended to the Makkan immigrants (Muhajireen) who had arrived in their midst (about 622). They shared food, clothing, living space, and funds with them until they got settled and found ways of taking care of themselves. In some cases the Ansars gave their sisters and daughters in marriage to the new arrivals.

Let me now relate an incident to which several commentators on Islamic brotherhood have referred. As the battle of Yarmuk (against a large Byzantine army in 636AD) ended, a soldier, Ibrahim, went looking for his cousin, Hisham bin Abilas, among those who lay on the field wounded or dead. Having found him, he offered him water from a flask he was carrying. As Hisham lifted his head to drink, he heard the loud groan of another wounded soldier and, instead of taking a sip, he motioned Ibrahim to go and tend this man. The latter did the same: he sent Ibrahim to give the water to someone whose groan had been even louder. This third man died before Ibrahim’s eyes. He turned back to help the second man and his cousin only to find that they had both died in the meantime.

The idea of Islamic brotherhood partakes of an organic view of the community, regarding it as a body so that if one part hurts the entire body is going to be in pain. Beyond the general feeling of sympathy and fellowship, we are to come to the aid of fellow Muslims when they are in need of assistance the same way that we would want help when we needed it.

To the extent that we can, we should protect them from oppression, injustice and humiliation. We must not speak ill of another Muslim, make fun of him or embarrass him. If he has fallen into error, we ought to bring him out of it gently, help him improve himself.

The most critical, indeed distinguishing, ingredient of Islamic brotherhood relates to the alleviation of privation. A good Muslim cannot eat, wear and live well if a fellow Muslim is hungry, half-naked, and homeless. He must do something to relieve this other Muslim’s stark deprivation. Second, as he advances from strength to strength in his own chosen field of endeavour, he must take others along, guide them and help them enhance their own skills and overall competence so that they may earn larger rewards.

Much of what we have said above holds good for interaction between persons who know one another. Yet, those who speak of Islamic brotherhood hope to carry the mutual affection of which we have been speaking to the unseen, that is, to the level where we entertain a sense of obligation to Muslims whom we have never met and will never see. In a spasmodic and sporadic way, we can act in this regard in our individual capacities. Anyone of us can send money to Bosnia. But the work of translating brotherhood into meaningful action, and doing it on a sustained basis, cannot be accomplished except through collectivities such as state and society.

Islamic brotherhood has a global dimension, which we will leave alone for want of space. Moreover, there is plenty to do by way of making brotherhood operational within our own state and society. Our managers seem to think that the requirements of brotherhood have been met by the government’s collection and distribution of zakat. This is foolish. Not only are the proceeds of this levy abysmally small relative to the extent of destitution that afflicts our people, the stipends doled out are inadequate and temporary palliatives. They do nothing to alleviate deprivation on a big enough scale.

Much more important than “alms” is that other ingredient in the Islamic notion of brotherhood, the notion that as the successful go forward, they must carry others with them and enhance their levels of capability, enabling them to stand on their own feet. In simple terms this enterprise requires the state and society, groups and individuals, to allocate requisite resources for the education and training of our people.

There is no shortage of sceptics and cynics who maintain that discourses on brotherhood are nothing more than utopian rhetoric that goes nowhere. One of them, Kingsley Amis, writes that howsoever distressing it may be to discard the ideal of brotherhood of man, the ambition to build the “just city,” discard them we must, because in the real world they will simply not work. This, in my view, is bad advice. Proponents of ideals don’t expect them ever to be fully realized. If and when a desirable way in societal interaction gets to be accepted and implemented to a point where it becomes common practice, it ceases to be an ideal. It becomes a “ground reality.”

Yet, without ideals we lack direction in campaigns for improvement and reform. Let us then, by all means, keep and cherish the ideal of brotherhood like a shining star on the horizon of our hopes and aspirations for Pakistan.

Our ulema appear to place a much higher value on piety than they do on brotherhood of Muslims. Any brotherhood they do value is circumscribed within ever-shrinking circles. Those outside will not be admitted to brotherhood because they are deemed “misguided.” This attitude of mind has instigated an enormous amount of sectarian violence. One may wonder if there is not a great deal of validity in the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s admonition that the conflict between the Sunni and the Shia springs either from ignorance or from the foreigner’s intrigue and propaganda. “Know that if a dispute arises between the Sunni and the Shiite brothers, it will hurt all Muslims. Those who sow discord between them ... work for the enemies of Islam.”

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, USA.

E-mail: ssyed@cox.net

GENERAL Anthony Zinni, who used to coordinate American military activities in the region that includes Iraq, said of the proposed democratization of that country: “God help us if we think that this transition will occur easily.” His prescience is now easy to commend.

Iraq’s democratic chances are being squeezed by a combination of divided counsel in the US and the rigid conditions laid down by the countries who were against the war. The compromise at the UN, with France, Germany and Russia voting for a new resolution on Iraq but refusing to offer new aid, whether military or financial, to that country until sovereignty is fully transferred, is a cold compact. It avoids what would have been damaging abstentions at the UN, but still expresses disapproval of US plans, and thus still adds to the pressure on Bush to advance the handover of power.

It is not so much that the American government takes serious note of the objections of the French, German and Russian leaders. What it does take note of is the growing disillusionment of the American public at the human and monetary costs of Iraq. The administration is still unlikely to be able to counter that mood by pointing to substantial new financial and military support from abroad.

The meeting of donor nations in Madrid next week could produce somewhat larger sums than the risible amounts which the Americans earlier feared, and a successful UN resolution might just unlock one or two serious military contributions. But on the whole, as one American commentator put it: “There is no cavalry coming over the hill to bail out the United States in Iraq.”

The Bush administration is working out its own not very logical compromises. It has settled on the position that it will not allow itself to be bumped out of Iraq in the short term, whatever the attitude of former opponents of the war like France, of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and of its own proteges on the Iraqi governing council, who have also pressed for an early transfer of sovereignty. Behind the scenes, the argument between the supporters of deep reform and a long stay and the advocates of a relatively early retreat is not over, although it is slipping towards the latter’s position.

Deep reformers and early leavers can come together, to some extent, in agreeing on the desirability of maintaining substantial American political influence after a formal transfer. But what they cannot truly agree on is the nature of the Iraqi polity America is trying to bring into being. The strains this disagreement is producing have undermined the alliance between the administration’s handful of authentic neo-conservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz, and its more old-fashioned nationalists, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, pushing the latter closer to Colin Powell.

All this is happening, of course, in the context of a campaign already begun for Bush’s second term, in which the question of what is best for the US, let alone what is best for Iraq, is ever more likely to be obscured by the search for electoral advantage.

The parallels between America’s enterprise in Iraq today and Britain’s similar undertaking in the 1920s are in some ways very close. In an illuminating new book, Inventing Iraq, Toby Dodge describes the initial tension in British-controlled Iraq between those British officials who saw their work in purely colonial terms and those who took seriously the League of Nations mandate to help the Iraqis create a liberal state, although one which they of course expected to be a close ally of Britain.

Driven by a combination of prejudice, cultural ignorance, and the demands of a government back in Britain desperate to reduce and eventually discard the highly unpopular burden of Iraq, they then did, he argues, the opposite of creating a liberal state or, for that matter, a dependable ally.

In their use of bombing as a means of political control, the British prefigured the habitual use of extreme state violence which Saddam intensified but did not innovate. In their employment of patronage and subsidy, they laid the foundation for a style of government in which loyalty was purchased rather than earned. And, in their emphasis on communal, ethnic and rural-urban differences, they similarly set a pattern of rule through division.

An increasingly large income from oil later completed a process through which Iraqi governments were relieved of the necessity of consulting and convincing their people, ruling instead largely through coercion, bribery and manipulation. The US today, Dodge argues, must grasp that it is both facing the consequences of that British failure and is “in danger of repeating it”.

As the British became more desperate, they colluded with any figures or forces in Iraq that seemed likely to make the job easier, regardless of what that might mean for Iraq’s future. Signs of a similar process are not lacking today, with reports of the recruitment as helpers and allies of some of the former regime’s intelligence people and senior army officers. Deals with religious militias, however convenient now, could have dangerous political consequences later. Dependence on tribal leaders, whether they were close to Saddam or not, recalls Britain’s preference for rule in rural areas through complaisant sheikhs. And, although unavoidable, the elevation to the governing council of some political figures and parties who have, so far, little or nobody of support in the country is equally worrying.

Pressure on the US to shorten the timetable for the transfer of full power to the Iraqis remains strong. Some of it is theatrical and may not be seriously intended, but that does not mean it has no impact. Some of it rests on the certainly arguable proposition that the occupation must be scaled down or violent opposition to it in Iraq, Muslim anger in the region, and terrorist activity generally, will increase. Some of it just counts the American political cost too high.

Yet it seems obvious that a rapid transfer of power by the US would be disastrous. For many who know Iraq well, 18 months to two years is the minimum requirement, and some argue for a much longer period. If power was handed to politicians who had yet to establish either a real base among the population or a balance between themselves, there would simply be a breakdown of the new Iraq. If withdrawal was eased by handing over power to what Dodge calls the Saddamist “shadow state”, the surviving network of his allies and enforcers, as well as to others in Iraq inclined to a brutal style of politics, the result would be an even worse betrayal of the Iraqi people.—Dawn/Guardian Service