KARACHI: Teachers less tolerant of minorities than students
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Oct 25: Teachers in Pakistan are less tolerant of religious minorities — as far as their participation in the economic life and power distribution system of the country is concerned — than students.
This was one of the arguments of the paper read by Prof Tariq Rahman, director of the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University, at the seminar on “Approaches to pluralism in Muslim contexts” organized by the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations of the Aga Khan University on Saturday.
Based on a statistical survey, Dr Rahman’s paper looked at the attitudes of school students in the senior-most class in Pakistan for their views about the “religious other” — Ahmedis (Qadianis or Mirzais), Hindus and Christians. “The schools provide convenient clusters of students from the working classes (Madressahs and Urdu-medium schools), lower-middle and middle classes (Urdu medium schools) and upper-middle and middle classes (English medium schools). This means that the attitudes manifested in this study also reveal to what extent Pakistani society is polarized along socio-economic lines,” Dr Rahman explained.
Quoting another survey, Dr Rahman, author of award-winning books Language and politics in Pakistan and Language, education and culture, said most students joined Madressahs for economic reasons. “According to Fayyaz Hussain, a student who completed his ethnographic research on Jamia Ashrafia of Lahore in 1994, students joined the Madressah for the following reasons: economic, 48.95 per cent; social, 40.63 per cent; religious, 5.71 per cent; educational, 3.12 per cent; political, 2.09 per cent.”
Prof Aziz al-Azmeh, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, read a research paper on “Pluralism in Muslim societies”. He said, “It would not be meaningful to speak of pluralism in the historical experience of Muslim societies if we were to take the term pluralism in the sense that it has come to acquire in the historical experience of the modern world as reflected in democratic political theories. Pluralism is more than simply a vicarious recognition, no matter how well-meaning, of the various pluralities that exist in all societies, linguistic, ethnic and regional, ideological, associational (including religious associations), generational, socio-economic and otherwise,” he said.
Prof al-Azmeh, whose edited works include a volume on Islamic Law and anthologies of the works of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Ibn Taimiyya, Al-Mawardi, Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Ibn Khuldoon, explained that deriving ultimately from canon law, where it designated the holding by a single person of more than one ecclesiastical benefice or office, pluralism had come to acquire a variety of senses in political thought of a democratic bent. “Of particular salience to what I have to say is that pluralism has spanned the spectrum of possible interpretations between individualism and corporatism, in a variety of combinations and with a variety of emphases, all of which — and this is the crucial point — sought to transpose social plurality with a single political order in which all duly constituted groups and all individuals are actors on an equal footing, reflected in uniformity of legal capacity. Pluralism in this sense presupposes citizenship.”
Dr Elizabeth Frazer, lecturer at the department of politics of the University of Oxford, read a research paper on “Pluralism and politics”. Speaking about the theoretical foundations of pluralism, she said, “In current debates it is often the case that pluralism is linked closely with liberalism and it can be argued that the theoretical foundations of pluralism are in the liberal tradition. It might be as well to deal with both the plausibility and the implausibility of this argument first. Liberalism is a complex set of political and social traditions and projects, values and principles, and theoretical and philosophical concepts, and it is extremely difficult to generalize about what is or is not implied or entailed by it. Certainly, though, in its Kantian variant the central idea that individual persons must be treated both as autonomous (which means they must be treated as rational and free, capable of governing themselves) and as ends in themselves (that is not to be used as means in any other person’s projects) does plausibly imply that each one of us must decide for ourselves, live our own lives, exercise our faculties of reason, and, ultimately, govern ourselves.”
The director of the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, Dr Abdou Filali-Ansary, and the president of the Aga Khan University, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, also spoke on the occasion.
The speakers pointed out that Muslim societies had preserved a continuity, homogeneity and immobility so prodigious as to set them apart from human societies at large, agencies add.
The growing inter-connections of cultures and the urgent need to find ways of peaceful co-existence of people from different backgrounds had added premium to the orientation that was adopt towards diversity.
