A GOOD deal of comment has recently been heard against fundamentalism, extremism, and obscurantism. We know that fundamentalists are those who wish to profess and practise their religion in what they consider to have been its original, “pure” version to the exclusion of influences it may have gathered during its journey through cultures beyond its place of birth.

We know also that extremism is an attitude of mind that tells its adherents that those who do not follow their beliefs and practice deserve to be placed outside the pale or, better still and if possible, removed from this world.

It is not equally clear what “obscurantism” is. In casual usage it may refer to beliefs that one consider to be incredible, weird, outmoded, or dysfunctional. In stricter usage it is, to begin with, the inclination to make a proposition or a body of knowledge difficult for the generality of people to understand, and thus limiting its intelligibility to a small elite group. This may be done by choosing an uncommon medium of expression and/or by resorting to allusions, riddles, allegory, metaphor, similitudes, sarcasm, ambivalence, and other such techniques.

Taking an example from a professional context, let us suppose an herbalist tells his assistant to add a certain amount of “hermes” to the lotion he is preparing. The latter will understand this instruction only if he knows that a deity in Greek mythology named Hermes corresponds to a Roman god called Mercury.

Obscurantism may relate not only to the language used but also to the substance to be conveyed. I have just finished reading Uberto Eco’s famous novel, The Name of the Rose, which apart from telling a story presents many long accounts of theological discourses and disputations within the Catholic Church. The setting is a Benedictine abbey (monastery) in Italy in the 1320s. Everybody here speaks Latin and, with the exception of a few servants, no one understands the vernacular spoken in the neighbouring villages and towns. Outsiders are thus excluded from the knowledge the abbey houses.

Its library is famous all over Christendom for the richness of its collection the bulk of which is Latin, but it does also contain several thousand Greek and Arabic volumes. No one other than the abbot (head of the abbey), the librarian, and his assistant may enter the library. A resident monk may tell the librarian the title of a book he wants, and the latter will give it to him if he thinks the book in question is appropriate reading for that particular individual. In other words, the monks do not have free access to knowledge of their choice. For instance, a monk may not read a book on Islam if the librarian thinks there is no need for him to read it.

Not only the church but also the professions wished to keep their knowledge beyond the reach of outsiders. Physicians, judges, lawyers, and professors spoke and wrote Latin, which was the medium of instruction and discourse in the universities, but which the folks outside did not understand.

In the medieval Catholic tradition knowledge or belief at variance with the scriptures was banned, and the person spreading it was liable to be arrested, tortured, and burned on the stake. We have all heard of Galileo’s experience: he discovered and announced that, contrary to the Bible, the earth revolved around the sun and not the sun around the earth. The church authorities arrested him for heresy, tortured him, asked him to recant, and threatened to burn him alive if he wouldn’t. Galileo invited them to look out through his telescope and verify his finding. This they declined to do.

Women physicians who cured illnesses with new herbal medicines were considered to be in league with Satan, accused of witchcraft and, if discovered and apprehended, put through the Inquisition and then to death.

Regardless of their reasonableness or efficacy, beliefs uncongenial to the Pope were treated as heresy. That a doctrinal position had emanated from him was to be taken as proof of its veracity, for being the Vicar of Christ he was to be regarded as infallible. Take the case of the Minorites, an offshoot of the Franciscan order, who eschewed property, lived on alms, and preached poverty on the reasoning that Jesus was poor, and that he had only the use, but not the ownership, of whatever little he possessed. This doctrine annoyed the Pope who at the time was immensely wealthy. In places where he had political power the Minorites were branded as heretics and punished.

Obscurantism is still alive and kicking. Thousands of school boards in America have asked their biology teachers to stop teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution and instead teach the “creationist” view of the beginnings of the earth and mankind. The Darwinists maintain that the earth came into being many millions of years ago, and that man evolved from lower species over a very long period of time. Paleontologists have been discovering fossils that support this explanation. DNA technology shows a 98 per cent correspondence between chimpanzees and humans.

Creationists say that these explanations have been devised by atheist scientists under the spell of Satan. The earth, they believe, is only a few thousand years old and all the species living on it were created in their present form in six consecutive days of a single week about 4,000 BC.

Equally obscurantist are the racist theories that hold that the people of colour, particularly the blacks, were made genetically less capable of learning than the whites. Howsoever reprehensible these theories may be, the fact is that they have not been given up.

Muslims have their share of obscurantism. It should be clear that the issue here is whether propositions in the realm of belief are to be subjected to rational examination. The “Mutazilites” did just that: they sought to find rational explanations for articles of faith. They were influential for less than a century (748-827 AD), and then they were suppressed until they disappeared from Muslim theological discourse.

The winners in this contest, known as Asharites, opposed the application of reason to matters of religion. They preached conformity to the teachings of the earlier interpreters, and they cultivated prejudice against philosophy and non-religious branches of knowledge. In 1150 Caliph Mustanijid ordered the burning of the philosophical works of Ibn Sina (Avicena), and in 1194 Amir Abu Yusuf al-Mansur, then at Seville (Spain), ordered the burning of the works of another great Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd (Averros). Further thinking in philosophy, mathematics, and science ceased in the Muslim world.

The ulema opposed the products of modern technology. The printing press did not appear in any Muslim country until 1798 when Napoleon came to Egypt (some 350 years after the first printing of the Bible). It came to Turkey in 1839 but was limited to the production of non-religious books. The Quran was not printed in a Muslim country until 1874. The ulema do not oppose modern science and technology any longer, but they still oppose the attitude of mind (disposition to questioning and free inquiry) that made advances in these areas possible.

It may be argued with considerable justification that objective reason has no place in the domain of faith. If a proposition passed the test of such reason it would not have to be taken as a matter of faith. The problem in our case arises from the fact that our ulema have extended the domain of faith to include thousands of injunctions relating to all aspects of life and human interaction. We are asked to give them unquestioning obedience, because “so it is written and therefore so it must be done”. The ulema are unwilling to concede that some of these injunctions may have been addressed to specific situations in a given temporal context, and that their applicability was therefore intended to be transient, not eternal.

Insistence on conformity and disapproval of the questioning mind have spilled from the domain of faith to other areas such as home, school, and the workplace. The subordinate person in these places must accept what the superior has said simply because he has said so. This attitude has had a devastating impact on the acquisition, dissemination, and application of knowledge in the Muslim world.

The same attitude of unquestioning obedience is commended with respect to custom and tradition. Not only certain readings of theology but tradition say that women are to stay home. It is argued that there is then nothing wrong with stopping them in parts of NWFP from contesting local elections or even casting their votes at polling stations.

Some Muslim theologians believe that it is wrong to have a good laugh or to tell jokes that make the listeners laugh, because the Prophet (pbuh) never laughed; he smiled and that too only occasionally. (Catholic priests said the same thing with reference to Jesus.)

It may be useful to recall how the Quran deals with the issue of obscurantism. In verse 7 of the third Sura (Al Imran) we are told that there are verses in the Book which are basic (“muhkimat”) and whose meaning is clear and firm. Then there are others (“mutshabihat”) whose meaning is not well established (or, shall we say, obscure). Persons who look for their hidden meaning have perversity in their hearts, and they seek thus to create discord in the community. No one knows their true meaning except God and those few who are firmly grounded. (My paraphrase of Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation.) We are in effect being asked to leave alone the formulations whose meaning is obscure; not to bring them into discussion and debate.

Fundamentalism and extremism pose a clear and present threat to the peace and good order of the republic; indeed, a threat to its very existence. Obscurantism may produce the same result through a different procedure. It works like a slow-acting cancer that will eventually kill the Muslim people’s spirit of enterprise, capacity to be innovative, and creativity. Thus it makes them retrogressive and incompetent and vulnerable to external forces that intend to control and subjugate them.

E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

LAST Friday’s general strike came six years too late. It should have been called on the first Friday following October 11, 1999 when General Musharraf seized power, dissolved the parliament and dismissed the prime minister.

This delay characterizes the behaviour of our political leaders typical since 1954. They miss democracy, human rights and individual liberty only when they are not in government.

The scramble for power went on, carrots were dangled and sticks raised, deals were struck and cabinets enlarged till a few weeks ago, but politicians of Pakistan as a class are unable to accept the constraint that all of them cannot be in government, nor live at the expense of the tax-payer, all the time.

This proposition raises some soul-searching questions for the agitated politicians to answer. Is the government they seek now to topple more worthless or more undemocratic today than it was five years ago or, going back in time, is it more corrupt or oppressive than the other governments they had worked for or supported in the past? Further, could their agitation not prolong Gen Musharraf’s hold on power — just what they want to avoid?

In contemplating these questions the political leaders must acknowledge that every past government run by the army or dominated by it drew its collaborators from amongst their ranks. So has this one. Again, it is they who made possible the transition of Ayub’s and Ziaul Haq’s administrations from military to civil through constitutional amendments, referendums and elections. So it is now.

If Gen Musharraf found an instant champion, or vindicator, of his intervention in Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Raja Zafarul Haq was the “opening batsman” of Ziaul Haq’s eleven-year long innings. Both are Muslim Leaguers and also, so to say, Islamists. Raja Sahib now sits on the head table of the strike front along with the leaders of Jamaat-i-Islami (which was the first to join Ziaul Haq’s cabinet) and Maulana Fazlur Rahman who manned Benazir Bhutto’s Kashmir front.

The purpose in recounting all this is not to question the right of the political leaders to call a strike against the present government or to try to dislodge it by physical force but just to remind them that what they are now striving to demolish was indeed built over the past six years with the help of some and connivance of most among them. The essential point to make is that battles in courts or on the streets would not bring democracy to Pakistan this time round as they could not do in the past nor make the government more responsive to public opinion. Only partisan rancour will grow in which the political parties whether supporting President Musharraf or opposing him all will be the losers.

The path to a durable democracy is paved by general elections and not by general strikes nor by local councils. President Musharraf and his opponents both are belied by history on this score. A condition indispensable however is that the elections should be frequent and not just fair but also open to all citizens without discrimination or disqualification of any kind barring those who are convicted of moral crimes in the normal course of justice and not by special courts under special laws.

A principle universally acknowledged for fair and free elections is that the authority laying down the rules for elections and supervising them should be independent of the government and the officials conducting and counting the ballot should be non-partisan. Pakistan’s political culture and past experience also demand that for the duration of the elections and preceding campaign the government should comprise not of politicians but of neutral administrators.

In the recent local elections and general elections of the past all these conditions were missing. The charges of tampering with the constituencies and electoral rolls before the polling, with the votes during the polling and with the count after the polling have been made in the past as are being made now and, surely, will continue to be made in the future unless the government overseeing them and civil servants conducting them both are neutral.

The sole purpose of Friday’s strike, its chief sponsor, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, contends was to remove President Musharraf from office. Now, even if that purpose is achieved which looks unlikely, it would certainly not mean dawn of democracy. The more likely result would be chaos followed by a longer lasting but less democratic rule. Though the stage and the actors this time round are different it conjures up the horrible image of the 1977 rigged elections, wheeljams and political wheeling dealing, Bhutto’s hanging and repressive times that followed and haunt the nation even today and, perhaps, always will.

The aim of the agitating leaders therefore should be not to remove Musharraf but to compel him to bring about such changes in the laws and procedures as create an environment conducive to fair and free elections.

In pursuit of this aim their foremost demand should be to amend that article of the Constitution which leaves the appointment of chief election commissioner to the discretion of the President.

The CEC, instead, should be appointed by the President but on the recommendation of a body comprising the chief justice of Pakistan, chief justices of all the four high courts, chairman of public service commission and three other citizens not connected with politics. Further, selection should not be confined to the judges, as it is now, but should cover the civil servants and other professionals as well. (One does not get tired of quoting the example of India where the CECs have been mostly civil servants but the elections there much more credible than here).

Secondly, the civil servants who are expected to supervise the campaign and conduct the polls impartially are totally dependent on the government for their service security and prospects. Hence they are unable to resist political pressures. Fair polls thus are just not possible while a political government is in office because its own future is at stake. A caretaker neutral government must replace the party government as soon as the election schedule is announced. (This rule was followed in the local elections by replacing the nazims with district officers).

Illahi Bukhsh Soomro, once a colleague of this writer in the Karachi administration, has been winning and losing elections over the past 30 years. He is frank enough to admit that an election (especially in rural areas) is more than half won once a candidate has got the officials of his choice posted in his constituency. This observation underlines the vital role civil servants play in conducting elections. The prestige and independence of the civil services have been systematically destroyed over the years by the political leaders and military administrators alike. Now both, in turn, have to reap the bitter harvest of rigged elections and lawlessness.