THE ulema in the good old days used to preach that a Muslim woman, if she was to stay pious and chaste, must remain at home, keep the house, and tend to her duties as a wife and a mother. Times have changed and so have the ulema. They are now teaching young women how to be righteous warriors.

Two months ago, a group of them from Madressah Hafsa occupied a library in Islamabad in retaliation against the demolition of mosques built in violation of the local building code. In the last week of March some of these “righteous warriors” made rounds of homes in their neighbourhood and kidnapped three women whom they accused of sponsoring immoral conduct. Wielding batons, they also went around asking owners of video stores and music shops to close down their businesses and threatened dire consequences if they didn’t.

After the police arrested four of them, their seminarian colleagues took away two police officers. The Lal Masjid imam said his disciples would march to the Abpara police station and burn it down if their detained companions were not released. The government then capitulated, and released the four militants in return for the two detained policemen. These events may be regarded as an extension of the pro-Taliban militants’ recent invasion of Tank in the NWFP.

These events are also being seen as evidence that the writ of the state no longer has very many takers, and that law and order has broken down. Why should this be happening? It could be that the state itself has progressively weakened; it could also be that the public’s sense of obligation to obey the state has declined, and that this decline has been made the more precipitous by the state’s weakening. A vicious circle.A state may weaken because of a shortage of resources it needs to function as a going concern. That is not the case in Pakistan so far as the material means of meeting operational costs are concerned. General Musharraf’s government claims that the state’s resources have steadily increased under its stewardship. It does not appear to be short of money for projects it considers vital. Nor does it seem to be lacking in security forces and the weapons they use for curbing threats to public tranquillity.

What may be lacking is the will to take forceful action proportionate to the trouble to be removed. This weakness may result from the government’s own doubts concerning its legitimacy — that is, the legality of the means by which it came to power — and therefore its moral status vis-à-vis that of the trouble-makers.

A military coup d’etat is inherently illegitimate. The law in most countries regards it as treason. A coup maker may have done his deed in a spirit of righteousness, answering the call of a higher law than that of the state (the law of God, “necessity”, or the public weal). His action may initially be met with general approval. But as time goes and it transpires that he is unwilling or unable to deliver the good things he had promised, he falls in public esteem and encounters a general disavowal of his right to govern.

As this process of public disenchantment with him goes on, he is shaken and he becomes ambivalent and indecisive. His will to act forcefully to counter adversity is breaking. All of this may be happening to the present government in Pakistan.

What is fuelling the gangsterism to which the young men and men in our seminaries appear ready to convert? Are they wrecking public order in Islamabad because the state has done them some grievous wrong? No, they have not specifically been targeted for any injustice. Any deprivations they suffer are not uniquely theirs: they are the common lot of the generality of people in this society.

Nevertheless, they are an angry bunch, angry not because they are deprived but because most of their fellow citizens do not wish to adopt their version of Islam, and live and act as they do.

They do not believe in the freedom of belief and expression. They do not accept the individual’s or even the majority’s right to make their choices concerning values and lifestyles. They reject democracy as we understand it; they favour dictatorship of the righteous, and they insist on their prerogative to decide who the righteous are. They are an extremist minority ready and eager to use force to capture power and coerce the rest of us into submission.

I cannot be sure how large a majority the “enlightened moderates” make and how the militants, and those sympathetic to their advocacy, figure in contemporary Pakistan. If the government cannot subdue the extremists, tragedy lies ahead. Millions of opponents were killed in the wake of the communist revolutions in Russia and China.

The majority of peasants in the countryside and the poor in urban centres in Iran were potentially sympathetic to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, but tens of thousands nevertheless perished in the ensuing conflicts during the next few years. The same, and worse, happened following the Taliban’s revolution in Afghanistan. In each of these cases, millions fled the country of their birth and love.

Once again, if the present government cannot forestall the militants, what may be in store for us? What will the average citizen do if a bunch of armed men and women, claiming to be the enforcers of Islamic morality, force their way into his house and break up his television set, video player, musical instruments, recording system, and speakers? Will he and his neighbours, who have been treated likewise, take it all meekly and promise to mend their ways or fight back? In the former case, a reign of terror has been unleashed, and in the latter a civil war is being forced upon a reluctant people. Why must things be allowed to come to this kind of a head?

We sit here helpless, waiting for tragedy to strike, because our government cannot come to our rescue. As I have explained above, its inability to clear away the gathering storm of extremist lawlessness derives from the dubious nature of its status in terms of legitimacy.

The crisis of legitimacy has afflicted several of our governments since the dismissal of Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin in 1953. The crisis came about primarily because of the unrepresentative character of these governments: they had been installed by an autocratic head of state or they had resulted from rigged elections.

Secular-minded though they were, these governments attempted to gather legitimacy by yielding ground to the proponents of Islamisation. The greater the concessions they made, the more the ulema demanded, and the more these governments gave in. This pernicious trend continues to be at work.

General Musharraf’s government, currently harassed by intensifying challenges to its legitimacy, does not wish to invite more trouble by taking on the Islamic militants. Seeing its reluctance to counter them, the latter are prepared to pursue their expansionist goals ever more aggressively.

Where do our Islamic political parties stand in all of this? Judging from the successive election results, except that of 2002 in which government agencies are said to have intervened to their advantage, these parties do not have much popular support beyond a few districts in the NWFP and Balochistan. One may wonder whether they are to be counted among the moderates or ranked with the extremists.

Maulana Fazlur Rahman said the other day that he did not approve of the aggression that the pro-Taliban forces launched in Tank. But I don’t remember him condemning the extremists who go around hitting video stores, music shops, and cinema houses. His party’s government in the NWFP is poised to employ a cadre of mohtasibs (overseers of public and private conduct) and use its police power to enforce its version of Islamic morality.

One may also recall the late Maulana Maududi’s declaration following independence that his party intended to seize the government by force, as soon as a suitable opportunity presented itself, and Islamise the state and society in Pakistan. I am inclined to think that our Islamic parties would join hands with the likes of the Taliban if and when they thought the time was propitious for such a move.

Lastly we may ask where General Musharraf’s own party for which he is out campaigning all over the country (PML-Q), and its parent (PML-N), stand vis-à-vis the Islamic parties. The general has been willing to use Islam instrumentally and make deals with the Islamic parties when he thought he would be the puppeteer and they the puppets. But the puppets have come out of these games chastened and wiser. He is not likely to be able to use them any longer; indeed, the greater danger is that he may allow himself to be used by them.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the other top PML-Q leaders have been bending over backwards to appease the Islamic parties. Mr Nawaz Sharif and others in his faction of the party have traditionally gone out of their way to project themselves as champions of Islamisation. Mr Nawaz Sharif, apparently of his own accord and without any external pressures on him, sponsored a Shariah bill and a constitutional amendment, requiring the state to enforce the Shariah during his terms as prime minister.

It is hard to say whether the professed Islamic zeal of these two PML factions is genuine or hypocritical. Either way it has to be worrisome for the moderates.

If the three Islamic parties, the imams and khatibs in the mosques, instructors and students in the seminaries join hands to force their version of Islam upon the rest of us, what will the moderates then do? I hope they will not opt to surrender or flee, leaving our dearly beloved country to those who do not regard it as worth preserving if it will not go their way. The “silent majority” must wake up and get organised to assert its preferences as the next election comes along.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics for the spring semester.
Email: anwarhs@lahoreschool.edu.pk

FIFTY-FOUR years ago, almost to the day, sectarian disturbances broke out in Punjab which the provincial government was unable (by some accounts unwilling) to control. After two persons died and 66 were injured — bad enough for those benign days — the central government was persuaded to call out the military to restore order in several towns and placed the city of Lahore under martial law.

As violence accompanying a public grievance or demand was a rarity in those law-abiding days, the governor of Punjab lost no time, after order was restored, in setting up a court in June that year to inquire, inter alia, into the adequacy or otherwise of the measures taken by the provincial authorities “to prevent, and subsequently to deal with, the disturbances.”

The court of enquiry comprising Justices M. Munir and M.R. Kiyani, after an extensive and painstaking investigation, produced a report within a few months which, besides unambiguously answering the questions posed to it by the governor, remains a profound treatise on almost every branch of human knowledge — reason and revelation, religion and church, exegetics, aim and the objectives of a man’s life, his origin and destination, democracy and theocracy, status of non-Muslims in an Islamic state and that of Muslims in a secular state.

The searching questions of the two judges, both jurists of great distinction, befuddled many known scholars, pirs and politicians and made some others submit to the reasoning of the judges against their ritualistic beliefs.

Their diverse views on the definition of a Muslim led the court to arrive at this interesting conclusion: “keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulema, need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental. If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by any one of the ulema, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of everyone else.”

The dilemma of Pakistan being an Islamic state which also aspires to be a democracy and the price it has extracted in human lives, peace and progress could not have been analysed better than was done in the enquiry report.

But let the focus in the context of the current public disorder shift for a while to another observation the judges made: “…if there had been but one stout man who could ignore all considerations extraneous to law and vitalise the excellent material lying at his feet there should have been a different story to tell — We long for the lion of God and the Rustom of ancient lore.”

In Islamabad’s current turmoil, Pervez Musharraf, with all his power and enlightenment, is obviously not the kind of man the two judges were waiting for. Islamabad’s Hafsa women wouldn’t have ever dared occupy a children’s library or raid a private home to kidnap its female inmates nor would the music shops have been under siege if even a run-of-the-mill administrator were to be allowed to do his duty under the law.

Reverting to the 1953 agitation in Lahore, the inquiry court then expressed its deep conviction that “had the Ahrar (its chief instigators) been treated as a pure question of law and order without any political consideration, one district magistrate and one superintendent of police could have dealt with them.” In dealing with the Hafsa women on the prowl as well as with the lawyers rising in defence of the Chief Justice nothing but political considerations prevailed.

Weird is the behaviour of the lawyers who riot on the streets while the reference against the Chief Justice is to be heard by the Supreme Judicial Council.

Their petitions against the composition of the council, the suspension of the Chief Justice and the appointment of the acting chief justice are also to be decided by the Supreme Court. The legal community must make up its mind whether it wants the two matters to be decided on the streets or in the court and by the council. It cannot be both.

Whatever the motivation of the government in making the reference against Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, the fact that must not be overlooked is that the accusations made against him deserve scrutiny. It is true that ministers routinely promote the careers of their sons or misuse government funds, cars and planes, say one thing in private and do the opposite in public but no judge is ever expected to act in that way.

Ministers and judges are both public servants and have their share of human failings but their worlds are wide apart. For a minister, politics is paramount. For a judge it is justice. When a judge seeks favour for his son at the cost of a candidate more meritorious he denies the latter the justice that he is sworn to administer to all people in all manner of situations, without fear or favour.

A politician can seek and return favours but not a judge. This scribe has known sub-judges of times gone by (he was born to one) who would have felt ashamed if the allegations, howsoever baseless, of the kind made against Justice Chaudhry were to be made against them.

Going back in the past, can the agitating lawyers imagine even a scoundrel (forget the glib showman-lawyer Naeem Bokhari) making such allegations against Sir Abdul Rashid, A.R. Cornelius, Manzur Qadir, Shahabuddin, M.R. Kiyani, Qaisar Khan, Safdar Shah, to name but a few, and in more recent times against Shafiur Rehman, K.M.A. Samdani, MA Rashid and a host of others?

The strategy of the lawyers in taking to the streets and pleading before the courts at the same time is inherently flawed. They must choose one or the other course. At the moment, they appear to trust neither the judges nor the mobs.

They must counter even the alleged illegal actions of the executive authority by legal means, otherwise they would be playing on the pitch of the politicians and destroy whatever little pride and independence is left in the judiciary. The shoe-hurling melees outside the Supreme Court and arguments inside truly represent two irreconcilable approaches of the legal community to justice.

The celebrated report of Justices Munir and Kiyani ends on the following prophetic but sad note: “we are prompted by something that they call human conscience to enquire whether in our present state of political development the administrative problem of law and order cannot be divorced from a democratic bed fellow called a ministerial government, which is so remorselessly haunted by political nightmares. But if democracy means the subordination of law and order to political ends — then Allah knoweth best.”

Not long after this report was written, Justice Munir as Chief Justice of Pakistan combined his deep knowledge of jurisprudence with his equally deep mistrust of ministerial government to lay down the theories of “state necessity” and a “successful coup in itself being a law-creating fact.” These theories then had their intrepid dissenters in Cornelius, Sharif, Bachal Memon and some others. There are none now.

Pakistan since then has seen a variety of ministerial governments — basic, people’s, Islamic, real — and “Rustoms” — Ayub, Yahya, Zia and Musharraf. But not only the administrators of law and order, even the courts have come to serve political ends. Where are we heading? Allah knoweth best.