YOU can’t blame the holy fathers of the MMA (the religious alliance) for being so single-minded in pursuing their agenda. They are doing what comes naturally to them: utterly convinced they serve the cause of Islam when denouncing ‘obscenity’, attacking women marathon races, turning non-issues such as the religious column in passports into burning issues.

It would be a huge mistake to assume that these clerics of the Pakistani school stand alone in the glorification of irrelevance. The way of the professional cleric — Jewish, Christian, Islamic — throughout history has been to champion bigotry and trash reason. Why does Bulleh Shah, the great sufi poet, mock the certified maulvi? Because he finds his make-believe and hypocrisy laughable.

This is no reflection on religion, only on the mischief so often perpetrated in its name. To give but one example, if the glories of the Spanish Inquisition — torturing ‘heretics’ and burning them at the stake — are recounted, Islam’s holy fathers, by comparison, emerge as the very pictures of tolerance. There’s been no burning-at-the-stake in all the history of Islam, which does not mean that dark deeds have not been committed in its name.

Makes everything sound relative, doesn’t it? It also leads to another conclusion: about the most profitless undertaking in the world is to get into a discussion about religion. You never arrive at a conclusion, seldom convince the other person. Only end up producing a lot of heat.

Converts are few and far between. Most of us are born into the faiths we profess or hold sacred. I am a Sunni not because I have read the great Sunni texts and been persuaded of their merit but because I was born into a Sunni household. This being the genesis of my faith how does it behove me to impose my views on others, much less take up fire and sword to spread them?

Religion is a matter of faith, woven into the tissues and sinews of the believer, part of his blood, of the very air he breathes. How can you change such a thing by debate or disputation? Isn’t it best then to practice tolerance and let each person stick to the faith he/she professes? Live and let live and get on with the business of the world.

These are commonplace observations with nothing original or profound about them. The only reason they still command some relevance in the world of Islam is because whereas Christendom got over its baffling or dark ages long ago — beginning with the Renaissance, to be precise — the countries of Islam are still caught in a debate about the meaning of Islam and its application to everyday life.

Take Pakistan, the quintessential debating society, still agonizing over the meaning of Pakistan: Pakistan according to Jinnah or according to the maulanas and their various schools of thought? Amazingly, this debate is still on, the battle for the soul of Pakistan as fresh today as it was 57 years ago at the country’s founding.

You could be forgiven for thinking that fuelling this debate is religious fervour. Wrong. It is something more prosaic: out-and-out political failure. The more elusive democracy and economic progress prove, the greater the temptation to seek refuge behind the screen of Islam.

Barring one or two countries, autocracy holds sway across the Muslim world. You would think that Muslim countries would be grappling with this problem which, above all, prevents them from realizing their potential. No, what they get from their rulers are grave sermons on how Islam is a progressive and enlightened religion.

Pervez Musharraf is not the only one who has taken to speaking this language. Post-September 11, in the wake of western concerns about the direction Islam was taking across the Muslim world, every pro-western figure in the Islamic world (what other kind is there?), from Mubarak of Egypt to Abdallah of Jordan, has become a professor of ‘enlightened’ Islam.

Islam can do without such defenders. Its cause would be better served with less talk and more progress towards representative government. Bin Ladenism is a reaction to Muslim autocracy and American imperialism, the one feeding on the other. That the cure proposed is worse than the disease is beside the point. Bin Ladenism thrives on real grievances and as long as those grievances remain, there will be no shortage of recruits to its cause.

What about George Bush’s newly-discovered love for democracy in Muslim lands? Well, in his hands democracy is a handy stick with which to keep the Muslim world in line, that is, firmly behind the United States. Curbing even the most egregious manifestations of American imperialism in the Middle East is no part of his agenda.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, its self-appointed ruler — no doubts, I trust, about his self-appointed status — protests too much about ‘enlightened moderation’. Enlightenment in the Pakistani context means only one thing: the army’s return to its primary duty of national defence, unless of course primary duty now also means ever more defence housing authorities; and the country’s return to constitutionalism, the genuine article.

But precisely because Musharraf is hesitant to move on these fronts — neither removing the army from the political sphere nor creating the conditions for free elections, thus hampering the ‘mainstream’ parties, the PPP and the PML-N — he is proving to be the biggest benefactor of the religious parties, thriving in the vacuum he has created.

Gen Zia was an avowed Islamicist, part of his political strategy the conscious effort to cultivate a religious constituency. But what even he couldn’t achieve through pro-activism Musharraf has achieved unwittingly, the religious parties more powerful now than at any time under Zia.

The religious parties thus are not to be blamed for trying to make an issue of non-issues or taking to the warpath against women athletics. They feel strongly about these issues and if the government itself is giving them space, they would be foolish not to use it.

Their belief in purdah is genuine. Music, dance and other forms of entertainment they genuinely frown upon, their outlook on life deeply conservative, their sense of right and wrong clearly defined. If there is a ‘liberal’ America and a ‘conservative’ America, a distinction made starkly clear in the last US presidential election, the same distinction holds true more powerfully for countries like Pakistan. Just as ‘liberals’ would be appalled at the prospect of becoming maulvis, don’t expect maulvis to make a stampede for the doors of ‘liberalism’.

And it is no use holding on to different interpretations of Islam and claiming superiority for one interpretation over the other. Deeply-held beliefs, as already stated, are susceptible to no logic or reason. You believe and that’s the end of the matter.

So what is to be done? For a start, don’t just talk ‘moderation’ or ‘enlightenment’. Do something about them. Be true to the Constitution and the rule of law, practise self-restraint, curb your hunger for power, study history and the causes of the rise and fall of empires, and before you know it the frontiers of ‘enlightenment’ will expand and those of bigotry shrink.

Does one need a certificate from Al Azhar University to realize that justice should be speedy and quick, the streets should be clear of garbage and buses and trains should run on time? That the sick should be treated, every child should be educated and no one, not even dogs and other animals, should go hungry? That it should be the sovereign right of every school-going child to receive a glass of pure milk at school every morning?

A reasonably well-run state in which cruelty, exploitation and injustice are not banished altogether, that being impossible, but in which the levels of all three are lowered as much as possible, is the aim, or should be, of every polity on the face of the earth. The meaning of Pakistan cannot be any different from this. Forget about attaining this goal. As soon as we start moving towards it, debates both theological and existential will become irrelevant. And although, even then, there will be maulvis on the right warning of imminent perdition, and ‘liberals’ on the left decrying the prospect of freedom unfulfilled, Pakistan will have strength enough to bear the weight of such tensions.