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LAST week, the Senate’s Functional Committee on Human Rights called for disbanding the misogynistic and retrogressive Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) and suggested that its budget be reallocated to the National Commission on the Status of Women. Such insightful and inspired thinking from the upper house is a treat — and testament to why democracy is the only way forward for Pakistan.
The case for disbanding the CII is strong. Its headline-making recommendations — making child marriage and the ‘light’ beating of one’s wife permissible, amongst others — have already demonstrated that it has nothing to offer Pakistan in 2016. Its input on issues ranging from co-education to contraception and women in the workplace are anathema to present-day Pakistan where women are breadwinners, top scorers, record-breakers, Nobel laureates and more.
The CII has long outlived its mandate. Tasked in 1962 to review Pakistani laws, the council should have been disbanded after submitting its report (several decades late) in 1996. On a more fundamental level, the council is redundant. Pakistan’s Constitution — and the Federal Shariat Court — are sufficient to ensure that our laws are compatible with Islam.
In a perfect Pakistan, the CII wouldn’t last another day.
The fact that the council is deeply politicised furthers the case for its dissolution. Only the most naive would fail to acknowledge that the CII is a sop to religious political parties that muster no traction at the ballot box. It offers a way for Pakistan’s political parties to appease the religious right without making concrete concessions. Most members of the council, including the current chairman, are partisan. This means that the council is vulnerable to being co-opted — as it was under Zia — to push through repressive political agendas.
If we lived in a perfect Pakistan, the CII wouldn’t last another day. Sadly, we do not. We live in a Pakistan where people denounce their compatriots as infidels; where clerics come on air to incite violence against already persecuted communities; where a famous qawwal and a free-spirited civil rights activist are shot on the streets of our most thriving metropolis; where family members kill, strip, torture, and maim their daughters and sisters to preserve so-called honour; and where women are the first to criticise how other women dress and label them immoral. We live in a Pakistan where the CII should be an abhorrent anachronism but, instead, articulates the prevailing mindset.
The question of what the state should do with the CII is, in other words, a question of what it should do about the high tide of extremism in the country. The past decade of bloodshed and horror has made it clear that the government can no longer turn a blind eye. But if it pushes through progressive legislation and clamps down on intolerant and regressive voices, extremist ideologies will only percolate in madressahs, on social media, in Al Huda classes. The Taliban narrative of an Islamic public resisting a secular state will become more entrenched. Mob justice will become more commonplace. The state will lose further credibility.
Imran Khan seems to be clumsily making this point in his defence of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s decision to fund Darul Uloom Haqqania. But his is not the way forward either. To support a seminary with a dubious and violent track record before it has implemented significant reforms is obviously a form of pandering to the religious right, and it is patronising of Khan to pretend otherwise.
The challenge for the government in a post-Zia Pakistan is to address extremism — and the excesses of bodies like the CII — without its actions being reframed as a clash between secularism and Islamism. It should go without saying that there is absolutely no space for the government to become involved in religious debate or jurisprudence. But it can shape the environment in which religious discourse takes place, and reorient the conversation to be one between reformists and fundamentalists.
What does this mean in practice? Genuine and comprehensive madressah reforms and regulation; even more stringent laws against sectarian hate speech; a continuing crackdown against all violent extremist groups; protections for free speech and freedom of expression; support for civil society interfaith and other dialogue initiatives; the reduction of political space for religious parties that have no electoral mandate.
In its early incarnations, the CII was required to be headed by a judge and comprised lawyers, judges and some ulema. It is a reflection of Pakistan’s trajectory that religious ‘scholars’ have outstripped civilian voices. Perhaps the government should consider replacing the council with a body as was originally intended, expanded to include women’s and human rights groups, free speech advocates, youth ambassadors and minority representatives. Such a council could set the tenor for informed and inclusive discourse on key issues, and help a deeply radicalised society make peace with itself again.
The writer is a freelance journalist.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2016
