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September 21, 2003
Review: Religion and politics
THE main problem for Jamaat-i-Islami’s politics is its inadequate social base. It is, as Moten says, “middle class-dominated and urban-based”. It is a party of shop-keepers and small traders, with no access to the peasants, even their richer stratum. It has some influence among the intelligentsia and white-collar workers, notably the lower echelons of the state bureaucracy. It is a petit-bourgeois movement, par excellence. That conditions its reach, methods and economics.
The party started out in Lahore in 1941 as one of the revivalist movements, eschewing politics and not so much opposing the demand for Pakistan as rejecting it as irrelevant to the “real problem” of the South Asian Muslims. It said that, since the leadership of the Muslim League was secular, it could not create an Islamic society in Pakistan, although the Muslim League had never claimed it could. It only wanted a secure national market for the Muslim bourgeoisie, who were being kept out of the capitalist sector by the Hindu capitalists.
After independence, the Jamaat gave itself the assignment which, according to it, was beyond the Muslim League and set out to Islamize the society. It claimed credit for the Objectives Resolution of 1949, although it was the first major example of the otherwise secular politicians using religion for political purposes.
Meanwhile, the social composition of the party itself was changing. Originally, it had been a grouping of ulema, as the majority of the Muslim intelligentisa had been with the Muslim League. Now, as the question of building a state and a new polity arose, many of these young, educated in the Western system, joined the Jamaat, displacing the influence of the madressah-educated ulema. They were not satisfied by the old-style politics-by-example and believed that an Islamic society could not be created without state power. They provided the bulk of the support to Maulana Maudoodi in the 1957 session of the General Assembly of the party, which decided that the Jamaat should take part in electoral politics, though as a cadre-based party.
Many of the old leaders and cadres, including Maulana Islahi, who were opposed to this decision, left the party or were expelled. By 1970, only one fourth of the party assembly was composed of the ulema.
Since then, the Jamaat has participated in elections, at first alone, later in coalitions. But its vote bank is permanently small due to its small class base. But it did better in the cities. In 1958, its 19 candidates won in Karachi out of the 23 it nominated. But in the country as a whole, it never got many votes. Only four of its candidates won of the 331 in 1970 and nine in 1977. Actually Islamist parties never got more than 15 per cent of the popular votes.
While analyzing the reasons for the failure of the Jamaat to become a mass party, the leadership saw the contradiction between a cadre-based organization and the desired mass character of the party. However, that did not preclude mass support. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, a former businessman, becoming Amir in 1987, has made an effort to gain popular support, specially since by then the party’s class composition had also changed. Its leadership comprised 44 per cent businessmen in 1985 and 31 per cent professionals.
Its economic outlook is neo-classical. It talks of exploitation but the most radical solution it comes up with is the narrowing of gaps between salaries. Property, the cause of wealth and poverty, is sacrosanct to it. It does not mention land reforms and is opposed to state ownership of industry.
Actually, its economics has no theory of value, unless it is Marshallian. Therefore, its talk of exploitation is thin air. The main point today is not of ameliorating poverty, a question that charity addresses but of removing its causes. The society should cease to create rich and poor. That question the Jamaat does not address.
As Fred Halliday says in Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (p.129), “Islamists have no answers to Muslim countries’ problems.”
The book is well documented, though there are some chronological mistakes in it. But its premise is that the people of Pakistan have a natural inclination to support the Jamaat-i-Islami and are kept from doing so by the ruling class. This is not borne out by history.
Revolution to Revolution: Jamaat-e-Islami in the Politics of Pakistan
By Abdul Rashid Moten
Royal Book Company,
BG-5, Rex Centre Basement, Zaibunnisa Street, Karachi-74400 Tel: 021-5653418, 5670628
Email: royalbook@hotmail.com
ISBN-969-407-288-3
201pp. Rs595
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