The huge price that Pakistan has paid for invoking religion in pursuit of its national aims is most poignantly demonstrated in the assassination of Allama Mufti Dr Sarfraz Naeemi inside the campus of a religious university-cum-mosque.

What can be more poignant than a religious scholar as learned and influential as hardly any other, leading an austere lifestyle, moderate and tolerant in behaviour, presiding over a chain of 6,000 madressahs, being murdered along with some of his pupils in the house of God where every human being, not Muslims alone, must find solace and safety? Here, the slain and wounded were all Muslims. So, surely, was the exploding youth indoctrinated by Muslim warlords or clerics to die while killing other Muslims.

Howsoever strongly one might wish to the contrary, the murders of identified individuals and mayhem at congregations will not cease in the country while religious sects or schools also act as political parties or lobbies in pursuit of secular aims. The suicide bombers then become fidayin destined for paradise who dispatch the deviants, or renegades, to hell.

A universally accepted and sane view is that no religion, or any of its derivatives, ordains the murder of dissidents, howsoever blasphemous, much less of the unwary devout. But in practice this, unfortunately, is not the case. Religious killings and wars are a historical fact. The politics of parties that are rooted in schism come in direct conflict with the democratic right of dissent — both in matters of belief and the routine of life.

In Pakistan all political parties broadly acknowledge the supremacy of the principles of Islam in statecraft. But the politics of every party springs from its own understanding of those principles. Some among them, for instance, openly hold that an apostate must be put to death. Some acquiesce in that view, while others choose to remain silent but hardly anyone condemns it outright as a crime.

Allama Naeemi, who was a leading light of the Barelvi school of the Sunni sect, had decreed that suicide bombing found no sanction in Islam. Most leaders of other schools of thought would tend to agree with him but prefer to remain silent or non-committal as open endorsement could exact a price. Naeemi paid with his life. He was an easy target. Unlike many other maulanas, he was neither guarded nor escorted at state expense.

The politics of Pakistan’s religious parties is rooted in the efforts of Muslim scholars to preserve the teachings of their faith when the protective umbrella of the Mughal rule was blown away in 1857. The first potent symbol of that effort was the founding of a darul ulum at Deoband in the Hanafi legal tradition by Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. To gain recognition as an ideologue of this school in the 20th century was Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi.

Through an ever-expanding network of madressahs with their long and grilling courses, Deoband emphasised the individual’s own responsibility for correct belief and practice instead of relying on the intercession of dead saints and Sufis and holding celebratory assemblies (urs) at their graves — a common practice then and now.

During the 1880s, Maulana Ahmed Raza Khan of Bareilly and his admirers claiming to be the true representatives and heirs in the subcontinent of the companions and followers (saints and sufis of the Qadri order) of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) disseminated a different message through their own seminaries. Being a good Muslim, they exhorted, was contingent on one’s personal devotion to the Holy Prophet as a guide and intercessor between Allah and the individual through a chain of pirs coming down to a living pir to whom an individual was bound by oath. Those denying intercession were deemed arrogant.

The adherence of the masses to the Barelvi creed in Pakistan is marked by the ubiquitous green and white turbans worn by youth and growing crowds at the shrines round the year.
The Deobandis are fewer in number but more assertive and influential in politics and in elite circles. Close to them in belief is the Jamaat-i-Islami that was founded by Maulana Abul Ala Maududi in 1941. It projects Islam as a holistic ideology, analogous to western democracy or Marxism, which must capture political power to implement an Islamic order of its own brand.

The Jamaat has a pyramidal structure with an amir at the top who is advised by a Shura (consultative council) but is not bound by its advice. Gen Ziaul Haq, it can be imagined, was impressed by the Jamaat model and renamed Pakistan’s parliament as the Majlis-i-Shura but he did not live to raise the pyramid to fully implement his concept of state authority. Nevertheless, he nurtured the jihadists who now sponsor suicide bombings.

It would be of interest to note that though the parties that are heirs to Deoband — Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI in particular and Jamaat-i-Islami — opposed Jinnah’s Muslim League and the concept of Pakistan (Hussain Ahmad Madni, a staunch Congressite, was in the vanguard of this opposition) now they count for much more in Pakistan’s politics than the Barelvi JUP and the assortment of Sunni Tehriks. But then it can be said that all factions of the Muslim League, and the PPP too, are in a way heirs to the tolerant and ritualistic Bareilly school. The graves of Z.A. Bhutto and Benazir are now a shrine while Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is a descendant of the Qadri order.

The purpose in recounting the origins of Pakistan’s religio-political parties and their creeds is to suggest that the fight against terror would be won sooner and easier if the heirs to Deoband were also to condemn the suicide bombing just as the late Allama Naeemi had done so admirably. It would surely help as the Taliban belong to their school of thought.

It is amazing why all religio-political parties are not doing it unreservedly and with one voice. More amazing however is why even Imran Khan in his short journey from Oxford to Deoband is not doing it. Whether it is personal, political or doctrinal consideration that holds them back is hard to say.
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