FOR the last few years, “enlightened moderation” has been this government’s glib mantra. Ever since Musharraf used the phrase, his many spokesmen and sycophants have parroted it as though it was their leader’s contribution to humanity. Just to remind them what the 18th century movement of Enlightenment stood for, I can do no better than to quote Immanuel Kant, writing in 1784:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolve and courage to use it without another’s guidance. Sapere aude! Dare to know! That is the motto of Enlightenment.”

This movement paved the way for the modern, secular society that has come to dominate the world. Spearheading it were giants like Voltaire, Rousseau, Bacon and Diderot. Scientists like Galileo and Newton contributed vastly to this struggle to establish reason as the basis for civilisation.

So when our ill-educated politicians in and out of uniform speak of “enlightened moderation”, they should reflect, even if briefly, on what the Enlightenment stood for. Indeed, had Mushrraf been aware of the term’s true connotations, he might not have been so keen to adopt it as his motto.

If he were to pass by the Madressah Hafsa in Islamabad , he would realise how far we have to travel before we reach the level of maturity Kant called for. In this seminary, hundreds of girls are being indoctrinated to hate everything western. Farhat Taj, a Pakistani academic, wrote about a recent visit to this madressah in a Lahore daily. According to Ms Taj, as soon as she walked in, she was bombarded with questions from the teachers and students: “They questioned my personal appearance – my hairdo and my attire, which in their view was ‘too tight’ and therefore un-Islamic. They told me I was committing a ‘sin’ by roaming all over the world unaccompanied by my male relations and sans burqa…”

Ms Taj continues: “The students of the Jamia wake up every morning at 5 am. They are not allowed any games, outdoor trips or TV. Watching TV, they said, was banned in Islam. They live in strict gender segregation and believe in the subordination of woman to man. They study Islam in its most extreme form. The students and teachers told me the madressah is grooming wives and mothers for jihadis, female suicide-bombers and female foot-soldiers who will clash with the law enforcement agencies of Pakistan, if necessary…”

The writer was asked to promise to kill the editor of the Danish newspaper that ran the offensive cartoons in 2005. When she replied she could not take the law into her own hands, the students of the madressah could not understand her reluctance.

This, then, is the kind of ‘enlightened moderation’ being taught in the nation’s capital, barely a stone’s throw from the presidency, parliament and the Prime Minister’s House. And to make matters worse, it is these girls who have now occupied a children’s library to protest against the demolition of an illegally constructed mosque. Night after night, images of their scary black burqa-clad forms, armed with long batons, appear on TV.

And even though the government has backed down and agreed to rebuild the mosque, these women are refusing to vacate the library. The administration is a mute witness to these illegal acts as its writ is challenged before the gaze of TV cameras. Yet, only some weeks ago, a small group of peaceful citizens was mercilessly thrashed, with one young man being publicly stripped and beaten by the Islamabad police. Their crime was to wish to present a letter protesting the disappearance of their near relatives to the deputy army chief. Human rights groups as well as courts have established the state’s hand in these cases.

Although the government fears a backlash from the mullahs if it acts, the fact is that our clerics are paper tigers when it comes to the crunch. This was amply demonstrated when the Protection of Women Bill was passed. Despite their threat to resign from the assemblies if the government pushed this watered-down piece of legislation through, the holy fathers still occupy their parliamentary seats. Their threat to launch a street protest has been equally empty. History shows that they enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the army, and will not act without GHQ’s clearance.

That this nexus exists is proved by the fact that bearded men and burqa-clad women are allowed to get away with literally murder, provided they can somehow link their actions to their version of the faith, no matter how erroneous. For years now, private and public land has been illegally occupied on the pretext of building mosques. Soon, shops and dwellings have sprouted on these sites, with the legal owners helpless to end this land grab. After shutting its eyes to this practice for years, the government woke up and decided to act. But its planned demolitions have ground to a halt in the face of resistance from a handful of madressah students.

The reality is that Pakistan – and much of the world – is far from attaining the level of maturity the Enlightenment called for. We are guided, perhaps more than ever before, by considerations other than reason. All kinds of superstitions cloud our thinking, rendering us prone to the most irrational behaviour. Rather than moving forward, we seem determined to go back in time.

The paradox is that while emotionally and intellectually we remain rooted in the mediaeval era, we still seek the fruits of modern science and technology. We see no contradiction in using the Internet to propagate the most violent quasi-Islamic philosophy. Videos of people being beheaded in the name of the faith are routinely sent around the world through cyberspace.

In his wonderfully iconoclastic book “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World”, Francis Wheen writes in his introduction:

“The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore. Some are manifestly sinister, others seem merely comic… Cumulatively, however, the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation, especially as many of the new irrationalists hark back to some imagined pre-industrial or even pre-agrarian Golden Age… My purpose in writing this book is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters: those who rewrite or romanticise history… are condemned to repeat it…”