LAHORE: The Afkar-i-Taaza ThinkFest had one panel discussion on ‘Shrines, violence and society’ on Saturday, where Khwaja Moinuddin Koreeja, the caretaker of Khwaja Fareed’s shrine, with Iqbal Chawala from the Punjab University, and Hassan Abbas from the National Defence University, USA, spoke on the issue.

The discussion began after Mr Abbas said he had to the Muslim world on a pilgrimage to different shrines and found there was no sectarianism and shrines offered diversity.

“In Karbala, one of the prominent processions is by Christians, and this tradition is age old,” he said.

“Why do people go to shrines? There is so much acceptance there that anyone can go there without any judgement or rejection,” he said specifying that it was the only sacred place in Islam where men and women were seen together without problems.

Mr Koreeja said that in today’s literature courses students read all about different poets and philosophers but nowhere are the sufi saints found. “What are we telling them about our real heroes?” he questioned.

Mr Chawla said that it was ironic that we were following the directions of our masters. “When they told us to fight ‘jihad’, we fought it, and now they were telling us to discuss sufism, so we are discussing it. The thing is that this discussion is redundant because sufism is inside us,” he said. Prof Rasul Bux Rais in the audience said that the Ayub Khan regime had seized the lands of the shrines through the Auqaf Department. Now these lands should be returned and universities or schools be built there espousing sufi thought.

THE RISE OF THE RIGHT WING: In another session Robert Hoyland, Azeem Ibrahim, Tariq Rehman, and Omar Warraich discussed the repercussions of the far right through different eras of history.Dr Rehman said that the Pakistani state had used religion in more than one way.

“They used it for liberal agenda as well as for their extremist agenda,” he said. “Jinnah’s speeches have been interpreted both ways for instance and that was a starting point. In short the State has facilitated this kind of rise in Pakistan.”

Hoyland discussed that the aspect of globalisation in many parts of the world meant that some people from foreign countries were brought in, and appealed to the people’s sense of history and identity, for example Osama bin Laden. “So even if they were inappropriate ideologies that they espoused, they became popular.”Mr Ibrahim said that in context of the surge of right wing nationalism especially in the 1930s, the European countries who felt they were ignored largely, began to raise a nationalist identity.

This kind of separation was caused by the marginalized people, which led to fascism and more marginalization eventually led to the world war.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2018