Abul Ala Maududi (d.1979), the founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), had nine children. He is often considered to be one of the most influential Islamist ideologues in the Muslim world. Yet, he sternly debarred his own children from joining the JI. In fact, in a 2013 interview that one of Maududi’s sons gave to the Bangladeshi newspaper Daily Star, he said his father did not even allow his children to read the many books that he (Maududi) had authored.

The son, Haider Farooq Maududi, has frequently castigated his father for stopping his children from following the political philosophy that he shaped and advocated. According to Haider, this, however, did not stop his father from ‘using’ sons and daughters of other people to bolster JI’s politics. Haider entered his twenties in 1970 but was pointedly told by his father that he could not even go near a JI rally.

Yet, in 1971, when civil war broke out in the former East Pakistan, Maududi’s party was in the forefront of recruiting young men to aid the military in its war against Bengali separatists. In Religion and the Cold War, the historian Phil Muehlenbeck writes that the military helped the JI form two militia units, Al-Badar and Al-Shams, whose purpose was to root out and hunt down Bengali separatists. 

Thousands were killed in the war, but this could not stop the separatists from succeeding in turning East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Many young men from West Pakistan too were recruited by the JI, especially for Al-Shams. However, none of the two militias included even a single son or daughter of JI’s top leadership. 

The apathy of the PTI Chairman towards the detainment of his supporters, when contrasted with his recent insistence that his children must not travel to Pakistan for their own safety, reveals a lot about him — both as a person and as a leader

History then repeated itself when, during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-88), the JI was facilitated by the regime to recruit young men to fight a ‘jihad’ against communists in Afghanistan. Many died on the battlefield. Whereas the JI leadership was enthusiastically recruiting sons of other people to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the leadership’s own children were studying in good educational institutions, or were employed in reputable companies, or they were running their own businesses. None of them saw any action in Afghanistan. In fact, many even migrated to the US and became citizens of that country.

Recently, former prime minister Imran Khan, who has been besieged by the fallout of the many irrational political decisions he has made, was severely criticised when he told a British interviewer that he couldn’t even think of summoning his children to Lahore from the UK because of Pakistan’s volatile political situation.

Just a few days before saying this, he had told young Pakistanis that it would be better for them to die than accept ‘slavery’. By slavery he meant the current government and the military establishment (ME). The ME that had helped him come to power in 2018, dumped him in early 2022, after being badly impacted by his government’s failures on multiple fronts. Khan retaliated by whipping up sentiments against the ME until May 9 this year, when his rhetorical campaign triggered actual violence. 

Today, because of the violence, dozens of young men and women are behind bars and even facing trials in military courts. Their parents are running from pillar to post, trying to bail their children out. But, of course, to Khan, they are other people’s children. 

A few months before May 9, Khan used to applaud young men and women for throwing petrol bombs and setting fire to state property. He endearingly called them ‘tigers’ and ‘tigresses’. But when the ME closed in and dismantled his party and threw the tigers and tigresses in jail, Khan tweeted an old photo of him with his two sons.

He wrote that he misses the long hikes that he used to take with them in the scenic northern areas of Pakistan. Both live with Khan’s former wife in the UK and are not ‘allowed’ by their parents to visit Pakistan. In fact, the former wife is reported to be busy using her contacts in the UK government to extract Khan from Pakistan, in a bid to save him from facing trial in military courts. 

In contrast to this is the Bhutto family. Benazir, the eldest daughter of former PM ZA Bhutto, plunged into politics when her father was toppled by Gen Zia in a military coup in 1977 and then executed in 1979. Benazir spent years in prison till she was exiled in 1985. Bhutto’s two sons on the other hand tried to topple Zia through an insurgency.

In 1985, Bhutto’s youngest son was allegedly poisoned by his Afghan wife. Benazir and her mother claimed that the wife was on the payroll of Zia’s agencies. Bhutto’s eldest son was gunned down by the police in 1996. Benazir was assassinated in 2007. 

In 1992, when I interviewed Benazir for an English weekly, she said, “I would never ask a young man or a woman to do something that I would not first ask my own son and daughter to do.” Her eldest son is now the co-chairperson of the party that was launched by his grandfather and then led by his late mother. Nawaz Sharif’s daughter Maryam Nawaz too spent time in jail. In a recent speech she said, “We went to jail, so that our supporters didn’t have to.”

In 2009, over 50 people were killed in a stampede during an opposition rally in Guinea. Most of the people killed were young men and women. Soon, many Guineans took to social media and blamed politicians who “led other people’s sons and daughters to their deaths while their own sons and daughters were comfortably living elsewhere.”

Similar sentiments were often aired in the US during that country’s armed involvement in Vietnam over 50 years ago. More than 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam. A majority of them were recruited from working class families. Only a handful of those who fought in Vietnam were sons of the members of the Congress or the Senate. 

In August 2022, The Guardian reported that the daughters of various leaders of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan attend schools in Qatar and Pakistan. These are the same leaders who have banned women’s education in their own country. 

In an August 2019 essay for the Washington Post, Nancy Gibbs wrote, “It is not an act of particular virtue to love your children and treat them well.” She then added, “It’s how we treat other people’s children that measures and tests us.” Indeed.

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 18th, 2023