On August 8 this year, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) announced the launch of a mainstream political party, the Milli Muslim League (MML). JuD was co-founded in 1985 by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed who was a teacher at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore
Formed at the height of the Zia regime’s so-called ‘Islamisation’ phase, the JuD was originally conceived as an evangelical outfit. Its aim was to propagate a particular strand of the faith in an environment in which various Muslim sects and sub-sects were looking to dominate the politico-religious space created by the policies of the Zia government.
Asif Bayat in his 2013 book Post-Islamism writes that Saeed as a young man was a member of Jamaat-i-Islami’s (JI) student-wing, the Islami-Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT). Bayat also informs that after creating JuD, Saeed travelled to Saudi Arabia where he came into contact with Saudi groups engaged in the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan.
The launching of the Milli Muslim League harks back to previous attempts by the establishment to control Pakistan’s narrative
Stephen Tankel in his book Storming the World Stage notes that this is when JuD’s militant offshoot, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) appeared.
In 2002 Saeed claimed that he had severed ties with LeT especially after the Gen Musharraf regime (1999-2008) banned a number of militant organisations, including LeT. But most analysts have suggested that the banned outfits continue to spring back under different names and are largely “tolerated” until banned again, only to spring back under yet another set of names.
Nevertheless, it is now obvious that unlike a majority of so-called ‘Islamist’ ideologues, Saeed’s ambitions have always been more political in nature. From 2005 onward he began to push hard to create constituencies for JuD through charity-based activities.
The JuD was robustly involved in aiding victims of the 2005 earthquake in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and then again during the record floods in 2011 in Sindh. The JuD worked the short-comings of the state and the government in this context to its advantage.
However, according to an August 13 article in Dawn by Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute of Peace Studies, JuD’s ideology has remained driven by a “narrow social view” and is based on the far-right viewpoint of one of its ideologues Ameer Hamza.
JuD has been on the UN’s watchlist for over 10 years. In January 2017, the government of Nawaz Sharif put Saeed under house arrest. As a result the MML appears to have finally launched JuD into the mainstream electoral politics of Pakistan.
Amir Rana suggests that MML’s appearance is also a way by some sections in the “establishment” to challenge the electoral prowess of mainstream political parties which have broken away from the orbit of so-called “establishmentarian” influences.
If so, then this will not be the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1980s, the Zia dictatorship revamped the once centrist Pakistan Muslim League (PML) as a political expression of his regime’s theocratic understanding of Pakistani nationalism. During the first post-Zia election in 1988, remnants of the Zia regime within state and political institutions helped form the Islami Jamhoori Ithehad (IJI) — an alliance of various right-wing outfits including the refurbished PML.