Intellectual
Discourse In Pakistan:
An Indian Visitor's Perspective
By Yoginder Sikand
28 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Last week, unidentified gunmen
shot at and critically injured Manzoorul Hassan, editor of the Urdu
magazine Ishraq in Lahore. Ishraq is published by the Lahore-based Al-Mawrid
Institute, brainchild of one of Pakistan's few somewhat liberal Islamic
scholars, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. It is suspected, although this has not
been confirmed, that the attack may have been planned by rival Islamic
clerics or by an Islamist group angered by Ghamidi's moderate stance,
particularly by his support for modifications in the draconian Hudud
laws in place in Pakistan that harshly discriminate against women and
which people like Ghamidi feel are not really 'Islamic'.
Earlier this year, while
on a visit to Lahore, I had the chance of meeting Ghamidi and speaking
at his Institute. I was quite unimpressed, I must confess. The Institute's
large Moroccan-style building is fancy and opulent but the work it is
engaged in, as explained to me by its staff, seems hardly novel or path-breaking:
producing commentaries on the Quran and translations of the Hadith,
traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and developing alternate
perspectives on a limited range of issues of juridical import, such
as on the debate on whether or not Muslims can eat animals slaughtered
by non-Muslims or whether swimming is 'un-Islamic' and so on. In short,
the Institute represents something of a 'liberal' Islam in tune with
the demands and aspirations of a section of the Pakistani lower- middle
classes. Steering away from fundamental questions vital to the masses,
such as those of widespread poverty, Pakistan's deep-rooted feudal system,
the nexus between Pakistani bureaucratic, military and political elites
and their Western overlords and so on, and focussing, instead, on intricate
theological debates and juridical niceties, the Institute and its work
seemed to me, when set against the harsh, brutal life which is the fate
of most Pakistanis, hardly socially relevant.
Yet it is probably seen,
as the attack on Manzoorul Hasan shows, as enough of a challenge to
certain rival religious outfits in Pakistan, who find the limited reformulations
of Islamic jurisprudence offered by the Al-Mawrid Institute a sufficient
threat to their authority. Sources in departments concerned specifically
with sectarian crimes in Lahore have disclosed that Ghamidi had been
receiving threats from various quarters for the past year. It is possible
that these threats were issued by certain conservative or militant religious
groups. Actively encouraged by the Americans in the course of the Afghan
war, the Pakistani establishment backed many such groups to serve its
purposes in Afghanistan and Kashmir and to stifle democratic dissent
at home. And now, as suggested by the attack on Manzoorul Hasan, which
might be the latest of a series of bloody attacks on dissenting scholars
by activists associated with certain militant religious groups in Pakistan,
these forces have gone quite out of hand. Pakistan's reversal on the
Taliban and its shameless capitulation before American dictates have
only given further legitimacy to such groups, who probably see moderate
voices, such as those represented by the Al-Mawrid Institute, as playing
into the hands of what are routinely described in radical Islamist discourse
as 'enemies of Islam'. The space for publicly articulated progressive
thought and even for liberal and moderate perspectives on Islam, already
restricted in Pakistan, appears to be only further narrowing.
*
On the bus from Delhi to
Lahore early this year, I chatted with an elderly Muslim man from Delhi
who was travelling to Pakistan to visit his relatives. He identified
himself as a socialist. 'I don't want to go to Lahore but my wife insists
I should', he said to me frankly. 'I get so bored there. I can hardly
find any like-minded people to talk to', he went on. 'You'll soon discover',
he warned me, 'that the level of intellectual discourse is so limited
in Pakistan. Quite awful actually'.
I thought the man was exaggerating,
but I was soon to discover that he was not entirely wrong.
In my interactions with a
wide cross-section of people in various places that I visited in Pakistan
during my one-month visit I was shocked at the pathetic state of intellectual
discourse that seemed to pervade the country, which I often unconsciously
contrasted with the situation in India. There are, I discovered, less
than half a dozen good bookshops in the whole of Lahore, once considered
to be the intellectual capital of India, that stock books in English.
The vast majority of these books are, curiously enough, published in
India, a few in the West and the rest, a very small proportion, are
local Pakistani publications. Books on Pakistani society, based on empirical
realities, are almost impossible to find, although the number of titles
on the so-called 'two-nation theory' and the history of the Muslim League,
as well as on elite politics in Pakistan, run into the hundreds. So
do books on Jinnah and Iqbal, the two major ideological heroes of Pakistan,
after whom a vast number of public institutions throughout the country
are named. As a Lahori friend of mine quipped, 'The intellectual scene
in Pakistan is so bad that our rulers think we have almost no one else
to name our institutions after'.
Even on Islam and Kashmir,
two issues that are central to the way in which the Pakistani state
has sought to construct the notion of Pakistani national identity, I
discovered hardly any decent literature in English in the numerous bookshops
that I visited. Many of the few English books on Islam I came across
were actually published in India. A few others were by Western writers,
while the rest, not more than three dozen titles, many of these being
were poorly-researched and ideologically-driven propaganda tracts of
the Pakistani Jamaat i Islami and its associated publishing houses.
Likewise, on Kashmir. In Lahore's biggest bookshop that also stocks
English books I came across an entire shelf of books on Kashmir, but
almost all of them were written by Indian scholars, published in India
and probably represented the Indian position on the disputed territory.
Many of the relatively few
English books on sale in Lahore's bookshops are textbooks, and several
of these, particularly those on the hard sciences, are published in
India. The school texts that I glanced through are carefully tailored
to reproduce what is officially called the 'Ideology of Pakistan', with
Islamic Studies and Pakistan Studies being compulsory subjects in the
school curriculum. The Islamic Studies texts present Islam as the only
true religion. Islam is described in terms of beliefs and practices
in line with Sunni Islam, and this is obviously resented by the country's
sizeable Shia minority. The books represent a monolithic, extremely
literalist and conservative understanding of Islam as upheld by the
Sunni ulama. They are completely silent on alternate expressions of
the faith, such as those offered by dissenting sects as well as certain
Sufis known for their humanism and their critique of the soulless ritualism
and narrow communalism that they associated with the dominant ulama
and ruling Muslim political elites of their times. The reality of lived
Islam, as distinct from the scripturalist Islam of the ulama of the
madrasas, is, likewise, completely glossed over. The Pakistan Studies
texts reflect the same approach to Islam, and are specifically geared
to drilling into the minds of students the 'two-nation' theory, the
argument of Hindus and Muslims being two monolithic and mutually opposed
communities that can never peacefully co-exist, this being the very
rationale for the creation of Pakistan as a separate state for the Muslims
of undivided India. Not surprisingly, some of these texts describe Hindus
in negative terms, as being allegedly hostile, as an entire community,
to Muslims and Islam. No mention is made therein of ethnic differences
and imbalances and class divisions in Pakistan, the aim clearly being
to propagate and reinforce the notion of a singular, monolithic Pakistani
Muslim identity, one that fits in entirely well with the demands of
the state and the ruling classes. No opportunity is missed to reinforce
the 'two-nation' theory by the state wherever it can, and this not just
through the education system. The gigantic, rocket-like Minar-e Pakistan
that stands outside the precincts of the Royal Fort in Lahore has plaques
on every side insisting on the veracity of the theory. An entire gallery
in the Lahore museum is dedicated to this very theme, with dozens of
pictures titled 'Hindu and Sikh atrocities on Muslims' in the 1947 Partition
violence being prominently displayed to convince viewers of the claim
to truth of the theory. Challenging the 'two-nation' theory in public
in Pakistan can often invite official wrath as well as the ire of the
mullahs. No wonder, then, that I found almost no published critique
of it in Lahore's bookshops, although in private conversations many
Pakistani friends insisted that the theory was a bogus myth.
*
The Urdu publishing scene
in Pakistan is somewhat different, although I found it almost as uninspiring
as its English counterpart. Lahore's famed Urdu Bazaar, located in a
chaotic, run-down part of the old town, consists of several narrow lanes
lined with filth-clogged drains, almost impossible to wade through.
I made it a point to spend two entire days in the bazaar and to visit
every of the dozens of small bookshops that it boasts of. On the lookout
for literature on lived social realities in Pakistan, I was sorely disappointed.
The vast majority of the titles on display were about Islamic rituals
and theology, hagiographic accounts of the Prophet, early Muslim warriors,
saints, rulers and ulama, treatises on the ideological founders of Pakistan
and on the 'two-nation' theory, tomes on the history of the Muslim League
and the alleged perfidy of the Hindus, accounts of Pakistani rulers
by their supporters and critics, besides hundreds of texts containing
gems of Urdu literature. Although important as sources of Pakistani
history and national identity, they had little to reveal about the actual
social realities of Pakistan today that I was keen on knowing more about,
a telling reminder, once again, of the poverty of intellectual discourse
in the country.
As a student of Islamic history,
I was particularly interested in procuring books by socially-engaged
Pakistani scholars articulating progressive positions on various issues
through engaging creatively with the Islamic scholarly tradition. However,
wading through the books on display in the shops in the Urdu Bazaar,
I that found few such texts are actually available.
This starkly suggested to me that there appears to be no counterpart
in Pakistan to the numerous Indian Islamic scholars that have sought
to creatively engage with the Islamic intellectual tradition and the
myriad challenges posed by the pressures and demands of contemporary
life. There is simply no Pakistani equivalent of the Indian Islamic
scholars Asghar Ali Engineer and Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (incidentally,
both of whose books are widely read and published in Pakistan), a sad
commentary on the state of Islamic intellectual discourse in a country
that was created ostensibly in the name of Islam and in order to protect
Muslims from 'upper' caste Hindu domination. The only noted socially-engaged
Islamic public intellectual that Pakistan has produced, the scholar
Fazlur Rahman, was forced to flee Pakistan in the 1960s and seek refuge
in Canada because of the vociferous opposition that he faced from the
Jamaat-i Islami and various ulama groups for his progressive utterances.
The task of offering socially
progressive responses from within the broadly defined Islamic tradition
to the challenges of modernity and to the lived realities of widespread
poverty and exploitation has hardly begun in Pakistan. Hence, today
certain radical Islamist as well as conservative ulama groups and their
propagandists are able to powerfully assert their claims to speak for
Islam quite unchallenged, offering responses that are, overall, decidedly
distasteful: fanning sectarian rivalries, promoting hatred against the
country's religious minorities, condemning moves to promote gender and
economic justice and redress ethnic imbalances, pronouncing communism
and leftists as 'enemies of Islam' and as allegedly conspiring to divide
Muslims, and lambasting the West and India as the very epitome of evil.
Some of the publishing houses in the Urdu Bazaar are run precisely by
such groups, and their magazines, I was told, have hundreds of thousands
of subscribers.
'We urgently need a combination
of Marx and Muhammad today', said a friend, a well-known leftist activist,
who accompanied me to the Urdu Bazaar and who was pained at my disappointment
with the market that had failed to yield up the treasures I had been
dreaming of procuring. 'Because religion is so deeply-rooted in people's
lives', he continued, 'we cannot ignore it. We need to articulate socially
progressive interpretations of religion in order to make appeal to people
and to prevent radical Islamists and conservative ulama as well as the
state from monopolising the terrain of Islamic discourse'. 'But, as
you can see from the books sold in this market', he added, 'the Pakistani
Left has almost completely ignored this vital task'.
*
The warning of the elderly
Muslim man from Delhi whom I had met in the bus to Lahore swirled in
my mind almost each time I entered a bookshop or research institute
or even in meetings with NGO activists during my stay in Pakistan, in
all the several places I visited. Punjab University in Lahore, the largest
university in the country, I discovered, does not possess a single bookshop,
and the only students organisation that is legally allowed to function
on campus, or so I was told, is the Islami Jamiat-i Tulaba, the students'
wing of the Jamaat-i Islami. The day I visited the university, one day
after the anniversary of the fall of East Pakistan to the Indian Army
and the Mukti Bahini, the campus was splattered with posters put up
by the Jamiat denouncing what it termed as 'Indian Imperialism'. I saw
a few other posters pasted on notice boards in the university, but most
of these were about forthcoming religious events. I could not help contrast
this to what I had been reared on in the five years that I spent at
the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where almost every day we
were treated to a talk or a seminar by intellectuals, politicians, journalists
and social activists on a whole range of pressing social issues, almost
none of these being on theological niceties.
Notable exceptions apart,
my limited conversations with students and teachers in Punjab University
proved to be hardly inspiring. A friend suggested that I speak to the
students of the Sociology department on some aspect of Indian society,
but the head of the department was clearly reluctant. 'Speak on the
importance of studying Sociology instead', he suggested, and, of course,
I politely declined. It appeared that an unwritten rule was in force
in the university to prevent any dissenting views being expressed that
might challenge the official line of the state from intruding. All over
the university were boards painted with quotations from the Quran and
the Traditions of the Prophet, stressing the importance of knowledge
as well as, at the same time, pious behaviour, this probably being also
envisaged as a means to ensure obedience to the authorities. The Vice-Chancellor
of the University, I was told, was a retired senior Army officer. He
was not unique, however, with the heads of numerous other universities
and other public institutions in Pakistan being from identical backgrounds,
probably yet another means to enforce conformity, stifle opposition
to the state and to stamp out views that might challenge the position
that the state wanted to enforce. And to make matters worse, I was told,
the Government had now started encouraging the setting up of fancy private
universities that catered only to the elites, charged hefty fees and
paid their teaching staff fat salaries. It had also begun attracting
non-resident Pakistanis teaching in universities abroad to come back
home to teach, offering them a salary of well over a lakh a month, or
so I was given to understand. Charges of nepotism racking this new scheme
were rife and the purpose of it was widely questioned. 'Such people
will obviously have no commitment to the poor, the vast majority of
Pakistanis', a friend of mine pointed out.
'Socially engaged social
scientists are almost extinct in Pakistan', lamented a leftist friend
I met in Hyderabad, Sindh, who works with landless labouers, helping
to rescue them from the clutches of the landlords and their private
armies. 'Such scholars', he argued, 'are bound to be critical of the
state, the ruling establishment and the system of exploitation and that's
why we have so few of them. The state will simply not let them thrive'.
With Pakistan having been ruled by military dictators for decades, he
went on, the space for intellectual dissent by such intellectuals was
bound to be extremely narrow. This was entirely how Pakistan's rulers
and their American patrons appear to want things to remain. Matters,
he explained, were made worse by the fact in Pakistan, in contrast to
India, the middle class, sections of which could be expected to take
up progressive causes, is miniscule, with the vast majority of Pakistanis
being poor and bereft of decent education. This makes the market for
decent social science literature and research and other forms of intellectual
production extremely limited, striking evidence of which is the fact
that a single copy of an English language Pakistani newspaper costs
an astronomical fifteen rupees. Less than a dozen doctorates in the
social sciences are awarded every year by all Pakistani universities
combined, and most of the few noted Pakistani social scientists that
do exist have shifted to the West, in search of greener pastures and
the academic freedom that their own country lacks.
The pathetic state of intellectual
discourse in Pakistan has much to do with the country's political economy.
Pakistan has the dubious distinction of being among the countries that
spend the least per capita on education. The Pakistani public education
system is said to be in a state of complete shambles, even worse than
in India, if that can be imagined. As in India, mass education of an
emancipatory sort, is seen as a potent challenge to ruling authorities.
In Larkana district in Sindh, I was informed by an officer in the local
education department when I visited the area, half of the government
schools do not function because the landlords are afraid that education
might help provoke pathetically poor peasants and labourers to protest
and revolt. A similar situation is said to prevail in several other
parts of the country. And to add to that unenviable situation, Pakistani
dominant elites, like their Indian counterparts, are least interested
in socially progressive causes, in issues related to the lived realities
of the masses and in any sort of sensible intellectual discourse and
output, using religion and nationalism as a powerful weapon to stamp
out any dissent, a task in which they are assisted by the literally
hundreds of Islamist and ulama groups that now flourish in the country
thanks to official patronage.
*
The 'mainstream' NGO scene in Pakistan is no less depressing in terms
of the possibilities it offers for socially relevant intellectual discourse,
but then the situation in India is hardly different. While I was in
Lahore, preparations were underway to organise the first ever Pakistan
Social Forum, as a precursor of the World Social Forum to be held a
few months later in Karachi. My host in Lahore, a committed leftist
activist, took me to a meeting called by the organisers of the Forum.
It so turned out that the man in charge of the event failed to turn
up without informing the group, this being the third time he had done
precisely that. And so the few people present in the hall remained busy
gossiping among themselves, the main topic being the politics of NGO-ism
in Pakistan. In the small group of leftist activists that had separated
themselves from the NGO-walas, a consensus seemed to prevail that foreign-funded
NGOs, notable exceptions apart, were functioning as agents of imperialism
and of the Pakistani state and that they were designed to quash radical
challenges to the system of exploitation. 'Heavily funded by Western
donor agencies, they pay their staff hefty salaries, make them used
to flying in and out of conferences and put them up in fancy hotels',
said a young man who writes for a communist paper published from Lahore.
'In this way, socially engaged intellectual critique of the system is
blunted and peoples' movements are depoliticized', he explained. Pakistani
NGOs funded by Islamic charities in the Gulf were no better, he said.
'They just build mosques and madrasas. Many of them promote sectarian
hatred and propagate the most reactionary understandings of Islam that
are foreign to most Pakistanis'.
*
It is not that the old Muslim
man from Delhi was completely correct about the poverty of socially-engaged
and progressive intellectual discourse in Pakistan, although I must
say he was not far off the mark. During my visit to Pakistan, that took
me to several towns and a few villages in Punjab and Sindh, I met with
numerous people struggling to articulate progressive visions and activism
on a range of issues, such as gender relations, the rights of workers,
peasants and religious minorities, Western imperialism and Pakistani
ruling class politics, India-Pakistan relations and so on. On my very
first evening in Lahore I was amazed by the boldness of a play staged
by the Ajokha theatre group that I attended about the life of Bulleh
Shah, an immensely popular iconoclastic Punjabi Sufi and folk hero,
who mocked the mullahs and Brahmins alike and dared to defy the authority
of the rulers of his times. Also in Lahore, I met with activists of
a leftist group actively engaged in a struggle against brick-kiln owners
and landlords in southern Punjab and against the Kalabagh and, which
threatens to convert Sindh into a vast desert. In Tando Allah Yar, Sindh,
I met Khurshid Kaimkhani and Aslam Khwaja, both of whom are working
with the hapless Dalits of the province, the wretched of the earth,
many of whom live in a situation of bonded labour. And in Moenjodaro,
of all places, I encountered an activist who has translated numerous
communist texts into the Sindhi language. I could multiply the number
of such instances, but, as across the border in India, such brave souls
remain on the fringes, marginal to the shaping of 'mainstream' discourses
in Pakistan.
*
'What both India and Pakistan
desperately need', a Lahori friend told me while talking about the state
of intellectual discourse in our part of the world, 'are organically
rooted public intellectuals that articulate the lived realities and
concerns of the masses. Only then can the radical transformations that
we desire ever come about'. 'But', he somberly added, 'given the pathetic
state of intellectual discourse in Pakistan, that will probably take
decades to happen'.
I told him that he was probably
right about Pakistan, but, I quickly added, the same was true for India
as well.