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EDITORIAL: Taliban, Pakistan and modernity

President Pervez Musharraf has stated that Islam is compatible with modernity as modernisation means access to good education, civic government, development, justice and democracy, and not mere Westernisation of society. Just as his words were being digested by the nation, the “local Taliban” in South Waziristan executed a 25-year-old man under their idea of “Islamic” law or sharia. The “Taliban” had announced their government under the sharia earlier this month although the government has been in denial. The execution distinctly says that a part of Pakistan has turned its face away from modern times in imitation of the Taliban rule that brought grief to Afghanistan in 2001.

Other more ironic things happened the same day President Musharraf delivered himself of the wisdom about Islam and modernity. A Muslim convert to Christianity in Afghanistan was saved by subterfuge (it was said he was mentally sick and therefore couldn’t be held accountable under any law for converting to Christianity) by the Kabul government from being done to death, triggering protests from the Islamists who wanted him killed. The clerical view in Pakistan that appeared in the press, too, wanted the man killed. Then Pakistan’s top cleric, Mufti Munib ur Rehman, who chairs the moon-sighting committee on Eid days, came on TV and announced that “if a state is truly Islamic” it would have to kill the apostate.

Pakistan has all sorts of laws it cannot implement because they are completely out of tune with our times, but one idea that it has thankfully not made into a law is death for converting away from Islam. The cardinal principle behind this resistance to give death for conversion is the Quranic dictum La Ikrah Fi Din (no coercion in faith), but Mufti Munib ur Rehman misapplied the dictum without fear of reprimand simply because these days it is fashionable to fly in the face of the times and insist on endless recidivism of thought. He said the dictum applied to those non-Muslims who wished to convert to Islam. It was not permitted to force anyone to convert to Islam, but if any Muslim converted out of Islam he had to be asked to do tauba (expiation) or die. (In the case of women, they simply had to be confined till death.)

It was tacitly accepted by the TV channel that let Mufti Munib shoot off his mouth that Pakistan was not “truly Islamic”. One supposes that in his mind and those of his like-minded fellow-clerics only Mullah Umar’s Afghanistan was “truly Islamic” for five years without bringing about the utopia the Muslims were promised. Schools for girls were closed down, women were beaten up on the roads if they went out to find work, and men were thrashed if they didn’t keep beards or wore shorts. After so many executions no improvement in the character of the people was in evidence. They simply suffered and accepted that it was dog-eat-dog in a Hobbesian state.

Pakistan is signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which has an article allowing freedom of religion including conversion. The clergy has been demanding that death be awarded to those who convert out of Islam. So far only insane and otherwise disabled persons have announced their conversion; and their fate has been quite scary. Because of bias and sheer ignorance, such individuals are thrown in jail where they die mysteriously. The result is that no one in his right mind would announce any internal change of belief. On the other hand, Mufti Munib’s fatwa that no one should be forcibly converted to Islam is belied by cases where non-Muslims have converted simply to avoid discrimination and a second-class status. The latest case that came out in the press was that of our Christian singer A Nayyar who was beaten up by goons asking him to convert. No cleric came to his defence and a week later he was still receiving death threats.

The Islam that Allama Iqbal envisioned was in line with modern times. (He was opposed to the enforcement of hudood and abolition of riba.) These days the clergy — dominant by reason of its high public profile — is clear that democracy is not permissible under Islam. The MMA may be seeking pure democracy by ousting Pervez Musharraf but the dominant parties inside it favour a sharia of the Taliban. Some of the laws in force in Pakistan — for instance, the Blasphemy Law and the law of cutting hands and stoning to death — already fly in the face of modernity. We have to do much yet to enter the 21st century because we missed the bus in the 20th. *

SECOND EDITORIAL: Who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas?

At Washington’s National Art Gallery, a film about the great Buddhas of Bamiyan was shown recently with the director of the gallery telling the audience that the Taliban had got Saudi and Pakistani engineers to destroy the two colossi. According to him, Osama bin Laden had persuaded Mullah Umar to pull down the “idols” even though the local Afghan population was opposed to destroying Afghanistan’s most famous world-heritage relics. The director said that the local Afghans had told him about the engineers, something he could not otherwise confirm.

Well, there is information and the Washington National Gallery should have known it. It came from the international archaeological community in touch with the situation in Afghanistan. It was finally printed in an Indian publication. In 2000, the Taliban destroyed two 5th century AD statues of Buddha in Bamiyan. One was 114 feet tall, the other 163 feet tall. It took 21 days for the job to finish. Egged on by Al Qaeda, Mullah Umar commissioned Arab, Sudanese and Bangladeshi demolition experts, as well as Chechen sappers, to do the job. Pakistan’s role was there but it was that of an approver. The Karachi-based Al Rasheed Trust, linked to the Banuri Town seminary, published a memorial calendar celebrating the deed. Alas, the opinion in Islamabad’s religious ministry also favoured the vandals. *

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