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EDITORIAL: Jamaat-e-Islami’s fatal isolationism

The three-day Jamaat-e-Islami congregation or ‘world conference’ at Azakhel near Peshawar on Saturday has taken extreme political and economic positions. These will serve to intimidate the world and compel many interest groups in Pakistan to review their options vis-à-vis the religious party. The party chief, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, who was not allowed to visit Holland and Belgium and was embarrassed by questions from journalists in Norway last month, has taken the Jamaat one step further on the road of radicalisation by condemning the West. He has done this for two reasons: he wants to attract the attention of the electorate in Pakistan and he seeks to upstage the JUI within the MMA.

The naib (deputy) amir of the party, Senator Prof Khursheed Ahmad, told the gathering that the United States and its allies had crippled the economies of the Muslim countries by taking over their resources. He argued that the only way to recover from this subjugation was by waging jihad. He said that the Almighty had directed Muslims to increase their power, which included economic strength. “But we have given up jihad and accepted western hegemony which has enslaved us”, he stated. He trod familiar ‘anti-globalisation’ ground when he added that western multinationals had occupied 87 percent of the resources of the Muslim world in the name of social uplift through institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He said that these institutions had deployed their ‘puppets’ as rulers in the Muslim countries.

Qazi Hussain Ahmad also had a social message to give to the women of Pakistan. He said that the West was conspiring to destroy the very basis of the Muslim family unit in the name of women’s liberation and gender equality in order to weaken and degenerate our society. He added that women’s liberation was being promoted only by those trying to defeat the basic values of ‘decency’. The secretary general of the party, Syed Munawwar Hassan, who is known as the most aggressive speaker among the Jamaat high command and has often insulted his interlocutors on TV, came out with a gem: “We did not react emotionally but tried to face the situation with patience and endurance”. While asking President Musharraf to step down, he said that the Jamaat “did not want to create public resentment against the army to benefit the country’s enemies”.

The fact is that Prof Khursheed has always embraced an extreme economic view which he links to ‘Islamic’ teachings. The shopkeepers of Pakistan may be aligned to the Jamaat amid their other loyalties to the sectarian jihadi formations, but the private sector investors are generally scared of the Jamaat’s stand that bank interest should be rooted out. There is an emphasis in Prof Khursheed’s economic worldview on the ‘welfare’ aspects of the state which entails a rollback of the privatisation process underway. Now he has added jihad to his proposed economic survival kit of the state.

The gathering critique of globalisation no doubt has its validity. But shouldn’t one cobble a consensus on an alternative system through experimentation before adopting it as a creed? So far the trend in the world economy is towards ‘liberalisation’. In the context of Prof Khursheed’s theory of jihad as an answer to globalisation, one simply has to look at the decade of jihad in Kashmir where the Jamaat was deeply engaged to determine whether it paid off or not. The 1990s were the worst period of economic performance in the history of the country while the ‘target’ state India came out of its trough of ‘Hindu growth rate’ through liberalisation and overtook Pakistan in most fields, including poverty alleviation and literacy. An intelligent woman’s guide today will say that jihad is not good for a state and it certainly does nothing to improve the national economy although it definitely improves the standing of the clergy.

Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s diatribe against the West in general was an act of blind flailing at an unknown enemy. The cultural change in Pakistan over the past half century has been a cumulative process, and modernisation has been a part of this change. All societies cope with social change in an evolutionary manner, but any ‘revolutionary’ rollback — Bacha Saqqa in 1930 and then Mulla Umar in the 1990s in Afghanistan — is doomed to face a blowback. Qazi Saheb’s assault on the modernisation poses another threat to the social sectors contributing to economic growth in Pakistan. It threatens a rollback of modernisation under the Islamic edict, and that means intrusion into the private lives of Pakistanis who are presumed to live a life of ‘Western imitation’. But the truth is that only a police state can achieve the kind of purging that Qazi Saheb wants.

The Jamaat-e-Islami may have cut a swathe through a territory of JUI supporters in the NWFP, but it has certainly scared the rest of the country. The worldview it has presented is isolationist in the extreme. To be sure, many Pakistanis might think in terms of the ‘honour of the state’ and want Islamabad to assert itself in foreign policy beyond its political and economic resources. But we are sure that they don’t want the sort of overturning of reality this would require inside Pakistan. Most of them are angry about what has happened to Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, but surely they don’t want Pakistan to either become the Afghanistan of Mulla Umar or the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. To the business classes, the fallout of international isolation has become a palpable reality. They have seen the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq. They are witnessing the dangers faced by isolationist Islamic regimes in Iran and Sudan, and they don’t want it happening to Pakistan just because the Jamaat wants to create a utopia that has just received its comeuppance in Afghanistan. *

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