Quantum Note
April 15, 2005
Islam, State and Society (I)
One would expect that a former Minister of Law, Justice, Parliamentary Affairs and Human Rights would not lose his own disciplined training in law upon losing his ministry, but this is apparently not the case with Iqbal Haider, a one time Minister of such things in Pakistan; at least that is how it seems from his article, “Passport to Bigotry”. Fuming with anger and intolerance, the article claims that the decision of the cabinet of a military ruler of Pakistan to restore “the religion column (sic) in the machine-readable passport and to inscribe the words ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ on the passport’s cover” is “devoid of any logic, reason or civilised norms” and that it “only shows that the government has once again buckled under pressure, belying its own claims of ‘enlightened moderation’.” Haider then rhetorically increases the dramatics: “the greater tragedy is that this has been done under pressure from the orthodox, religious forces, only a day after their ‘million march’”.
Whether or not political expediency is at work here is inconsequential and does not merit attention, the greater issue at hand is the claim that this decision is “devoid of logic, reason and civilised norms”. Logic and reason demands that arguments be constructed logically, not rhetorically and the first thing one would expect from a former Minister of Law, Justice, Parliamentary Affairs and Human Rights is to define his terms: What constitutes “civilised norms” in a world occupation is called freedom, dictatorships are being certified as democracies, prisoners of war are being kept in animal cages in that outpost of tyranny called camp X-ray, and living, dignified human beings are said to have no human rights. In such a world, one would expect a former Minister of Law, Justice, Parliamentary Affairs, and Human Rights, who is also the current Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, to be concerned about the human rights of these inhabitants of the animal cages in Guantanomo Bay rather than details of a passport, but if he cannot use his rhetoric to highlight the plight of these victims of a barbarism hitherto unknown to humanity, at least he should first define his terms.
Even if one left the issue of definitions aside and concentrated on his arguments, one finds that his arguments rest on the following: (i) “Pakistan was never termed as ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ in any official document at the time of its Pakistan’s creation—the Independence Act of 1947, other Constitutional Documents, or Law”; and (ii) “or [in] any statement or speech made by the Quaid-e-Azam. The official name was the ‘Dominion of Pakistan’, because the Quaid was conscious that a state, by any stretch of logic or reason, cannot have a religion.”
He further alleges that “it was the unholy alliance of the civil and military bureaucracy that perpetuated its undemocratic rule in the fifties which introduced the prefix of ‘Islamic’ to the name of Pakistan while promulgating the 1956 Constitution. It did so to exploit the religious sentiments of the people.”
These arguments may be appealing at the surface because of their thin veneer of legality, but they become transparently void when one considers the actual historical and civilizational processes that gave birth to a separate homeland for Muslims of the Indian subcontinent and especially when one pays attention to the central argument used by all leaders of the Independence Movement: The Partition of India was won on the basis of “Two Nation Theory” which clearly established the presence of two distinct polities in the Indian subcontinent: Muslim and non-Muslim polities that could not live within the boundaries of a single state because of the vast differences in their beliefs, ways of life, social and cultural aspirations.
This theory, originating in a well-documented form in the 1930 address of Allama Muhammad Iqbal, constituted the real argument for demanding a separate homeland for Muslims. It should be noted that Iqbal merely articulated what was a historical fact and what had already been stated by many others in less clear, though valid formulations. It should also be noted that Iqbal’s formulation was not legal, but philosophical and his arguments were drawn from a worldview rooted in the vision of Islam.
The legal battle for the establishment of Pakistan was fought by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his associates, but his contribution to the actual establishment of a separate homeland for Muslims cannot be made the source of definition of that state, especially when it is impossible to ascertain Jinnah’s own views about the role of religion in a modern state with any degree of certainty. Haider quotes one of his speeches to buffer his argument, others have quoted many others speeches to prove the opposite. But the essential point here is that, ultimately, Jinnah’s personal views about Islam’s role in state and society can only be one man’s views about such things and no matter what position he holds in the historical process, his views cannot be equated with the actual historical process; at best, he can only be one contributor to the process.
In other words, what is being said is the following: a polity’s religious orientation is a process; it cannot be defined by an individual. A polity is not a fixed, stagnant object; polities exist in time and space and, hence, they are constantly changing. What defines a given polity at a given time is not the personal views of one or more leaders; rather the primary features that define a polity come from the vast historical synthesis that takes centuries to evolve and when a large number of people have solidly fixed their orientation toward a vision of life and death, one can say with a degree of certainty that this polity now holds such a religion, philosophy or ideology as its raison d’etre.
Pakistan’s emergence as a state needs to be seen not merely from the point of view of some legal documents that came into existence in 1947, but from the perspective of a historical synthesis that emerged in the Indian subcontinent over centuries, combining various elements of the Indian, Iranian and Arab civilizations. The kinetic energy for this synthesis was provided by Islam as a religion, defined as a set of beliefs dealing with a very specific, clearly definable vision of life, death, and the Hereafter. This means that at the time of Pakistan’s establishment, millions of men, women, and children who lived in the Indian subcontinent and who called themselves Muslims held a unique belief, lived according to the ways prescribed by that religion and therefore had a specific culture that drew its earthly elements from the above mentioned three civilizations but that was totally imbued with the vision of Islam which ran through the entire fabric of this polity like the trunk of a tree, providing it a vertical axis and an orientation rooted in Islam’s message of Tawhid. This characteristic feature of the new polity that emerged in the Indian subcontinent after the arrival of Muslims in the eighth century was expressed through their unmistakable allegiance to Islam over a long period of time, spanning centuries. When they were subjugated and colonized by the British in the nineteenth century, their loyalties to Islam did not change and they continued to live as Muslims under occupation.
When they were able to muster enough strength for getting rid of the overweening colonial rulers, their rallying cry for the demand of a separate homeland was: Pakistan ka matlab kaya? La ilaha Illah (what is the meaning of Pakistan: there is no deity except Allah). This spontaneous expression of the deepest aspirations of a people echoes throughout the long history of their existence as well as in the various facets of their struggle for independence and though it does not find expression in the legal documents underwritten by the British lawyers or brown sahibs trained in the British law schools, its absence from these legal documents neither nullifies it nor grants these legal documents of the British bureaucracy the authority to unalterably define the relationship between state and religion in the newly established state; this relationship has to be defined on a solid framework based on a system.
(To be continued)
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