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essay Roots
of political Islam
Zia
Mohyeddin column
essay The two most feted
Pakistani novels of the year, written in English, The Wandering Falcon, by
Jamil Ahmed, and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif, both received
international accolade and literary awards. Since both Ahmed and Hanif write
purportedly social and political fiction, it is important to examine how they
construct the imaginary and, writing in English, if there is a particular
audience that they create. The
two novels may seem very different in tenor and style and are yet
complementary. Jamil Ahmed’s Spartan and restrained Wandering Falcon is the
” good anthropology” of social realism, critical anthropology without the
arrogance of the academic discipline, documenting the political history of a
peoples in a desperate land, their innocence lost, their dignity eroded,
perhaps too definitively. Meanwhile, Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice
Bhatti is political commentary, a repackaging of this desperation in
corrosive humour, a snarling send up of place and peoples in the mode of
Salman Rushdie’s South Asian magic realism. They
are similar in the anthropological gaze they turn to their study, both
authors in some way commodifying the despair they ca The
Wandering Falcon is a work of careful documentation and political empathy
with the wronged tribals. It seems particularly unself-conscious in
addressing its audience and steers clear of valorising their lives.
It is a tale of parts of Pakistan now inaccessible to most of us,
eastern and northern Balochistan, Waziristan, even Chitral. A story or many
stories about the wit and wisdom tribal peoples commandeered to survive their
conditions. Commendably, it is not about present day Pakistan and is safely
located in pre Taliban times. Safely for the reader who does not necessarily
wish to get his or her journalism through novels. Tor
Baz, or the wandering falcon, is the story of a little boy who is the thread
to the disparate stories. A boy who grows to maturity witnessing the
vicissitudes of his times. Clear eyed and unsentimental as the writer who
creates him, the boy is no better than his peers, no hero at all, but a
survivor of many misfortunes. He is not even romantic in his tragedies, but
turns out to become an informer for any side, a trader in women, a bit of a
gambler who endures. The stark, yet sensuous
beauty of Balochistan is not Jamil Ahmed’s forte, and the land of his
fiction may be anywhere along
the Gulf Coast — maybe even Oman — where
it is always raining sand or chiselled brimstone, where summers are about surviving the desert and winter is about a
pained migration. Much detail is ignored in documenting the internecine wars
and the atrocities, like the silent, snowy winters, the spring full of apple
and almond blossom, the strong autumnal gale, and the serene rhythm that once
characterised this land. But to his credit, Jamil
Ahmed’s women are feisty characters, in charge of their lives and their
sexuality and willing to pay the price for it, be it the threat of being
stoned to death or shot, being superseded by a younger wife, or being exposed
to the market for women. In this, the author mercifully breaks with the
stereotyping of women in Pakistan as a guileless, endangered species. The other political novel
this year, a more media-celebrated one, Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice
Bhatti is another sort of listing, documenting the many terrors of the urban
slum, particularly for the minority Christian population. Again, there is no
contour or colour or smell to his world. Not the Anglo-Indian presence in
Saddar with women in frocks, the peculiar sentences in English that tend to
end in “also”, the salty smell of the sea mingled with dead rats lining
the streets. The cameo characters suffer no psychological underpinning in the
young and pretty Catholic Christian nurse, Alice, and her bodybuilding rogue
of a Muslim In
Our Lady, Hanif paints Alice in bold, rambunctious hues as a woman who enjoys
her body and her good looks. That of course makes her all the more vulnerable
in a society that the author backdrops in all of one colour – deep
misogyny. Making claims for the deplorable state of women that would put a
feminist to shame, Hanif here plays to an enthusiastic foreign readership
that imagines this country as full of veiled women being pilloried in the
streets. Predictably,
the western Press, mostly in the UK and the USA, went into a swoon over this
kind of writing. “Perhaps one would expect Hanif as a journalist to skewer
the terrible attitudes to Pakistan’s women and its society’s endemic
misogyny, but he does so without heavy handed polemics,” wrote the reviewer
for The Guardian. One wonders what can be
more ham-handled in Hanif’s diatribe
because, according to the reviewer for The Independent, “Alice trudges
through the daily ritual of sexual harassment on Karachi’s streets without
a single day when she doesn’t see “ a woman shot or hacked, strangled or
suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive,’ “. The reviewer
goes on to conclude magnanimously that redemption may still be possible for
this “flawed nation”. The reviewer in Time
magazine goes a bit further, “How did a country come to such a pass?’ She
asks, and then speculates anthropo-logically. Maybe because of ‘ …a
sizeable tribal population with archaic codes of conduct, selective
interpretation of the unreconstructedly patriarchal parts of religious text,
above all, the failure of any decent, let alone progressive educational
programme.” It is tendentious novel
writing such as this, and much else written in the name of English fiction in
Pakistan, that can make a political pundit of a Time’s literary books
reviewer. One is tempted to respond by remarking on the” indecency” of
the educational programme of the United States of America that gives people
so little geographical sense and so much hubris, so little political history
that would explain the neo-imperial role of her own country in keeping this
part of the world destabilised by propping up military regimes. And the
reviewer definitely needs to check her tendency toward racial profiling to
prove her credentials of having been through a “progressive education.” But
then, what is one to say about the hip journalists or staid bureaucrats
writing fiction that plays to the gallery, matching their own neo-liberlaism
to the racialism of the outsider. And fiction from Pakistan is thus condemned
to being just that, parochial, replete with relentlessly self deprecatory
humour that can make one nauseous, or else the voice of definitive despair
that makes the mouth go dry. While other people write novels that may or may
not be located in political history, Pakistanis writing in English seem to be
completely circumscribed by the sociological and the anthropological, never
quite rising to the literary.
Roots
of political Islam Political
Islam in Colonial Punjab:
Majlis-i-Ahrar 1929-1949 By
Dr Samina Awan Publisher:
Oxford University Press, 2010 Pages:
235 Price:
Rs 625 Religio-sectarian by birth,
activist by instinct, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal by ideology and
nationalist by passion, the Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam (MAI), a conservative
Sunni Mulsim political party founded in 1929, died an early death but not
without leaving an impact on major cities of Punjab like Amritsar, Lahore,
Sialkot, Multan, Ludhiana and Gurdaspur. The Jallianwala Bagh
massacre of 1919 and the disintegration of the Khilafat Movement in 1922 gave
birth to numerous organisations not only in the Punjab but also in the former
NWFP, Bengal, UP, Bihar, Kashmir etc. The politics of the second decade of
the twentieth century was characterised by joint struggle against the
imperialist rule not only in streets but also in the assemblies. Yet the
undoing of Khilafat Movement proved to be the parting of ways among the
liberals, nationalists, and fundamentalists. When the All India National
Congress (AINC) endorsed Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation campaign (which sought to
increase pressure on the British through peaceful civil disobedience together
with the Khilafatists), Jinnah was among those Congress liberal leaders who
publically criticised the movement. Finally, twenty of them including Jinnah,
K M Munshi, G.S Khaparde and others left Congress at its Nagpur session 1920. In 1922, a second lot of
politicians like Motilal Nehru, Vithalbhai Patel and Chittaranjan Das
followed Jinnah and formed the Swaraj Party against religion-based policies
of Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi, they participated in the elections of provincial
legislative assemblies throughout the 1920s. After some shifts and jerks in
the 1920s, the Khilafat Committee and the AINC disintegrated into numerous
territorial and ethnic factions. Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam was one of them,
confined to the Punjab. The book, Political Islam
in Colonial Punjab: Majlis-i-Ahrar 1929-49 is a PhD thesis of Dr Samina Awan
who is Chairperson Department of History at Allama Iqbal Open University,
Islamabad. The author rightly calls the book, “a journey through several
interrelated domains including political Islam; South Asian Muslim identity
politics; and the transformation of Punjab from a bastion of the Raj to a
sword-arm of Pakistan Movement.” The work, indeed the first of its nature,
is an essential study to comprehend Punjab’s politics of the last two
decades before partition. Yet she failed to link the whole phenomenon with
pitfalls like the Lucknow Pact (1916) and emergence of provincial powers
after the Government of India Act 1919. Hakim Ajmal Khan, Iqbal, C R Das, Sir
Mian Muhammad Shafi and leaders of Ahrar were against the Lucknow Pact. The
issue of separate electorates got prominence in the Muslim majority provinces
by the late 1920s due to the unwise weightage formula of the Lucknow Pact. Ahrar, founded in Lahore on
Dec 29, 1929, had a variety of leaders from the very beginning. It had
parliamentarians like Maulana Mazhar Ali Azhar (son of a respected Shia
literary family from Batala), Ch Afzal Haq a well-known writer and
intellectual, Ch Abdur Rahman, son of a prominent Rajput family of Juandhar
and orators like Syed Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari, Sheikh Hassam-ud-Din, and
Maulana Habib ur Rehman Ludhianvi and activists trained under Naujawan Bharat
Sabha, like Master Taj-ud-Din Ludhinavi. According to Ch Afzal Haq, “Ahrar
had Sunnis, Shias, Barelvis, Devbandies and Wahabis in it”, yet their
over-emphasis on anti-Ahmadi politics restricted them to a sectarian
framework. Islamic socialism was their alternative slogan but, unlike
Z.A.Bhutto, they failed to make it into an election slogan. The Kashmir Movement 1931
was their first test; here they had to face opposition from the All India
Kashmir Committee, which was headed by Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood who was
the head of the Ahmadya community. The 12 member Committee had personalities
like Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, Fazil-i-Hussain, Muhammed Iqbal, Ghulam Rasool
Mehr, Syed Mohsin Shah and Khawaja Hassan Nizami. According to the book,
“The main office of the Committee was established in Qadian.” In a few
months, trained agitators of Ahrar not only mobilised the Punjabis and
Kashmiris by Jail Bharo campaigns but also launched heavy criticism on Muslim
leaders who accepted the leadership of Mirza sahib. “As a consequence of
their successful agitation, Iqbal resigned from Kashmir Committee and gave a
press statement against Qadiani leadership.” There was dictatorial rule in
the princely states and Ahrar politicised these issues smartly not only in
different States but also in adjourning settled areas. Unlike AINC, Ahrar
supported the communal awards in 1932 and got prominence in the eyes of
Punjabi leaders like Iqbal. In June 1933, Ahrar participated in three
by-elections of the Punjab assembly. Afzal Haq, Mazhar Ali Azhar and Ch Abdur
Rahman won all three seats. In 1934, Ahrar participated in the elections for
the Indian Legislator and won two seats — K L Gauba in Lahore and Qazi
Muhammad Ahmad Kazmi in Meerut, UP. The author gives new
information about the strengthening of relations between Ahrar and Jinnah in
mid-1930s. According to her, Ahrar leaders held several meeting with Jinnah
before the 1937 elections. “Jinnah’s talk with the leaders of MAI and
Majlis-i-Itehad-i-Milli were successful, and Iqbal provided requisite help in
this context.” The author also gives references of Jinnah’s exclusive
meeting with Ahrar’s leaders at Abdul Qavi’s residence in Lahore. “MAI
arranged a public meeting in honour of Jinnah where her volunteers guarded
him with their symbolic axes”. Jinnah announced ALL India
Muslim League (AIML) Parliamentary Board, which had four MAI leaders, Afzal
Haq, Sheikh Hassam u Din, Abdul Aziz Begowal and Khwaja Ghulam Hussain. Due
to immaturities of both MAI and AIML, the alliance could not last for more
than 5 months and it broke much before the election eve. Ahrar, Muslim League
and Congress were among losers in the Punjab yet League immediately revisited
its policies reflected in the historic Jinnah-Sikandar Pact (October 1937)
which created new spaces for it to grow in the Punjab. As for the Ahrar, it
could not understand the power politics in the new electoral phase. The British government
introduced an amendment in the Defense of India bill in 15 September 1938.
According to this amendment, no one could launch propaganda against
recruitment in the British Indian army. The Ahrar launched an
anti-recruitment campaign immediately. As Congress was holding ministries in
seven provinces, it did not support Ahrar on this. Interestingly, Subhas
Chandra Bose criticised the Congress and supported the Ahrar on this issue.
“Till December 1939, 7500 Ahrar volunteers had been arrested including its
president Sheikh Hassam u Din from all over India”. Left out in the political
wilderness, Ahrar started a defamation campaign against the Muslim League,
Lahore resolution and Jinnah which further discredited it among the people.
During early 1942, Ahrar tried to regain its old glory but failed to attract
the people. Finally, it lost the 1946 elections which compelled it to revisit
its politics and ideology. After the creation of
Pakistan, in the Defence of Pakistan Conference (Dec 12-14, 1947), Ahrar
disbanded. According to my late father Sheikh Riaz-ud-Din who was the son of
Sheikh Hassam-ud-Din who was present in that meeting, “Our leaders said
that people have rejected us, our ideology is defeated and we have to accept
that defeat boldly.” It was an unprecedented, politically mature, brave and
wise decision. The most interesting riddle remains unresolved, which is that
is our official record — including the Munir Commission Report — that
proved Ahrar’s involvement in a movement (anti-Ahmadya movement of 1953)
which started four years after its demise. The
author is Lahore based researcher and editor
Zia
Mohyeddin column The social problems that we
in our country suffer today, all kinds of corruption, deals— favoritism,
spiteful vendettas, abject poverty — were all prevalent in Elizabethan
England. It was an authoritarian regime made up of many personal fiefdoms.
Elizabeth followed a “divide and rule” policy and her Earls — Essex,
Leicester, Northumberland, etc; were kept on tenterhooks. None knew who was
in her real affections. The populace, including writers and artists, depended
on their Dukes and Earls for protection as much as for money. Shakespeare
nearly went to the racking dungeon once because his play Richard the Second
was interpreted to be in support of the rebellious Earl of Essex, his patron.
The play was withdrawn hastily from the repertoire of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare and his
contemporaries dreaded writing anything that might provoke the wrath of the
Court. The playwright, Thomas Kyd, was torn apart on the rack accused of
writing an anti-government poster. Ben Jonson, (author of Volpone and The
Alchemist), was sentenced to jail for six months for writing a play which
criticised the Mayor of London for corruption. Not a single copy of this
play, The Isle of Dogs survives. Christopher Marlowe, the young maverick and
a highly regarded dramatist, suffered a great deal at the hands of the Censor
before his promising career came to an end when he was knifed in the eye. It was an age littered with
the omnipresent security network of moles and informers. A writer living by
his wits as Shakespeare did, dared not offend the nobility leave alone the
monarchy. He could not write a political play which attacked someone in
authority or a ruling philosophy. His genius lay in infusing his plays with
hidden meanings that lie deep within the work. His play, Measure for
Measure, which is referred to as a “problem play” is an attack on the
Puritans who were the revolutionaries of the day. The play was performed in
the court of James the first. (Some contemporary scholars feel that the play
was written to please the monarch). James I’s reign was
dominated by the growth of Puritanism, a movement which would lead to the
execution of Charles I and the sovereignty of Parliament. James I must have
been mightily pleased to see a play in which the state’s enemies are all
caught and punished, puritanical zeal crushed and the old ‘kingly’ order
restored. We don’t know what the monetary rewards were but Shakespeare must
have been regarded as a safe, establishment playwright. At the end of the play, the
king’s government is all powerful but merciful, religious dogma is
satisfied, death has been avoided and sexual rampancy has been regularised
with multiple marriages realised and prostitution forbidden. Since it is not
a tragedy, everything has been put to right. But Shakespeare was not
merely an Elizabethan or a Jacobean propagandist. If he had been one the play
would have lost all meaning for us. The central theme of Measure for Measure
– though it is much concerned with justice and mercy — is sex and sexual
morality. Fornication is a sin and, in Shakespeare’s Vienna, a capital
offence. The play’s interaction is initiated by Claudio’s condemnation
for getting his fiancé with child. His sister Isabella, a would-be nun
pleads for his pardon with the substitute Duke (King), Angelo, who has
condemned him, but in doing so, unwittingly, tempts the seemingly virtuous
Angelo to trade a pardon for her virginity. The uses and abuses of
power gives the play a special appeal for our sensibilities. It is
interesting that all the ‘good’ characters fail in some respect. The low
life characters inhabit a diseased world of brothels and prisons, but there
is a touching quality in their frank acknowledgement of licentiousness: “Our natures do pursue Like rats that raven down
their proper bane A thirsty evil, and when we
drink, we die” Elbow, the constable and
law enforcer cannot distinguish between a malefactor and a benefactor. He is
totally incapable of discerning the illicit commerce between religion, sex
and government, all having been reduced to smutting respectability. The
raucous, rough and ready Falstaffian life is here transposed to an underworld
crying out for ‘lenity to lechery’ because the high priest of morality
(Angelo) will otherwise “unpeople the province with continency.” Lucio, the fantastic, one
of Shakespeare’s best written rogues, thinks that Angelo is not made by man
and woman “after the downright way of creation… it is certain that when
he makes water his urine is congealed ice…sparrows would not build in his
house-eaves because they are lecherous.” The pimps, bawds and hangmen all
indulge in the orgy of self-righteous indignation which is their chief joy of
life. The 19th century critics
found fault with the play precisely for this reason. How could the Master not
offer any redemption for the likes of Abhorson (whoreson?) Coleridge had
other reasons for rejecting the play. “Measure for Measure” he wrote,
“is the single exception to the delightfulness of ‘Shakespeare’s play.
It is hateful though Shakespearean throughout. Our feelings of justice are
greatly wounded in Angelo’s escape.” But does Angelo escape? The
king, who remains disguised throughout most of the play, makes sure that
Angelo accepts Marianne, the woman whom he had rejected. She may have been a
plain woman; we know for certain that Angels refused to carry out his
marriage contract because her dowry went down with a foundering ship. Angelo
gets his comeuppance: a lifelong reunion with a woman he dislikes. Perhaps
this is why he begs the king to condemn him to death; the king instead tells
him to remain faithful to Marianne, surely a fate far worse than death. Measure for Measure is a
dark play, sinister and exciting. It has some of the most haunting, dark
characters all of whom are put in the dark dungeon, except poor Mistress
Overdone (“nine husbands sir, overdone by the last”) who is left without
livelihood. In Shakespearean blank
verse one line flows on to the next without a break. Occasionally when the
blank verse uses monosyllables a real power is achieved: “What’s this? What’s
this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted,
who sins most, ha? Not she; nor doth she
tempt; but it is I That lying by the violet in
the sun Do as the carrion does, not
as the flower.” Shakespeare’s title comes
from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “With what measure ye mete it will be
measured by you again.” The hidden meaning of the play has been provided by
the Bard himself: “There is scarce truth
enough alive to make societies Secure but security enough
to make fellowship accursed Much upon this riddle runs
the wisdom of the world.”
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Pakistan for a largely foreign audience that already considers the place
phantasmagoric and beyond comprehension. This is not story telling as much as
it is a documentation of the intractability of the belligerent Other. People
who suffer no inner life and no self reflexivity makes them human, for they
are a collective and not individuals like those produced by advanced
capitalism. At best they may be native informants, mirroring their authors,
at worst; they are absurdist anecdotes in the brutal march of history.
husband, Teddy. 
