Imran Khan's Faux Patriotism And Religious Populism Has Done Pakistan Severe Damage

His Rhetoric Of Riyasat-E-Madina And Single National Curriculum Has Taken Pakistan Decades Back Main Points: 1. Jinnah never wanted Pakistan to be a theocratic state. 1. 2.Muslim clerics had largely opposed the idea of Pakistan. 2. Ziaul Haque popularised the idea that Pakistan was created in the name of Pakistan. 3. 4.Nawaz Sharif also tried to make Pakistan a theocratic state. 4. Imran Khan contributed to the spread of religious fanaticism in Pakistan. ------ By New Age Islam Staff Writer 18 April 2022 Yasser Latif Hamdani takes an analytical look at the religious politics played by the successive governments of Pakistan since Ziaul Haque. He was the first leader to popularise the idea or the myth that Pakistan was create in the name of Islam. Jinnah had never spoken about his dream to make Pakistan a theocratic state and he distanced himself from communal politics at that time. The fact is that some Muslm leaders including poet Mohammad Iqbal were concerned with jobs, political representations of Muslims in Assemblies and their educational rights in new India. Islam was not at the root of Pakistan. It was created for Muslim minorities and since, Hindus and Christians had also been accepted in Pakistan, Jinnah wanted a secular Pakistan where Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities would have equal rights. But gradually, clerics and some political leaders repeatedly asserted that Pakistan was made to be a theocratic state. When Nawaz Sharif came to power, he continued this trend and tried to make Pakistan a full blow theocratic state. Islam became a ploy both for the dictators and political leaders to win public sympathy. The dictators did it because their occupation of power was illegal and illegitimate and so to create the impression among the people, that though they have occupied power illegally, they are serving Islam better than the legitimate rulers of Pakistan, they hid behind Islam. The legitimate rulers know that they can any time be toppled by dictators or the army, and so they try to garner the support of the people as well as of the religious leaders, madrasas and of militant religious parties so that they can prolong their tenure. Musharraf halted the trend of Islamisation which had grown under Nawaz Sharif. He in fact tried to reverse the trend. He did not need the support of religion because he was confident of his hold on the sear of power. During his tenure, liberal and progressive ideals and values gained acceptance. This trend was taken forward by the PPP government which took some practical steps to make Pakistan a liberal and modern secular state. It brought the 18th amendment to the Constitution which granted minorities cultural rights and identity. It also ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Due to the liberalisation and secularisation of Pakistani polity, Nawaz Sharif in his second term did not see the need to play religious politics and instead extended the voting rights to the oppressed Ahmadiya minority community though it stirred a vociferous campaign by the religious section. But all the good work done by the previous governments was undone by the PTI government headed by Imran Khan that came to power in 2018. Since his was a minority government, he took the help of religious parties and the religious rhetoric to stay in power and to keep the army at bay. He surrendered totally to the TTP and allowed them to hold violent protests on various issues even killing police personnel. During his tenure, terrorist attacks on Shias and minorities went on a rise and still he said that he wanted to make Pakistan like the state of Madina of the prophet's time. Imran repeatedly said in his speeches that Pakistan was founded on the fundamental creed of La Ilaha Illallah. Jinnah never supported the idea of Pakistan as a theocratic state and distanced himself from such slogans. Wielding another blow to Pakistan's already messy education system, in August last year Imran Khan introduced the Single National Curriculum under which the holy Quran and hadiths would be taught as compulsory subjects in secular schools. Educationists feel that religious studies should have been left with madrasas and secular schools should be made to focus on modern sciences. Merging two systems of education which have radically different objectives will only prove counterproductive. In short, Yasser Latif Hamdani feels that the ghost of faux patriotism and religious populism of late Imran Khan government will haunt Pakistanis for a long time to come. ----- Imran Has Damaged The Idea Of Pakistan. Don’t Expect It To Turn Into A Normal Country Soon By Yasser Latif Hamdani 13 April, 2022 Much has been written about Imran Khan’s departure from power. It is still early, but, at some point, Pakistanis will have to come to terms with the damage that Khan’s four years of misrule did to the country. As someone who has been keenly interested in the debate around Pakistan and its genesis as a modern nation-state, I fear that the damage that Imran Khan has done to the country’s national narrative will take decades to fix. Consider that in 2015, Venkat Dhulipala, a relatively unknown Indian-American professor, who let his nationalism and personal antipathy towards Pakistanis get in the way of academic honesty, wrote a book titled Creating a New Medina to paint Pakistan as a ‘millennial theocratic dream’ that harked back to Medina. This is despite the fact that some of the biggest opponents of the ‘Pakistan idea’ during Partition were Muslim clerics. The truth is, at no point did the All-India Muslim League or its president Mahomed Ali Jinnah invoke Medina or speak of a theocratic State of any kind. The entire idea of Pakistan had to do with a Hindu-Muslim counterpoise on secular issues such as representation, jobs, and so forth. Religion was just not the point. This is the only narrative that explains the enthusiasm for the ‘Pakistan idea’ among modern Muslims in the 1940s and the almost universal disenchantment with it of the Muslim clerics. The latter, in fact, saw the new nation-state as a Kemalist coup against their hegemony, and many of them called Jinnah ‘Kafir-e-Azam’ (the ‘great infidel’) and Pakistan ‘Kafiristan’ (the ‘land of the infidels’). More importantly, this is the only narrative that can help Pakistan come out of the theocratic abyss it has fallen into since the 1970s. Thwarting Gen Zia, Sharif’s ‘Islamic’ Project In the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, left no stone unturned to prove that the nation was founded in the name of Islam. The difference is that Pakistan was founded for the Muslim minority of India, not Islam — you may disagree with it as many Indians do, but the distinction is a significant one. The logical extension of this was that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in his second term, tried to transform Pakistan into a full-blown theocracy. He would have succeeded, given his two-thirds majority in parliament, but General Pervez Musharraf’s coup put an end to it. Unconstitutional as it was, the by-product of the coup was that the new regime tried — in earnest — to undo some of the damage done by the General Zia government. Columnists and authors began to rediscover the ‘modern Muslim’ project. Ardeshir Cowasjee, a Zoroastrian and Pakistan’s great journalist and philanthropist, famously coined the term ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ as the byword for a modern, liberal, and progressive nation-state. The Musharraf regime fell as all unconstitutional projects do, but the changes it had introduced meant that the civilian political parties once again recalibrated their ideological calculus. The Pakistan Peoples Party government from 2008 to 2013 took several strides toward a socially liberal Pakistan. Other than the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, this period also saw a significant change through the 18th Amendment of the Constitution. It promised minorities in Pakistan the right to freely develop their cultures — a constitutional language that had previously been omitted by General Zia’s tinkering in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif, who, in 1999 tried to turn Pakistan into a theocracy, was greatly chastened in his third term and did not press further with any particular conservative agenda. Indeed, in 2017, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) government became the target of vociferous campaigning by religious parties because it tried, quite feebly, to extend the right to vote to Ahmadis who had been denied that right since the 1980s. Nevertheless, a broad political consensus was in the offing on the issue of the interaction between State and religion before it was shocked to the core by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) in 2018. Backtracking On Modern Pakistan Taking a leaf out of Creating a New Medina, Imran Khan ratcheted up the rhetoric of ‘Riyasat-e-Medina’. Even if we put aside the Muslim modernist view and look at it from a purely religious lens, could Pakistan become a new Medina without the Prophet’s guidance? Modern nation-states are temporal entities, not spiritual or otherworldly ones. Pakistan is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious State. Given the sectarian divisions among Muslims, there can be no consensus on what the idea of a ‘Medina-state’ entails. It is this rhetoric that has now metamorphosed into a grand conspiracy narrative. Imran Khan’s loyal followers are now painting him as a great Islamic leader who was targeted by the US because he was working to create a true Islamic State, modelled on Medina, with an independent foreign policy. In his numerous addresses to the nation, Khan made it a point to state that Pakistan was founded on the fundamental Islamic creed of ‘La Ilaha Illallah’, that ‘there is no God but Allah’. The truth is that Jinnah had specifically distanced himself from the famous slogan “Pakistan Ka Matlab Kya? La Ilaha Illallah” (What is the meaning of Pakistan? And so on). He said that he and the Muslim League had nothing to do with it and that some people may have used it to “catch a few votes”. Yet, such is the potent appeal of this manufactured slogan that in the midst of a grave constitutional crisis, Imran Khan doubled down on it. In Pakistan, it is religion, not patriotism that is the last refuge of an autocrat. Even before it found itself in hot waters, in August last year, the PTI government introduced a retrogressive educational curriculum called the ‘Single National Curriculum’, which included compulsory recitation of the Quran and teaching of hadith in schools. Contrary to popular belief, the Constitution of Pakistan speaks of the State’s responsibility to enable Muslims to lead religious lives but not enforce it. Much like his ideological predecessor General Zia, Khan was out to remake Pakistan’s future generations in his own mould — the ideal Pakistani Muslim who carries prayer beads with him everywhere and is gripped with superstitions and irrational fears. This is the antithesis of the Jinnah ideal — a modern thinker who does not wear religion on his sleeve and is unfettered by meaningless rituals. Imran Khan was an immensely popular figure, and his remaking of the Pakistani identity is likely to be more enduring than that of General Zia. Do not expect Pakistan to turn into a normal country anytime soon. This heady mix of faux patriotism and religious populism will plague the country for decades. ----- Yasser Latif Hamdani is an advocate of the high courts of Pakistan and his biography of Jinnah will be published by Pan Macmillan India soon. Views are personal. (Edited by Humra Laeeq) Source: Imran Has Damaged The Idea Of Pakistan. Don’t Expect It To Turn Into A Normal Country Soon URL: https://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/imran-khan-patriotism-religious-populism/d/126815 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism