Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [71]
When, however, I pressed them to state a preference between the Shariah and the pashtunwali, twelve chose the pashtunwali and fourteen the Shariah, with the rest not voting. The striking thing was that most of the men chose the pashtunwali and all the girls chose the Shariah. They did not state their reasons, but they seem obvious enough. Restrictive though they appear to Westerners, the provisions of the Shariah proscribe the most savage provisions of the pashtunwali as far as women are concerned – like the odious practice of giving girls as part of the settlement of feuds between families – just as the Koran was intended to reform the savage tribal traditions of seventh-century Arabia.
The Shariah also guarantees a share of inheritance to girls, while the pashtunwali gives it only to boys; and furthermore it guarantees rights to wives in the case of divorce. This progressive aspect of the Shariah was also something that the Information Secretary of the MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal) Islamist alliance (then forming the government of the NWFP) stressed to me in an interview later that afternoon, emphasizing that his party stood for Islamic progress against tribal barbarism.
For all that, there is no chance of the Shariah as preached by the Taleban sweeping Pakistan, for the same reasons that the Taleban themselves cannot sweep Pakistan. The first is that while the ruling elites may be willing to make any number of local compromises with the Shariah, they will fight hard and successfully to prevent Islamist revolution.
That leaves open the possibility that moderate Islamist forces in Pakistan might develop a new form of the Shariah like that of the modern state in Iran, more adapted to the contemporary world. But this will be extremely difficult in Pakistan, because the different Islamist groups in Pakistan cannot agree on which form of the Shariah is in fact valid. While Iran has a unitary and centralized form of Shia Islam, Pakistan – quite apart from its Sunni – Shia divide – has a multifarious collection of different forms of Sunni Islam. This critical obstacle to Islamist revolution will be explored further in the next chapter.
NOT QUITE AS BAD AS IT LOOKS
Re-reading this chapter, I feel that it needs a certain correction. Naturally a description of a country’s criminal justice system will focus on crime, but it would be a mistake to draw from the above the idea that Pakistani society is in a state of permanent chaotic violence. A number of things need to be kept in mind. The first is that the jirga and panchayat mechanisms described in this chapter are explicitly dedicated to regulating and containing violence, and usually do so successfully. Local saints and their descendants also play a part in this regard.
As Stephen Lyon has pointed out, one also needs to watch out for local hyperbole. If you believed all the stories you hear concerning violence in the countryside, ‘there would hardly be a man left alive or a women left un-raped’.19 Political violence aside, most of Pakistan is not in fact very violent or crime-ridden by the standards of many US cities, let alone those of Mexico or Brazil. In fact, given levels of poverty, the level of ordinary crime (as opposed to crime stemming from politics, religion or ‘honour’) is in many ways remarkably low.
One reason is that this society is mostly dominated by landowning and business politicians who, while they have to be prepared to order killings if really necessary, have generally inherited their positions, not murdered their way to them in savage gangland wars. They generally have to obey some sort of local moral consensus, which approves courage in defence