Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [72]
It is quite true that in much of Pakistan, tribes and chieftains operate as autonomous armed forces – but that was true of medieval Europe, and it did not prevent the great achievements of that period in terms of both culture and commerce. To paraphrase the words of various ‘feudal’ acquaintances and tribal chieftains, for by far the greater part of the time, the point of armed force is not war but deterrence – to show that you are strong so as not to have to fight. In a paradoxical way, therefore, to use violence may be a sign of weakness, and also of lack of self-control. This virtue is not prized as much as physical courage, but it is still highly prized, since the consequences of lack of self-control can be both personally fatal and bad for your kinship group’s prestige.
Finally, the rather miserable picture of the police and courts painted in this chapter is equally true of by far the greater part of India; indeed, because of caste divisions, parts of India are considerably worse as far as police atrocities are concerned. The same is true of the dominance of customary law. In fact, throughout most of this chapter (except, obviously, those parts dealing with the Shariah), I could, without any substantial inaccuracy, have substituted the words ‘Indian’ or ‘South Asian’ for ‘Pakistani’.
This is awful for much of the Indian population, and has contributed directly to the growing Maoist insurgency among low-caste and tribal peasants in much of the Indian countryside; but it has not so far prevented the great recent economic achievements of the Indian state. The difference with Pakistan is that in India there is no coherent and unified cultural alternative to the modern state and its legal structures, which also operates as a standing moral reproach to those structures. In Pakistan, in the view of many believers, there is the way of Islam, reflected in the Shariah. This code for every aspect of life and society is the subject of the next chapter.
4
Religion
Don’t compare your nation with the nations of the West
Distinctive is the nation of the Prophet of Islam
Their solidarity depends on territorial nationality
Your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion
When faith slips away, where is the solidarity of the community?
And when the community is no more, neither is the nation.
(Sir Muhammad Iqbal)1
Verily God will not change [the condition of] a people, until they change what is in themselves.
(The Koran, Shura 13, verse 11)
Since 9/11, international discussions of Islam in Pakistan have focused mainly on the threat from religious extremism and terrorism. In these discussions, a dangerous intellectual mess is often created by the mixing up of words such as ‘extremism’ and ‘militancy’ with the very different concepts of ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘conservatism’.
Long before 9/11, however, much of the discussion of Pakistani Islam, inside and outside Pakistan, concerned whether Pakistan, having been founded as a refuge for the Muslims of South Asia, should or should not be an Islamic state; or, on the other hand, why Islam had allegedly failed to keep West and East Pakistan together, and was continuing to fail to help develop Pakistan as a united and successful society.
On the first point, I have already argued that, while terrorism is obviously present and frightening, Islamist extremism in Pakistan presents little danger of overthrowing the state unless US pressure has already split and crippled that state. The religious barriers to the spread of extremism will be outlined in the present chapter.
The second question is whether or not the state should have an official Islamic character, which will go deeper than the formally Islamic nature it has possessed since the constitution of 1973 (under the government of the ‘liberal’ Z. A. Bhutto) declared Islam the state religion.