Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [74]
There is no sight in Pakistan more moving than to visit some dusty, impoverished small town in an arid wasteland, apparently abandoned by God and all sensible men and certainly abandoned by the Pakistani state and its own elected representatives – and to see the flag of the Edhi Foundation flying over a concrete shack with a telephone, and the only ambulance in town standing in front. Here, if anywhere in Pakistan, lies the truth of human religion and human morality.
FEUDING THEOLOGIANS
As to modern Islamist politics in Pakistan, the most important question to be asked is not why they are so strong, but why they are so weak. Think about it. Across much of the Middle East and the Muslim world more widely, Islamist political parties and reformist movements are making progress. Such a party rules in Turkey, and others would probably come to power in Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Morocco if those countries held democratic elections. Iran of course experienced an Islamist revolution, albeit of a specifically Shia kind, as did the Shia of Lebanon.
Pakistan has always had a political system which is far more open than those of most other Muslim states; it has levels of poverty which would seem to cry out for a mass reformist movement in the name of Islam; and it has inherited from India before 1947 one of the leading intellectual traditions of Islamist modernism and reformism. Yet with brief exceptions, the Islamist parties have always performed miserably in the polls, and are no nearer today than they ever were to creating a mass political movement that would successfully pursue a truly Islamist system in Pakistan, whether by peaceful or revolutionary means.
The truth is that, while most forms of Islamist radicalism have ancient roots, they are also modern, and a response to modernity. Most forms of Pakistani Islam for their part are traditional and conservative – far too conservative to support a revolution, and far too diverse to submit themselves to a monolithic version of Islam. This in turn derives in part from the fact that Pakistan remains in many ways a very rural society, where even the rapidly growing cities are still heavily rural in culture, owing to the constant flow of migrants from the countryside.
Islamist radicalism, whether of old or new varieties, has always been a basically urban phenomenon, and derived from old and new patterns of urban society and culture. In Pakistan, the rural masses can occasionally be stirred up to furious panic by the cry of ‘Islam in danger’, as they were in 1947, but only two radical forces have established a long-running presence in parts of the countryside. The first are the Sunni sectarian extremists of the central and southern Punjab, who have succeeded in appealing to Sunni tenant farmers and the lower middle classes against the local Shia elites. Where, however, the landed elites are Sunni, they help prevent the spread of the Islamist parties through their control of the appointment of mullahs to local mosques, which they use to bar anyone with a hint of social radicalism.
The other case of Islamist success in rural areas is the Pakistani Taleban in parts of the tribal areas and the NWFP – a success which is due above all to specifically Pathan factors and traditions, and the impact of developments in Afghanistan. As of 2010, the Taleban and the Sunni sectarians have forged an alliance which is carrying out terrorist attacks across much of Pakistan; but to overthrow the Pakistani state would be quite a different matter, and something of which they are, in my judgement, incapable unless the US indirectly gives them a helping hand.
Theologically speaking, all the Sunni