Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [76]
The greater radicalism, and anti-Westernism, of the Deobandi theological tradition can be traced in part to its urban, social and institutional origins, which differ from those of the Sufi and Barelvi traditions. British rule made little difference to the practice of Islam in the South Asian countryside. Except in the case of the most outrageous abuses, the British never meddled with the shrines, and as long as local pirs did not rise in revolt the British tried to co-opt them.
It was quite otherwise in the cities. As the last chapter, on justice, described, the role of formal Islamic justice in the countryside was always very limited. In the old Muslim states, however, the qazis (Islamic judges) and ulema (Islamic scholars; singular alim) ran the justice and higher education systems in the cities, and played a crucial role in the administration of the Mughal empire and other kingdoms. The destruction of those kingdoms, and the introduction by the British of British systems of law (with the exception of personal law) and higher education dealt a shattering blow to the power, prestige and income of the ulema and qazis. Inevitably, many were radicalized in response.
The decline of the urban clerics from their status under the Mughal empire was highlighted for me by the contrast between the Badshahi (Imperial) mosque in Lahore, and its state-appointed imam or chief cleric. The mosque is Pakistan’s greatest and most splendid architectural monument, and from its completion in 1673 to 1986 was the biggest mosque in the world. Its imam, however, lives in a cramped and shabby lower-middle-class house in its shadow. He sat on his bed while I interviewed him – a burly figure with a booming voice who dwarfed his small bedroom.
His circumstances of course could reflect religious austerity; but other things suggested a man who essentially was a very minor government functionary: the deference he paid to my companion, a local PML(N) politician; the continual repetition – evidently from a very well-worn official record for the consumption of Western visitors – of his commitment to peace, religious harmony, birth control and so on; and his bringing out of a tattered photo album showing his attendance on behalf of the Pakistani state at various international inter-religious conferences. Despite his international diplomatic role, he spoke almost no English, thereby marking his de facto exclusion from all Pakistan’s elites. I’m afraid that I was strongly reminded of meetings with officially sanctioned – and officially controlled – religious figures in the former Soviet Union.
I visited the imam during Moharram 2009. Twenty years earlier, I had also been in Lahore’s inner city during Moharram, to visit young activists of the Jamaat Islami. They all came from the educated lower middle classes. They were a pleasant lot, well-mannered, hospitable and keeping whatever fanaticism they possessed well veiled before a guest. What I took above all from my visit to their homes was the intensity of their families’ struggle to save themselves from sinking into the semi-criminal lumpenproletariat, and the way in which religion – and the Jamaat allegiance and discipline in particular – helped in that struggle. These boys spoke with deep feeling of the lure of street crime, heroin smuggling and heroin addiction. Not far away the Hira Mandi – the red-light district – beckoned as an attraction for men and a fate for women.
Something that one also takes away from visits to the lower and lower middle classes in Pakistan’s cities is the singularly repulsive nature of the semi-Western, semi-modern new culture these cities are liable to breed, especially concerning the treatment of women – a mixture of Western licentiousness with local brutality, crudity and chauvinism. This culture threatens women with the worst of all worlds, in which