Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [88]
Maududi and the Jamaat were strongly influenced by the Deobandi tradition of hostility to British rule, and attachment to the idea of the universal Muslim Ummah. They also deeply distrusted the secularism of Jinnah and other Muslim League leaders. On these grounds, they initially opposed the creation of Pakistan, preferring to struggle for a more perfect Muslim society within India.
After partition became inevitable, Maududi and his chief followers moved to Pakistan. For a long time, the party kept a strongly Mohajir character (Maududi himself was born in Hyderabad, India). The cultural influence of relative Mohajir openness and progressivism (a key example of the role of migrants in promoting whatever social and economic dynamism exists in Pakistan), as much as Jamaat ideology, may have accounted for the more enlightened and modern aspects of the Jamaat, especially concerning women.
Maududi took his intellectual inspiration from Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen) of Egypt and the Middle East, but carried their ideas considerably further. His plan for the Jamaat was very much that of al-Banna for the Ikhwan: ‘A salafiyya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a scientific and cultural link, an economic enterprise and a social idea.’14
As these words indicate, the Islamist vision of this tradition is an allembracing one, based on the belief that Islam is ‘a system for the whole of human life’. Maududi took this further, developing a reformist agenda with certain socialist elements, strongly condemning modern capitalism and arguing that the Muslim tradition of zakat corresponds to modern Western ideas of social insurance. The Jamaat’s statement on its website (in rather poor English, for the Jamaat) emphasizes above all issues of social injustice, suffering and corruption:
Have a look at our dear homeland injustice and mischief has become order of the day. God created man equal but a handful people have grabbed more land they needed and amassed, money in excess of their needs for, they want to live a luxurious life. And, such people have enslaved other fellow human beings by keeping them poor and ignorant, we have weakened our fellow compatriots by denying them their due rights. And thus have deprived their lives even of trifle joys, Corruption together with adulteration is prevalent. Bribery is must even for a legal thing. Police always acts beyond any norms of decency and emptying the purses is the only way to get justice from a court of law. Standard of the education is all time low and morality and ethics too, are no better. Obscenity is all permeating. The armed forces instead of conquering the enemy have conquered its own nation many a time by declaring Martial Law in the country. Bureaucrats who are supposed to be public servants have become public bosses.15
Gulfaraz, a Jamaat student activist studying political science at Peshawar university and with the neat, Islamic-modern Jamaat look (trimmed beard and spotless kurta) emphasized hostility to ‘feudalism’ and the ‘feudal’ domination of the other parties, as one of his key reasons for joining the Jamaat:
This is the root of all our problems that this small group of feudals and their businessmen allies control everything. It is because India got rid of them through land reform that India can be a democracy today. In all the other parties, the people who say they want change are in fact from within the feudal system, so obviously these parties can’t change anything. That is why we need student unions, trades unions, NGOs that can give rise to new, democratic parties ... In Jamaat, this feudal and dynastic system doesn’t exist. Our leaders are elected all the way down to the student groups, and they never pass the leadership to their children.
My reasons for joining the Jamaat were first religion, and then social justice and democracy. I only did it after a lot of thought. My family are ANP, and I am the only one of my brothers