Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [89]
On the other hand, while the Jamaat has always strongly denounced ‘feudalism’, in practice its support for land reform has wavered to and fro and has never been more than lukewarm at best.
The Jamaat has enjoyed its greatest success among the educated classes, and has made gaining influence in the universities and the media a key part of its strategy – a sort of Islamist version of the reform-Marxist ‘long march through the institutions’. However, this also reflects the party’s failure to appeal to the masses in general, or to transcend the 5 per cent or so of the electorate which has been its average for the past sixty years.
Although its leaders often come from old ulema lineages, the Jamaat remains a party of the aspiring urban lower middle classes, and especially of their educated elements. Apart from the hostility of Pakistan’s dominant classes, and lack of a clan and patronage base, the party also suffers from the fact that its entire puritan and intellectual style is rather alien not just to the mass of the rural population but to the urban proletariat as well, with their vulgar, colourful popular culture, love of Indian movies, extensive use of hashish and alcohol, and surprisingly frank attitude to sex (except of course as far as their own womenfolk are concerned).
The fact that the old urban middle classes are constantly being swamped by new migrants from the countryside casts a certain doubt on whether – as some analysts have predicted – Pakistan’s rapid urbanization necessarily means an increase in adherence to the Deobandi tradition as opposed to the Barelvi, and with it an increase in support for the Jamaat and other Islamist groups. For this to happen, a sufficient number of former migrants and their descendants would have to be not just urban, but upwardly mobile – anecdotal evidence suggests that the influence of Tablighi Jamaat preachers, for example, is strongly correlated with a rise in the social scale from the proletariat to the lower middle class. The problem is that the lack of sociological research and detailed surveys means that this is indeed only anecdotal evidence.
The Jamaat’s disdain for the mass of the population was very evident when I visited their headquarters in the great Punjabi industrial city of Faisalabad to see if they were benefiting from the workers’ anger at power cuts and unemployment. The Jamaat’s district leader, Rai Mohammed Akram Khan, seemed surprised that I thought appealing to the workers was important, and spoke contemptuously of their lack of education and ‘real Islam’, including their love of illicit liquor:
We don’t want to rally the masses behind us, because they don’t help us. They can launch strikes and demonstrations but they are disorganized, illiterate and can’t follow our ideology or stick with our strategy. We want our party workers to be carefully screened for their education and good Muslim characters, because if we simply become like the PPP and recruit everyone, then the Jamaat is finished ... We don’t care if we can’t take over the government soon as long as we keep our characters clean. Only that will help us one day to lead the people, when they realize that there is no other way of replacing the existing system.17
The Jamaat believes that the Koran and Shariah, properly interpreted and adapted, hold the answer to every social, economic and political question. It differs however from other Islamist movements in its acceptance of the principle of ijtihad, which allows the reinterpretation of lessons of the Koran and hadiths (within certain limits) in accordance with human reason and in answer to contemporary problems. The Jamaat shares its belief in ijtihad with the Shia tradition; and indeed,