Pakistan Dawn
Cowering before the Taliban By Cyril Almeida Friday, 17 Apr, 2009 | 08:48 AM PST
IN this wretched, unfortunate land, anger and despair have been wasted emotions. After all, while we may never have known how to fix things, at least we could be relatively sure that they wouldn’t get much worse.
But as things begin to fall apart, the assumptions of yore are crumbling before our eyes. And the good and the great – the few that there are – are on the retreat. Many have written of their horror at the pact with the butchers of Swat, the grotesqueness of signing a Sharia deal with men who stand outside the pale of any religion. But it’s something else that has horrified me: the absence of unqualified rejections.
Listen carefully to what the critics are saying. The butchers of Swat are not men of religion. You can’t trust them. You can’t force them to give up their ways. They will only grow stronger.
It’s all very carefully calibrated. Cause minimal offence, upset no sensibilities, avoid stepping on toes. Can no one in this country stand up and say this: we do not want to live in a society where a man, woman or animal is flogged, where anyone’s limb is hacked off, where anyone is stoned. Period.
It doesn’t matter who is demanding it or why. Be it the purest of hearts or the most evil of men; be it with the best of intentions or the worst.
We do not want to live in a society where such punishments have the sanction of the state. Period.
How did we get to this point where it is so difficult for anyone to just say that, and only that? Without qualifications, without apologies, without lowering his voice.
We do not want to live in a society where anyone is flogged, where anyone’s limb is hacked off, where anyone is stoned. Period.
When did it become a radical idea to simply state we don’t want to live in the imagined land of the Taliban? And this is where many get it wrong – that the Taliban are reverting to an ideal. That they are going back to a glorious past. That they are going back to an Islamic past.
Friend Rafia Zakaria writing in The Hindu has laid bare the inherent fakeness of the Taliban project. I can do no better than quote her.
‘It is necessary first to appreciate the imagined Islam of the Taliban as an act of construction rather than reversion. Doing away with hundreds of years of jurisprudence of classical Islamic law, of administrative procedures and methods of reasoning, of sources of law and juristic analysis, the Taliban have redefined Sharia as a performative tableau rather than a jurisprudential exercise.’
‘An entire judicial system thus is reduced to the application of hadd punishments, floggings, beatings and amputations. Thus the qazi, arguably the most integral of those involved in justice provision, is nearly always invisible, while the crowd, the victim and those meting out a punishment play a central role. Justice is redefined as a means to subjugate and punish, with the entire collective crowd partaking in its ... enactment.’
After the flogging video sent shock waves around the world, a predictable debate started here. Was the video real or fake? Was it the work of westernised, secular, illegitimate people trying to sabotage peace? Some denounced it as un-Islamic. But here’s what distressed me: otherwise sensible voices decided to take on the Taliban on their terms.
The flogging was wrong because the girl’s guilt wasn’t determined properly. The process was flawed. There was no trial. The punishment wasn’t administered properly. The wrong number of lashes was served.
And then, helpfully, the right process was laid out by these critics. Well, if they had done this or they had done that and followed this particular rule or that particular principle, then the punishment would ... would what? Be acceptable?
How about a simple, we won’t accept such a country under any circumstances? Doesn’t matter if the right process or the right whip or the right intention is present.
How did we arrive at this point? Trite answers abound. We’re regressing. We’re uneducated. We have lost our way. Perhaps. But there is an underlying problem, one that isn’t sexy or simple enough to attract much attention.
Ejaz Haider first set me thinking about it a few years ago. We in Pakistan have still not resolved first-order issues of the state. The basic stuff. How is power to be divided between the various institutions of the state; what is the raison d’être of the state; what are society’s grundnorms; what is the social contract on the basis of which the state and its people are to interact. Simply, we haven’t yet figured out the framework within which we are to solve what we consider our real problems.
Ejaz contrasted us with India, which also fails to provide adequate goods and services to many of its people. There are still poor people in India, there is illiteracy, there is hunger, rights are routinely denied. But hardscrabble as life may be in India, the Indians have worked out a consensus on what kind of state – the first-order issue – will address its people’s problems, the second-order issues. In India, a constitutional democracy that embraces fundamental rights is the agreed framework in which to pursue economic and social betterment.
Here in Pakistan we have no such consensus. Sixty-one years of not agreeing on how the state is to be organised has made it impossible to work on the people’s problems. But that failure also always left the door open to anyone who could promise the people a better future at the cost of reorienting the state.
So now that the Taliban are trying to barge in, we have few ripostes. Well, at least they promise peace. At least there will be law and order. At least Green Chowk in Mingora will not see bodies strung up every morning. And if they do all of that in the name of Islam, well, maybe it is time we tried another nizam after all. The current one hasn’t proved any good.
As Rafia put it, the Taliban have slyly latched on to a simple and persuasive line: ‘the more visibly different from the epithets of modernity that the Taliban can be, the more automatically Islamic it becomes.’
Fighting back is difficult because we have never developed a consensus on an alternative. Jinnah’s Pakistan versus Ziaul Haq’s Pakistan – having never quite figured out what we want to be, we now face the very possibility that the Taliban may decide for us.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges