When the British colonized South Asia, the native population
were believers in God. The Mughal Empire was disintegrating. There were many
regions ruled by Muslim monarchs. The Muslims residents lived according to
their centuries old traditions. Their culture was a mixture of Persian,
Turkish, Afghan and Indian influences. Arabic was a foreign language for them
and they were dependent on their scholars to interpret religion for them. The
scholars for the most part were answerable to the ruler and presented the ruler’s
version of Islam. The people were taught to read the Quran for blessings but
were not aware of what they read. The rulers were not interested in educating
the general population in the religious sciences. Most centers of learning were
fixated by jurisprudence rulings about matters instead of the principles of religion.
The societies were for the most part deprived from the fresh wisdom from the
study of the Quran. In fact, the religious elite considered it haram to
translate the Arabic Quran until the time of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi.
The British arrived with their technology, civilization,
religion, culture and education and set about establishing their institutions
for its dissemination from Calcutta to Delhi and beyond. The Muslims were in no
position to oppose the civilizational onslaught. There were two main reactions
from the Muslims. One group said that they will completely boycott the Western
influence and culture. This group dispersed to the corners of society and study
to the teaching of the religious sciences. The Darul Uloom of Deoband
represents this group. Traditionally, its students have been blind to
modernity. The second group led by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan said that they cannot
avoid the knowledge which presented itself to them. He argued that they will
study Western knowledge, take whatever fits Islam and discard all that does
not. Modern Muslim education institutions were established in India and then in
Pakistan based on this philosophy. In theory the attitude of this group was
right, but in practise the students of these institutions were mesmerized by
Western civilization and the hard physical sciences like physics. They applied
the methodology of Western scientific inquiry to explain their own religion. As
it was, the practise of Islam was lost in the decadent Muslim monarchies.
These
educated elite then set about explaining religion based on their own warped
reasoning rather than through the understanding and practise of the Prophet
(SWAS). There were very few students of this system who mastered Western knowledge
better than the Westerners and excelled at it to the degree that they were able
to see the inherent flaws in it. One such student was Muhammad Iqbal who then
used inspiration of Quran and Hadith to realize flaws in Western thought and
the centuries of decay which has characterized the Muslim civilization. He realized
that the sources of Islam had the basis of a system of life which was
inherently stronger, just and better. He outlined the methodology Muslims
needed to regain the intellectual heritage through his seven lectures in the “Reconstruction
of Religious Thought in Islam”. His poetry yearned to wake up the Muslims. Other than
Iqbal, the majority of the graduates of this education system were Muslim
versions of their colonial masters especially in later times. Other than the feudal landowners, in time
they became the Muslim elite. It was such elite who were the leaders of the
movement to create a modern nation state for the Muslims in South Asia –
Pakistan. The theoretical basis on this state was to be the system of life of
Islam. That was the rallying point for all the Muslims of South Asia.
When the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was created in 1947,
most of its citizens were cultural Muslims in the image of the Muslims ruled by
the Muslim monarchs of pre-colonial South Asia. They were completely depended
on the ulema to explain the religion to them. The fact that they never
attempted to learn Arabic and have a personal relation to the Quran, has
resulted in a very strong Pakistani clergy in a religion in which there is no
place for clergy. Whereas the Muslim clergy in India suffered deprivations and
state oppression, their counterparts in Pakistan flourished in the Islamic
Republic.
For the most part this clergy was educated in Deoband style madrasas and were
alien to modern thought. Hence the gulf between modern education and religious
education separated the society into people of very different thought
processes. Using the masses, the clergy exerted their influence to make sure
that the underpinnings of the new state was in theory based on Islam. Thus the constitution
states that the sovernity of the State belongs to Allah and that no laws in the
legislation can be made contrary to the Quran and Sunnah. But in practice all
this has shown itself to be just lip service to Islam. The average Pakistani –
educated or illiterate – is deeply sentimental about Islam even if they do not
understand the principles of Islam. This sentiment is in fact not for religion,
per se, but can be better understood as a form of nationalistic fervor.
Pakistan has managed to produce very few scholars who tried
to reconcile the education from the modern secular West to the principles of
the Quran and Sunnah. Maulana Fazlul Rahman Ansari was appointed by Ayub Khan
for this task. After years of struggle he left Pakistan disillusioned to become
the Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies in the University of Chicago in
the 70s. He was severely criticized back home by the Mullahs.
By and large, the people of Pakistan have been left ignorant
of Arabic and dependent on a clergy to represent their religion, as the Hindu
clergy did before them. A clergy who in out of touch with modernity. Due to
their historical distance from forming a personal understanding of the message
of the Quran in its source language, the revelation does not have the miraculous
effect of their individual hearts to establish and grow eemaan. For the most
part, the average Pakistani is stilled entangled in the legalistic complication
of religious rulings. External form of Islam has become way more important to
them than its essential wisdom and guidance. Due to a power struggle the clergy
has divided itself based on sectarian and ideological differences and since
people are ignorant to the basic message of their religion, they blindly follow
the clergy who denounce all other groups to be misguided and destined to
Hellfire. There are frequent infighting among the followers of these groups so
much so that they refuse to pray behind one another. The participation of religious
groups in national elections has resulted in smear campaigns of one Islamic
party against another. The question of leadership prevents them from contesting
elections as a united body.
In this backdrop, to the average educated Pakistani the
bickering among its clergy and the general state of their followers, results in
disenchantment with formal religion. To many, the ignorance of the clergy to
modern thought and their blind followers, their infighting and their power
politics, distances them from religion. Many await for the ideal Muslim leader
to help save them. They elect one corrupt politician after another – each
one turning out worse than the other. They do not realize that salvation lies
in their own hands. Each Pakistani can change his destiny by educating and
reforming himself. If he has secular education, he can seek religious education
and vice versa.
Since the ideology of the State is theoretically Islam,
every Pakistani pays lip service to it, but to most deep down they know that this
is a farce. Thus Pakistani society is a society in which hypocrisy in
institutionalized. When the 2005 earthquake happened in Pakistani, I made a
general appeal in the oil company I was working in Abu Dhabi for donations.
Soon afterwards, I was approached by my manager, a UAE national who had studied
Mechanical Engineering in US. He was a practicing Muslim. He used to pray dhur
in congregation and was in Makkah in the last 10 days of every Ramadan. He told
me that Pakistan is cursed by Allah because Pakistanis made an oath to
establish it on the basis of Islam and had shown themselves to by hypocritical
in this pledge. This earthquake, according to him, was a punishment, so was the
floods, the dismemberment of the country, the electricity crises, the law and
order situation, the ethnic and sectarian strife, the domination of India and
other countries, corrupt leadership, etc. According to him, Pakistanis deserved
what they were getting.
In the absence of any practical ideology, the Pakistani
state has become a failed state. It consistently ranks among the top most corrupt countries of the world. Its rulers set the example for its
population by looting the nation. The son in law of the politician who promised
to provide every poor Pakistani bread, cloth and housing, used his father in
laws popularity to win the election and soon became the richest Pakistani in
the land. In this state of affairs, the average Pakistani equates the failure
of the State with the failure of its ideology, i.e. Islam. The War on Terror
and the subsequent emergence of terror groups in the name of Islam has also led
the whole society to secularize en mass. The world media from the West and
India is beamed into Pakistan, exposing the average Pakistani to secular
liberalism. Many seek escape from their painful state by immigration. Most of
those who immigrate lose their religion in one or two generation. Those who try
to hold on can seldom do so till the third generation.
The Pakistanis who are in diaspora throughout the world
should realize that they are there due to divine collective punishment from
Allah like the Jews were punished before them and were dispersed throughout the
world. Their salvation is still the same. They have to change themselves and
their children to change their destinies. As Pakistanis (for the most part)
have proved themselves to be a hypocritical people, they will do well by
associating with Muslims from other countries rather than themselves. Their
repentance should include a complete cut off from the hypocritical culture they
grew up in. A complete disassociation with Pakistani culture by cutting off all
satellite channels in their homes is a good step. If their children lose the
Urdu language they should not grieve, but rather take the opportunity to
replace the language of hypocrisy with Islam’s source language – Arabic. They
will benefit more if they stay away from traditional Pakistani religious groups in the West. It is better for
them to join a heterogeneous jamaat with good representation of indigenous
Muslims and indigenous or second generation Imams.
Rather than follow the Pakistani formula of success for
their children, they must realize that role of their children in the West is
not to become cogs in the secular machinery of the West, but rather to become
agents of positive change by reforming Western society as Iqbal had envisioned.
The West is already technologically very advanced. The effect that your child
will have as a Computer Scientist in such a society is insignificant as
compared to the role he can have by intellectually challenging the extreme nature
of this civilization due to its distance from religion. Thus as spiritual
doctors, you children can serve their host society better as it is their own
society. As callers to religion, they have a lesser chance losing their way of
life and in the process reconcile the modern with the religious in a manner
that your intellectuals in Pakistan failed to do. Perhaps then may Allah
forgive us.
