Accidental Blogger

Staying on the topic of Pakistan for one more day – this time I bring you a book review by Indian journalist Manoj Joshi. Written by Pakistani born author Farzana Shaikh, the book examines the underlying causes of Pakistan's political and existential turmoil. According to the author, turning its back on the country's multicultural south Asian past and a deliberate (and sometimes conflicted) attempt to redefine itself as a militant (and military) Arabized Muslim nation may have played a role in precipitating an identity crisis in Pakistan. Created more than sixty years ago by the partition of British India, during the Cold War of the last century, Pakistan was used by the United States as its client state in South Asia as a buffer against both the former Soviet Union's influence in the region as well as India's socialist leaning "non-aligned" international stance. Should Pakistan once more reclaim its softer south Asian roots to counter the artificially imposed Arabic influence? Does making peace (even an uneasy one) with India offer Pakistan an option to settle the upheaval at home? Who knows? In politics things don't always work out the way common sense dictates.

In this context I will share with A.B. readers something very odd that I heard nearly a decade ago. In September, 2000 my husband and I were on a vacation in the beautiful state of Goa on the western Indian coast. One morning I woke up at an unholy early hour due to jet lag. With nothing else to do and the hotel's dining room not yet open for breakfast, I sat listening to an early morning TV interview with an Indian engineer who was also an amateur astrologer. The man made various predictions about world affairs. Two of them have stuck in my memory.  He said that in the upcoming US elections the following November (remember this was the year 2000), Al Gore would be the winner but there might be some "problems" with the results. The other prediction he made was that in 2013, India and Pakistan will form a loose federation with a common currency and that most hostilities between the two countries will cease. I don't believe in either homeopathy or astrology but stranger things have happened. Now on to Manoj's review.

Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New Delhi/London, Foundation/Hurst, 2009)

Review by Manoj Joshi (Mail Today - November 1, 2009)

The uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind Pakistan’s social and political upheavals, says Farzana Shaikh.

INDIA HAS had difficult relations with Pakistan since inception, but that is understandable given our history. But today there is a widespread sense of exasperation in relation to that country across the world, as well as a sense of alarm. Just what is this country of 160 million people, some of great talent and industry, all about ? Farzana Shaikh’s book title provides perhaps the most comprehensive and well argued answer.

Shaikh, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs ( Chatham House) in London concludes that the country’s uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind its social and political upheavals and its uncertainty as a nation. As she perceptively notes, the problem is not with Islam itself, but with “ the uncertainty about its influence over Pakistan’s identity as well as with the lack of consensus over the very terms of Islam.” She goes on to add, that it is the arguments and the fights over the “ multiple meanings of Islam” that result in the “ doubts about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of being Pakistani.” India, of course, looms large in the Pakistani consciousness. As Shaikh has noted, “ much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India.” Fear of Indian hegemony, political, economic and cultural, has kept Pakistan in a campaign mode against India. To maintain effective parity against its much larger neighbour, Pakistan has sought external alliances, spent an unconscionably great amount of money on defence, made nuclear weapons and finally unleashed a covert war with the help of Islamist jihadis. In fact Shaikh sees Islamabad’s Afghan policy as yet another attempt to shore up its fragile identity by seeking parity with India in the form of assuming the role of a regional hegemon.

In some ways the book takes off where her first book, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860- 1947 , ended. In answering the question "Why Pakistan?” she has argued that two rival discourses of Islam — the communitarian and the Islamist — have struggled “for ascendancy in defining Pakistan’s national identity.” The first was the discourse visible in the secularist politicians like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim middle- class of central India who played such a key role in the founding of the state. The second is the Islamist discourse “grounded in a religious and at times radical reading of Islam.” The tension between the two yield many ambiguities, but there are also uncertainties associated with the fact that Partition was the consequence of an endgame gone awry, for which the principal political actors of the time — Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and others are responsible.

The problems in defining Pakistan spills over naturally into the other question “Who is a Pakistani?” Shaikh points out, that the definition of ‘the Pakistani’ is still “deeply contested.” It is not just the microscopic Hindu and Sikh minority, the Ahmediya community or even the mohajir whose "Pakistaniness” is questioned, Shia Muslims who comprise anywhere up to 20 per cent of the country’s population are looked on with suspicion. Today, with the radicalisation of the Deobandis, even the Ahle Sunnat or Barelwis are feeling the heat. This of course, does not take into account the alienation of the Pashtuns, the Baloch, Sindhis and the residents of the Northern Areas of occupied Kashmir.

A major reason is the “uncertainty about Pakistan’s national identity and the lack of consensus of Islam’s relation to the state.” A lot of this was embedded into the Pakistan movement’s doubts about the value of pluralism.

There is a special poignancy when Pakistan’s history is viewed from India. It is not about the wars and hostilities that the country has thrust on us. It is the sense of wonder as to how two people who had a common history and culture, and chose to go their separate ways in August 1947 have had such different histories.

Reading the book it becomes clear why Shaikh is not particularly popular among Pakistani intellectuals and that her ideas are seen as controversial. Her chapter on how Islam weighs heavy on Pakistan will undoubtedly anger many Pakistanis since she takes the view that Pakistan’s founding leaders suppressed their secularist leanings with the cynical view of getting the support of the Muslim masses for their own, ill- defined political project.

The use and misuse of Islam has been a constant factor in the sorry history of Pakistan since independence. “Mobilising Islam in order to substitute for the absence of political legitimacy was a legacy of Pakistan’s national movement and has defined civil and military governments since the state’s inception,” Shaikh writes.

The Pakistan Army is another institution that looms large in the book. From the outset, Shaikh points out, the Army has selfconsciously sought to use the communal narrative to strengthen itself, even while the Islamists have sought to use their connection with the Army to strengthen themselves. We have today reached a breakpoint in this relationship, but given the ambiguity of the Army’s campaign against the jihadis, we cannot be sure of the outcome even now.

For Pakistan to survive as a modern nation state, it is imperative that its identity shift away from opposition to India towards accepting that their destiny and identity “ is rooted in the common history of South Asia.” But this will not be a simple exercise. Prising the hand of the military from the levers of power, for one, will not be easy. Neither will it be easy to put the militant Islamist genie back into the bottle. This is a larger project of turning the clock back on jihadi Islamism and restoring South Asia’s syncretistic traditions.

A review of the same book from a British prespective.