Moderates with West-inspired values try to corner conservatives, and never venture into understanding their religion
LAHORE: This letter is apropos the article, “Will moderate Muslims please stand up?” by Rafiullah Kakar published in your daily on November 22. The writer, who was my senior at the Government College University, Lahore and my colleague at the Youth Parliament Pakistan, has tried to nudge moderates in Pakistan to take on a proactive approach towards defining a battered Muslim identity mutilated by the likes of the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban. He has urged moderate Muslims to make efforts to project a true identity to save Muslims at large who, at present, have been pitted against the antagonism of palpable Western Islamophobia and savagery of the above-mentioned terror groups.
The writer is spot on when he says that moderates in Pakistan are holed up in their closets and if they ever want their version of values to be adopted by society at large, they need to break the closets they live in. However, the problem with moderates in Pakistan is that they suffer from Anosognosia: the inability of a person to recognise that he or she is ill. Moderates in Pakistan, through their inertia, have forgotten to evaluate the antics of those standing within their ranks, who have basically turned into the lunatic fringe of the moderate and secular class. What moderates usually do is that they rant against conservative sections of society, trampling all those values of secularism — such as studying phenomena objectively when faced with diversity — for which they clamour.
Moderates in Pakistan with Western-inspired values try to corner conservatives, and never venture into understanding their religion. Without trying to understand religion in its entirety, their warped understanding of Islam through the prism of Western-inspired education leads them to develop a tunnel vision. This bastardisation of secular values among moderates, knowingly or unknowingly, has robbed them of their true base of which they seem unaware.
In Pakistan, society at large is conservative. People’s predisposition towards the conservative approach in Islam can be forgiven because their understanding is reinforced daily through their exposure to religious indoctrination directly through the mosque or indirectly through discussions. Thus, a common citizen’s exposure to conservatism is greater than his or her exposure to secularism, keeping in view the shambolic state of formal education in Pakistan.
For moderates, the key is to study religion in its entirety, objectively and build their case for adoption of secular values based upon Islamic teachings, which they can then preach to the public at large. Such an approach will help moderates gain some space. The point here is that moderates need to stop living in a hermetic manner. In a nutshell, instead of bashing conservatism among Muslims through the Western prism, moderates should study religion. They must then develop a model for society which is both secular and Islamic. This can help them connect the masses with modernity without invoking people’s fear of losing their Islamic identity if they toe the line of the moderates. This fear is constantly invoked by extremists whenever moderates try to present their version of understanding of any problem before them.
Inamullah Marwat
Published in The Express Tribune, December 3rd, 2015.
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