The cancer of militant extremism

It says something about a society if the only thing that opens up a debate on existential issues is a terrorist attack.

You can’t fault the people. If anything, the sudden release of emotions from a fire-hose of discontent reminds us of the great danger of a censorship culture. Censor a long overdue debate on religion and its role in the construct of the jihadist worldview, censor the discussion on the long overdue discussion on the reform of religion, censor the discussion on the challenge of achieving parity between a worldview which sees all as equal (regardless of belief, gender) and one which insists that some — by accident of birth — are more equal than others, censor the uncomfortable history of Muslim conquests of Hindu and Christian lands, censor it all and what you’re left with is a people brimming with beliefs and very little religion.

More than 70 people died in the latest Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park tragedy. As always, the victims were from less than affluent families. Deprived of all access to the private enclaves of bliss reserved for the elite, the victims of these public attacks were mostly hard-working people from the lower income stratum, finding affordable reprieve in a deeply classist country. This time it was Easter, a sacred day for the Christians. And as with all previous times, the sword of radicalism cleaved them asunder. Once again, the terrorists struck the most vulnerable; the most weak. Think of the families, dressed up for Easter, at the park; fathers who sat their kids on slides, mothers who sat their kids on swings, siblings chasing each other in games of hide and seek, and then for all of it to end in one brief, unforgiving moment. Think of the children forever torn away from their parents, kids left orphaned, others handicapped. Imagine the grief of the mother who saw her child running in one moment, only to be reduced to a ball of dust and blood, the other. The fact that a significant number of victims were Christian, a minority group reduced from 20 per cent to two per cent since Partition, is a moment of abject shame for the Muslims of Pakistan.




The tragedy is not simply that the Gulshan-e-Iqbals, the All Saints Churches, the Joseph Colonies, bled — the tragedy is we can no longer say with a straight face that this won’t happen again. We’ve seen the Zarb-e-Azbs and NAPs, the counter-terror strategies and nice looking power-points, but that’s just cutting away at the malignant tumour which pops up in random places. Deep beneath these ephemeral tumours runs a cancer that’s affected most of the body. Confronting the cancer is a problem: killing entirely the monster you created is hard, there are in-house sympathisers and enablers who could be provoked into dangerous factions if the establishment went full-hog against the whole spectrum. There are external partnerships, Gulf linkages, old favours, and just a slew of complicating factors too many to condense here.

But the question is: if not now, then when?

How many more will die before we realise that militant murderers are not all illiterate loafers in search for meaning and purpose. Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man who slaughtered Daniel Pearl, in front of a camera, graduated from London School of Economics. The 9/11 bombers were mostly college educated. Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the IS, is a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Baghdad. Faisal Shehzad, the Pakistani-American who tried to blow up Time Square, graduated with an MBA from an American university and was decently employed before deciding to abandon a lifetime of decent choices for the promise of celestial glories. Over and over again, militants are shouting out their motivations, quoting scripture and precedents from early Islamic conquests, yet many moderate Muslims insist that the militants are not Muslim. Interestingly, the feeling is quite mutual — the militants think the same about the moderates and are not shy to kill a few to make a point. So then who is a Muslim? Depends on who you ask. Islamic Fiqh (schools of religious jurisprudence) offers little consensus as well — hence the different mazahib (theologies). But isn’t diversity good? Where else do we have near-perfect consensus on anything really, let alone a centuries-old faith tradition? Diversity, indeed, is welcome, perhaps even necessary, but only when such divisions don’t come with death verdicts.

The reality is that while many mainstream Muslims like to dissociate themselves from militancy, and for good reason, the theological distance between the two is disconcertingly small. Vast numbers of Pakistanis believe in the ultimate truth of their respective beliefs, to the clear exclusion of the others. An Islamic militant is someone who takes these views to their logical conclusion. The truth of the matter is that while some liberals may take issues with elements of Pakistan’s Constitution as being exclusionary and parochial, they do, in some significant part, reflect the mainstream sentiment. None of this means mainstream Pakistanis are ticking time-bombs only a tier away from all-out jihad. But it does mean, that when pushed on their theological commitments, many mainstream Pakistanis find it incredibly difficult to articulate a clear point of departure from the extremist view. And given Paris, Ankara, Baghdad, Istanbul, Brussels, and now Lahore, to take the most recent tragedies, it’s quite clear this is not just about Kashmir, India, Afghanistan, America or Israel. This is very much a problem within the global Muslim community, and censorship of legitimate debate is not part of the solution, it’s very much a part of the problem.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd, 2016.