The ‘castle of Islam’ concept

You must have heard people say that Pakistan was created as a ‘castle of Islam’. It is clearly a defensive concept and seeks to convey the meaning of protecting something by separating it from the outside world. It is not difficult to imagine a minority — Muslims in India were 20 per cent of the total population — being attracted to separatism on the basis of a religion it felt was being diluted or otherwise vitiated.

But a castle is not what Muslim history talks about. What we idealise are war-like hordes looming from the open desert and attacking enemy castles. Our poetry doesn’t idealise a closed-door community cowering at the thought of being attacked. Ideally, we don’t defend; we attack. We are not inside a castle; we are outside the castle walls trying to break in. Our word for victory is ‘fatah’ which means ‘opening the gates’, not shutting them against the outside world.

The world has given ‘castle’ a bad name. All the evils are ascribed to the people who live inside a castle, their minds impregnated with fear. The word for this is ‘siege mentality’. It is a narrowness dictated by an indoctrinated mind, deaf to words of reason and new thinking. It is paranoia mixed with fear, a recession from reality that rejects the breeze blowing in from the desert outside, pregnant with new ideas helpful in resolving old problems. The single word for this state of mind in today’s globalised word is: isolationism.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), like Ibn Khaldun, is full of insights when it comes to describing state behaviour. He shocked the western world by talking about castles in a new way. He will shock the Castle of Pakistan even today. This is what he says in The Prince (Chapter 20, paragraph 6): “Fortresses, therefore, are useful or not according to circumstances; if they do you good in one way they injure you in another. And this question can be reasoned thus: the prince who has more to fear from the people than from foreigners ought to build fortresses, but he who has more to fear from foreigners than from the people ought to leave them alone”.

What Machiavelli is pointing to is the oppression of living inside a castle. The ruler cannot control the invader besieging his castle but he can control the people living inside the castle. If the people want to escape his authority, there is nothing they can do. In a state without castles, if you can’t stand the oppressive authority of the ruler, you exile yourself. If you live inside a castle, there is no place to run. In other words, a castle is a place where people can be easily oppressed and the ruler can be certain he will be obeyed.

The tool of isolationism is ideology because it indoctrinates and creates the uniformity of thinking that the castle demands. States that give the impression of being castles insist on the uniformity of mind. It is only by thinking the same way that you can live inside a castle without conflict. Hence, the importance of an agreed ideology protected by a Penal Code prescribing the measure of punishment that a breach of ideology, will entail.

Pakistan, as a castle, is trying to defeat efforts at creating difference of opinion and tolerance of opinion opposed to the indoctrination of the state. If English punctures the isolationist discourse, it must be either abolished or tamed through forcing ‘three streams’ of education — English, Urdu, madrassa — into becoming one dictated by the state. The castle of Pakistan is still being built.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2012.