KARACHI: This is with reference to the debate over Mr Yaqoob Khan Bangash’s assertion that Jinnah wanted an “Islamist” Pakistan. This contention between liberals and Islamists splutters on 65 years after the Quaid’s death. Meanwhile, Jinnah’s or not, we have the Pakistan that we have — a complex country full of contradictions, with a Constitution that guarantees equal rights for all citizens but debars non-Muslims from the highest offices; professes freedom of religion but does not quite offer it to Ahmadis; where the government dare not amend the routinely-abused blasphemy law; where the police go all out to stop people flying kites but stand by while Christian houses are burned down and Hazaras are massacred.
Should one despair of this state of affairs? There is another side to the story: people did rise as one against the Taliban when a girl was flogged in Swat and cheered when the Taliban were driven out of the area; the government has been prompt in rebuilding the Christian and Shia homes destroyed by religious fanatics and Malala Yousufzai has become a national heroine. During General (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s tussle with the judiciary, Muslim lawyers clamoured for the Hindu Justice Bhagwandas to become acting chief justice.
Pakistan is, in fact, a non-theocratic (viz. secular) state in that the laws are not made or vetted by the clergy but through the democratic process. Indeed, Islam has no institutional clergy or “mosque” that may exercise state power and is, therefore, compatible with democracy. The pragmatic Benazir Bhutto saw the matter in perspective when, in her last book, she wrote: “Let us close the academic debate on secularism and focus on stemming the obscurantism and bigotry that are being fanned in the name of Islam.”
It will be a long haul but it can be done given the political will.
Iqbal Akhund
Published in The Express Tribune, March 30th, 2013.
