Fields of Blood (59 page)

Quite different was the
Jamaat-i-Islami, which had been founded in
India in 1941 to oppose the creation of a separate secular state. Jamaat had no madrassa base and did not cling to the past, as the Deobandis did, but developed an Islamic ideology influenced by the modern ideals of liberty and independence.
Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79), its founder, argued that because God alone ruled human affairs, nothing else—“be it a human being, a family, a class, or a group of people, or even the human race as a whole”—could claim sovereignty.
²⁰
Therefore nobody was obliged to obey any mortal authority. Each generation had to fight the jahiliyyah of its day, as the Prophet had done, since jahili violence, greed, and Godlessness were an ever-present danger. Western secularism epitomized the modern jahiliyyah because it amounted to a rebellion against God’s rule.
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Islam, Maududi insisted, was not a Western-style “religion,” separate from politics; here he was in full agreement with Gandhi. Rather, Islam was a
din,
a whole way of life that had to include economic, social, and political as well as ritualized activities:
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Muslims had been charged to reject the structural violence of the jahili state and to implement economic justice, social harmony, and political equality in public as well as private life, all based on a profound awareness of God (
taqwah
).

Before partition, Jamaat had concentrated on training its members to reform their own lives in the
Greater Jihad; only by living an authentically Quranic life could they hope to inspire the people with a longing for Islamic government. But after partition, the movement split. Of its 625 members, 240 remained in India. Since only 11 percent of the population
of India was Muslim, Indian Jamaat could not hope to create an
Islamic state; instead, its members acquired a qualified appreciation of the moderate (as opposed to atheistic) secularism of the new state of India that forbade discrimination on the basis of religious belief. This, they declared, was a “blessing” and a “guarantee for a safe future for Islam in India.”
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But in Pakistan, where there was a possibility of an Islamic state, Maududi and his 385 Jamaat disciples felt no such constraints. They became the most organized Pakistani political party, gained the support of the educated urban classes, and campaigned vigorously against the dictatorship of
Ayub Khan (r. 1958–69), who confiscated all clerical property, and the socialist regime of
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (r. 1970–77), who used Islamic symbols and slogans to win popular support but in reality had nothing but contempt for religion.

Maududi, therefore, was still committed to the struggle (
jihad
) against jahili secularism, but he always interpreted jihad broadly in the traditional manner so that it did not simply mean “holy war”; one could “strive” to achieve God’s sovereignty by peaceful political activities, such as writing books or working in education.
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It is a mistake, therefore, to brand Pakistani Jamaat as fanatically intent on violence; the fact that the party went in two such different directions after partition shows that it had the flexibility to adapt to circumstances. Maududi would have nothing to do with revolutionary coups, assassinations, or policies that stirred up hatred and conflict, insisting that an Islamic state could put down firm roots only if ends and means were “clean and commendable.”
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The transition from a secular nation-state to a truly Islamic society must, he would always maintain, be “natural, evolutionary and peaceful.”
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But in Pakistan physical force had become one of the chief ways of doing politics.
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Leaders regularly came to power in military coups, and in their ruthless suppression of political opposition, neither Khan nor Bhutto could be seen as examples of benign, peaceable secularism. So prevalent was armed conflict in Pakistani society that a group that abjured it had little hope of success. In an effort to gain popular support for Jamaat, Maududi agreed to lead a campaign against the so-called
heretical
Ahmadi sect in 1953 and wrote an inflammatory pamphlet, which sparked riots and put him in prison.
²⁹
This, however, was an aberration. Maududi continued to denounce the violence of Pakistani politics and condemned the aggressive activities of Jamaat’s affiliate IJT (Islami Jamiat-i-Taliban), the Society of Islamic Students, which
organized strikes and demonstrations against Bhutto, paralyzed the communication systems, disrupted urban
commerce and educational establishments, and led militant confrontations with the police. While other members of Jamaat succumbed to Pakistan’s endemic violence, Maududi remained committed to achieving an Islamic state democratically. He repeatedly insisted that an Islamic state could not be a theocracy, because no group or individual had the right to rule in God’s name. An Islamic government must be elected by the people for a fixed term; there must be universal adult franchise, regular elections, a multiparty system, an independent judiciary, and guaranteed human rights and civil liberties—a system not very different from the parliamentary democracy of Westminster.
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When
Zia al-Haqq seized power in a coup in 1977, established a dictatorship, and announced that Pakistan would follow
Shariah law, he drew heavily on Maududi’s writings in his speeches. He also brought several senior Jamaat officials into his cabinet and employed thousands of Jamaat activists in the civil service, education, and the army. Shariah courts were established, and traditional Islamic penalties for alcohol, theft, prostitution, and adultery were introduced. By this time, Maududi was in failing health, and the current Jamaat leaders supported Zia’s military regime, regarding it as a promising beginning. But Maududi had profound misgivings. How could a dictatorship, which usurped God’s sovereignty and ruled with martial and structural violence, be truly Islamic? Shortly before his death, he penned a brief note to this effect:

Future generations of Muslim activists would have done well to heed this lesson.

Western
modernity had conferred two blessings in the places it was first conceived: political independence and technical innovation. But in the
Middle East, modernity arrived as colonial subjugation, and there was little potential for innovation, with the West so far ahead that
Muslims could only imitate.
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The unwelcome changes, imposed as foreign imports from without, were uncongenially abrupt. A process that had taken centuries in Europe had to be effected in a matter of decades, superficially and often violently. The almost insuperable problems faced by modernizers had already become clear in the career of
Muhammad Ali (1769–1849). He had become governor of
Egypt after
Napoleon’s invasion and managed the monumental feat of dragging this backward Ottoman province into the modern world within a mere forty years. Yet he could do so only by ruthless coercion. Twenty-three thousand peasants died in the forced labor bands that improved Egypt’s irrigation and communications. Thousands more were conscripted into the army; some cut off their fingers and even blinded themselves to avoid military service. There could never be technological self-sufficiency, because Muhammad Ali had to buy all his machinery, weapons, and manufactured goods from Europe.
³³
And there could be no
independence: despite his achieving a degree of autonomy from the Ottomans, modernization eventually led to Egypt’s becoming a virtual British colony.
Ismail Pasha (1830–95), Muhammad Ali’s grandson, made the country too desirable to the Europeans: he had commissioned French engineers to construct the
Suez Canal, built nine hundred miles of railways, irrigated over a million acres of hitherto uncultivable land, set up modern schools for both boys and girls, and transformed Cairo into an elegant modern city. In the process, he bankrupted the country, ultimately giving the British the pretext they needed in 1882 to establish a military occupation to protect the interests of shareholders.

Even when a degree of modernization was achieved, the European colonial powers managed to snuff it out. Perhaps Muhammad Ali’s greatest achievement had been the creation of the cotton industry, which promised to give Egypt a reliable economic base until Lord Cromer, the first consul-general of Egypt, put a brake on production, since Egyptian cotton damaged British interests. No friend to the emancipation of women—he was a founding member of the
Anti-Women’s Suffrage League in
London—Cromer also scaled back Ismail’s programs to educate women and blocked them from entering the professions. Every benefaction was less than it seemed. In 1922 the British allowed Egypt a modicum of independence, with a new king, a parliamentary body,
and a liberal Western-style constitution, but they retained control of military and foreign policy. Between 1923 and 1930 there were three general elections, each won by the
Wafd party, which campaigned for a reduced British presence in Egypt; but each time the British forced the elected government to resign.
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In the same way, Europeans obstructed the development of democracy in
Iran, where modernizing clergy and intellectuals had led a successful revolution against the
Qajar shah in 1906, demanding constitutional rule and representative government. But almost immediately the
Russians helped the shah to close the new parliament (
majlis
), and during the 1920s, the British routinely rigged elections to prevent the majlis from nationalizing the Iranian oil that fueled their navy.
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The
Muslims of the Middle East had therefore experienced the secular rule of the colonial powers as militarily and systemically violent. Things did not improve after they achieved independence in the twentieth century. As the Europeans dismantled their empires and left the region, they ceded power to the precolonial ruling classes, which were so embedded in the old aristocratic ethos that they were incapable of modernization. They were usually deposed in coups organized by reform-minded army officers, who were virtually the only commoners to receive a Western-style education:
Reza Khan in Iran (1921),
Colonel Adib Shissak in
Syria (1949), and
Gemal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt (1952). Like
Muhammad Ali, these reformers modernized rapidly, superficially, and even more violently than the Europeans. Used to barracks life and the following of orders without question, they cut down opposition ruthlessly and underestimated the complexities of modernization.
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Secularism did not come to their subjects as liberating and irenic. Instead, these secularizing rulers effectually terrorized their subjects by tearing down familiar institutions, so that their world became unrecognizable.

Again, you could take religion out of the state but not out of the nation. The army officers wanted to secularize but found themselves ruling devout nations for whom a secularized Islam was a contradiction in terms.
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Undeterred, these rulers declared war on the religious establishment. Following the aggressive methods of the
French revolutionaries, Muhammad Ali had starved the clergy financially, taking away their tax exemption, confiscating the religiously endowed properties (
awqaf
) that were their principal source of income, and systematically robbing them of any shred of power.
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For the Egyptian ulema,
modernity was forever
tainted by this ruthless assault, and they became cowed and reactionary. Nasser changed tack and turned them into state officials. For centuries the ulema’s learned expertise had guided the people through the intricacies of Islamic law, but they had also stood as a protective bulwark between the people and the systemic
violence of the state. Now the people came to despise them as government lackeys. This deprived them of responsible and expert religious authority that was aware of the complexity of the Islamic tradition. Self-appointed religious leaders and more simple-minded radicals would step into the breach, often to disastrous effect.
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