The History of Christmas

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

State and Ideology: The Cultural Holocaust

Shaheryar Ali

Some Theoretical Considerations: Death of Pluralism  

This article is intended to be the first part of a series of articles on the suppressed cultural identities in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a Pakistan you never knew. One on the fate of Pakistani Jews has already been published and can be reached here.

A couple of years back I was reading a research report by a very intelligent Pakistani academic, Dr. Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group, on the rise of sectarianism in Pakistan. Being trained in the progressive tradition myself, I was familiar with the theoretical framework in which Dr. Ahmed operates: the state and its origin, adaptation of the ideologies of the state, cold war and Jihad etc. What struck me, and in fact fascinated me, was a passing remark by her on the working ideology of all sectarian groups of Pakistan: they operate on the ‘principle of exclusion.’

This is a remarkable observation if one wants to understand the ideology of sectarianism and a sectarian state. States are not just material institutions of economy and violence; the state has an ideological aspect as well. Structures of the state have significant influence on the superstructure of the society on which it is maintaining control. This means that through different ideological institutions, states create cultures and patterns of thoughts which help the state to keep control (Gramsci and Althusser). It has been explained as a mental condition in which a slave takes his/her slavery to be a state of ‘freedom’. This examination of ideology or ‘ways of thinking’ became the obsession of Western Marxists who were trying to understand the failure of revolutions to happen in Western Europe. A series of new disciplines emerged, like critical theory and cultural studies, which focused on the ideological and cultural aspects of the state and/or capitalism.

As postmodernism became more influential in the universities of Europe and North America, the critique was extended to a similar analysis of ‘reality’ (Baudrillard) and alterations in human perception by capitalism and the state/super state. The ideological foundations of the Pakistani state (not to be confused with official ‘Pakistan ideology’) lie in the communal/nationalist strife (Saigol, Rubina) which presumes an ‘absolute difference’ between Hindus and Muslims. Jinnah put forward an argument that utilized ‘cultural difference’ as the basis of civilization, and differentiated Indian Muslims from Indian Hindus with whom he shared the same ethnicity and language (he was of Bengali speaking, Hindu background). ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ emerged as grand identities which were rhetorical, as demonstrated by the work of the great Indian historian Romila Thaper. Before British colonialism, the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ were rather meaningless, i.e. they did not construct a unified socio-political identity. With the professed anti-clericalism and modernism of the founding fathers of Pakistan, ideological intervention became all the more important and a unified cultural umbrella needed to be constructed to legitimize the claim of ‘distinct civilization’. This logically meant the suppression of ethnic, national and indigenous identities to construct a ‘Muslim identity,’ through which the survival of Pakistan was envisioned.

A study of the discourses emerging from the ruling elite of Pakistan, the Pakistan Muslim League and the colonial administration they inherited from the British, suggests a focus on the themes of monism as opposed to pluralism. Jinnah’s slogan of ‘Unity, Faith and Discipline’ itself speaks of the need to unify and control. The slogan resembles the ideologies of totalitarian regimes such as Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, more than the liberal tradition of Western Europe in which Jinnah is said to be trained. Ethnic identities became the ‘others’ of Muslim identity and as a result were seen as an existential threat to the new state. The question of national rights was diverted by Jinnah’s stern warning against the ‘evil of provincialism.’ The need to construct a ‘unified culture’ was so strong that a man as modern as Jinnah, who took up the case of Muslim socio-cultural rights in India, stood in Dacca and thundered “Urdu, Urdu and only Urdu!” a language which was not the language of even 0.2% of Pakistanis at the time. Those who demanded the equal status of Bengali alongside Urdu were called traitors and communists.

After Jinnah’s death things became worse, and the PML – which lacked any popular base in East and West Pakistan — joined hands with the clerics and Islamic fundamentalists whom Jinnah thoroughly despised. Jinnah’s handpicked Prime Minister, Nawabzada Khan Liaqat Ali Khan, who was a member of the aristocracy, passed the Objectives Resolution, and the state acquired an ideological character. The ideological apparatuses of the state in the form of the media, mosques, universities and colleges started molding the minds of people. Considering oneself to be Bengali or Punjabi was something like treason, and it was the same with being Muslim.

In British India ‘Muslim’ was a broader and looser cultural identity which related more to the practice of circumcision and burial of the dead. Different sects of Muslims existed, but due to the neutrality of the state it did not operate on the principle of exclusion. The party which took up the issues of Muslim socio-political and cultural rights in British India, the All India Muslim League comprised of “Muslims” who were distinguished by their heterodoxy, not their orthodoxy. Sir Aga Khan, the president of the All India Muslim League, was also the Imam of the Ismailies: a sect engaged in a bloody struggle against the Sunni and Twelver Shias for hundreds of  years, and who were considered apostates by clerics of both mainstream sects. Muhammed Ali Jinnah also belonged to the Ismaili faith but later converted to the Twelver Shia faith; however, he was a non-practicing Muslim by all standards. Many important leaders like Raja Sahib of Mehmoodabad were Twelver Shias. Sir Zaferullah Khan was Ahmedi or Qadiani. Dr. Allama Muhammed Iqbal was a revivalist who was opposed by the Sunni orthodoxy, and was rumored to be an Ahmedi as well. The controversy ended when he denied these claims by writing an article in the Statesman condemning the Ahmedi faith. Controversy still exists over whether he was Ahemdi for some part of his life, and even after condemning the Qadiani faith he considered the Lahori group of this faith part of the Muslim community.

Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung       

Nawab Bahaduryar Jang, another prominent leader of the All India Muslim League, belonged to the Mehdivia sect. This sect is similar to the Ahmedies: it considered the pious saint Syed Muhammed Jonpuri to be the Mehdi. Due to the heterodoxy and professed modernism of the All India Muslim League, the Muslim clerics were bitterly against it. But this was to change when the movement ended in the formation of the ‘Muslim Homeland’ (not the intention of Jinnah according to some historians, most notably Dr. Ayesha Jalal). With the formation of the Muslim Homeland the question, ‘Who is Muslim?’ acquired great importance. Before partition, Muslims had an opposing ‘other’: the Hindus. After the partition of India on 15^th August 1947, all this changed. Muslim identity lost its contrasting ‘other’, a ‘moth eaten Pakistan’ meant that its founding fathers were already insecure about its survival. The land which they got was a hub of forces which opposed the partition of India. Punjab was firmly in the grip of feudal lords, with which Jinnah forged an alliance to make Pakistan. The All India Muslim League lacked support and organization in Punjab, as the salariat class which was motivating the struggle for Pakistan was weakest in Punjab (Alavi, Hamza). The NWFP – the province of overwhelming Muslim majority — despite the best efforts of Jinnah stood with Bacha Khan and the Indian National Congress. The 1946 elections, which were held to decide the issue of Muslim representation, saw the defeat of the Muslim League despite support from the British in the NWFP. In Bengal, the Muslim League had a popular base but it was due to independent minded progressive leaders whom the central leadership did not trust: Hussein Shaheed Soherwardi, A.K. Fazel-e-Haq and Molana Bhashani were all to be purged along with the popular base! Jinnah had to lean heavily on socialism (he went as far as declaring Islamic Socialism to be the guiding ideology of Pakistan in Chittagong) to gain currency in Benagal; but his negotiations with the Americans in 1946 had already decided Pakistan’s future alignment with the anti-socialist block.

Bengali was suppressed, the NWFP government dismissed, the party banned and its newspaper, the Pakhtoon, suppressed (the beginning of press censorship in Pakistan). The party headquarters were bulldozed and the police opened fired on unarmed party workers at Barbra, killing hundreds of Pushtoons; this despite Bacha Khan’s oath of loyalty to Pakistan. In Sindh, G.M. Syed had already left the Muslim League, depriving it of much popularity; and the loyal faction of Sindh League was disenfranchised when Jinnah dismissed the Sindh government. This would be the start of a never-ending Sindhi-Mohajir conflict. Balochistan had to be annexed by force when the upper and lower houses of Parliament in the State of Qalat explicitly rejected proposals to join Pakistan. Khan of Qalat signed the document of accession, but wrote himself that he did not have the authority to do so.

The events that took place in the first couple of years of Pakistan, unfortunately counterpoised Muslim identity against the local identities which also represented political opposition to Pakistan’s ruling elite. It became a rule to suppress any expression of cultural identity other than the official ‘Muslim’ one. This is what I call the ‘death of Pluralism’ in Pakistan. After deciding the fate of national identities, the project of defining ‘Muslim’ entered the agenda. The death of Jinnah accelerated the process, and the state’s alliance with fascist theorist, Abul ala Maudaudi, emerged. He gave a series of lectures on Radio Pakistan on the subject of Muslim Nationalism. The Objectives Resolution was passed, later anti-Ahmedi agitation started, and the anti-clerical vanguard in the country tried for the last time to resist the clerics. Justice Munir’s report, for example, tried to put clerics in their place; but it was too late. A unified and oppressive Muslim identity emerged which put all heterodox Muslim sects in a constant state of fear. The irony of history is that with this move most of the founding fathers of this country also joined the ranks of ‘apostates’. All alternative cultural expression vanished from the country: the Hindus, the Jews, Homosexuals, Heretics, Nationalists: all had to face ‘cultural Holocaust’. After Ahmedies, Shias were targeted, and now Bravelies are trying to protect their ’Islam’ from Muslims.

Sir Zafrullah Khan

Iconochasms, from Political Compass

Through this political compass test, I have discovered the following:

- Lawrence Summers said that dumping toxic waste in Africa makes economic sense as the life expectancy there is so low that the cancerous effects will not have time to take hold.

- Al Gore (who I already disliked quite severely, what with him being a fear-mongering narcissist and hypocrite, and thoroughly uncharming) “in 1997 championed the privatisation of California’s National Oil Reserve, and the subsequent drilling by Occidental that resulted in serious environmental damage, destruction to a sacred Indian burial ground and a windfall for his family trust’s Occidental stocks? (Occidental also put a pipeline through the Colombian rain forest.)”

- Thomas Jefferson proposed that “Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least.”

And: “I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature…..Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world.” I disagree with him, of course .

- Gandhi, being the neurotic spider that he was, disowned his own son for the ‘crime’ of wanting to get married (!!), and said: “How can I, who has always advocated renunciation of sex, encourage you to gratify it?”

And: “I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.”

And our beloved yet again, blessing us with his pearls of wisdom: “Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

- Ayn Rand was a homophobe.

- Adam Smith warned us against businessmen proposing laws, since they “have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public.”

- Winston Churchill: “I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes … to spread a lively terror.”

And: “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.”

(Cross-posted with modification to Yes and No.)

Hagarism and Radicals

Hagarism is an extremely controversial, but interesting and thought-provoking approach to early Islamic history. It attempts to chart a course of Islam based solely on the evidence present in non-Islamic sources, accepting nothing from the early sources of Islamic history. I do not believe that the conclusions of Hagarism are correct, but Hagarism is important in my view because it points out to us the fluidity of history. By creating a parallel history to the one given by the traditional Islamic texts, it makes us realize that history is not something we can take for granted and that things may have been very different from what we imagine it to be. Here is an extract on Hagarism and the Radicals from an article ‘Origins of the Koran’ which is a summary of the book by Ibn Warraq:

“Wansbrough argues that the Koran and the hadith developed out of sectarian controversies and were projected back to the time of Muhammad. Islamic law developed after contact with Rabbinic Judaism outside the Hijaz. Muhammad is portrayed as a Mosaic-type prophet, but the religion was Arabised – Arabic prophet, Arabic Holy language, Arabic scripture. At the same time as the formation of this Arabic religion we see the beginning of interest in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, further suggestive of a rise in Arab nationalism. Negative evidence further supports a late date for the creation of the Koran. There is no record of the Koran being used in legal decisions before the 9th century, and the Fiqh Akbar I (a sort of Muslim creed drafted in the mid-8th century to represent orthodox views) contains no reference to the Koran.

Cook, Crone, and Hinds argue that Islam developed as an attempt to find a common identity among peoples united in conquests that began when the Arabs joined Messianic Judaism in an attempt to retake the Promised Land. Looking at non-Muslim all we can say is that Muhammad lived, was a merchant and taught about Abraham. But other than that non-Muslim sources do not confirm the traditional Islamic account. We have no reason to think that he lived in central Arabia (much less Mecca), or that he taught about the Koran. The Koran first appears late in the 7th century, and the first inscriptions with Koranic material (e.g. on coins and the Dome of the Rock) show trivial divergence from the canonical text. The earliest Greek sources say that Muhammad was alive in 634 (Muslim sources say he died in 632). In the 660’s the Armenian chronicler describes the community of Jews and Arabs, but Muslims say that the Arabs split with the Jews during Muhammad’s lifetime. The Armenian also describes Palestine as the focal point of the Ishmaelite (i.e. Arab) activity, though Muslims say this focus switched to Mecca in AH 2.

The result of their research is described in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977). The major thesis of this work is that Muhammad preached a message of Jewish Messianism and became involved in a joint attempt by Jews and Arabs, citing common Abrahamic decent, to reconquer Palestine. Therefore the earliest non-Muslim sources report strong anti-Christian sentiment. But, eventually the Arabs quarrelled with the Jews in Palestine and needed to establish a separate religious identity. They were inhibited by lack of an indigenous religious structure, so they borrowed heavily from the Samaritans. For example, note the similar emphasis on the unity of God, the fatiha resembles a Samaritan prayer, the Koran only seems to know of the Torah or the Psalms (the Samaritans do not recognise the rest of the Hebrew scriptures), the importance of Moses, and the similarities between the Samaritan view of the Messiah and the Muslim concept of the Mahdi.

Samaritan structure with Muslim parallels
	Prophet	Major event	Scripture	Holy Mountain	Sanctuary near Mountain
Samaritan	Moses	Exodus	Pentateuch	Mt. Sinai/ Gerizim	Shechem
Muslim	Muhammad	Hijra	Koran	Mt. Hira	Mecca

 

Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity argues that the traditions about the caliphate are fictitious, and Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam claims that the existence of the Koran required the invention of stories to explain it. These stories became more detailed and elaborate over time and the further from Arabia that they were collected.”