Pakistan News and Discussion-8

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Identity and intolerance in Pakistan </b>
Khaled Ahmed
FT.com
Amartya Sen is the most effective detractor of Huntington's designation of civilisational identities that are opposed to each other and therefore poised for conflict    Out of Pakistan’s four provinces, Sindh has the most multiple identities. <b>It has suffered the most because of state-sponsored narrowing of identity. The Punjabi claim of being broad-minded comes out of his comfort of being an overwhelming numerical majority </b>

Muslims are passing through a dangerous age of “identity-marking”, which they seek in religion more than ever before. The states began by recognising religion as a marker of national identity, and then began to evolve on the basis of a further refinement of this identity. What is seen as “refinement” was a kind of narrowing of definition.

<b>Pakistan fashioned its nation-building on the basis of its “difference” from India. Muslims of India “separated” from it to form a new state because of their “different” identity. It ignored the British period as pro-Hindu and biased against Muslims and mined pre-British Muslim history for the fixation of identity for its citizens. That is where the first mistake was made</b>.

<b>Pakistan had to be selective in its history-reading. It rejected Akbar (1542-1605) because his rule presaged secular India of today rather than religious Pakistan</b>. Somehow Akbar was adjudged the fundamental “negator” of Pakistan’s ideology-in-the-making. To whittle down his formulation of identity of India, we dug up personalities that negated him.

The first person we enlisted in the formation of Pakistani nationalism was Sheikh Ahmad of Sirhind (1564-1624) and accepted the title given to him of Majaddid Alf Sani (Renewer of the Millennium). We ignored the fact that he had claimed for himself a spiritual status equalling or surpassing that of a prophet.<b> We ignored too the fact that he thought that the Shia were not Muslims.</b>

The “anti-Akbar” we sought in the Mughal dynasty we found in Aurangzeb (1658-1707). Just as there was an “identity polemic” about Akbar there was argument for against Aurangzeb. The brother, Dara Shikoh, he killed was definitely more gifted and more tolerant because of his own multiple identities. One of Aurangzeb’s many brothers, Shah Shuja, was a Shia. Aurangzeb got the Hanafi law compiled as Fatawa Alamgiri in which again the Shia are considered non-Muslim.

<b>Another figure we chose as a “differentiator” of identity was Shah Waliullah (1702-1765). He invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to come and sort out the Marathas who were about to put an end to the last Mughals in Delhi. Pakistan took him on board because the “high-church” Deobandis, who had rejected Pakistan, considered him their founding saint. This was done to make the Pakistani identity “inclusive”. But it once again “excluded” the Shia as Shah Waliullah was inclined to apostatise them.</b>

Amartya Sen is the most effective detractor of Huntington’s designation of civilisational identities that are opposed to each other and therefore poised for conflict. He thinks that man has multiple identities which must remain intact. A citizen must have the freedom of choice to flit from one identity to another without being penalised for it. He denounces the “singular affiliation” fashioned by states and communities because that gives rise to exclusion and violence.

<b>Forced singular identity presumes “discovery”: that a man has a prior identity within a group and he tends to wake up to it and finally “discovers” it.</b> He thinks that a state should not prescribe a singular identity in its nation-building programme, so that violence is prevented. <b>Pakistan’s founder Jinnah seems to have this thought in mind when he made his 11 August 2006 speech. A state that allows multiple choices of identity to individuals avoids violence; but such a state can’t avoid the label of “secular” which the Muslims abominate.</b>

Harvard’s Jessica Stern, examining violence in Pakistan, thinks there can be problems with a “surfeit of choice”. She thinks many identities produce confusion when the individual can derive satisfaction only from the “certitude” of a single identity. This of course happens if an individual has either left his lived life “unexamined” or has not been trained by municipal law to accept multiple identities as a fact of life. Imran Khan “discovered” his Islamic identity after an “unexamined” period; Gavaskar did not have to discover his Hindu identity.

<b>Out of Pakistan’s four provinces, Sindh has the most multiple identities. It has suffered the most because of state-sponsored narrowing of identity. </b>The Punjabi claim of being broad-minded comes out of his comfort of being an overwhelming numerical majority. The Pushtun and the Baloch have the least differentiated communitarian identity, although the Baloch case is less intensified because of the lower social development of the Baloch.

The exclusion emanating from a single identity creates an environment of intolerance. State ideology of forming a “single identity” has been most internalised by the Pushtun and the Punjabi.

“Singular identity” bestows “certitude” and certitude gives rise to intolerance. The “surfeit” of knowing oneself in many ways may cause confusion but it does not give rise to exclusion and violence. An individual will always adjust to being a member of many communities if the state does not put a premium on a single identity.

“Certitude” consoles the individual but it allows the group he joins on this basis to “exclude” other groups and thus creates conditions of conflict.

Imran Khan is the citizen of a state that is still evolving away from Jinnah’s multiple identities. He therefore can challenge the state to establish his leadership. He sits on the fringes of a large clerical leadership challenging the state on the basis of its objection to the freedom of choice in regard to identities. Gavaskar is able not to seek identity with the BJP which challenges the state of India.

As opposed to Indian cricketers, who wish to be admired by all Hindu and non-Hindu communities, the current Pakistani team seeks a single restricted Muslim identity under Tablighi Jamaat’s Deobandism. <b>A Christian Pakistani cricketer has to become a Muslim to partake of the satisfaction of a single identity.</b>

Those who are excluded develop their own reactive identity under duress. The “potentially excludable” are better off if the state encourages multiple identities. They “sacrifice” their most conflictual markers for the sake of harmony when such a freedom of choice is available. The state moves towards its own undoing because of its contraction of the identity acceptable to Iit
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