Control, my friends, has now passed - from the tottering Pakistani state (it was a joke even before, but not yet tested).............to the "awam"....as, whatever our awam believe in, the buck always stops at Islam. Always. Now we will really see "people's power", till now an epithet which was the refuge of our rascal, and scoundrel "democratic" politicians, but no longer........now also, the cover of those has been blown who say that this society and our people are "not extremist"....
Salman Taseer's murder was like a signal, a switch being flicked - to alter the paradigm mode...it has the same significance on our level as 9/11 did for the world....and it is the murder of a governor, a key government functionary that crowds are now openly supporting - and not some private citizen even, like the lynching of the Qadiani lawyer Chaudry Riaz and his friend, by a mob in Shabqadar bazar way back in 1995....the Taseer case is without precedent in Pakistani history, and there is nothing that the rulers can do about it.....I think it will even be difficult for Zardari to hang Malik Mumtaz Qadri, being the characterless thief that he is....and no judge will dare sentence him; so it is a classic case of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea for the Pakistani state, which is otherwise terminally diseased, and our ramshackle and dysfunctional society - teetering as it has been on the edge of chaos for many years now.....
And now to the topic of this piece: about issues of terminology and truths, which devious people have been twisting since 9/11 at least, in trying to pull the wool over others eyes, and detract from what is basically an unpleasant situation....Till now, politically correct liars from across the whole socio-political spectrum were having a field day babbling to foreign media about how "moderate" and "sufi" Pakistani people are in their outlook, or how our Pashtun society is for that matter; about Pashtuns I can say they have always been 98% religious extremist: I remember the day that a "Panjpiri" was killed by a mob in a mosque in Charsadda in 1977....Panjpiris are a sect, originally from the village of the same name in Swabi, who are similar to Wahhabis, and who deny the veracity of sufi sainthood in Islam.....so it was the supposedly "moderate" followers of shrines who killed this man when it became known who he was, at a time when the word "Wahhabi" didn't even exist in the public vocabulary.....in other words, our people are inclined to Islamic extremism of any branding, whether Sufi or Salafi.......Sir Olaf Caroe has said that this probably was even the case with us when we were Buddhists, 2000 years ago, under Kushan rule: we were Buddhist fundamentalist extremists! But as we were and are still so bad at record keeping and preserving history, the annals of that time don't exist to corroborate this otherwise sensible deduction....Besides, any student of history will know that all the previous wars Pashtuns have fought against outsiders were religiously motivated and led by one kind of extremism or another - in this case sufis or saints; or what kind of trouble sufi fanatics and extremists gave the British colonial authorities (as well as Pakistanis).....Pir Rokhan, Jalala, Mullah Najmuddin of Hadda, Sar Tor Faqir, Lewanay Faqir, the Mad Mullah of Mian Isa, Akhund Darweza Baba, Pir Baba, Saidu Baba of Swat and Haji Fazle Wahid of Turangzai, the Shami Pir, and the Faqir of Ipi were not Wahhabi or Ikhwani fanatics or Maududi's poisonous followers, but all were of the now nauseatingly touted "sufi brand" which has been made to mean "moderate brand" since 9/11, but this is not historically true.........as Wahhabism was an illness not yet known (or accepted) here in those days, even though its creator Abdul Wahab lived in the 17th Century Hejaz, and yet another Indian "saint", Shah Waliullah and his "saintly" protegés Shah Ahmad and Shah Ismail, and much later on, that adventurer of doubtful provenance Syed Jamaluddin Afghani were all on a similar path....And lack of space here dictates that I am unable to treat this subject with the detail it deserves; however a book published many decades ago by a notorious Pakistani bureaucrat and anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed and titled "Millenium and Charisma among Pathans" gives an otherwise beautiful historical account of our extremist doctrinal tendencies. I must add here, that even the Afghan Pashtun Khalqi "comrades" of my past, whom I had met - were as vehemently fanatical about their "communism" as their other brethren are about Islam! Look at what they and their wayward leader Hafizullah Amin did in three months, to the prospects of Afghanistan's otherwise promising revolution.
If we are to get any where, then we must face - not deny - the unpleasant facts about ourselves; only then can we hope to do anything about them, and get anywhere, surviving as a respectable nation in the world comity of nations. We need to be reformers, as well as nationalists. It is now a matter of our bare survival; and the truth will out...always....
Before ending this, I will reiterate that it is just that conditions in this society are now ripe for the full emergence - after a long gestation - of what till now was bubbling violently under the surface.....
