Islamic States – A Look at Pakistan and Iran – Tanveer Ahmed

Issue 3 | 28 July 2009 

Dr Tanveer Ahmed has a unique multidisciplinary background. A prominent voice in the media, he writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, has worked as a foreign affairs television journalist for SBS and he is an appointee to the Advertising Standards Board. He is also a member of the governing council of the Smith Family, a psychiatry registrar and former national representative for junior doctors within the Australian Medical Association. Tanveer Ahmed addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 28 July 2009 to discuss the historical, geopolitical and international security significance of Pakistan and Iran.

ISLAMIC STATES – A LOOK AT PAKISTAN AND IRAN

TANVEER AHMED

 

It’s a pleasure to be speaking at the Sydney Institute again. Thank you for attending at such short notice.

The topic I’ve chosen is somewhat artificial. The fact is that Pakistan and Iran are both states rooted in Islam – but it’s debatable whether they could both be technically called Islamic states. What they have in common right now is that they are in a period of significant instability and that instability, while due to a variety of factors, is rooted in the foundation of both countries in a kind of Islamic utopian ideal.

Iran is constitutionally an Islamic state in that law is related to Shariah and the Grant Ayatollah has the ultimate say and not the democratic vote. Pakistan’s identity was founded on Islam but there was an inherent conflict in its birth – whether it should be a secular state for India’s Muslims or a theocratic one. Constitutionally it defines itself as secular but also states that no law should contradict Sharia law. It depends on what your view of what constitutes an Islamic state. There are a myriad of views from a strict Sharia law ruled by a despotic leader to one based only on Sharia principles. There is also a view that the Islamic state is a myth built as a post colonial protest and rooted more in communism and fascism than Islam.

Pakistan

With regard to Pakistan, there are those who believe the country’s genesis had a real historic purpose to it, and that it would become a beacon for the Islamic world. This fundamental conflict still lies at the heart of the country in many respects.

I visited Pakistan only a month or so back and have written a report for the CIS about it, so I shall concentrate much of my talk on it and then give some brief thoughts about Iran’s predicament. The fact that they are both in the news at the moment is partly coincidental, but I also think it is related to their failure to root their identities and their political and social organisation on Islamic practices.

I was born in Bangladesh and came to Australia when I was five years old. Bangladesh covered present day Pakistan until 1971, when a new county was formed after a brutal civil war. So I must say, I felt a degree of self discovery when I visited Pakistan; it felt quite similar to Bangladesh in that it is a fairly timid South Asian society that had historically practised an almost Hinduised Islam but is now facing a barrage from a more austere, Arabised version. I was also often told by locals that I should consider myself a Pakistani.

Today, Pakistan faces the threat of being overwhelmed by Islamic radicalism and becoming the global epicentre of terror. In fact, there have been some reports that the most recent attacks in Indonesia had links with Al Qaeda based in Pakistan. The country also represents the key agent to the ongoing, difficult war in Afghanistan. The Taliban there is not a coherent group, more an umbrella term for extremists of all kinds who often see attacking the Pakistani state as a proxy for attacking the US. In this respect, the Taliban is a kind of anti-colonial movement in a region that has a tradition of such movements.

Lurking in the shadows is the army and its associated intelligence forces, often maligned for stoking religious extremists to minimise the dominance of India. The army is obsessed with India and the majority feel the Taliban is America’s war. India thus threatens to be destabilised if Pakistan’s woes continue.

This is all occurring in a country with an estimated 100 nuclear warheads. Furthermore, recent anti-terror raids in the UK have also focused on Pakistani nationals. An Australian-Pakistani has previously been arrested for suspected terror links. While he was exonerated, he was still an Australian born man who later trained with Lashkar-e-Toiba. This is a mater directly relevant to Australia, not to mention the fact that Stephen Smith is making his personal mission to build much stronger ties with the South Asian region.

Let me give a bit of history to illuminate the current situation. The concept of a separate Muslim nation is inherent in Islam, but this concept bears no resemblance to a territorial entity. The proposal for a separate Muslim state in India began in the 1930s, driven by a fear among many of India’s Muslims that India was bent on reinventing itself as a Hindu colossus. The country was formed in 1947, at the very moment India was created, amid a migration of tens of millions of people and unprecedented communal massacres.

In spite of the formation of Pakistan being led by the Muslim intelligentsia, the first leader of Pakistan, the Oxford educated Mohammad Ali Jinnah, died one year after independence and his chief lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated three years later. The leadership fell to bureaucrats and soldiers. This to and fro has continued ever since, with military rulers in power for almost half of Pakistan’s existence.

From independence, Pakistan inherited 33 per cent of the army and only 17 per cent of the assets of British India so the military had primacy from the start. The state came into being as a federation and was trying to meld six different ethnic groups together. These groups often had little in common and Islam was the only glue that could hold them together. This remains the case today where a number of provinces are seeking greater independence, most notably the North West Frontier area as well as Balochistan.

Pakistan has also understood and organised itself as a national security state with strong Cold War ties to the United States. While the US has had communism and then terrorism as its focus, for Pakistan it has always been India first and foremost. Its geographical position has allowed it to collect rent from the US.

The country’s attempts at democracy took an unexpected turn when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir, inherited power in 1971 after the civil war that led to East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh. He had founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), whose slogan was “Bread, Clothing and Shelter”; a call to the ordinary aspirations of the people that was a break from the norm. Like many parts of the world, while democracy may be outwardly supported by the elites, when it actually begins taking shape they are not always so impressed. The military and much of Washington viewed Bhutto as a dangerous rabble rouser and he was overthrown in 1977.

Bhutto’s army Chief of Staff, Zia ul-Haq, deposed the prime minister and then had him tried and executed on a trumped up charge, before ruling for over a decade. Zia’s period of power, and its associated religious dimension, is crucial for understanding the role of religion in Pakistani life today. In many respects there was a re-evaluation of what the glue should be that holds Pakistan together. It was Zia who began to see the idea of Pakistan as an Islamic state and not as a secular state for Muslims.

Zia crushed all opposition and introduced a previously unseen austerity and piety into Pakistan’s life and institutions. He was a true believer and empowered both religious groups and political parties in a bid to foster a new national ideology. He created the notion of Sharia benches that would function in parallel with the common law based legal system and established the notorious hudood ordinances that allowed for flogging and amputations in accordance with Islamic law.

He was aided by the fact that his reign coincided with the CIA’s war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It was Zia’s military and intelligence officials who controlled the Afghan mujahedeen, distributed the funds from America and even shared aspects of their worldview. This mirrors the situation today with parts of the military and the Taliban.

By the end of his reign in 1988, when he died in a plane crash, he had transformed Pakistani politics away from its secular origins. The secular leaders that followed him, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, were beholden to the army, until Musharraf assumed power and re-instituted the military as the ruling power once again.

While Musharraf did make some attempts to give more legitimacy to secular institutions like the media and legal system, Zia’s changes altered Pakistan fundamentally and foreshadowed both the growing Islamic militancy within its borders and the complex relationship between its army and the Taliban.

What really tipped it over were the US attacks in Afghanistan post September 11 which essentially led to a whole bunch of Taliban fleeing to the border, where they lay low but havereassembled in recent years with the help of Pakistani Pashtuns in particular.

The other key development has been that the US will not accept the army supporting extremist elements in their battles against India. There has essentially been a messy divorce between a set of extremist groups whose raison d’être was to resist India and fight for Kashmir. Now that the army has cut them loose, many are re-aligning themselves with the groups closer to the Afghan Taliban. This development has been blamed for the spate of bombings closer to the heart of Pakistan i.e Lahore, Islamabad.

What exacerbates the problem even further is the shocking state of civil society within Pakistan, testing the legitimacy of the government. In this case, the rise of extremism mirrors that of other parts of the Islamic world where groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood gain prestige not from their religious credentials but the fact they were better at providing basic services. In Pakistan, this has been coming in the shape of swift, efficient justice within what is a notoriously slow and bureaucratic local system.

I want to give some simple facts related to the failure of civil society. Half of women are illiterate; recent UN statistics stated that 40 per cent of schools had no textbooks; the country spends 2.5 per cent of GDP on education. It is one of a tiny handful of states where polio has not been eradicated, one in 200 women die in childbirth (compared to 1 in 6000 in Australia) and half a million kids die of diarrheal diseases. The police sector is particularly deprived, e.g. of approximately 700 million dollars in aid US gave in recent years for security, only five million went to the local police and security forces. The economy was almost bankrupt last year and was saved by an IMF loan. Pakistan has the riskiest government debt in Asia, half the population lives on US$2 a day and remittance payments from the Gulf in particular are beginning to slide.

In spite of this, there is a significant liberal intelligentsia within Pakistan and a flourishing electronic and print media. Earlier this year the culmination of a courageous and sustained lawyers’ movement was to reinstate the judges dismissed unconstitutionally by Musharraf. The cities of Lahore and Karachi are where the elite live and they are largely secular in their outlook. But there is a growing religiosity that is threatening them.

For example, in April 2009, a Christian college in Lahore was threatened with bombing unless the female students dressed more modestly. The school board decided to overturn a century of liberal and secular tradition and outlaw the wearing of jeans.

There are also changes in local practices, from incorporating Allah in everyday greetings to stopping secular celebrations. A long-standing kite flying festival was cancelled last year after protesters deemed it un-Islamic. In such an environment of religiosity the space for militants is less constrained.

Obviously the army have now confronted the Taliban in the frontier generating a significant humanitarian crisis. Australia has very much been part of the relief effort. Stephen Smith visited there earlier this year and one of their top army commanders visited our shores only last month. We are on a UN group called Democratic Friends of Pakistan.

The available policy options follow from much of what I have said; continue the fight against the Taliban, improve civil society, support the secular/moderate forces without making them look like stooges of the West and prioritise a broader regional solution to the Kashmir situation. Engaging India will obviously be a key plank in such a strategy.

Iran

Let’s compare the situation then with Iran. I will obviously not do it justice, given the unprecedented developments there. I have never visited Iran but have had much to with its local communities as a journalist. Most Iranians that live in Australia came after the Shah was overthrown or as refugees during the Iran-Iraq war. They are eyeing recent events with great interest for some of the protests are akin to when the Shah was overthrown way back in 1979.

It has many differences with Pakistan. It is a formal Islamic state, often referred to as a revolutionary theocracy. Its version of Islam is of course the Shia branch. As a psychiatrist, I find Iran and the Shia branch of Islam intriguing. Its whole basis on martyrdom and the initial, violent death of its inspiration and the associated Shia themes of sacrifice, dispossession, and mourning. It was underlined in the Iran-Iraq war with 12 year olds attacking Iraqi machine gun emplacements on bicycles, and 750,000 Iranians filled the multi-acre cemeteries, and perhaps twice that number were left crippled in body or mind.

Iran has a better functioning civil society than Pakistan and a very deep ancient history – as Martin Amis recently wrote in the Guardian, “… it makes China look like an adolescent”. Iranians worship their poets as much as their clerics. What we have right now is a clerical superstructure sitting atop a society that has in many ways become secular, with repressive laws straining to hold back women emancipated by the education the revolution brought. Today, 60 per cent of university students are women.

We are seeing a fundamental battle between nationalist revolutionaries and reform-minded internationalists played out. Would the country continue to stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalisation with the aim of preserving its Islamic theocracy? Or was it confident enough of its Islamic identity, its security alongside a now Shia-dominated Iraq and its firmly established independence from America to drop the tired vitriol of Great Satanism and a self-defeating isolation?

The answer, at the moment, appears to be the former. A host of reform minded dissidents have been jailed in the past month. Most of the reformist brains trust has been rounded up. Anyone who, like Rafsanjani, believes strongly in a “China option” for Iran – the possibility of opening to America and the world while preserving the system – has been beaten back for now.

But the power structure has definitely been wounded, not least by the murder by a single shot of twenty-six-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, caught on a video that went global and defined the reckless brutality of the moment. This will forever undercut Ahmadinejad’s talk of “justice”.

Martyrdom is a powerful force in Shia Iran, with its three-, seven-, and 40-day mourning cycles for the dead, and its parade of ceremonies commemorating in self-flagellating grief the death of members of the Prophet’s family. It is certain that the martyrs of this election will live and reverberate in Iran’s collective memory.

I have given you a summary of recent events in two very different countries both rooted in an Islamic identity that are being torn at the seams. I believe their utopian model is in part derived from earlier communist thinkers of the twentieth century. In both states, the people are rejecting the failed promise of a just and equal society that stands apart from the West based on Islamic ideals.

But, also in both states, the forces of Islamism have guns and are maintaining some kind of grip with an iron fist. In Pakistan, the forces are less organized and being met with state force, whereas in Iran the popular will is being suppressed, for now. They are both examples of the yearning that two countries with very young populations are expressing – the quest to be part of the global order and the opportunities and promise it can offer. It is a yearning that Islamism is unable to satisfy.