THE ROMANCE OF REGRESSION:
MODERNITY
CALIPHATE VERSUS
M.J. Akbar
History is synonymous with turbulence; but even by its troubled
standards, the churn in a single century between 1857 and 1960s was
unprecedented. Every single empire, ancient, middling or modern,
collapsed: Mughal, Chinese, Japanese, Ottoman, Safawid, Tsarist,
Spanish, Hapsburg, German, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian,
French and British. Strategic stability, always a tenuous reality, went
into a spin as post-empire and post-colonial states had to find new
equations, not only with old masters but also between themselves and
within themselves.
Great empires linger on their deathbed, and it is difficult to pinpoint
the precise moment of decline. There are few disputes however about
a death rattle.
The Mughals spent over 125 years in hospital, unwilling to die and
unable to live after Nadir Shah smashed what was left of their
pretensions in 1739. Ottoman fragility was evident when Russia
advanced to the Black Sea, France took Algeria in 1830, and Greece
became independent in 1832. In 1853 Tsar Nicholas made his famous
remark about Ottomans to British ambassador Sir George Hamilton
Seymour: “We have on our hands a sick man – a very sick man. It
will be, I tell you frankly, a great misfortune if, one of these days, he
should slip away from us, especially before necessary arrangements
were made.” Sir George’s answer should have been equally famous:
“For myself, I will venture to remark that experience shows me that
countries do not die in such a hurry.”
This crawl, however, turned into hurry when World War 1 ended the
Tsars, Ottomans and Hapsburgs. The British Empire enjoyed a false
resurrection, when it gained some 800,000 square miles of territory in
1919; but by 1947 it had lost India, instigating the downward spiral
that finished Europeans as world powers. The age of empire gave way
to an era of uncertainty.
The most startling impact, however, was in the Muslim world. With
the collapse of the last two great Muslim empires, Mughal and
Ottoman, within a space of six decades, every single Muslim from
Morocco to Indonesia became a subject of Europe. The Soviet Union,
in theory, was a coalition of independent states. Lenin quickly
disabused such illusions when he sent troops to reconquer Muslim
Central Asia. [The great library of Bukhara was destroyed by
Communists after reoccupation.]
Ridicule is the fate of the weak. Queen Victoria, the story goes, asked
the Sultan of Turkey why he called himself Caliph when Victoria
ruled over more Muslims than him. In 1918 that joke turned into a
nightmare. Nothing shocked and psychologically destabilised
Muslims more than one fact: for the first time since the advent of
Islam, even Mecca and Medina were under Christian control.
A cry that had building for some time in the subconscious
acquired momentum: Islam was in danger.
This triggered a significant political reaction. Muslims began to seek
an ideological mooring in Islam both as an inspiration that would
revive their ability to defend their faith and to restore the power and
glory that was once theirs. This was not instant revelation, but a
gradual awakening that often had to lurk within the shadows of debate
before it acquired relevance with the birth of new Muslim states. Even
when Muslims did fashion a democracy, as in Pakistan, they attached
a new notion to their Constitution: an Islamic republic, in which one
faith was supreme.
A parallel idea began to flourish: the search for "Islamic space" that
would function as a supranational alliance to ensure common security
and project Islamic interests. A cursory examination of these concepts
would reveal innumerable contradictions, but emotional idealism was
not easily deflected by intellectual or practical obstacles.
The most powerful support for Islamism, logically, came where pride
in the past was most prevalent; in the successor communities, and
then successor states, of the Mughal and Ottoman empires.
THE MEDINA QUESTION: A BARGAIN WITH ALLAH
At the heart of the present Muslim angst lies what once Henry
Kissinger described, in a conversation, as the Medina question: how
did small bands of 7th century Bedouin from a minor oasis in the
Arabian deserts conquer, within a lifetime, the known world between
the walls of China and the south of France? The historian and
sociologist Ibn Khaldun [1332-1406] argued that the answer lay in
Sharia, which protected religion and broadened intellect in this life
and preserved the soul in the next one. It also created group solidarity,
from which emerged battlefield success and empire. Glory, therefore,
was the boon of a compact, a bargain between Allah and the people
who believed in Him.
If the history of others, wrote Ibn Khaldun, followed the familiar
trajectory of rise, decline and fall, then that of Muslims added a fourth
dimension: rise, decline, fall and renewal. Renewal was possible
through a return to first principles that had turned an oasis into a
world power.
Belief in renewal becomes acute, understandably, in any age of loss.
It also raises questions: where had Muslims gone wrong? Had Allah
abandoned Muslims? The debate was sharpest where humiliation was
most keenly felt, within Mughal and Ottoman space.
On the Indian subcontinent, Muslims joined Mahatma Gandhi after he
accepted leadership of the first movement for the restoration of the
Caliphate. Uniquely, Gandhi thus became the first non-Muslim to lead
a Jihad, albeit a non-violent one, which was a condition he imposed.
But there should be no confusion about what Muslims wanted from
this struggle: a post-British India in which Muslims would offer
allegiance to an Imam-e-Hind, a sort of Caliphate-light, and the
community live by the Sharia irrespective of what system nonMuslim Indians chose for themselves. This position was repeatedly
articulated by the Jamat-e-Ulema. The first nominated Imam-e-Hind
was, in fact, Maulana Azad.
At exactly the same time, Arabs rose against the British in an intifada,
with its epicentre in Iraq. The British used air force and gas, and lost
453 dead [mostly Indian troops] and 600-odd missing before calm
was restored. London realised that direct rule was impossible, and
soon instituted forms of neo-colonization through feudatories on the
lines of the princely states of India.
Neo-colonization is the grant of independence on condition that you
do not exercise it. Implicit in its strategies is partition; the weaker the
neo-colony the more amenable it will be. A serious attempt was made
to Balkanize India as well just before 1947; 'Ulsterization' was a
familiar trope of our independence discourse. The plan for Turkey
after 1918 was a brutal carve-up. But the Arabs did not have either a
Kemal Ataturk or a Sardar Patel.
It only remains to note the level of tension that one unresolved
problem of a princely state has caused in South Asia, and wonder,
perhaps with a shudder, what might have happened if more such
states had taken shape.
In the succeeding decades, Arab frustration over various forms of
"foreign influence" and lack of Arab unity has grown slowly but
surely. Nasser, famously, tried to unite Egypt and Syria; it was a nonstarter. Today, the self-styled "Caliph" of the "Islamic State" has
made destruction of the Sykes-Picot pact of 1916 between Britain,
France [and later Russia] which planted the seeds of western
domination, a rallying point. Details need not detain us, but a personal
letter written by Sir Mark Sykes, quoted by David Fromkin in his
monumental work on the Versailles treaty, tells its own story. Sykes
wrote to a friend, Aubrey Herbert, with that faux seriousness typical
of the brighter members of his class, “Turkey must cease to be. Smyra
shall be Greek. Adalia Italian. Southern Taurus and North Syria
French, Filistin British, Mesopotamia British and everything else
Russian – including Constantinople,…and I shall sing a Te Deum in
St Sophia and a Nunc Dimittis in the Mosque of Omar. We will sing it
in Welsh, Polish, Keltic, and Armenian in honour of all the gallant
little nations.”
While every dream of this project did not become a reality, many did.
The British considered every option: fully supplicant Sultans;
annexation; "spheres of influence"; semi-autonomous regions;
reconstitution of Ottoman vilayets into Anatolia, Armenia, JazirahIraq, Syria and Palestine; a railway route to India; and handing the
Caliphate to Arabs of the Hijaz. When the Americans finally learnt of
this plan, revealed prematurely in December 1917 by Leon Trotsky
to a British journalist, an aide of President Wilson, Colonel House,
remarked, presciently, "They are making it a breeding ground for
future war."
In March 1921 Winston Churchill created straight-line maps for Arab
"countries" at a conference in Cairo, where naturally not a single Arab
was invited. Sherif Hussein was allotted Mecca, but the Sauds never
accepted his claims, and drove them out of the Hejaz in 1924. The
Saudis could not declare themselves the new Caliphs, but they did
command one of the essential prerequisites of the title: they became
the new custodians of the Two Holy Mosques, in Mecca and Medina.
THE REALM OF 'DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS'
The ideological struggle for the future had begun two centuries
before. Two theologians, one Indian and the other Arab, born in the
same year, 1703, offered theses that control the narrative till today.
Shah Waliullah, born in Delhi, died in the 1760s; Muhammad ibn
Abd-al Wahab was born in Najd and died in 1787.
After witnessing Mughal impotence in 1739, Shah Waliullah offered
a salient prescription: Shias were apostates [murtadd] who had
betrayed Islam and hence beyond trust; he urged Sunni unity; traced
Sunni decline to dynastic monarchies which had abandoned the
practice of consensus in the choice of Caliph; blamed Mughals for
wasteful expenditure on monuments rather than public welfare [Taj
Mahal had been built rather recently]; and, most significantly, accused
Mughal elites of deviation by adopting Hindu practices, and allying
with Hindus and Shias. This was shirq, or compromise with
polytheism. His list of "sins" is in fact recognition of Mughal
inclusiveness, which so perturbed Aurangzeb and which certainly
outlasted him
His solution for shirq was a physical and cultural "theory of distance"
between believer and infidel, and advocated a line that resonates
powerfully in contemporary below-the-radar discourse: 'nearer to
Arabia, closer to Allah'. His political contribution was significant.
When the Marathas entered Delhi in 1758, he invited to Ahmad Shah
Abdali to cross the Khyber and save Muslim rule. This is,
interestingly, a "threat" which would be repeated for generations, in
the rhetoric of leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad and prominent figures of
the Muslim League in the pre-Partition phase.
A new force soon overshadowed such concerns. In 1803, Lord Lake
entered Delhi. Shah Aziz, Shah Waliullah's son, responded with a
famous fatwa declaring India a Dar ul Harb, or House of War. The
British represented, in his view, a threat to Islam. Aziz's disciple,
Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi [1786-1831] launched the Jihad in the 1820s
that would continue under his successors till the 1870s.
Barelvi's manifesto, written in 1818, shows how close the ideologies
of Waliullah and Abdul Wahab were, although Barelvi met Wahabis
only when he went on Haj between 1822 and 1824. Barelvi attacked
Indians who indulged in shrine worship [going to a dargah] and
"obnoxious" behaviour like singing and dancing during weddings. It
is easy to see why the Taliban venerate his shrine at Balakot, despite
the injunction against "shrine worship".
In Arabia, Wahabis might have withered but for a charismatic
disciple, Muhammad ibn Saud, emir of Najd who stunned the
Ottomans by conquering Mecca and Medina by 1804. In India, the
British began to describe Waliullah's followers as Wahabis, and were
forced into bitter battles against the "Fanatical Host".
In 1867, a few ulema from the Waliullah school of thought, led by
Maulanas Nanotvi and Gangohi, started a seminary that has become
an international force, Deoband. However, Deoband's Maulanas,
having experienced 1857 accepted the need for collaboration with
Hindus against British. They remained deeply committed, though, to
cultural distance, initiating what has now matured into identity
politics.
But simultaneously sections of the elite, led by Sir Syed, felt that the
British were here to stay and their best interests lay in partnership
with the new rulers so that they could regain the administrative and
educational ascendancy they had enjoyed in the past.
Shah Waliullah's inheritance, thereby, broke into two directions:
cultural separation through Deoband, and political separation through
Sir Syed. The politics of separation led inevitably to separate
electorates in 1909 and partition in 1947.
After partition, Pakistan's Muslim League leaders staved off cultural
Wahabism for a while, but lost the political argument very quickly,
when they accepted Pakistan as an Islamic state in the objectives
resolution. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, from the UP landed
aristocracy, thought he was conceding nothing more than words; in
fact, he was setting the compass towards General Zia ul Haq's Shariacompliant Nizam-e-Mustafa. Pakistan is the first Islamic Republic in
the post-colonial era, and "Islamism" has changed not only behaviour
but history books and polity.
The failure of Islam to keep Pakistan together in 1971 did nothing to
weaken its hold on the social and political imagination. While
Bangladesh reinvented itself along linguistic ethnicity, a shattered
Pakistan reinforced the belief that Islam was the only glue; that it was
not Islam which was to blame, but the inability of Muslims to
understand their faith.
The conflation of Islam and nationalism has been a guarantee for
instability, because religion has never been the basis for political unity
anywhere, including in the history of Muslims. Why else would there
be 22 Arab nations?
REALITY OF CALIPHS AND IMAGINED HISTORY
Internal conflict, which quickly grew into civil war, broke out even in
Islam's pristine age, over succession to the Prophet, leading to the
Sunni-Shia divide. Of the first four "rightly-guided" Caliphs, only
one, Abu Bakr, died in bed. Umar, Usman and Ali were assassinated.
Umar was murdered by a Persian servant in 644; Usman was killed in
656 by Mohammad, son of Abu Bakr, because of factional quarrels;
Ali was assassinated in 660 by a rebel. In 657 Ali, who shifted his
capital to Kufa, faced Muawiya at Siffin, Syria, in what is known as
the Battle of the Camel. Muawiya, with the Prophet's Aisha as an ally,
accused Ali of instigating the murder of Usman. Muawiya seized
power after he forced the resignation of Ali's son Hasan, and
established the first dynasty, that of Umayyads. When Muawiya died
in 680, Hasan's brother Husain challenged Muawiya's son Yazid, but,
heavily outnumbered, was killed at Karbala in 680, a martyrdom that
is central to Shia lament. Blood and confusion travelled together till
the comparative stability of the reign of Abdal Malik.
Caliphates became dynasties: 14 Umayyads; 37 Abbasids; and, in the
last phase, 26 Ottomans between 1517 to 1924, when Ataturk
abolished the institution and turned Turkey towards modernity. In
1517 Selim the First was unsentimental when he wrested the
Caliphate from Arabs; he claimed the office by the right of the sword.
As in any dynasty, great names mixed with mediocre ones. The best
Caliphs had open minds. Harun al Rashid [786-809] had Sanskrit
texts and Greek philosophers translated for his House of Wisdom in
Baghdad. He also partied with his court poet Abu Nawwas, who
wrote classical verse. The Ottoman Caliph Bayezid sent boats to
rescue Jews expelled by the Spanish Inquisition. In 1839 Abdulmecid
the First introduced secular law alongside Sharia, gave non-Muslims
equal rights, banned slavery and opened taverns. Abdulhamid, who
ruled between 1876 and 1909 and was the last Caliph to exercise
genuine power, loved music; his daughters played the piano and sons
the cello. On Thursday nights he would join Sufis in dhikr, and the
next day his imperial orchestra would play Offenbach on the way
home after Friday prayers. Western music was played at imperial
banquets. His wife Sehsuvar was painted reclining with Goethe's
Faust in her hand - and not a veil in sight. French was a court
language, along with Persian, Armenian and Arabic.
None of them would have been considered "legitimate" by today's
Islamist radicals.
The office of the Caliphate has Quranic sanction. It derives from
khalf, meaning 'left behind', or inheritor. It might surprise some
hardliners to learn that the model Caliph in the Quran is King David.
Verse 2:30 says: "Behold, thy Lord said to the angels, 'I will create a
viceregent [khalifah] on earth'." The first was Adam, the second was
David. The great example of faith against odds, and belief in Allah as
a prerequisite for victory, is that of David who fought Goliath. Verse
2:249 says: "How oft by Allah's will hath a small force vanquished a
big one? Allah is with those who steadfastly persevere."
This verse inspires the conviction that numbers do not matter on a
battlefield as long as you have faith. In today's context, therefore,
small bands of terrorists believe they can destabilise superpowers, if
they are ready to become martyrs. Since the road to Paradise is under
the shade of swords, it is a win-win situation for those ready to die for
the cause of Allah. This is Jihad fi sabil Allah: War in the cause of
Allah [also, incidentally, the official motto of the Pakistan armed
forces].
No poet used the phrase, shade of swords, more effectively, or evoked
the romance of an Islamic past better than that great poet of loss, Sir
Muhammad Iqbal, who is rightly revered in Pakistan as an intellectual
architect of the two-nation theory.
IQBAL: QUESTIONS AND AN ANSWER
Iqbal's most influential work is surely Shikwa, the complaint,
followed
by Jawab-e-Shikwa,
the
answer
to
this
complaint. Shikwa, first recited in Lahore in 1909, was an unusual
lament, for it laid the blame for Muslim decline not on man but on
God.
THE SEARCH FOR MODERNITY
If the challenge of the 20th century was freedom from colonialism,
then the struggle of the 21st is around the content of nationalism. Will
the renaissance come from a modern definition of a nation-state, or
from a structure like the doctrinaire Caliphate, which despite its flaws
in practice still created an historic glory?
The first Muslim leader to answer this question, with astonishing
clarity, was Kemal Mustafa Ataturk. He understood the rational
causes of Ottoman decline, the loss of technological
ascendancy, scientific innovation, gender equality and the fact that the
Caliphate had become defunct as an idea. On the eve of the first
World War, the Ottoman empire had only around 17,000 workers in a
population of 25 million: it was still an agricultural economy. Ataturk
could ignore the ulema because his credentials as a nationalist
who had saved his country from foreign invasion and dismemberment
was impeccable. He had the trust of the people. If we want to
understand America's domination of the 20th century, just list some
American inventions from the 19th or 18th: Benjamin Franklin gave
us the stove, bifocals and lightning rod; Charles Goodyear, vulcanized
rubber; Walter Hunt, the fountain pen, safety pin and breech-loading
Winchester; Elias Howe, the sewing machine; Joseph Henry (a
professor at Princeton), the telegraph; Graham Bell, the telephone.
There were 30,000 miles of railways in America by 1860. How many
telephones existed in Istanbul in 1880, when there were 60,000 phone
lines in America?
The situation in the Arab world through the 20th century was bleak.
Where neo-colonies could not be sustained, the alternative was armybacked dictators or despots who tended to create their own dynasties.
Worse, these armies were repeatedly defeated by the focal regional
foe, Israel; the disaster of 1967, despite the advantage of numbers,
became an imperishable memory bewildering the citizen and offering
opportunity for a Phoenix waiting to arise from the ashes, Islamism.
1979: A PIVOTAL YEAR
History takes a new twist in 1979, when the strategic imperatives of
superpowers created conditions for the rise of a Shia Islamic state in
Iran, and a Sunni Jihad in Afghanistan that acquired such momentum
that it has spawned, directly or indirectly, Jihadist movements across
Pakistan, the Middle East, and north, central and east Africa. [The
Taliban revere Shah Waliullah and Syed Ahmed Barelvi.] The
Afghan Jihad had Washington's weapons and blessings but it was also
a Saudi-Pak project that aimed at turning Afghanistan into "Islamic
space". That project has succeeded. To their north, the Saudis
challenged the Shia "murtad" through Saddam Hussein, who attacked
Iran and started a war that would continue for eight years. The Saudi
attempt to overthrow the Ayatollahs failed.
It was now America's turn to do Shia Iran an epic favour, by going to
war against Saddam Hussein and replacing his autocracy with an
elected government. The true homeland of Shias is not Iran, which
only became Shia when the Safawids came to power, but Iraq, where
Ali based his capital, in Kufa. For the first time since the death of Ali,
Iraq was back under Shia dominance. The strategic consequences
have been dramatic.
There are now three parallel zones: a line from Turkey to the secular,
Sunni, Soviet-centric 'stans' led by old-style strongmen. Below it is
the new Shia line, from west of Mazar-e-Sharif via Herat to Iran, Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon. To its south is the Pakistan-Afghan Taliban-Saudi
axis. These are fluid lines, of course, but retain identity and common
purpose during a crisis. The war in Syria is about breaking this Shia
consolidation. The Islamic State of Daesh began as a by-product, of
fighters financed and armed to protect Sunni interests. They now, of
course, have an agenda of their own which threatens even their early
if silent sponsors.
The emergence of the Islamic State has made public what has been so
far a subterranean urge: the restoration of a Sunni Caliphate that can
erase "aberrations" like monarchies, democracies and the many
variations in-between. The romance of regression has become a geopolitical reality. But we should not be so complacent as to believe that
IS is the only such state carved out of some existing nation. The
Taliban occupies vast space in the Afpak region, while the Boko
Haram, Shabab and IS are creating havoc across north, central and
east Africa.
A DEFINITION OF REGRESSION
I have used the term regression: what does it mean? All we have to do
is examine the doctrine and objectives of Daesh, led by Abu Bakr alBaghdadi since 2010. His sermon from the Grand Mosque of Al Nuri
in Mosul on 5 July 2014 is recognised as the moment when he began
to galvanize serious international support. This is now the most
militant Salafist movement [the term comes from al salaf al salih, the
pious forefathers: the Prophet, of course, and the first four Caliphs].
The problem is not reverence for the forefathers, for that is shared by
other Muslims. The difference lies in the interpretation of the past,
and its skewered application to the present. Two examples should
suffice.
The Quran recognises the existence of slavery, although it does enjoin
Muslims to free slaves. Daesh glories in the enslavement of nonMuslims. In October 2014 Dabiq, the official magazine of IS, laid out
its policy in an article titled "The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour"
identified the "non-Muslims": Yazidis, pagans, apostates and lapsed
Muslims. Yazidi women and children were offered as rewards for
fighters who took part in the Sanjar operations in northern Iraq.
Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, chief spokesman of IS [at least
till time of writing], said in a missive to the West: "We will conquer
your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do
not reach that time, then our children and our grandchildren will reach
it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market." It
requires deep resources of manic hatred to believe in such a present
and future.
While the "pagan" is an obvious enemy, the grey area between
apostasy and 'lapsed Muslim' extends the arc of enmity deep into the
heartland of Muslim communities. IS, like Wahab and Waliullah,
condemns Shias as innovators who have deviated from Quranic
principles; or as the "Rafida", the "forsakers", who turned their backs
on the legitimate Caliphs. Daesh does not consider the Ottoman
Caliphs legitimate as they did not enforce Sharia rigidly; and believes
that there will be only 12 true Caliphs, of which Baghdadi is the
eighth. Even the Muslim Brotherhood is not good enough for IS,
while the range of 'lapsed Muslim' could extend from Arab
monarchies to Muslims, like those on our subcontinent, who visit Sufi
shrines to pray to saints like Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti to intercede
with Allah on their behalf. The punishment for such deviation
is takfir, or excommunication. The heretic in the midst of Muslims is
the fifth column, the traitor, an agent of the "enemies of Islam" and
arguably more dangerous than the declared foe.
This, in turn, leads to the doctrine of "Three Enemies": the Far Enemy
[the West, including Russia]; the Near Enemy, hypocrites or deviants
within; and those "infidels" who have occupied "Islamic space". India
and China are among the countries that "occupy Islamic space".
The final battles, before the ultimate triumph, will be with the Dajjal,
or impostors, on the one side; and against "Christianity" on the other,
at Dabiq, near Alleppo. Having lured Russia into Syria, IS-Daesh is
now anxious to invite Nato troops there as well so that this
"prophecy" can be fulfilled.
Daesh|IS does not recognize any borders, and not merely the ones
imposed after 1918; or the nation state as a basis of international
stability. The treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is considered a starting
point for strategic stability because it established the concept of
secure borders, laying the foundations of the nation state. The Daesh
Caliphate seeks to reinvent an age when one "Islamic power" ruled
contiguous territory. It is perfectly logical, in its view, to expand its
war into Afghanistan, and then, following the same logic, into
Pakistan and India, against the "near enemy" and occupiers of Islamic
space.
Just in case we consider Iraq too distant, a story by the journalist
Anthony Loyd published on 5 December 2015 in the Times, London,
should clarify doubts. Loyd reports from Abdel Khel in eastern
Afghanistan that up to 1600 ISIS fighters now control swathes of four
districts south of Jalalabad, through its affiliate Wilayat Khorasan. On
8 December Loyd reported that the governor of this Wilayat Khorasan
was a Pakistani, Hafiz Saeed Khan, appointed leader in January 2015.
According to their admirers, Daesh have a presence in some 80
countries. Even if this is an exaggeration, its ability to strike anywhere
between France, India and Indonesia cannot be in doubt.
Daesh would sneer at anyone who accused it of terrorism, and argue
that this is merely a tactic to rebalance the uneven distribution of
military might in the world. Every soldier is a suicide missionary; and
those who choose life on the battlefield face punishment, including
death, on return. A suicide missionary is fearless: how do you frighten
a man who is not afraid of death?
CHALLENGE OF 21ST CENTURY: THE MODERN STATE.
There is an answer: modernity. This term is used all too frequently,
and defined all too infrequently. I offer four principles that define
modernity: Freedom for the individual and democracy for the state;
faith-equality as a pillar of the Constitution; gender equality as a
national mission; and economic equity, where the poorest of the poor
feel that they have a stake in economic growth. Daesh, of course,
rejects democracy, which is dismissed repeatedly in Daesh literature
as shirq, or polytheism. The bad news is that democracy is not in very
good health elsewhere too.
The nub of the challenge lies in whether nations adopt faithsupremacy or faith-equality as a fundamental principle of nationalism.
Those who believe that they can accept faith-supremacy as a tactic,
and tame it to their needs, will discover that the long war will be won
by supremacists and not by advocates of compromise. India is a role
model for the post-colonial world because it adopted modernity as the
template for its Constitution: democracy, faith-equality, genderequality and economic equity are all embedded in its Constitution.
THE LONGEST WAR
The conflict between India and Pakistan has now become, without
anyone quite realising it, the longest continual war in history. What is
the conflict about? This is not about geography, but about ideology.
Kashmir is an alienable part of India precisely because it is Muslim,
for the Indian Constitution does not discriminate on the basis of
religion.
Are we condemned to a thousand years of war, as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
who did his bit to promote Islamism in Pakistan in the hope that it
would fetch votes, promised? We might, just now, be witnessing the
consequences of an altered situation. There are Pakistanis who are
beginning to appreciate the meaning of a "near enemy" and recognise
that they are it. A common enemy is the best reason for creating a
common front, although I would always add that the past shows that
any engagement with Pakistan is a walk on eggshells. It may be
relevant to note that if anyone wants Quranic sanction for faithequality, it is there just after the famous Verse 2:255, the Surah al
Kursi, or Verse of the Throne. Verse 2:226 reads: La ikra fi al deen:
Let there be no compulsion in religion. This is reinforced by another
verse: La qum deen o qum wa il ya deen: Your faith for you, and my
faith for me.
Where modernity has failed, or failed to reach, the vacuum is being
increasingly filled by the romance of regression.
I am reminded, at the end, of Walter Nicolai's dictum. Nikolai was in
charge of Germany's intelligence agency before and during World
War One. We have to fight, he said, a 'war in peace'. A century later,
the boundaries between war and peace have blurred to the point of
being indistinguishable.