Your jihad is unIslamic

Coming as you do from the whiskey-drinking section of the Pakistan Army, you may not realise what you are talking about. Neither did your hero Kamal Ataturk ever equate mindless violence of the kind going on in Kashmir as jihad, nor did even the patriarch of militant Islam in the subcontinent, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the founder-ideologue of the Jamaat parivar, ever do so.

You must have been very young in 1947-48 when Pakistan started its proxy-war in Kashmir. Even then Pakistani leaders had tried to justify it in the name of jihad. Maulana Maudoodi had opposed that and forcefully argued against calling proxy-war jihad. His son, Maulana Haider Farooq Maudoodi, explained his late father’s views to me in an interview in Lahore last year. Jihad, he said, can only be declared by an established state. Neither the civil war in Afghanistan nor the militancy in Kashmir can be termed jihad as Islamic theology requires that jihad be performed by an organised state. This condition is so binding that when eminent theologian Shah Ismail Shaheed decided to wage a jihad against the British, he went to Balakot in the tribal areas of NWFP and tried to establish a government so that he could declare jihad within the framework of Islam. Even this did not really fulfill the condition. But it shows that Shah Ismail too realised that only an established state could declare jihad.

Jihad is not the right or duty of an individual or group, as jihadists who operate in Pakistan with impunity claim. Maualana Maudoodi had said that if Pakistan thought it could win a war against India, it should abrogate all treaties, break diplomatic relations and then declare and fight a war. The problem with a proxy-war is that you cannot declare it and Muslims are not supposed to lie and cheat. So a Muslim state, particularly one with pretensions of being Islamic, simply cannot wage a proxy war.

As Chief Executive of the established state of Pakistan, however, you could, in theory, declare jihad. But then you might face another problem. Jihad can only be fought against the kafirs, that too, only if they threaten your state’s very existence. As you may know India is a country of believers. There are many more Muslims here than in Pakistan. There are very few kafirs (òf40ónastiksòf39ó) here.

What you really want is to keep your own people in bondage. You are sending war-clouds merely as a smokescreen for your designs. Your real concern is the very survival of the Army as the fountainhead of power in Pakistan.

You know how unpopular the Army is among the people of Pakistan, except in a section of the elite which has to serve its own vested interests. This is at least what I discovered during my month-long visit. From Labore and Islamabad to Karachi and Peshawar, wherever I went I was surprised at the high level of political awareness of the common people. I found them speaking in the language of the well-known economist Mahaboobul Haq, linking their deprivation with defence expenditure, the unnecessarily large size of the Army and the proxy-war in Kashmir.

Many Pakistanis did not understand why they should be constantly picking up fights and trying to compete with a country eight times their size. They quote facts and figures, to express their bewilderment. Pakistan ranks as the seventh largest military power among the top 10 Asian countries, compared with India as third and China as first. Another barometer they commonly use is to compare the soldiers-to-citizens ratio. Pakistan has a ratio of 4.26 soldiers to 1,000 citizens, compared to India’s 1.16 and China’s 2.34.

Not many among the two billion Muslims in the world support militancy. Allah, they believe, as the Holy Koran assures them 82 times, in different verses that were transmitted in different situations, is with those who maintain patience and perseverance in the worst of adversities.

— The writer specialises in Muslim politics and culture.