Qazi and I

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, former amir Jama’at-e Islami, whom I have known for nearly two decades, met and spoke with innumerable times, has alleged in a column written for daily Jang that I reported to Marvin Weinbaum, a retired American professor, and briefed him in detail about Pakistan’s religious leaders and religio-political parties.

It is of course a matter of shame and deteriorating journalistic standards that the newspaper’s op-ed editor made no attempt to verify this accusation by Mr Ahmed. I shall return to that later but first a word about Mr Ahmed’s allegation.

What he has written – referring to me as Mr Ejaz, who was on the staff of The Friday Times and, presumably additionally, Mr Weinbaum’s representative in Pakistan – shows why it is important to superannuate people when they reach a certain age. The JI is already reeling under the poor political decisions taken by Mr Ahmed in 2008. His attempt, post-retirement, to write a newspaper column is likely to be a bigger disaster.

Mr Ahmed begins by recounting a 2001 tour of the United States and pat-pats himself for taking very clear positions in several meetings with US officials and think tankers. He notes that he found that Jews were very active in the US official system (a known fact this at best shows Mr Ahmed’s naïveté). It was at one such meeting that he met Mr Weinbaum, who was then on the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department. Mr Ahmed expresses the surprise that Weinbaum had deep insights into the workings of the religio-political parties, including attempts by these parties to get together on a single platform – that effort ultimately succeeded in the shape of Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal.

It is in this context that Mr Ahmed refers to me, quite gratuitously. Let me put the facts on record.

Mr Ahmed’s statement is calumnious and made in bad faith. I will of course send a legal notice to Mr Ahmed for this defamatory statement but here I must put some facts on record. I have known Weinbaum for many years but never worked with or for him. Mr Ahmed’s insinuation that I was providing Weinbaum, as his representative, and by extension the US State Department, information on religio-political parties is even more bogus.

When I was a Ford Scholar at the University of Urbana-Champaign in 1997, Weinbaum was on leave from UIUC and I never got to meet him. It was in 1999 that I met Weinbaum. I was in the US and he asked me to give a talk at the Middle East Institute where he was then a senior fellow. This was shortly before he joined the State Department. The same night, I had dinner at the residence of our then-ambassador to the US, Riaz Khokhar, a most gracious host.

Weinbaum is a West Asia expert. Like other area experts, it is his job to study events and trends in this part of the world. He doesn’t need my services for his information, knowledge and analysis. For my part, I live in the public space and my writings are available to anyone who would care to read. I write on a broad range of issues: politics; political Islam, regional security, nuclear strategy, civil-military relations, armed conflict and much else. Just like we read American and other scholars and journalists to assess policy trends in the US, they read us. It is an open, above-board exercise. I am absolutely sure that Weinbaum read me, including my articles on the JI, which are available on the TFT website and in the offline editions. This does not, repeat does not, make me Weinbaum’s representative (nomainda), or in the employ, directly or indirectly, of the US State Department, as Mr Ahmed has insinuated.

But there is more to it. Just before embarking on his America visit, Mr Ahmed requested me to arrange his talk at some think tanks, including the Brookings Institution. I must add that up until then I had not been to the Brookings Institution as a visiting fellow. I accepted that position in October 2002. I spoke with Steve Cohen about Mr Ahmed’s desire and Cohen expressed interest in hosting Mr Ahmed’s talk. I have no idea where else Mr Ahmed spoke or who arranged his talks at other think tanks. I could do this because I had worked with Cohen in 1997 at UIUC and I did it because I wanted Mr Ahmed to present his point of view to an American audience. It was in the same spirit that I extended the Brookings invite to Mr Ahmed in 2004 for a Doha conference where he went along with his son and another JI leader, Abdul Ghafar Aziz.

These facts can be corroborated by Steve Cohen. Mr Ahmed spoke much sense at Brookings, unlike his fulminations while addressing his constituency here. That is part of the deception perpetrated and perpetuated by leaders of the religio-political parties in Pakistan.

Let me just quote from a rejoinder to Mr Ahmed written for Dawn by eminent physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy and captioned, Pluralism and Qazi Hussain:

“In summer 2001, while visiting the University of Maryland, I went to hear Qazi Husain Ahmad, emir of the Jamaat-i-Islami, lecture at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. He spoke on Islam, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. What I heard both surprised and impressed me. Much of what Qazi Husain said was more or less along expected lines – Islam being misunderstood in the West, unfair US embargoes upon Pakistan after the nuclear tests, the unwarranted hostility towards the Taliban (although he disagreed with their rejection of education of girls), etc. But the rest was refreshingly new and remarkably enlightened.

“In his opening remarks Qazi Husain praised the US for being a ‘pluralist’ society where he could go to a mosque and freely proselytize, pointed proudly to his shalwar-kameez and declared he could dress as he pleased, and remarked that those of his family members who had migrated to the US felt quite at home. I had never heard him speak publicly in English earlier, nor had I expected such a sound appreciation from him of ‘pluralism’ (a word that he repeated at least twice). In essence, he had anticipated General Musharraf’s celebrated ‘enlightened moderation’ by three years. His acceptance of the fact that different groups within a society could accept a plurality of beliefs and philosophies, and still live in harmony, was welcomed by all. I left with a new respect for his values and skills, as did many others in the audience.

“It therefore saddened me to read Qazi Husain’s article in Dawn (10 June) wherein he espouses values that stand diametrically opposed to those he declared at Brookings. This article apparently negates his former stand on pluralism and tolerance. Instead, he now adopts a menacing tone towards Ismailis, referring to them thrice as a ‘religious minority’ without conceding that they are a Muslim sect. He darkly hints that they may meet the fate of the Ahmadis in Pakistan, and claims that there are deep conspiracies to undermine Pakistan by attempting to change the school curriculum ‘by taking over the country’s education boards’.”

Clearly, Mr Ahmed has double standards. Not just in saying what he says but also in other regards. His family members, including children, are US nationals. I, on the other hand, continue with my green passport and intend doing so because this is where my work and family are and this is where my elders are buried, many of whom fought for this soil. And I choose to remain a Pakistani national despite the fact that this country has been turned into a living hell by groups with which Mr Ahmed and his party not only sympathise but whose extremist members they sheltered in many cases.

I liked Mr Ahmed before he began frothing from the mouth after the formation of the MMA and developed a forked tongue. He will now have to prove the charge against me or apologise for such calumny. My views are openly available and for the most part I am considered a hard-line realist by most people.

As for the newspaper that carried the accusation and the insinuation, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists should take note of journalistic practices. The standards have not just fallen, and continue to, but the fall is endless because there is no bottom that we could hit to bounce back. So help us God!

The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.