Reality check

The hypocrisy of calling Pakistan an Islamic state must stop

My purpose is not to spread doom and gloom. Rather, it is to provide reality checks as I see them best. I haven’t lost hope and neither should you. As I said last week in ‘Children of a Lesser Evil’, if one has faith it would be impossible to lose hope because one would know that it is tantamount to denying the Creator and His munificence.

Our most important reality check without which we will not improve is that unless we know the truth about ourselves and accept that Muslims are 200 years behind the most knowledge-based societies we will never understand how our societies got crafted so badly and not know how to reform them. The world is progressing while we are regressing.

Hardly anyone understands the global dynamic, how it is changing the world and we are being mindlessly swept along with it. Those who think they do provide proof that they do not by their theorizing, narratives and rhetoric. Instant journalese, tired old theories, hearsay, superficial propaganda often unleashed by intelligence agencies and lapped up by the media, drawing room chatter and everyone trying to demonstrate that they have ‘inside information’ informs their thinking. When even those at the helm are lost, interested only in acquiring power and pelf by any means, how can the passengers of a rudderless ship know where they are headed? They tend to fall for the prima facie, the tip of the iceberg instead of trying to look at the entire iceberg and often crash into it. I don’t blame them entirely. Who has the time when at the end of each day fighting for survival people are left breathless, mindless, switch on their television sets and absorb the brainless drivel bombarded at them without let? If you wish to think then stop listening like androids to the hogwash on television and free yourselves of the tyranny of the media and the instant ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ it disseminates and reclaim your thought process. More important than listening is thinking.

Global change is in fast-forward: the Leviathan is morphing, convulsing, shedding its old skin and acquiring a new one. Every new skin is called the ‘New World Order’. The catalyst of the Leviathan’s morph is the perpetual global dynamic that determines the forces of history that influences thinking, doctrines, strategies and policies, not the other way round, though many think that it is.

The truth is far different, sometimes horrifying, sometimes thrilling, for underlying horror and thrill are man’s innate stupidity and native intelligence. It was highly intelligent to discover atomic fusion but it was extremely stupid to use it for destruction in the name of protection. Man has always used knowledge for good and evil. That is how he is made and that is how he will remain for God has given him free will and the option to choose between right and wrong. Often man chooses wrong on the basis of some religion, ideology or belief system that has almost always been mutilated and adulterated from its pristine original in pursuit of influence, power and hegemony for control over resources and wealth. We Muslims have almost entirely lost our ability to tell between right and wrong, good and evil, because we have abdicated our understanding of God’s Word to fake men of religion as distinct from men of Faith.

As I have thought about it I am coming to the conclusion that the greatest damage to humankind has been done by men of assumed piety peddling religions and wannabe revolutionaries touting ideologies by passing themselves off as scholars and politicians. Sadly, half-baked, semi-literate scholars are in the majority while genuine scholars are becoming a decreasing majority. Because their education is by rote fake scholars have gathered information without understanding. They thus use if for selfish ends, to help countries and churches acquire illegitimate power over their own peoples and flocks and impose dominion over others. If they truly were men of knowledge they would not have religion but Faith, for Faith is God’s Word while religion is a collection of dogma, customs and ritual – often fabricated – run by bureaucrats called clerics in an institution called church or de facto churches as in Islam that recognizes no church or clergy. But Muslim ‘scholars’ turned de facto clerics have established de facto churches that go by the name of movements and sects, each with its own Sharia or roadmap of the correct path. They wage war on one another and divide Muslims, just as many churches have divided Christianity.

True scholars would know that in the next life there is no religion, only God, no body or gender, just heightened consciousness that we call spirit or soul – ‘Nafs’ in Quranic Arabic. Real scholars would also know that since there is no intermediary between man and God there is no room for clerics for they have made religion into politics and business for power and pelf. Its not just Muslims: look at the shenanigans of the Vatican and you will understand what I say. So too with mystics and their graves: they can give you nothing nor can they intercede on your behalf with the Almighty. And their often-craven progeny most certainly cannot for piety does not come with the genes. Perhaps it was to discourage the heredity of piety that God did not give sons to any Prophet except Adam and Abraham. If the rest had any they died. This should tell you at the very least that dynasticism of any kind if abhorrent to God.

Muslims should also know that the only politics in Islam is revolutionary politics. The beneficiaries of an iniquitous status quo are predators: to protect it through western electoral politics it was natural for them to give revolution a bad name for self-preservation. Revolution is not about killing and maiming but perpetually changing the status quo for the better, keeping it dynamic and constantly improving the human condition. Else what else is the purpose of societies and states, politics and power?

They would also know that secularism is inherent in Islam, but the fakes have deliberately mistranslated ‘secular’ as ‘La Deeniyat’ or ‘faithlessness’ whereas secular means temporal, worldly and has to do with man’s behaviour and the laws he lives under in this world. The Quran is full of secular injunctions that were mostly revealed after the Prophet’s (pbuh) migration to Medina because then Muslims had a state of their own (not a necessity in Islam, by the way) and the Prophet (pbuh) was its head and military commander apart from being its spiritual head and guide. Islamic secularism is wide and has to do with how to live our lives, about etiquette, behaviour, laws etc. The Christian concept of secularism is narrow – separation of church and state – and cannot thus be imposed on Muslims there being no church in Islam. But what the fake scholar fears is separation between state and mullah and his misinterpretations of God’s Word.

Others say that true secularism is separation of state from the spiritual. But that is impossible: even those states that say that they are secular are not entirely so, else why would the US dollar say, ‘In God We Trust’ and the Queen of England also call herself ‘Commander of the Faith’ – very close to ‘Ameer ul Momineen’. Even communist societies have had to give way to the spiritual and sadly to organized religion. When spiritualism and secularism have a symbiotic relationship how can one separate them? Those that have tried have fallen flat on their faces. When you cannot take the spiritual out of man how can you take it out of his state and society? Without man the concept of state and society becomes meaningless and with man spiritualism is inherent.

If you don’t like what I say stop hypocritically calling Pakistan as an Islamic republic because by so doing you have laid such a heavy responsibility on yourself that you don’t have the capacity to meet because mentally you are still enslaved to western political and social constructs and behave like Black Minstrels. However, so long as you keep describing Pakistan as an Islamic state you will be judged by the measure of your Islamicity as a state. This and this measure alone is the measure of an Islamic state as enjoined in the Quran. We have been measured and weighed and found wanting. In 65 years we have amply proved that we have neither honesty, nor understanding or capacity to be an Islamic republic. In most respects except in public morality western societies are more Islamic in their treatment of their own people than any Muslim state. If we don’t hypocritically call ourselves an Islamic state, we the people will not stop being accidental Muslims by birth and will continue with our rituals and customs, our spiritual thought process hostage to mullahs of mind-bending hues in which the essence and spirit of Islam is nowhere to be found while our political thought processes remain hostage to western political constructs. Or take religion, not Faith, out of statecraft as 54 out of 57 Muslim majority countries have done and lessen your burden. A donkey cannot carry what an elephant can.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]