Resolving contestations

The debate on our identity has continued for the last 60 years, is continuing and will continue for the foreseeable future in Pakistan. Is our culture drawn from the Arabs or from South Asia, are our traditions South Asian or Islamic, do we look to Central Asia/Middle East or to South Asia? Despite many scholars, such as Sen, arguing that all of us have multiple identities and we have to somehow not only get used to them but learn to live with them comfortably, individually and collectively, we are a long way away from that and in almost every area of our social (even individual) existence in Pakistan.

Nowhere is this contestation more apparent than in the sphere of education. What should be the role of religion in our education system? This is something that should have been sorted out in 1947, or right after, so that we could have created a unified, or at least thoughtfully differentiated, education system that would have suited our national and individual needs. But the consensus was not developed so the contestations continue, and at multiple levels and on multiple issues. Is English, as a language of modernity the West needed or not, what is the role of Islamiyat, should Arabic be taught as a secondary language, should we have Quranic studies, what sort of history should we teach, where should we draw the values that we want to pass on to our children, and so on. The issues and debates are endless. But at the root of it all, there are issues of contestations in identities and people having very different views on how the identities of the next generation should be shaped.

Contestations happen in all societies and at all levels. Even in the US, debates about Bible study even in this age, evolution theory, US history and its content, knowledge about other religions, rights of children from other religions/ethnic groups, rage all the time. But what is probably different is that a) there is more consensus that has developed about the basics, and b) the ways in which contestations happen have become much more defined and agreed upon.

We are still struggling with working out how to structure our contestations. And instead of confronting issues and trying to develop consensus on basics and developing acceptable and agreed upon modes of contestation, we have allowed solitudes to develop. There are parallel systems of education running in the country, separated by wide gulfs of income, geography, values, and traditions. The madrassah syllabus, its mode of instruction, its language, and the traditions that it inculcates in students has very little in common with what happens in secular government schools. Even the gulf between the Urdu medium schools and the English medium, public schools and elite private schools is massive. A novelist had called the Canadian French and English cultures as the two solitudes. In Pakistan, we have the case of many solitudes.

Can a society exist and continue to exist and thrive with such diversity, and more pertinently, with such divisions? Since it is not only the case that these systems are different, they, implicitly and explicitly, breed contempt and distrust about the other as well. Surely, this is not the ideal state for our education system to be in.

But these divisions and fundamental contestations go across almost all spheres and with significant costs for people. Take the example of the marriage issue. There are many young men and women looking for suitable partners at any point in time in a society. But the problem, as in a lot of markets, is that information, about the characteristics of each candidate, is private and is not widely available. Traditionally, we had go-betweens who could solve this problem. These were men but mostly women who had access to many households in a community and could share information about eligible men/women across households, and since a lot of marriages took place within castes, occupational groups, larger families and so on, the transfer and sharing of information was possible.

With the development of bigger cities, labour mobility, education and change in the structure of society, such transference is not that common anymore. In addition, modern values of individual freedom and responsibility have also given younger people the idea that they should be able to decide on their partner for/by themselves. But most of our society is not too comfortable with the idea of young people meeting each other and mingling with each other before marriage. So, how is the marriage deal supposed to happen?

I find a lot of young men and women, especially in our cities, caught in this quandary: they do not want to go for a traditional arrangement, even if they have that option, as they consider it to be archaic, sub-optimal and negating their freedom, but there are not many opportunities for mingling either. Dating and marriages based on individual understanding, termed love marriages, are looked down upon by most conservatives and going to houses of prospective brides to see them, with family, is considered poor form by liberals. The social cost of this contestation, is significant.

These are but two examples of a phenomenon that permeates a huge area of our social space. Multiple identities are a fact and contestations are common, vital and even necessary. But agreement on basics and modes of contestation are also needed. This is severely lacking in Pakistan and with grave consequences, and potentially devastating consequences. And it does not look, from popular debate in the country, that we are converging on some agreement on basics. In fact, to the contrary, distances seem to be increasing and attitudes hardening. We need people such as Allama Iqbal again to attempt syntheses. For the sake of this country, as Sinai awaits a Musa, we await some credible and great synthesisers.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]