There is an often-recounted story that, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto met President J. F. Kennedy in Washington in 1963, the American President said to Bhutto, ‘If you were American you would be in my cabinet.’ In retort, Bhutto said, ‘Be careful Mr President, if I were American you would be in my cabinet.’1 Bhutto’s ambition, coupled with his huge ego, is renowned, and it is no surprise that his role model was Napoleon Bonaparte. His party, the PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) promised much, but delivered little. It put forward a populist agenda, which has been described as a mix of socialist and Islamic idealism.2 Bhutto’s style was autocratic and he demanded complete loyalty from his party officials, with those who disagreed with him being thrown into prison.3 Turning to the civil service, Bhutto got rid of legal provisions that gave civil servants job security and he effectively politicized the civil service under the auspices that he wished to make the bureaucracy more responsive to government.4 The result was greater power for the bureaucracy and state bourgeoisie, but not that of the labour force. As a result, the PPP lost its populist appeal, benefiting instead politicians and civil servants rather than the people. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Bhutto rejected demands for greater provincial autonomy. Within just months of assuming power, Bhutto clashed with the provinces by installing a PPP administration in Balochistan and deploying an army of 80,000 troops there with orders to open fire on any ‘miscreants’ who resisted this authority. Although reliant upon the army, Bhutto only caused resentment among the military elite by creating his own personal army called the Federal Security Force (FSF). Bhutto was little more than a bully with control of the reins of power and little in the way of political checks. The FSF would act as his henchmen, harassing and probably killing opponents.5 In 1972, when he announced the nationalization of major industries, he reacted to the protests of industrialists by imprisoning them.6
The Jamaat, for its part, opposed the government and, as a result, had the support of a great number of the disaffected electorate, of industrialists and, importantly, the military. The secularist and left-of-centre PPP responded by claiming Islamic credentials and promising to ‘re-Islamize’ the country, but this only resulted in making it more susceptible to attack from the religious sector as it was only too evident how un-Islamic the government was. In fact, the PPP from the beginning had claimed to be a proponent of what it called ‘Islamic socialism’ which, if nothing else, had a popularist ring to it. Bhutto himself declared early on that ‘Islam is our faith, democracy is our polity, socialism is our economy’, but the fact is that Bhutto was really a secularist and in terms of his policies, only the ‘socialist’ part got under way. Such acts as reinstating ‘Islamic’ as part of the official name of the state, and appointing the one-time member of the Jamaat Kawther Niyazi as minister for religious affairs, did little to appease the electorate.7 This recognition of the importance of religion in Pakistan was to the advantage of the Jamaat as its support grew. When the Jamaat called for the enforcement of sharia in the country it suddenly acquired some 15,000 new members.
Even the army started to blame the split of the country into East and West Pakistan to be a result of a lack of adherence to Islam and Yahya Khan’s womanizing and drinking.8 In fact, the army was becoming less secularist in its outlook, especially since 1965 when the officer corps opened its ranks to the more traditionally Islamic lower-middle classes. Importantly, Bhutto appointed General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who was very sympathetic towards the Jamaat, as the army’s chief of staff. This was a great mistake on the part of Bhutto, for Zia used his new position to distribute Jamaat literature among the soldiers. In July 1976, Zia gave copies of Mawdudi’s Understanding the Qur’an to soldiers as a prize for winning a debate organized by the Army Education School, and he even proposed that the book should be part of the exam that army officers take for promotion.9 As Bhutto went on to say at his trial before the supreme court, ‘I appointed a Chief of Staff belonging to the Jamaat-e-Islami and the result is before all of us.’10
The PPP’s nationalization and land-reform measures only helped to cement opposition, not surprisingly from the propertied elite, but also in unison with the Islamic parties who considered the ownership of property an Islamic creed. Bhutto’s policies swung from one extreme to another when, in 1973, wary of the power and independence of the civil service, he decided to abolish it altogether and replace it with politicians under his patronage. He imprisoned the senior civil servant Altaf Gauhar, who then spent his time in prison translating Mawdudi’s Tafhimu’l-Qur’a into English.11
The Jamaat could have taken much better advantage of the increase in support for Islam coupled with the growth in the unpopularity of Bhutto. It could have worked towards uniting the opposition parties and presenting a united front with a clear and coherent political programme. However, it failed to do so, preferring to agitate against single issues such as the non-recognition of Bangladesh, or the declaration of the Ahmadis as non-Muslim. In fact, it was the Jamaat’s student organization, the IJT, that fared much better and was prepared to be far more radical than its parent organization, making it much more recognizably an opposition party, at least on the campuses. Actually, as a result of its electoral successes at the PPP’s stronghold, the University of Punjab in Lahore, in 1972 at a national educational conference in Islamabad, IJT students got a resolution passed which demanded the Islamization of the education system. The IJT was much more revolutionary than the parent group, and this in turn led the IJT to be a greater influence within the Jamaat, for they could no longer be ignored. The IJT leader, Javid Hashmi, had become something of a national figure with considerable political pull, to the extent that in September 1972 he was invited to meet with Bhutto at his mansion in Lahore. This was a failed attempt by Bhutto to mollify the student body.
Relations, such as they were, between the Jamaat and the government worsened when, on 8 June 1972, an important National Assembly representative of the Jamaat, Nazir Ahmad, was assassinated. Bhutto invited Mawdudi also to his mansion in September 1972 to try to convince him to support the government’s intention to recognize Bangladesh. As it turns out, this proved to be a wise move. Given the fact that Nazir Ahmad had only recently been assassinated, Mawdudi nonetheless said the Jamaat would be more supportive if the PPP distanced itself from socialism. This compromise was in retrospect a generous one, for Bhutto needed the support of the Islamic parties, especially the Jamaat and Mawdudi, for others would likely follow anyway. Bhutto purged the PPP of the left and stopped promoting socialist policies. In return, the Jamaat supported Bhutto in his creation of the 1973 constitution in which the First Amendment led to Pakistan’s recognition and diplomatic ties with Bangladesh while the Second Amendment declared the Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Bhutto, however, agreed to readopt the name the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and it was also stated within the constitution that both the president and prime minister must be Muslim and that laws passed under the constitution must be compatible with sharia. Getting the support of the Islamic parties was an important issue for Bhutto, although at the same time it is significant that Mawdudi was to some extent able to dictate the contents of the Pakistani constitution to a prime minister who rarely paid heed to the requests, let alone demands, of others. The following quote sums up Mawdudi’s (and hence the Jamaat’s) position:
We have no policy of confrontation with anyone. In the remaining Pakistan [i.e., after the secession of East Pakistan] as long as your party enjoys a majority, we recognise your party’s right to rule the country constitutionally, democratically and with justice and fair play. We shall not exert to remove you by undemocratic and violent means. But you should also concede that we have a right to perform the role of the opposition in a peaceful and democratic manner. And this is our constitutional and democratic right, that we should point out and criticize the wrong policies of the government. If the ruling party and the opposition were to act within their limits, there would be no danger of confrontation between them.12
However, this pact did not last for long, for Bhutto was not one to keep his promises. Soon afterwards, he banned the Jamaat from contesting the byelections in Swat and Darah Ghazi Khan, and so the Jamaat resorted back to its previous position of opposing the policies of the government. In fact, Mawdudi’s final act as amir in October 1973 was to construct a detailed case against the government’s recognition of Bangladesh. This policy was carried on with the new amir, Mian Tufayl, and the government resorted to attempting to suppress the activities of the Jamaat and the increasingly radical IJT. In February 1973, Tufayl was put in prison for a month which only caused Tufayl to be even more critical of Bhutto upon his release.
The influence of the IJT cannot be overestimated, especially after Mawdudi stepped down as amir and the parent group lost that charismatic and conciliatory influence. While the student body had a huge respect, if not fear, of Mawdudi, this was less so for subsequent amirs. The IJT was far more revolutionary in its intentions, and the student body as a whole in Pakistan has always been important, particularly as they were to inherit the reins of power. In 1974, the focus for the student Jamaat was a renewed anti-Ahmadi campaign. In May of that year a train carrying 170 IJT students was boarded by Ahmadi missionaries who distributed Ahmadi leaflets to the passengers. This certainly incited the IJT students, but matters were made considerably worse when, a week later, the same students were returning when the train was boarded again by the Ahmadi. Fights perhaps inevitably followed and the IJT pushed for the Ahamdis to be declared a non-Muslim minority. This move was followed by the parent body. The anti-Ahmadi campaign resulted in a huge increase in membership of the IJT, as well as sympathy from a number of other Islamic groups, and resulted in the government declaration on 7 September 1974 that the Ahamdis were a non-Muslim minority.
In 1973, the parties in opposition to Bhutto clubbed together to form the United Democratic Front. Although not exclusively Islamic, it is significant for the status of Islam at that time that the leader chosen was Mufti Muhammad of the Jami’at-i Ulama-i Islam. As Bhutto’s popularity decreased, he saw no other course but to call for fresh elections to be held on 7 March 1977. In response, the United Democratic Front was disbanded and became the nine-party Pakistan National Alliance (PNA). The parties concerned were certainly diverse in their views, from the secularism of the remarkable Asghar Khan, the socialism of Khan Abdul Wali Khan, to, of course, the Islamism of the Jamaat. What united all these parties was a mutual hatred of Bhutto. Despite its diversity, political pragmatism required a united platform, and this was popularly known as Nizam-i Mustafa (‘Order of the Prophet’). Implementation of Islamic law was its slogan, and they contested the elections under one election symbol ‘plough’ and a green flag with nine stars as its ensign. The party was so serious in presenting its Islamic credentials it went out of its way to encourage Shi’a Muslims to vote for them. The PNA gave the Jamaat 32 national tickets and 78 provincial ones.
Bhutto was nonetheless favourite to win the election but, despite that, it was rigged in his favour. Various tactics were adopted, such as the removal of opposition candidates’ names from the ballot paper by citing technical breaches of the election law, or the FSF disrupting campaign rallies. Suspicions were certainly raised when it was noted that 63 per cent of the electorate had voted in Pakistan’s first national elections in 1970, and for which there was obviously huge enthusiasm, yet an amazing 80 per cent turned out for the 1977 elections among a somewhat disheartened electorate.13 As a result, public pressure on Bhutto grew, and his responses, such as shooting on antigovernment protestors, did him no favours. The PNA also did not accept the result, claiming that 40 seats had been rigged and they declared the new Bhutto-elected government as illegitimate, with Mawdudi calling for the overthrow of the regime. Of the 31 seats the Jamaat contested, they won 9 (25 per cent of the PNA’s total of 36 seats won). The government, for its part, won 155 of the total of 191 seats that were contested. Considering the accusations of rigged elections, the Jamaat did surprisingly well. Bhutto was forced to hold talks with PNA leaders which resulted in him agreeing to dissolve the assemblies and hold fresh elections. However, before that could occur, Bhutto and members of his cabinet were arrested by troops under the order of General Zia. Martial law was imposed, the constitution was suspended, and all assemblies dissolved. On 18 March 1978, Bhutto was declared guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The Jamaat and Mawdudi, were particularly vehement in the call for Bhutto’s execution. After a lengthy appeal, Bhutto was hanged at Central jail, Rawalpindi, on 4 April 1979. The Bhutto years had been disastrous in terms of Pakistan’s democracy, but had also proved to be fruitful ones for the Islamic parties. This was all to change when Zia came to power.
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1924–88) would be the President and military ruler of Pakistan from July 1977 to his death in August 1988 when his Hercules C-130 plummeted to the ground shortly after take-off from Bahawalpur airport. It was hoped by many that the Zia regime would bring in a new era of peace and democracy. From the point of view of the PNA, who had rather hoped to fill the power vacuum created by the death of Bhutto, it was one of confusion and disappointment. Initially, however, the prospects looked good for the hopes of Islamic movements. Zia included the Islamic parties in his regime, offering the parties a power-sharing arrangement and political patronage. At first, the Jamaat and the PNA were none too pleased that the elections were cancelled, but Zia argued that now was not the time for elections and it would not have helped the aims of the PNA to have them. Zia probably had a point for, subsequent to the Zia regime, there was certainly no shortage of elections in 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1997 with the turnout dropping from 50 per cent in 1988 to something like 26 percent in 1997.14 Nonetheless, the PNA was encouraged by the election success of 1977, and so Zia promised there would be elections on 1 October 1977, but then postponed it, instead calling for an accountability process for politicians.
Zia, a practising Muslim, argued that elections could not be held while the nation was in a state of martial law, and so set about establishing a civilian government in which the PNA would oversee the national elections. The PNA would appoint two-thirds of the cabinet ministers, while Zia would appoint the rest. The Jamaat, as part of the PNA quota, received responsibility for such things as production and industry, and information and broadcasting. Khurshid Ahmad was appointed minister of planning. This is a significant moment in the history of the Jamaat for, ‘After thirty years of political activity in Pakistan, for the first time in its history the Jamaat had become part of the ruling establishment.’15 Elections were now promised for 17 November 1979, which caused Mawdudi to state that an Islamic state was on its way.16 Mawdudi, though no longer in any position of official power, was still considered an important figure for the Islamization of Pakistan and, for his part, he went out of his way to endorse Zia publicly, believing he was a prime mover in the Islamization process. The Jamaat was more sceptical, and rightly so as it turned out, but nonetheless followed in Mawdudi’s footsteps by supporting Zia’s political platform. Zia, in February 1979, introduced Islamic edicts on taxation and hudud punishments, and Zia encouraged the Islamic intelligentsia to act as his advisers. However, the problem remained with the Jamaat that they simply had no coherent plan as to what the Islamization of the state would actually entail, and Mawdudi’s writings on the subject were no help here. This is where ideology comes into conflict with political pragmatism. Although it did no harm for Zia to have the support of the Jamaat, he began to question how useful it could be in the everyday workings of the political machinery, and, though a long-time admirer of Mawdudi and the Jamaat, he would also patronize other Islamic groups, including Sufis. The Jamaat, which had pinned its hopes, and resources, on the elections, was to be disappointed when Zia, concerned he may actually lose the elections, cancelled them yet again. This resulted in the Jamaat ceasing to support Zia and calling for elections, denouncing martial law. Mian Tufayl remained close to Zia, however, and discouraged the Jamaat from engaging in political agitation, arguing that opposition would only aid the PPP. Consequently, the Jamaat remained politically quiet in the sense of public displays of opposition. As there was no elected parliament, Zia displayed his Islamic credentials with the creation in 1980 of a Majlis-i-shura, consisting of mostly Islamic scholars, journalists, intellectuals and economists.
Although the Jamaat may not have been the force in politics it had hoped to be, it nonetheless continued to have an influence, especially during the Afghan war as the Jamaat talked of the need for a religious crusade against the Soviet Union and, therefore, Zia was able to legitimize his Afghan policy as a jihad. The importance of this remains to this day as it opened up the Afghan Mujahidin to Jamaat, and Mawdudian, ideology. However, when elections were finally held in 1985, the Jamaat won only 10 of the 68 seats it contested for the National Assembly and 13 of the 102 it contested for various provincial assemblies. It was a failure for the Jamaat, especially given that a number of the opposing parties had boycotted the elections, and it also signified to Zia that it were no longer the force it once was. Zia started to make more overtures towards the Muslim League and other parties. Zia went so far to turn over the government to the Muslim League, which effectively left the Jamaat as an opposition party.
When Tufayl stepped down in October 1987, to be replaced by Qazi Hussain, this new amir of the Jamaat pushed further for a complete and open split from Zia and to argue for a return to democracy and a populist agenda. Husain was a different kind of character, who had no time for Zia and was a great supporter of democracy in Pakistan. Unlike some of his colleagues, he did not believe that democracy should be sacrificed, or at best delayed, for the sake of Islamization. Husain saw Zia’s Islamization programme as merely a method to placate Islamic opposition and garner support from the Muslim electorate, rather than a genuine and determined desire to Islamize the power structures of the state machine. It is true that virtually the whole of what was previously Anglo-Saxon law was replaced by a Nizam-e-Mustafa (‘Islamic system’), but this, Husain argued, was used as an excuse to maintain martial law and increase the powers of Zia, and that Islamization did not stretch out to the important organs of government such as its bureaucracy or economic system. Husain started to make overtures to the PPP. Such an alliance would be a major boon to the PPP and a blow for Zia in what was expected to be imminent elections. These overtures were not supported by all in the Jamaat, however, and Zia was encouraged by this to sow discontent within its ranks. Most notably was the Jamaat journalist Muhammad Salahu’ddin whose magazine, Takbir, was a major forum for the Jamaat. Salahu’ddin used the magazine as a mouthpiece, attacking the PPP as secularist and encouraging the Jamaat to return to its Mawdudian roots as an ideological party, not just a political instrument. This line of argument certainly appealed to many within the Jamaat for, although Mawdudi was now dead, his legacy remained a powerful tool for support and would appeal more to those who were ideologically oriented. But these disputes within the Jamaat did not help the party, as it now felt itself to be in a middle place, neither supporting Zia, nor the PPP, but not certain of its own identity.
With the death of Zia, Pakistan now underwent a series of national elections in a short burst of time with increasing laxity from the electorate. The Jamaat, for its part, was in a mess and unprepared to fight the elections on its own, having alienated other groups. It seemed that the elections of 1988 would be a battle between the PPP and the pro-Zia parties, with the Jamaat left out in the cold. Reluctantly but, again, out of political necessity, Husain agreed to join up with the IJI, the Islami Jumhuri Ittihad (‘Islamic Democratic Alliance’) which consisted of right-of-centre and Islamic parties (including the Muslim League) that were largely sympathetic to Zia. The party was really the mouthpiece for the military and intelligence services who had gained a great deal of power under Zia and were not about to lose it under the PPP. The Jamaat was now in the curious position of being part of a pro-Zia alliance having spent so many months previously denouncing Zia. The head of the nine-party IJI was Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, but its most resourceful leader was the young millionaire industrialist Nawaz Sharif, whom Zia ul-Haq had appointed chief minister of Punjab. Sharif and his family owned the biggest industrial empire in the country, and the family had not forgotten the time when Bhutto had nationalized their family factory in 1972.
After the election, neither the PPP nor the IJI had stable majorities, though the PPP were to control the central government. The Jamaat had only won nine National Assembly seats. Consequently, the Jamaat was not well represented in parliament and was, in effect, marginalized, with the Muslim League dominating the political machinations with the PPP. Nawaz Sharif was, like so many, largely self-seeking and corrupt, paying lip-service to Islam. Benazir Bhutto’s fragile government looked to secure the support of the Jamaat, despite her own largely secular and modernist credentials, but the Jamaat, perhaps wisely, chose to wait as the position of Bhutto and the PPP deteriorated to the extent that fresh elections were called in 1990. The 1990s are dominated by the two leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and the various governments and intrigues that were engaged in during this decade need not be gone into here. Owen Bennett-Jones sums up the period well when he says, ‘By 1999 disillusionment with democracy had become so deep that General Musharraf’s coup was welcomed as a blessed relief.’17 This period for the Jamaat is not one that can be looked back on with pride either. Put simply and succinctly, the Jamaat behaved on the whole as if it were a ship governed by the waves with no engine or destination of its own. It swayed from supporting Bhutto to Sharif depending upon whom it felt might have, or gain, power, and it had little ideological integrity of its own. So far as Bhutto and Sharif were concerned, Islam seemed less important as a vote winner. In the 1990 elections, the Jamaat won only 3 per cent of the vote in the elections to the National Assembly. During the Persian Gulf War, the Jamaat supported Iraq, which put it in opposition to the stance of the IJI. Khurshid Ahmad called American policy in the Gulf War a ‘trap’ designed to ‘entangle Iraq in war so that it could provide the United States with a chance to interfere and advance its sinister designs – to give an edge to Israel in the region and to control Muslim oil.’18 In fact, this support for Iraq helped drum up support for Jamaat from many people in Pakistan who also sided with Iraq. It also put Jamaat into the international arena and became less ‘local’ in its perception of the Gulf War as an ideological conflict between the Muslims and the non-Muslims. In line with this, the Jamaat joined up with the Tahrik-i Islami (‘Islamic Movement’) which is a multinational organization involved in coordinating a number of revivalist groups internationally. The Jamaat also made more liberal use of the term ‘jihad’ with reference to the battle of Islam against the west. This brand of fundamentalism, though giving the Jamaat an ideological steering, was not to the liking of all its members. The previous amir, for example, Mian Tufayl, argued that there was no justification for supporting the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein.19 Salahu’ddin also stated that ‘populism and demagogy did not befit an Islamic movement’.20 The Jamaat was coming across more and more like-minded political opportunists and was sacrificing its principles for the sake of popularity. Taking sides with a secularist like Saddam Hussein hardly seemed in line with its Islamic vision and it was also in danger of losing financial support from the Saudis, as it attacked them for being un-Islamic lackeys of the US. Obviously, the intention of the Jamaat was to give it a distinct identity from the government, the Muslim League and the like, but as a result it lost what little ideological credibility it still had. As a result, the other Islamic parties within the IJI, notably the Muslim League and the MQM (Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz: Muhajir National Front), gained support at the expense of the Jamaat. In actual fact, the attempt of the Jamaat to be popular backfired. In 1992, the Jamaat broke away from the IJI completely.
Benazir Bhutto had little sympathy for the Islamic radicals, but she did little to confront them either. She was pragmatic in publicly declaring her Islamic credentials, but did little in fact to Islamize the country. Nawaz Sharif was more conservative and, in October 1998, he secured the passage of the 15th Constitutional Amendment through the National Assembly which stated that Islamic law would become the supreme law of Pakistan. However, by the time of the 1999 coup, Sharif was not convinced he would achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to get the Sharia Bill passed by the Senate and, once Musharraf took power, the bill was abandoned altogether.
General Pervez Musharraf was a modernist who liked to drink whiskey and gamble and whose hero was the Turkish secularist Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. His first major speech is significant and worth quoting a part of it here:
And now for a few words on exploitation of religion. Islam teaches tolerance not hatred; universal brotherhood and not enmity; peace and not violence; progress and not bigotry. I have great respect for the Ulema and expect them to come forth and present Islam in its true light. I urge them to curb elements which are exploiting religion for vested interests and bring a bad name to our faith … 21
Musharraf has chosen his words very carefully here and it is important that he makes no mention of the Islamic parties. Instead he appeals to the conservative and apolitical ulama. In other words, Musharraf has no intention of looking to Islamic groups for support or in Islamizing the nation. In April 2000 he supported a proposal to reform Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Under this law, anyone could be accused of blasphemy by a member of the public. This law carries the death sentence and was often used by people to rid themselves of enemies, regardless of whether or not an act of blasphemy had been committed. Minority groups had also complained that the law had been used against them on many occasions and this led a Catholic bishop by the name of John Joseph shooting himself dead as a protest. Musharraf intended to tighten the law to ensure greater veracity of the accusation, but even this modest reform was attacked by the Islamic parties, and Musharraf backed down. However, Musharraf’s famous speech in June 2001 demonstrates his intentions well:
How does the world look at us? The world sees us as backward and constantly going under. Is there any doubt that we have been left behind although we claim Islam will carry us forward in every age, every circumstance and every land … ? How does the world judge our claim? It looks upon us as terrorists. We have been killing each other. And now we want to spread violence and terror abroad. Naturally the world regards us as terrorists. Our claim of tolerance is phoney … We never tire of talking about the status that Islam accords to women. We only pay lip-service to its teachings. We do not act upon it. This is hypocrisy.22
This was not the kind of thing a Pakistani leader would utter publicly in the past and, from the moment he took power, he clamped down on the violence committed by Islamic groups by banning, in 2001, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipha-e-Mohammed Pakistan (SMP). The SMP was a Shi’a militant group and one of the most violent organizations in Pakistan at the time. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was a splinter group of the Sunni Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) which carried out a number of assassinations, including a failed attempt on Nawaz Sharif in 1999. Musharraf’s onslaught on Islamic militant groups grew in intensity after 9/11 and he supported the US in its attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan. This helped Musharraf financially, but it did cause street protests among clerics in Pakistan. These events are significant because it provides an indication of how religious Pakistan actually is, and goes right back to Jinnah’s view, in opposition to Mawdudi, that Pakistan was essentially a country for Muslims rather than a Muslim country. Musharraf was taking a risk in challenging the religious parties in Pakistan, but no religious leader, including the most influential of them all, Mawdudi, had been able to translate their ideology into a political reality in the history of Pakistan. Also, religious parties have never done that particularly well in Pakistan elections, rarely managing more than 5 per cent of the vote.23 The Jamaat, although one of the most powerful religious parties, has still nonetheless remained in the margins of the political sphere and this has not been helped by its schizophrenic Mawdudian outlook of, on the one hand, claiming that an Islamic revolution will come and, on the other, seeking short-term political advantage at the expense of ideology. Musharraf proved to be right in his estimation of Islamic radicalism and its ‘street power’ which, in the end, came to little, and caused Musharraf to declare triumphantly, ‘I thought ten times about putting my hand in the beehive of religious extremism. But I realized that this was the maximum they could do and the vast majority of the people were with me.’24
After showing his cards on Afghanistan, Musharraf turned his attention to Kashmir. The US did not adhere to the view that there was no connection between Afghanistan and Kashmir and in this they were right for the Taliban and the Pakistani-based Kashmiri militant groups had the same origins. The US would know this, for it was the CIA who had provided the funding for an effective Mujahideen. While some of these groups remained in Afghanistan after the Soviets had left, others went to Kashmir. Musharraf, therefore, reversed the policy of previously backing Kashmiri groups, and banned two of the most prominent: Jaish e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba. The former was a relatively new group, whereas the Lashkar-e-Toiba had been fighting for some time to turn Kashmir into an Islamic state, rather like the Taliban’s intentions in Afghanistan. Curiously, Musharraf did not ban the most prominent of all the religious groups in Kashmir, the Hizb ul-Mujahideen. The leader of this group is Syed Salahuddin and the group is linked to Jamaat-e-Islami. Musharraf may well have spared its banning because it considers itself more a group in support of Kashmiri nationalism than Islamization. However, it is now listed as a terrorist group by the US and the European Union.
In 2004, Musharraf proposed his alternative to Islamic fundamentalism, which he called ‘Enlightened Moderation’:
My idea for untangling this knot is Enlightened Moderation, which I think is a win for all – for both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. It is a two-pronged strategy. The first part is for the Muslim world to shun militancy and extremism and adopt the path of socioeconomic uplift. The second is for the West, and the United States in particular, to seek to resolve all political disputes with justice and to aid in the socioeconomic betterment of the deprived Muslim world … I say to my brother Muslims: The time for renaissance has come. The way forward is through enlightenment. We must concentrate on human resource development through the alleviation of poverty and through education, health care and social justice. If this is our direction, it cannot be achieved through confrontation. We must adopt a path of moderation and a conciliatory approach to fight the common belief that Islam is a religion of militancy in conflict with modernization, democracy and secularism. All this must be done with a realization that, in the world we live in, fairness does not always rule.25
On 18 September 2005, he made a speech before a Jewish leadership, sponsored by the American Jewish Congress’s Council for World Jewry, in New York City. In the speech, he denounced terrorism and spoke of developing relationships between Pakistan and Israel, as well as between the Muslim world and Jews worldwide. This caused the Jamaat to condemn enlightened moderation as nothing more that kowtowing to US imperialism.
On 18 August 2008, Pervez Musharraf resigned his post as president under impeachment pressure from the coalition government. He was succeeded on 6 September 2008 by Asif Ali Zardari. He is the widower of Benazir Bhutto and leader of the PPP. One of the richest men in Pakistan, and renowned for his corruption, it will be interesting to see how things unfold between Zardari and the Jamaat. If nothing else, Pakistan seems as far away as ever from being the kind of Islamic state Mawdudi envisioned.
Mawdudi and the Jamaat have had, and continue to have, so many mirrored communities in the Islamic world, that there are simply too many to mention. Some of these ‘mirrors’ are sharper in their reflection of Mawdudi than others. As an example, the events taking place in Afghanistan during this time give an idea of how Mawdudi and the Jamaat’s ideology and organizational structure filtered through to other Islamic groups. For example, one figure, a military leader in Afghanistan called the ‘Lion of Panjshir’, Ahmad Shah Massoud (1953–2001). As a military leader, Massoud played a key role in driving the army out of Afghanistan and, once they withdrew, he became the defence minister in 1992 under the former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani. When the Rabbani government collapsed and the Taliban took power, Massoud again became a military leader as commander of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Pakistan. Two days before the 9/11 attacks, Massoud was assassinated by suspected al-Qaeda agents. The date of his death is now known as ‘Massoud Day’ in Afghanistan and is a national holiday.26 Mawdudi had an impact on many people, but Massoud stands out as someone who was a genuine disciple of Mawdudi and who blended his thoughts with that of salafism. Massoud received a religious education at the Masjid-i Jame mosque in Herat, Afghanistan, but also a western education when he attended at intermediate and senior grades the French Lycée Français of Al Istiqlal in Kabul. He was a gifted and talented student who was conversant in French, Farsi, Pashto, Hindustani and Arabic. While studying in Kabul in 1972, Massoud became involved with the sazman-i jawanan-i musulman (‘Organization of Muslim Youth’), the student branch of the Jamiat Islami. The Jamiat is the oldest Islamic political party in Afghanistan and is run along the lines of the Jamaat. Its ideology also reflects that of Mawdudi and the Jamaat. One thing in particular the Jamaat had always prided itself on was its discipline, and when Massoud organized a mujahideen group in the Panjshir Valley to fight against the communist government and its Soviet allies it was this emphasis on organization, discipline and a strict hierarchy that resulted in military success for him and his group. Another member of the Jamiat, and a follower of Mawdudi’s ideology, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (b. 1947) who went on to found the Islamic party Hezb-i Islami of Afghanistan. He was also prime minster on two occasions during the 1990s, although he is now on the US terrorist list. The Jamiat is closer to Mawdudi’s ideology in that it argues for a gradual revolution through infiltration of society, although the Hezb-i Islami, more radical under Hekmatyer than the Jamiat, also made use of Mawdudi terminology in calling for a vanguard of Islamic intellectuals to rise against the communist government in Pakistan. It is interesting that these two parties represent two sides of Jamaat and perhaps symbolize one of the key problems the Jamaat had in determining where it, and Mawdudi, actually stood in its ideology. It is either to his credit or to his detriment that Mawdudi can be interpreted in different ways to the extent that Massoud and Hekmatyer were often at loggerheads to the extent of internecine warfare.
Mawdudi and the Jamaat were original in many ways and, as such, influenced Islamic movements across the Muslim world, and continue to do so to this day. Certainly, one such ‘mirror’ was happening in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, and it could certainly be argued that if the fighters in Afghanistan did not have the model of the Jamaat and the ideology of Mawdudi as their own paradigm, they would have had less success militarily against the Soviets. However, another very important mirror can be found when we travel to Egypt. We have seen how Mawdudi’s views are closely related to that of the salafis, and there are two figures in Egypt in particular who are also ‘salafis’ in this sense: Hasan al-Bana (1906–49) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66). Qutb especially is not only a ‘salafi’ but a ‘Mawdudian’. Hasan al-Bana27 was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun), and a respected writer on Islamic jurisprudence. Ideologically, al-Banna is associated with the salafis and shares many ideas with his predecessors al-Afghani, Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh. Al-Bana’s education was similar to many Islamic intellectuals of the time, in that he experienced the dualistic educational approach of, on the one hand, attending a traditional Qur’an school from the age of 8 where he was taught to memorize the entirety of the Qur’an, and then moving to a government-organized modern primary school where he was taught under a more contemporary, ‘western’, curriculum. Like Mawdudi, al-Bana’s concern was with the decline of Islam as a cultural entity. At the age of only 16, al-Bana recounts how shocked he was by what he saw when he moved to Cairo to study: by the dominant British presence, the neglect of Islamic morality, the streets rife with gambling and the consumption of alcohol, and the general indifference shown towards religious matters. Another similarity with Mawdudi is that in forming the Muslim Brotherhood, he used the hierarchical, disciplined structure of Sufi orders as a model. In fact, from an early age al-Bana became seriously involved in the Sufi order known as the Hasafiya and remained a Sufi all his life, never repudiating its teachings or practices. Indeed, al-Bana himself preferred the title of murshid (literally ‘guide’ or ‘instructor’) for himself which is frequently given to spiritual teachers of Sufi orders. When al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, also translated as the ‘Society of Muslim Brothers’) in March 1928 it soon became the primary source of Islamic radicalism. Importantly it came before Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and so it is more accurate to say that at first Mawdudi learned from al-Bana. This is particularly evident in the view held by al-Bana that the Brotherhood was not a political party and did not, therefore, contest elections. In fact, al-Bana disapproved of political parties as he believed it perpetuated disunity among the Muslim community. Al-Bana, like Mawdudi, argued that, theoretically at least, the Muslim community, the umma, should have no need of separate parties with differing ideals.
When looking at the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is remarkably similar to the Jamaat-e-Islami. Its outlook was stated at a conference in 1933, that the organization should devote itself to the reinforcement of Islamic knowledge and culture, and so education was a primary part of its programme. The first step was to rebuild the Muslim community, the umma, and to redress the balance of power between Islam and the west, and so a ‘call’ (da’wa) was made to all Muslims to return to their faith. A publication house was set up to propagate the aims of the Brotherhood, as well as publish al-Bana’s own writings. Although the Brotherhood was not a political party as such, al-Bana stressed that there is no separation between religion and politics. Rather, Islam is an integrated and comprehensive system that, in the tradition of the salafis, should be understood exclusively from the Qur’an and the Sunna and be applicable to all times and places. Al-Bana organized the Brotherhood on military lines, with sub-groups known as ‘battalions’. Members would meet once a week for prayer and spiritual instruction and there was much emphasis on the avoidance of such temptations as alcohol and gambling. The organization built schools for boys and girls, and established the ‘Rovers’, which was not unlike the Boy Scouts. Night schools were run for workers, trade unions, clinics and hospitals were founded and members worked to improve sanitation and welfare for the poor. In many respects, the Brotherhood behaved like a state within a state and obviously this raised the suspicions and concern of the Egyptian government as it only highlighted its own failings in terms of welfare and education. Al-Bana, however, set out to demonstrate that Islam could be progressive and that welfare was based on Islamic principles. The Brotherhood, therefore, was far more active on the streets and concerned with welfare issues than was ever the case with the Jamaat and, also, it had no definite notions about the kind of polity the future Islamic state should have for al-Bana felt that discussions about an Islamic state were premature as there was still much work to do at grass-roots level in terms of the struggle against illiteracy and poverty. The Brotherhood was also, to a large extent, anti-intellectual, preferring action rather than words. Al-Bana is important because he essentially put the flesh on the bones of the work of his salafi predecessors and, in the Muslim Brotherhood, set about establishing a new type of Muslim community. Its originality lay in it being the first mass-supported and well-organized grouping that was in touch with the demands of a modern urbanized world and its ideological base, which was further developed by Sayyid Qutb, provided a model for countless Muslim organizations.
Although Qutb28 was not the head of this organization, he exemplified its radical trend, and so he is regarded as the intellectual heir of al-Bana. His writings are highly regarded to this day as literary works. Qutb’s life shares a number of parallels with al-Bana, for Qutb left the village to live in Cairo and this proved to be of pivotal importance due to the impression city life gave him; in particular the obvious social imbalance, political corruption and the presence of the British. At that time Qutb was less concerned with religious indifference, as he was somewhat indifferent to religion himself. At first, he joined the Wafd (‘Delegation’) party, the oldest existing political party in Egypt and the only major oppositional force during that period. It was also secular in nature. It was only after spending three years studying in Colorado that Qutb began to question western ideals. Here Qutb encountered first-hand what he regarded as excessive materialism, sexual permissiveness and racism. From then on, Qutb’s writings started to have an Islamic orientation, and, being of a literary nature, he wrote numerous articles on artistic imagery found in the Qur’an. Qutb found the Qur’an to be an important spiritual resource, and his attention focused on the importance of Islamic research and Qur’anic studies. In the same year that al-Bana was executed, Qutb’s work Social Justice in Islam (Al-’adala al-ijtima’iyya fi al-islam) was published. This attracted the attention of many scholars and Islamic activists and its originality lies in his perception of Islam as not only a spiritual resource, but as an integrated system of social and economic justice. This puts Qutb within the salafi mould. Qutb became disillusioned with the ideology and activities of the Wafd party as a result of widespread corruption among its leadership and accusations of being too closely associated with British interests and so he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952. He wrote regularly for their magazine, Al-Da’wa (‘The Mission’) where he developed the ideas that were to become central to the ideology of the Brotherhood. In November 1954 an assassination attempt was made on Nasser, and the Brotherhood was blamed. A number of its members were imprisoned, including Qutb who, in actual fact, was to spend virtually the whole of the rest of his life in jail. He spent the time writing. He wrote a commentary on the Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an (Fi dhilal al-Qur’an), in which he considered the Qur’an as an integrated whole, rather than engaging in an atomistic approach to each individual verse or even word. Another important work during this time is Milestones (Ma’alim fi al-tariq, also translated as Signposts on the Road). Here Qutb shows the influence upon him of Mawdudi, for the central theme of this work is that the problem with the Islamic community, as Qutb saw it, was not so much the encroachment of the west, or autocratic government, but rather what he also refers to as the jahiliya of society as a whole. He remarks that he saw his present society in a state of jahiliya similar, or even worse, than that which existed before the time of the Prophet. The community, in terms of its beliefs, traditions, culture, laws, politics, and so on, are all essentially un-Islamic in character in that, in true salafi tradition, they do not reflect the community that existed at the time of Muhammad and the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Like Mawdudi, Qutb makes uses of the term ‘vanguard’ of a new elite that would fight against jahiliya. Equally, Qutb is not specific in what this elite would actually do, and seemed to have a somewhat romantic and naive notion of a group of ascetic individuals that, once they know the truth of Islam, could simply come into being and take over the reins of state rule which would then require no earthly laws or regulations. In fact, Qutb is little concerned with what form a Muslim state would take, leaving the actual organization to the umma once they are capable of it. He makes use of another term borrowed from Mawdudi, that of hakimiyya (or ‘divine governance’). Qutb believed that provided society is governed according to God’s will – which can be determined via the traditional sources of the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet – then all will be well. He does not see religion as prescriptive, but more as an aesthetic–psychological experience. In a Platonic sense of the Philosopher Kings, the leaders would intuitively ‘know’ what to do, given the circumstance.
When the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, a copy of a text by Muhammad Abed Al-Salam Faraj (1952–82) called The Neglected Obligation was found on the body of the assassin. Faraj had previously been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before he founded the Islamic Jihad in 1979 as a result of his view that the Muslim Brotherhood has ‘neglected its obligation’ to enact jihad. Someone else who had previously been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood but left to join Islamic Jihad in 1980 was Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951) who went to fight in Afghanistan before merging Islamic jihad with al-Qaeda in 1998. Al-Zawahiri is today considered the intellectual force of al-Qaeda, and bin Laden’s right-hand man.
What these people have in common is a belief that what Sayyid Qutb especially had to say about Islam and jihad is the right way for Islam to go. In this respect, Qutb is far more the father of modern-day Islamic radicalism than Mawdudi is, but it must also be admitted that Mawdudi is not entirely blameless. Although, as stated above, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded before the Jamaat, the history of twentieth-century radicalism is one of constant interaction between these two great figures Mawdudi and Qutb, rather than one always imitating the other.
Mawdudi’s brand of Islamic political ideology represents a dangerous strand of fundamentalism. While one can understand why Mawdudi was so determined to push for a certain portrayal of Islam which emphasizes its exclusivity and a call for a ‘vanguard’ and a ‘jihad’, this does not excuse the fact that his influential ideas must be at least partly responsible for the atrocious acts that have been committed in the name of Islam in recent years. At times, it must be admitted, Mawdudi can come across as more moderate, but this is overshadowed by a worrying extremism which suggests his moderation was more a case of political pragmatism than a genuine belief on his part. After studying Mawdudi for over twenty years now, it is sad that this author must come to this conclusion, but it would be false to present Mawdudi as otherwise. It is only hoped that Muslims around the world can perceive Mawdudi as, perhaps, a necessary creation of a time of great uncertainty and insecurity that, it is to be hoped, can be replaced by more optimism and progressive moderation. Other faces of Islam are out there.