Pakistan - News and Discussion -7

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Dishing out religion on TV channels </b>
FT 
Khaled Ahmed’s  A n a l y s i s 
<b>Pakistan began its first Islamisation in 1948 with the Objectives Resolution, which reached its climax in the 1979-1988 interregnum of General Zia’s military dictatorship when coercion was used in line with the provisions of enforcement contained in Islamic jurisprudence</b>. After General Zia, the state tried to ‘go back to normal’ but the governments were never strong enough to roll back the process. In at least two instances when the elected governments were dismissed by the president under Article 58/2/B of the Constitution, one of the charges was that the government had stopped or neglected Islamisation. One unsuccessful military coup in 1995 also made ‘de-Islamisation’ one of its grounds for staging the coup. After 1998, prime minister Nawaz Sharif used Islamisation under the projected 15th Amendment to Islamise once again but failed.

<b>Musharraf regime and market-driven Islam:</b> Under General Pervez Musharraf the process of de-Islamisation began in real earnest with a measure of ‘indirect’ international coercion under UN Security Council resolution 1373 under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. Normally any order imposed under duress is easily rolled back by bringing the situation to normal: usually the laws remain unchanged but their enforcement by the state is allowed to default. An opposite thesis was proved: if a coercive order aimed at the transformation of society is allowed to reign for some years its effects become embedded in society, and a ‘public demand’ for Islamisation becomes unavoidable. Pakistan’s discourse at least remained as intensely Islamic as it was under General Zia because the public mind had become unfamiliar with secular-pluralist discourse during a decade of dictatorship. When the private TV channels opened in Pakistan the owners were struck by the high public demand for religious programmes.

The process of religious communication on TV in Pakistan was market-driven and it catered to the aggressive fundamentalist as well as to the ‘accretive’ magic-oriented istakhara type of discourse. Since under General Zia Pakistan had only one state-owned TV channel, the religious discourse under General Musharraf - through half a dozen new private TV channels - seemed actually to be several times more extensive in volume and quality than what General Zia was able to achieve.<b> This ‘stampede’ for Islam was also aided in no small measure by the earlier proliferation of clergy which had formed its own centres of power in parallel to the state.</b> The organisations banned by a UN committee under resolution 1373 for terrorism remained present on the ground and continued to assert their power in favour of a privatised Islamisation. In fact in 2002 clerics were emboldened enough by General Musharraf’s ‘secular ambivalence’ to announce that they would take over cities and start Islamising them by force.

<b>The phenomenon of ‘internalised’ Islamisation:</b> After 11 September 2001, the Islamic discourse on TV became more intense and aggressive, as spearheaded by a clergy now scared of Musharraf’s ‘subservience’ to the United States which might result in his taking steps to restrict the clerical activity in Pakistan. (This was seen to happen later on when Musharraf tried to ‘normalise’ the seminaries and sanitise the textbooks.) This was further compounded by a pan-Islamic wave of grievance, which was further strengthened by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Since this invasion was opposed by all levels of Pakistani society, the TV discourse reflected it through a new supremacy of the clerical speaker. The new TV channels, often initiated outside Pakistan, at times began with a ‘mission statement’ against the West and Western media and allowed a tilt to their religious discussions which intensified the over-all antagonism and hostility among the social segments in Pakistan seeing one another as either opposed or not sufficiently persuaded of the other’s worldview. The TV discourse now began to express an unrelated cosmic grief that looked less like a protest against global injustice and more like a regret over Islam’s inability to dominate.

Cable TV added its own commercialism to what was happening by adding ‘exclusive’ channels devoted to single clerics, as in the case of Maulana Akram Awan of Chakwal with a significant standing within the armed forces, Dr Israr Ahmad the founder of an organisation in Lahore devoted to the setting up of a caliphate in Pakistan, Indian orator Zakir Naek with a global ‘converter’ outreach like late Ahmad Deedat of South Africa, Ms Farhat Hashmi of Al Huda with a following among the born-again rich ladies, and Allama Tahirul Qadiri the Barelvi leader of a religious party of Lahore with a European outreach. (The last two are rumoured to have quit Pakistan for Canada and Europe respectively where they have lucrative preaching and proselytising connections. Both still retain chains of institutions devoted to their cause back in Pakistan.) Recorded competitions with missionaries from other religions were shown in which the Muslim cleric was shown to win. Dr Israr was exploited by one TV channel to spread the message over many serial programmes about the imminent rise of Imam Mehdi against the forces of evil for a final Armageddon ending in a victory for Islam. As an astounding proof of how the mass media may affect the mind of society, imposters claiming to be Imam Mehdi began to emerge from the various cities of Pakistan and had to be arrested.

<b>TV channels and their new wave of Islamisation:</b> Because of the private TV channels, the era of General Musharraf was in effect more of an Islamic era than the one presided over by General Zia. The tone of the Islamic discourse was aggressive, if not paranoid, and freedom accorded to secular and moderate voices to come and compete with the orthodox clergy simply led to more acrimony as youthful audiences inclined to defending the hardline positions taken by the clerical discussants. The moderate discussants were tentative and apologetic because of their inability to quote from the Quran and hadith in Arabic, and could clearly see the stage set against their point of view. The audiences were motivated by a number of external influences which in turn could have been induced by the TV channels themselves. The rise of collective namaz in mosques had been witnessed under General Zia and the period following his death, but the real dominance of the mosque was seen under Musharraf and his liberal policy vis-à-vis the media. Now the born-again feeling was felt to be genuine and those who became hardline in their thinking thought that they had arrived at their conversion in an environment of freedom. The ‘free-thinking’ secularists on the other hand seemed to represent alien values and therefore appeared apologetic.

A midwife’s role was played by the TV hosts. Almost all hosts adopted an extremely obsequious attitude towards the ulema and allowed their aggressive discourse to go on unchecked. In most cases the hosts were not knowledgeable about the topics they were discussing. This ‘ignorance’ could actually be a useful attribute were the hosts to use it to treat the ulema and the secularist-moderates with equal objectivity. Most discussions demonstrated that the hosts did not intervene when the secularist or moderate discussant was being unfairly treated by the cleric and the audience. <b>There was a certain satisfaction drawn from the fact that Islam was seen to win while the secularist moderate was made to admit defeat. </b>The audiences selected for listening to the guests and ask questions invariably became partisan. (This could have been intended, given the dominant point of view in society and the youth’s pride in being seen to be opposing the government.) Where the religious programmes were ‘marketing’ faith-healing, the clergy was treated with deference amounting to apotheosis, especially in programmes like Alim on Line and Istakhara .

<b>Extremism of the expatriate Pakistani:</b> Since the major private TV channels were also based abroad they were able to represent and reflect the attitudes of expatriate Pakistanis too. The radicalisation of the expatriate Pakistani Muslim has not been studied properly, except for some partial insights available about the Pakistanis living in the United Kingdom from studies done by some scholars. The TV channels helped to bring this radicalisation closer to the audiences in Pakistan. There was a kind of Islamic bravado in the UK-based Pakistani that was unfamiliar to the domestic audiences, but which emphasised the grief over the ‘unjust’ order abroad. Because of his ‘free-wheeling’ condemnatory style, learned from such aggressive non-Pakistani Arab clerics as Abu Hamza al Masari in the UK, the expatriate Pakistani was able to incline the Pakistani Muslims to an extremism unknown before. One such channel opened ‘officially’ by the government competed in a negative fashion with the private TV channels and only enlarged the space for extremism among the UK-based Pakistani community and among the audiences back home. The hosts in London studios felt that there was no onus on them to be non-partisan while discussing the plight of the Muslims living in the UK, or discussing such issues as the war in Iraq, or the blaspheming cartoons crisis in Europe. Shown in Pakistan, these discussions tended to discourage any efforts at moderating the religious attitudes in the country.

The channels sought people who could hold discussions on Islam and found that looking for discussants other than the clergy was not easy. The Pakistani intellectual was fast disappearing from the scene in the aftermath of the ‘coercive’ Zia era and the market-driven and in many ways more scary post-9/11 era of General Musharraf. Soon the exaggeration of the extremist point of view became apparent to the networks. Moderate Justice (Retd) Javid Iqbal suffered from many disabilities when confronted by the hardline clergy, including his limited gift of communication. Former PPP law minister and human rights activist Iqbal Haider was effective but always outnumbered by the more extreme discussants. Aga Khan University’s Dr Hussain Ja’afri could not be a proper counter-weight because of his Shia background and his inability to match the aggression of the orthodox cleric.

Dr Mubarak Ali was recruited to balance the one-sided discourse but his early brusqueness and rejectionism had the opposite effect. He later learned the ropes and became quite suave. Prof Mehdi Hassan gave battle to the orthodox manfully and continues to do his job. Prof Manzur Ahmad has offered to TV discussions a more rational view of Islam, but unlike his clerical antagonists, lacks the intensity of the extremist. It was in Javed Ahmad Ghamidi that the TV channels finally found the balancing factor. Eclipsed by the earlier militant phase of the 1990s because of his refusal to accept jihad as a non-state function, Ghamidi made good use of the Musharraf’s ‘permissive’ rule to take on the aggressive orthodoxy. He did not suffer from the one disadvantage that all other moderates suffered: the inability to press into service reference to chapter and verse of the Quran to spread the opposite point of view. A growing number of viewers awoke to a possible variant point of view to hardline Islam justifying violence. Ghamidi’s appearance on many channels has been an effort to offset the disadvantage of being a solitary advocate of moderation.
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