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| ZA Bhutto's historic alliance with Islamist clerics ZAB & Mufti Mehmood |
Source/Credit: Daily Dawn | Pakistan | Opinion
By Nadeem F. Paracha | February 12, 2012
Former Prime Minster Z A Bhutto has got a lot of flack by a number of Pakistani historians for enacting certain constitutional amendments and laws that went on to add a thorny dimension to the politics and sociology of Pakistan. His government’s constitutional move to declare Ahmadis non-Muslim (in 1974) and then (in 1977) the issuance by his regime of a series of ‘moral laws’ forcefully demanded by his Islamist opponents, are claimed to be the stepping stones used by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship to turn Pakistan into a hotbed of bigotry and assorted moralistic whiplash.
The irony of it all is that the popularly elected Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) were largely secular in orientation, left-leaning and also known for instigating a string of progressive initiatives. Nevertheless, the criticism that Bhutto receives for being the first to (uncannily) unleash the monster of religious persecution and intolerance in Pakistan is valid.
But one cannot treat this matter in isolation. The truth is Bhutto was far from being the only secular leader in the Muslim world who went on to adopt certain questionable conservative policies. Elected in 1970 on the back of a populist wave of support and progressive manifesto, Bhutto’s PPP had emerged (in 1967) as Pakistan’s version of the various progressive and secular movements that had appeared in various Muslim countries between the 1940s and the early 1970s: Indonesia (1949), Iran (1951), Egypt (1952), Tunisia (1956), Iraq (1958), Syria (1958), Algeria (1962) and then Libya (1969) and Yemen (1970).
Interestingly these movements that emerged from populist ideologies which fused modern secularism, nationalism and aspects of socialism with certain identity notions of ‘political Islam’ largely generated dictatorships, except in Pakistan (and in Iran).
Three of these regimes were overthrown by pro-US and Islamist-backed military coups: Iran (1953), Indonesia (1965) and Pakistan (1977).
Some of the ideologies that emerged through the mentioned fusion were ‘Ba’ath Socialism’ (Iraq, Syria); ‘Marhaenism’ (Indonesia); ‘Islamic Socialism’ (Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen); ‘Nasserism/Arab Socialism’ (Egypt). However, when Bhutto finally got around to imposing his party’s manifesto, the hey day of ideologies like Islamic Socialism and Arab Socialism had already come and gone. They hit a peak in the mid-1960s but began to patter out after the devastating defeat of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the 1967 war against Israel.
Though regimes based on these ideologies had enjoyed almost two decades of popularity, by the time one such government arrived in Pakistan, serious debate erupted in various secular Arab countries about whether these ideologies were good enough to sustain economic progress as well as to challenge ‘Western/Israeli hegemony.’ The Islamists, who’d been repressed by these regimes, began to find sympathetic ears as they started to actively advocate alternative ideologies, especially those that called for enacting governments on Sharia laws and ‘Islamic dictates’. Sensing the creeping change taking shape in people’s thinking (triggered after the 1967 defeat to Israel), secular regimes in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia began redefining their ideological parametres by giving a lot more lip-service to Islam, but retaining the overall secular structure of the state. For example, Egypt and Algeria that had had been staunchly opposed to the (pro-West) Saudi monarchy and were in the ‘Soviet camp’, began to move closer to Saudi Arabia and distance themselves from radical Palestinian groups.
Then, from 1973 onwards, governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria began a programme that aimed to gradually begin co-opting hostile Islamist forces. The Salafi Muslim Brotherhood that was brutally repressed in these countries was allowed to reactivate itself in the media, mosques and on campuses, and its members who’d escaped to Saudi Arabia were allowed to return.
The same forces were then used to neutralise the pro-Soviet leftists who’d begun to oppose the regimes’ changing character. As a consequence a more regular flow of funding and patronage began pouring in from Saudi Arabia and the US. By 1974 Bhutto too had begun to follow the Egyptian, Tunisian and Algerian line of pragmatism. He begun by slowing down his regime’s nationalisation and reformist process, coming closer to oil-rich Arab monarchies and then purging the critical leftist ideologues from the PPP.
Leftist student leaders who’d been at the forefront of galvanising the PPP into becoming a powerful street force, accused Bhutto of ‘tacitly’ allowing the unchallenged growth of the right-wing IJT (the student-wing of Jamat-i-Islami) on campuses and for encouraging divisions in leftist student and labour organisations. Then to supposedly further co-opt Islamist opposition, he agreed to declare the Ahmadis non-Muslim.
In 1975 he also became the first Pakistani premier to bankroll an Islamist guerrilla outfit in Afghanistan that opposed the ‘anti-Pakistan’ regime in Afghanistan, even though the ‘insurgency’ failed. Finally, in 1977, cornered by a movement by religious parties, Bhutto agreed to ban the sale of alcohol (to Muslims), close down nightclubs and change the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday.
But the genie was out of the box. The result of these so-called pragmatic manoeuvres was startling. Bhutto was suffocated by the Islamists through a protest movement and then overthrown by a reactionary military general (1977). Pakistan today is perhaps the most radicalised society riddled with some of the bloodiest Islamist and sectarian forces. In Egypt, President Sadat was assassinated by a radical faction of Muslim Brotherhood (1981) — an organisation that (after the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’), now holds power in Cairo.
The Algerian state was shaken by an Islamist movement (in the early 1990s) and a vicious insurgency; whereas Tunisia’s pragmatic secular structure could not stop religious outfits to overtake the 2011 democratic revolution in Tunisia by becoming the majority parties there. Secular pragmatics in ‘progressive’ Muslim countries had (in the 1970s) clearly fumbled. They believed that Islamists could be tamed after being given a few inches of the ruling and social turf. But the Islamists ended up snatching a whole yard.
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