Let’s Admit: It’s Anarchy
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“One hour of anarchy is equal to sixty years of tyranny. Imam Malik (711-795)
This insightful saying of Imam Malik is often quoted by the Western scholars when the subject of what matters most in the Muslim world - ruler or the ruled - comes under discussion; a benign dictator or a distorted form of democracy; a stable, orderly, organized and well-functioning country with less social or individual freedoms, or a chaotic and disorderly country, with more social and individuals liberties. Even Abraham Lincoln quoted this Medieval Islamic saying in one of his speeches.
Professor Noah Feldman of the Harvard Law School in his luncheon lecture titled “Better Sixty Years of Tyranny than One Night of Anarchy” delivered in 2009 makes this saying as his key-note. He quotes an old man of Baghdad after the American attack on Iraq in 2003 that further explains the difference between tyranny and anarchy. The old man said, “In Coup, someone comes on the radio or TV and announces, ‘I am General so-and-so. Now go back to work or you’ll be shot. In 2003 (after the American bombing), there was no such thing”. Anarchy came in full swing because, according to Professor Waldron, “We announced it”. Baghdad had been a witness to anarchy in the past centuries many a time, but this was different. It had a message for the world too.
Currently, Syria, a country once vibrant and full of history and beauty, is passing through its death-phase. The Economist of February 23, 2013, captions an article as “The death of a Country- As Syria disintegrates, it threatens the entire Middle East. The outside world needs to act before it is too late”. The outside world that matters did not act, and perhaps will not act now because the rationale for rescuing countries where chaos and anarchy prevail due to internal strife or foreign interference, has shifted. Violation of human rights, human liberties, lack of democracy and other such humanistic factors shall no more be valid and plausible causes, demanding an immediate intervention. If such had been the cause, why would the Muslim world that surrounds Syria - countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Israel that lie in Syria’s immediate vicinity - and other Islamic countries that claim brotherhood through Islam to it, would watch its 70,000 people die with tens of thousands missing and about 150,000-200,000 locked up with such cruel stoicism. (The Economist, Feb. 13, 2013). Well, the world watched the massacre of 100,000 Rwandans in one month and of about a million in four months, and nobody came because America did not choose to come. Drones, however, will surely come.
The tragedies in future would be complex and very consequential for those countries that are wasteful of their resources, are unmindful of their people, are incompetent as rulers, and who are lazy in mending the rot. Pakistan and Afghanistan both qualify for the standard political science definition of a civil war - a civil war is an internal conflict that causes 1,000 or more deaths in a battle in a year. Karachi alone witnessed the death of more than 8,500 people in the last five years, about 1,700 plus a year. A civil war mostly drags about four years; in Pakistan its occurrence has spanned over two decades; Civil wars stop when foreign powers get involved, such as it happened in Bosnia. Now, nobody will come to a country caught in such strife. Libya, and Syria in the current times, and Rwanda in 1994 offer good examples. Mali’s case is different.
Oxford economist Paul Collier and his collaborators explain why civil wars break out, quotes Niall Ferguson in his article published in the Time, February 2, 2007. According to them, civil wars break out in poor and mountainous countries (exception being Pakistan, a flat country). Bad economics, i.e. poverty and unequal distribution of wealth and recourses are some of the major factors. Of the past 70 civil wars surveyed since 1960s show that poor countries, with low per capita incomes and low growth rates suffered the civil war curse more than the richer countries. Civil wars are likely to inflict those countries where there is ethnic divide in people, and where there are religious and linguistic differences in people, and where a good portion of their population is male and is young in the age span of 15 to 29 years. Well, Pakistan has all these ingredients plus much more. According to Stanford political scientist James D. Fearson, the average post-1945 civil war has lasted more than a decade. Long ago England had its civil war of Roses, and the French had their civil war of Religion. America once also had its civil war of 1861-65. The poor countries are having them now as if they were a benediction from God.
Why is the developed Western world now closing it eyes to the carnage taking place around the world when partially or in good portion, in the prevalence of anarchy and chaos, it also has its share? Their own worsening conditions at home warrant so, that is one reason. And the best and honest explanation comes from President Barack Obama himself. “Saving lives alone is not a sufficient ground for military action.” Bitter and harsh lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the prevalent economic and social conditions at home have now forced the West to realize that peace cannot be imposed from outside in other countries, and that they need to win their own economic and social battles at home first. These trends will have some very far-reaching effects on countries that are unstable - whatever the reasons - and that are at the verge of economic and social disaster. The Western intervention will come only if their own vital interests and security get jeopardized or challenged, such as the disruption in the supply lines of energy; the spread of the weapons of mass destruction. As said above, future Western intervention would be non-human. Drones attacks would be more frequent than imagined.
Pakistan and King Lear: “The Napoleonic wars so drained the flower of French manhood that even today the physical stature of the average Frenchman is nearly half an inch below what it was at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign”, writes Orison Swett Marden in his book, “Pushing to The Front”. What about the Pakistani people? “When evil –doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out, “Stop”! When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurablethe cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer”, these lines of Bertolt Brecht, most aptly and graphically sum up the socio-political situation in Pakistan. Just in one month, the country rulers watched the Shia massacre in Quetta twice in one month; the targeted killings of the same sect in Abbas Town in Karachi, and now the planned destruction of the living quarters of poor Christians in Lahore. Nobody takes the blame, because nobody ever does that in Pakistan.
John Steinbeck in his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath” describes a confrontation between a tenant farmer and a tractor driver who had come to level the farmer’s house because he had failed to repay his bank loan. The farmer warns the tractor driver that he would shoot him if he came too close to his house. The driver points out that another man would be sent to demolish his house even if he killed him. The driver tells him, “You are not killing the right guy”. The farmer asks him, “Who gave you the orders then - the president?” “He is not the right guy, either”, the driver tells him. “He got his orders from the bank.” Finally, the driver adds there is no sense in shooting the bank’s president or its agents because they got orders from the East.
“But where does it stop”, the confused farmer said, “I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” The driver said, “May be it is not man at all. May be it is the property that is doing it.” The blame for all the mess in Pakistan is not on the President, or his henchmen, or the army for being inactive, or the judiciary that needs to be bolder; it is the people themselves. They need to learn from their sufferings. In 1994 Radio Mille Collines thundered out these lines, “The grave is only half full. Who will help us fill it?”
Why am I reminded of King Lear so acutely while writing this article on the chaotic situation in Pakistan? This is a play that I read in 1966 as a student. This play is relevant because it graphically depicts the absurdity of life at its best. It is a play that best tells us what happens when love gets withdrawn from the lives of people and strife takes its place. An “imbecile universe” comes into existence as a result of it in which there is no harmony, resilience, charity, justice and empathy, “it becomes impossible to retain any concept of an ordered universe.” A world which gets devoid of distributive justice then resorts to retributive justice and violence. No wonder, individuals in Pakistan have armed themselves , and the powerful have created their own militia in order to administer justice that suits them. In anarchy people cease to think on national level, they become ego-centric.
King Lear is a play of the 20 th and 21 st century because it deals with violence at its worst. It also depicts the filial ingratitude that often gets meted out to the older people. About 44% of old people in India and Pakistan get subjected to the bestial abuse meted out to them by their children and relatives. Old people, like King Lear, once un-accommodated, get reduced to nothingness. “They are no more than a poor, bare, forked animal.” King Lear is also a play that is about coping with hard times and tragedies that visit us. Some resort to rage as a reaction and some to denial, refusing to admit that a mistake had been made; some resort to endless explanations. Very few learn anything from the sufferings that they undergo. Some even begin to put the blame on the malice of gods/fate as a reason of their suffering; some conveniently put the blame on human nature. It is thus a play that also provides us an insight as to why people become callous and cruel and do evil things?
Above all, it is a play that also tells us how absolute rulers, like King Lear, often stay disconnected from the way of life lived by the poor people. Relentless sufferings and humiliations often then make such tyrants empathize with the kind of suffering they had not known about before. Shakespeare uses 57 kinds of animals of prey in order to show what happens when the civilized order of society breaks down and the non-human and brutal order takes its place. Animal instinct begins to overpower the human instinct as says Montaigne. Cruelty to people who are old and weak and helpless gets best manifested through these ferocious animals. In Othello, baser human instinct is depicted by Shakespeare through reptiles preying on each other; In King Lear, the imagery is of more active ferocity, such as that of a wolf, tiger, wild boar, vulture, serpent and sea monster. The vileness of humanity is so great, so unchecked and so universal that if it is not checked, it has the potential to surpass even the wildest animals in their wildness. “The lower animal souls have found a lodgment in humans”. According to G.B. Harrison, “It is as if Shakespeare wanted to portray a world in which most men and women are beasts and only the exceptional few are fully human.” Which country and people would tolerate daily mass killings and would not move an inch? After all, there is something that is terribly wrong with the people. Well, that country is Pakistan. Going to the woods once used to be one of the solutions because woods represented the Garden of Eden. Where should the people of Pakistan go now because even the woods are full of wolves and reptiles in human form.
The question that Pakistan is confronting is not of having democracy or a presidential form of government. The question is of its survival. There is disorder everywhere and of every kind, the kind of chaotic environment that Shakespeare paints in King Lear. As he would put it, once love is withdrawn, life and the universe both move towards chaos and anarchy. The storms, floods, earthquakes show the strife that is appearing everywhere. These musings may sound superstitious in the 21 st century, but the strife and struggle in all forms and at all levels - personal as well national - is manifestly noticeable. The remedy is self-correction. In Lear, there are no half-baked remedies. And also like the Indian movie, “Avtaar”, the punishment for being inhumanly insensitive and selfish is too serious a crime to be condoned through compassion or “Matti Pao” as would say Chaudhry Shujaat. The humiliation and sufferings of the culprits must be total if the salvation, correction or redemption is ever to come. Lear had remained detached and un-connected with the common, poor people all his life. Shakespeare not only makes him taste how it is to be poor, and un-accommodated; he actually painstakingly reduces him to that level. It is then that in that state of total destitution that he learns what poverty is. It is then that he begins to even “pray” for the poor.
The leaders of Pakistan en-bloc are like King Lear in his early autocratic role, completely divorced from what is happening outside in the common peoples’ world. How does a father or mother feel when their young son gets killed in targeted killing; how does a poor man feel when he sells his children for a few morsels of food; how does a sick, poor person feel when he dies a slow and painful death without getting any medical aid; and how do most people feel when electricity or water never reach their quarters. Like Lear, the leaders in Pakistan will never learn and will never have a genuine experience of the above unless they are reduced to that level. When and how that will happen, is not a matter of conjecture. It is a matter of certainty, because “this is the worst”.
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