Pakistan Reinterpreted - 1
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
At a time when Pakistan’s rivers are drying up, the rains flood the villages and the drought kills the crops, when the population seems beyond control and resources cannot match up to it, when violence and conflict stalk the land and its neighbors appear hostile, the calm, scholarly and reasonable voice of S.M. Zafar, one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, through his book History of Pakistan Reinterpreted, serves as an edifying palliative. (I have had the honor of writing the Introduction to the book.) We should be grateful for it. It allows us to step back and view the history of Pakistan and its people objectively yet with empathy.
For a nation that is nuclear and has a population of over 200 million people, Pakistan is not well served by the infrequent and often slanted books written about it. Too many titles breathlessly convey the impression of catastrophe waiting around the corner: From Crisis to Crisis: Pakistan 1962-1969 by Herbert Feldman; Pakistan: A Crisis in the Renaissance of Islam by Ejaz Ahmad Faruqi; Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett-Jones, and Pakistan: A Hard Country by AnatolLieven. There is also Armageddon in Pakistan: The Crisis of a Failed Feudal Economy by Khan. There is more to Pakistan than crisis and gloom and doom.
It is therefore a matter of some relief to come across Mr Zafar’s History of Pakistan Reinterpreted. Mr Zafar has been near or at the center of Pakistan politics for the last half century as one of Pakistan’s most prominent lawyers and a noted public intellectual and author. He has been a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, federal minister of parliamentary affairs, president of the High Court and Supreme Court Bar Association, chancellor of Hamdard University, and has a doctorate in philosophy in law from the University of Punjab. He has also been awarded the Nishan-i-Imtiaz. Not only is Mr Zafar a distinguished lawyer himself, but in his family he has produced at least two generations of lawyers: both his son and grandson are lawyers–his grandson is currently doing a course in law at George Washington University. The women of the family are equally active and prominent. Roshaneh, who founded and is head of Kashf, ably assisted her father Mr Zafar on this book project.
Mr Zafar’s History of Pakistan Reinterpreted brings a historical perspective in his commentary on the nation. This is a labor of love. While he is critical of Pakistan’s blemishes and does not spare those he blames for its predicament, he is nonetheless able to provide us a steady picture that allows us to see the many features that add to the strength of Pakistani society and help explain how it survives. It gives hope in spite of the predictions and prognosis of “crisis.”
The book is divided into three parts-constitutional, political, and social-and its 28 chapters systematically take us on a journey through the politics of Pakistan as we learn a great deal about its society. The chapters deal chronologically with the emergence of the Pakistan movement, various political personalities and governments of Pakistan and also cover a vast array of subjects including Baluchistan, Kashmir, bureaucracy, terrorism, and culture. I would like to point out some of the critically important arguments presented in the book.
This book may be read on two levels. First, it is a straightforward history of Pakistan and the Pakistan movement that takes in the entire sweep of its history from the time the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. In this way Mr Zafar places Mr M.A. Jinnah’s heroic struggle in leading the Pakistan movement to the creation of Pakistan in the context of a larger Muslim awakening in the Subcontinent. He depersonalizes the Pakistan movement which is against the trend of most Pakistani authors.
Secondly, and perhaps most important in terms of contributing to political theory and international relations discussions, is Mr Zafar’s analysis of democracy in the first chapter. While acknowledging the great benefits and value of democracy, and going back to Athens in discussing the Greeks including Plato, he explains that the notion of equality which we associate with democracy was contributed to Europe by an unexpected source: Muslim Spain. He links the concept of equality to the thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau who introduced the idea into European thinking. Indeed, the French notion of liberty, equality, fraternity takes at least this particular concept from the world of Islam.
Another important contribution that Mr Zafar makes to the discussion on democracy is the idea that democracy per se, that is majority rule, does not guarantee rights to individuals or their safety. Indeed, he points to the tyranny of the majority in any democracy, which can then negate the very fundamentals of the principles of democracy. It was precisely to fight against this tyranny that Mr Jinnah redefined the Muslim minority in India as a nation and thereby went on to create the state of Pakistan in spite of the enormous opposition and challenges he faced.
It is worth reminding ourselves that not all of the Muslims of India migrated to the new country of Pakistan in 1947. Those that remained in India now number almost 200 million people, which is larger than the largest European nation. They have their history, their culture, and their numbers, and yet because they are living in a democracy and are a perpetual minority suppressed by the majority they are reduced to a cipher in Indian politics. Muslims are grossly underrepresented in terms of their population in the services, the army, etc. There are horrific reports of lynching, murders, stabbings, and rapes involving the minority while the majority with its instruments of the security forces, the police, and government just looks away. Who can forget the prime minister Mr Narendra Modi’s callous reply when he was asked whether he felt sorry for the genocide of Muslims on his watch as chief minister in Gujarat: “Any person, if we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”
Mr Zafar does not conceal his admiration of Mr Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam: “the greatest achievement of Quaid-i-Azam was that he successfully created confidence in the Muslim masses of India that they were not a minority but a nation. He brought the Muslims from ‘minority syndrome’ to equality when he said that they are not two parties but a third party, the Muslim League, to decide the fate of British India.”
I find Mr Zafar’s discussion of democracy and the majority-minority relationship within it particularly interesting. He points out, adapting a statement by the scholar Paul Woodruff, “the supporters of democracy must remember that democracy is a dream which ancients did not realize nor have we (modern democracy included). Duty of each generation is not to give up the dream of democracy on account of its failure, instead to keep the dream alive.”
The author also points out the misperceptions about democracy and the high expectations people have of it: “voting itself is not democracy. Even in modern states where system is democratic question to be asked is ‘how much power the people really have over what they will vote about?’ This gets to the crux of the key question of majority-minority relations, as the tyranny of the majority is clearly one of the dangers of democracy. This is something that those leading the Pakistan movement in India in the 1930s and 1940s understood all too well.” As Mr Zafar writes, “majority rule if not made subject to rule of law, becomes tyrannical. Constitution or the rules of parliament control a majority from totally ignoring the minority.”
(The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC)
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