Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality

7. Mullahs, Sex, and Bureaucrats: Pakistan’s Confrontations with the Modern World

---------------Mullahs , Sex, and Bureaucrats Pakistan's Confrontations with the Modern World Sohail Inayatullah Identity or Identities Pakistan's attempts to enter modernity on its own terms have been fraught with obstacles and contradictions. Caught between East and West by globalization, undone by leakages through the tenuous membrane of national sovereignty (the rise of ethnic nationalism and sectarianism), and yet vulnerable to the reemergence of Islamic and pre-Islamic myths long forgotten, Pakistan remains both traditional and modern. 1 For Pakistanis there is an obvious dissonance between the claims of the West that civilization means Western civilization and Pakistani claims that Pakistan represents the land of the pure, the home of Muslims, with Islam representing the alternative to amoral capitalism and godless communism. The dissonance is even stronger when we Pakistanis confront our own behavior in light of official utterances as to who we are.2 In addition to a grand cynicism-the sense that all dreams will be betrayedthe dissonance between what is said and what is done has created a society where tolerance continues to decline and where the Other is less pure than oneself .3 There is no middle ground; one is either sinner or saint. Inasmuch as most of us occupy space in a continuum, what results is civilizational neurosis. The univocal category "Pakistan" is itself constantly being undone by movements and ethnicities which, like the state, also lay claim to the mantle of One God, One People, One State-the Mohajirs and Pukhtoons, to mention but two such that have a vision different from the current Punjabi statist formulation.4 Moreover , as in Iran, where the populace rejected Western technocratic elites and 122 Sohail Inayatullah their claim for a secular Iran,s Pakistan's future hangs perilously between authoritarian mullahist nominations of social reality (only real Muslims should rule and live in Pakistan) and the accommodationist views of leaders such as Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Shariff, who are far more concerned with bourgeois revolutions, even as they use the language ofIslam to bolster themselves, to assure citizens that they are not selling their souls to the devils of the West or the militaristic polytheists of the East-the Other of Pakistan: India. National.sovereignty for Pakistanis is thus increasingly problematic in a world ofCNN and Star TV, the diasporic Pakistani community, Pukhtoons traveling in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Pakistan's own efforts to destabilize India through intervention in Kashmir, and India's similar efforts in Karachi. Only the "enemy" of India holds Pakistan together, with the worstcase scenario for the Pakistani that offriendship with India. Friendship with India would lead to the final battle of sectarianism, with each subgroup of Islam calling the other Kafir, nonbeliever. Already certain Sunni groups in Lahore have declared that they will not allow the Shia to worship Muharram (the ten days of mourning for the tragic events of Karbala, where in the seventh century the problem ofthe appropriate succession ofthe Prophet was violently "resolved ").6 The Pakistan police force can do nothing but .watch the militarization and criminalization of various Muslim groups as well as political parties. This realpolitik frame stands in contrast to the original vision of Pakistan as the land of the pure, the homeland of Muslims. Perfection and Despotism Pakistan wants to escape traditional feudalistic society yet recover the utopia of original Islam. The search for perfection and its unattainability constitute, of course, the central problem of Islamic political theory. Classical Islamic theory is a search for the khalifa, the "righteous" representation ofGod; the Shia approach is the search for the perfect representative ofGod, the Mahdi. Western political theorists such as Hobbes and Montesquieu assumed that since we are all sinners, safeguards to the accumulation of power needed to be built into governance structures-the federalist political deSign. But Islamic civilization , Muslims believe, did have a perfect leader (a perfect representation of the laws of God) and a perfect constitution (the Medina constitution) and state. With the decline and breakdown of Islam, the structure ofone-person rule remained even as rulers could no longer match the wisdom of the Prophet's successors . The community was no longer voluntary but based on coercion, on trying to restrain dynastic, ethnic, and personal histories. Faced with the break- 123 Mullahs, Sex, and Bureaucrats down of unity in the Islamic empire, Muslims opted for authoritarian and often brutal leaders. The choice was chaos or authoritarian leadership, with...