Is Pakistan unusual?

IS Pakistan different from Muslim-majority countries in the world? In some ways, certainly, but in others not. While religious violence is higher, it shares some striking similarities with other Muslim countries.

Turkish author Ahmet Kuru helps place Pakistan within a broader context of authoritarianism, underdevelopment, and ongoing conflicts in Muslim countries. Kuru is a professor of political science at San Diego State University and director of the Center for Islamic and Arab Studies. Much of what follows is derived from his award-winning book, Islam, Authoritarianism and Underdevelopment: A Historical and Global Comparison. The rest comes from my public conversation with him this week over Zoom before an audience in Islamabad.

Countries where Muslims are the majority, Kuru says, have significantly higher levels of violence than others. The statistics tell a compelling story: two-thirds (eight of 12) of the protagonists in recent wars, and two-fifths of the sides in relatively minor conflicts (24 of 60) were Muslim-majority Muslim states or groups. These rates are disproportionate because Muslims make up only a quarter of the world’s population and Muslim-majority countries make up only a quarter of the world’s countries.

This thesis is reinforced by the case of Pakistan. A constant and unchanging component of its national life is violence among Muslims. Last week, on the 12th day of Rabi-ul-Awwal, more than 60 Muslims in Mastung and Hangu met a bloody end when they were suicide bombed by other Muslims. These ecstatic followers of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) were celebrating his birth, a centuries-old tradition. But his murderers, no less pious, belonged to a sect that condemns such expressions of joy as irreligious.

While particularly grotesque incidents sometimes make it to the press, news of other brutalities usually does not. Non-Muslims are considerably worse off than Muslims. In August, angry mobs led by the TLP burned down 21 churches in Jaranwala. Ahmadi temples and places of worship are systematically desecrated with impunity.

Author Ahmet Kuru’s research reveals that many Muslim countries share Pakistan’s problems.

Kuru’s other statistical data covers 48 Muslim-majority countries. You can see where Pakistan fits in. On average, Muslim countries have lower GNP per capita, lower literacy rates, fewer years of schooling, fewer examples of functional democracy, authoritarian leadership is more common, corruption rates are higher, and taxes are higher. The GDP/GDP ratio is lower. This last fact means that governments obtain their income mainly from income, that is, from the exploitation of some natural resource such as oil or geographic location. A smaller industrial base means lower value-added production. No Muslim country produces high-level technology.

What explains these negative characteristics? Kuru rejects suggestions that Islam is the cause, considering it essentialist and not supported by evidence. In fact, violence is a general human problem and for the last two centuries Western powers, not Muslim countries, have imposed their military domination over the world. As for underdevelopment, no one could have alleged it during the Islamic Golden Age. From the 9th to the 13th century (a period of approximately 400 years), Muslim civilization from Baghdad to Spain shone with enlightenment and learning.

The causes of Muslim decline have long been debated. The Mongol invasions and the advent of European colonialism in the 18th century remain popular explanations. While Kuru admits the importance of it, he maintains that the real reason lies elsewhere.

The Islamic Golden Age owed its vitality largely to independent scholars and Arab traders who traveled the world in search of trade and brought back new ideas. The broad-minded caliphs of that era welcomed such individuals into their courts. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars filled the royal courts.

But around the 11th century, rulers and usurpers discovered the usefulness of clergy in providing legitimacy to their government. An ulema-state alliance emerged, which greatly strengthened the ulema. The number of clerics surrounding the caliph skyrocketed, but the number of independent merchants and scholars decreased. By the 12th century, the clerics were firmly in power.

The impact on Muslim society was catastrophic. As an example, in Turkey, influential ulama denounced the printing press, invented by Gutenberg in 1436, as the devil’s machine. It was finally deemed Sharia compliant in 1727, a whopping 293 years later! Consequently, while the literacy rate in Europe in the 19th century was around 31 percent, in the Ottoman Empire it was a pitiful 1 percent. Clerical resistance also set banking back some three centuries. The first bank in a Muslim country was the Ottoman Imperial Bank (1856), followed by the Egyptian Arab Land Bank (1880).

Kuru insists that the ulema-state alliance is neither an essential part of the Quran and hadith nor a permanent feature of Islamic history. He may be right: Indonesia’s largest Muslim political party, the Nahdlatul Ulama, with some 40 million members, has a manifesto that promises to defend pluralistic and democratic values ​​and seeks to “curb radicalism, extremism and terrorism.”

The ulema-state alliance exists in its crudest form in Pakistan. Beginning in the 1980s, Pakistan’s generals and clerics became symbiotically linked through the Afghan and Kashmir jihads. The Madressahs became jihad factories that successfully ousted the Soviets and eventually installed the Taliban in Kabul. But this alliance devastated Pakistani society. The 2007 Lal Masjid uprising turned Islamabad into a war zone that left hundreds dead. It showed how powerless the state had become in the face of the forces it had nurtured.

That helplessness is also evident today. Even in heavily policed ​​Islamabad, every two out of three mosques and madrassas are built on encroached land. The civic authorities are helpless in the face of this anarchy, unable to demolish the hastily built structures. The government’s attempts to have equal prayer time for all mosques in Islamabad have also failed. Madressah reform is dead. On the other hand, now that the Single National Curriculum is being imposed, regular schools have become something like madrasas.

Religious fanaticism, like any deadly infectious disease, spreads when those in power deliberately use faith to further their political ambitions. Pakistani politicians freely indulge crazy clerics and their hate-filled rants. Among others, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan benefited from this strategy, but the cost was borne by society. Consequently, more and more people in Pakistan are willing to lynch first and ask questions later. Even our friends fear us.

The writer is a physicist and writer based in Islamabad.

Published in Amanecer, October 7, 2023.