Lessons
From The Lal Masjid Tragedy
By Robert Jensen
12 July, 2007
Counterpunch
Islamabad, Pakistan.
For my first three days in
Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a
reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound. I had
landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government
forces would eventually storm the mosque and the attached women's seminary
to end the confrontation with fundamentalist clerics and their supporters.
The final assault was finally
unleashed as two companions and I drove to Lahore as part of a lecture
tour. During several hours of intense discussion in the car, they gave
me background and details that explained the real tragedy of the conflict.
When the news of the final
assault came via cell phone we all fell silent, and we all quietly cried
-- for those killed and for opportunities lost, out of our grief and
from our fear.
In the Western news media
and even much of the Pakistani press, the story was framed as crazed
radical Islamist forces challenging relatively restrained government
forces. Indeed, the two brothers who ran the mosque preached an interpretation
of Islam that was mostly reactionary and sometimes violent. None of
us in the car -- two Muslims and one Christian, all progressive in theological
and political thought -- supported such views.
But there was more to the
story. Farid Esack, one of the world's foremost progressive Muslim theologians
who was in Pakistan to teach and lecture, and Junaid Ahmad, a Pakistani-American
activist and law student directing the lecture series, both pointed
out that key social/economic aspects of the story were being overlooked.
In addition to calls for
shariah law under a fundamentalist Islamic state, Lal Masjid imams Abdur
Rashid Ghazi and Mohammed Abdul Aziz critiqued the corruption of Pakistani
political, military and economic elites, highlighting the living conditions
of the millions of Pakistanis living in poverty. As in most Third-World
societies, the inequality gap here has widened in recent years, as those
who find their place in the U.S.-dominated neoliberal economic project
prosper while most ordinary people suffer, especially the poor.
"We can reject the jihadist
and patriarchal aspects and still recognize that there is in this fundamentalist
philosophy a call for social justice, a challenge to the power-seeking
and greed of elites," said Esack, the author of Qur'an: Liberation
and Pluralism. "When I spoke with Ghazi, it was clear that was
an important part of his thinking, and it's equally clear that the appeal
of this theology is magnified by the lack of meaningful calls for justice
from other sectors of society."
Esack, who teaches at Harvard
Divinity School and is a former national commissioner for gender equality
in South Africa, had been visiting the mosque regularly and speaking
to Ghazi and others inside until government forces sealed the area a
few days earlier. A native of South Africa who was active in the struggle
against apartheid, Esack spent much of his childhood in Pakistan at
a madarasa, where he was a classmate of Aziz. Contrary to the media
image of Ghazi, the cleric had a broader agenda and wanted to learn
more about how an Islamic state could be structured to ensure economic
equality, Esack said.
"My vision of an inclusive
polity influenced by progressive Islamic values is very different than
Ghazi's, of course, but his theology should not be reduced to a caricature,
as it so often was, especially in the West," Esack said.
Ahmad emphasized that another
crucial part of the story involved economics, specifically land. Press
reports focused on the provocative activities of students and supporters
of Lal Masjid members threatening video store owners, raiding brothels
and clashing with police, but an underlying cause of the conflict was
the existence of "unauthorized" mosques. Many of these mosques
and madrasas had been built without permits on unused public land in
Islamabad. As the city has grown more crowded and developers eyed that
real estate for commercial building, the government took the risky step
of destroying some of those mosques (though the many non-religious,
profit-generating projects also built without permits remain undisturbed).
Clerics protested, adding to the intensity of the Lal Masjid conflict.
Esack and Ahmad agreed that
another aspect of the crisis mostly ignored in the press was the fact
that the events played out in Islamabad, home to the more secular/liberal
and privileged elements of the society. While those liberals might ignore
such movements and conflicts in the outer provinces, many found it offensive
that such an embarrassing incident could happen in the capital, where
the world eventually would pay attention.
"We hear about how this
is bad for the image of Pakistan, with no comment about the lives of
ordinary Pakistanis and the substance of what the country is about,"
Ahmad said. "Instead of talking about these fundamental questions
of justice, many people wanted to see the incident ended to avoid further
tarnishing of the country's image. It's like the obsession the United
States has with simply changing its image in the Muslim world rather
than recognizing the injustice of its policies."
In the construction of that
image, the stories of the reality of the lives of people at Lal Masjid
are typically untold. As the crisis unfolded and some of the madrasa
students left the compound, the government gave them some money and
told them to go home.
"The problem is, many
had no homes to go to," Ahmad said. "Whatever the reactionary
theology of Lal Masjid, it provided a place for many who were dispossessed
or from poor families. If the economy ignores people and the state provides
nothing, where will they go?"
My trip to Pakistan had been
set months in advance; my presence there during this crisis was coincidence.
Throughout my stay, as I listened to the discussion about the conflict,
I realized how much less I could have understood the events if I had
been in the United States, even though I would have been reading the
international press on the web. The complexity of such stories so rarely
makes it into print, and the humanity of the people demonized drops
out all too easily.
As we drove in silence, I
thought of how easy it is from positions of safety and comfort to denounce
fundamentalism, how often I have done just that. But who are we targeting
when we make such statements? I have no trouble denouncing the bin Ladens
and al-Zawahiris, or the Bushs and Robertsons, and critiquing their
twisted worldview. But what of the ordinary people struggling against
the elites who ignore the cries of the suffering? When those people
take up a fundamentalist theology that we Western left/progressives
reject, must we not highlight the inequality we also say we oppose?
Esack said some have asked
him what he hoped to gain by going to Lal Masjid and talking with someone
like Ghazi, but he has no doubts about the value and appropriateness
of his visits there.
"When we abandon engagement
and dialogue with those who hold these beliefs, we are abandoning hope.
My goal is not to wall myself off from other Muslims, but to search
for authentic connections, even across these gaps. Is that not how we
can heal the world, and ourselves?" he said. "It is precisely
when we start to think of some of us as 'chosen' and others as 'frozen'
that we happily become willing to defrost them with our bombs."
That moment in the car, as
we absorbed the news that the troops had cleared the mosque and that
Ghazi and dozens of others were dead, I felt angry at people like Ghazi
and at the same time a deep sorrow for his death. I felt a much deeper
rage at Pakistan's military president, Pervez Musharraf, and the U.S.
leaders who support him. And I felt a kind of fear for the Muslim fundamentalism
that unleashes such violent forces, which always reminds me of the equally
frightening Christian fundamentalist theology circulating in the United
States.
I bounced between a deep
sense of despair and an equally deep sense of hope. Once the confrontation
was set in motion, perhaps the people inside the mosque and the soldiers
killed were doomed. But in the car in that moment, I could feel hope
that the work of people like Esack and Ahmad was setting in motion other
forces. Mostly I was grateful to be in their company to share the grief.
In such moments, that connection is perhaps the most human and the most
hopeful of endeavors.
Robert Jensen
is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a
member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He
is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege
and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can
be reached at [email protected].
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