Abstract
Because of the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims, religious rites in Pakistan are often conducted under strict security. Here a police officer stands guard as Sunnis offer Friday prayers in Rawalpindi.
Abdul Qudoos, whom I met in the cellar of a qehwa-shop in Peshawar, was unlike the stereotype of a hardened Afghan warrior. No blood in the eyes, no wavy beard–only a stiff mustache.
He was nine years old when his family fled to Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Like most Afghan refugee boys, Abdul Qudoos was educated and trained in guerrilla warfare at a religious seminary, or madrisa. Four years later, he was back in his native country, fighting the communists.
“For five years I was part of the jihad. And when it was over and the civil war started, my father advised me not to use my arms against my erstwhile brothers-in-arms. So I returned to Pakistan,” he said, as he puffed on his cigarette.
“But I don't know any other way of life. Martyrdom is the goal of my life. You die, anyway. It's better to be killed fighting in the way of Allah than to shrink yourself to death in bed,” he said, explaining his decision to go to Kashmir and become a “freedom fighter” against Indian troops.
Abdul Qudoos belonged to one of the many jihadi networks that evolved during the Afghan war, fighting with the political, financial, and military support of the United States, whose objective of bringing down the “Evil Empire” was duly achieved. But the struggle left behind an entire generation of men whose sole aim in life is to fight until “the final victory of Islam”–Islam as they understand it–is achieved.
Sunni v. Shia
In the mid-1980s, I was a teenager. My family lived in a house with a Sunni meeting place for yearly Eid prayers on one side, and a Shia imambargah, or mosque, on the other. This was in a small town in southern Punjab, the region where the flames of sectarianism first flared in Pakistan.
It was Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, when some friends of mine who belonged to the Sunni sect knocked excitedly at the door. They were taking a time out in the middle of their attack on the Shia imambargah, and they wanted to take a breather at our place. The mosque, a shabby building, was in flames.
The Islamic year, which follows a lunar calendar, does not start on a fixed date of the Western calendar. (This year, it started on April 18.) The first 10 days are associated with the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He, along with 71 of his family members and friends, was killed in Karbala, Iraq, in 680. Although these 10 days are an equally somber and sorrowful occasion for Sunni Muslims, the Shias mourn with a particularly fervent religiosity.
“What are you doing?” I asked one of my friends, whom I had known all my life. “Shias are kafir (infidels),” he said, and he went on to tell how, during one of the Muharram sermons, a Shia speaker had said some nasty things about some of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. This had provoked them to take drastic steps. “Fighting against Shias is jihad,” he said quoting a famous Sunni extremist.
These friends were not the only visitors we received in our house that day. Two of my school pals–Shia brothers–also arrived to take refuge after escaping the fiery onslaught and struggling unsuccessfully to put out the fire. As soon as they entered the house, the Sunni contingent left, carrying bottles of kerosene to add to the dying flames.
Things were never the same again in my neighborhood. Elsewhere in the country, the centuries old Shia-Sunni conflict also took a violent turn. In the last 10 years, more than 2,000 people have been gunned down in targeted killings, massacres at mosques, and ambushes. Tensions run high throughout the year, but especially during the first 10 days of every Islamic year, when military contingents patrol sensitive areas and stand guard at almost all Shia imambargahs. All Shia religious rites must be conducted under strict security.
Schooled to kill
Sunni political parties have been around since the days of British colonialism, but Sipahe Sahaba, the first openly anti-Shia sectarian group, emerged in Pakistan only in the mid-1980s. It is an offshoot of the JUI (Jamiat-e-Ulemay Islam), the main party of the Deobandi Sunni Muslims–the sect to which the Afghan Taliban also belong. This school of thought is named after the town in India where a madrisa was established to counter the effects of the modernization that colonization brought to the subcontinent. The Deobandis are puritan in outlook, oppose the use of reason to introduce innovations (ijtehad) in Shariah (Islamic law), and do not believe Shias should be allowed to participate in politics.
The JUI is a non-militant, religio-political party that now has many splinter groups, including Sipahe Sahaba. But even Sipahe Sahaba is not the most fanatic of the Sunni groups. A more violent faction is the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, named for a Sunni extremist killed by Shia militants in 1989.
Pakistan has Shia political parties as well, and a militant outfit, Sipahe Muhammad, which is the Shia rival to the Sunni's Sipahe Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Both sides kill in the name of jihad and both draw their strength from the madrisas they run. Madrisas, an Islamic tradition, are schools usually housed in a mosque. Children go there to learn Quranic text and basic Arabic. Some are day students; others may live at the madrisa while they study to become religious scholars of one school of Islamic thought or the other.
Because of their involvement in the Afghan war, many madrisas have become hatcheries for sectarian zealots and “freedom fighters.” Today, most of the Sunni madrisas are run by political parties. Their sources of funding include government grants and contributions from individual philanthropists or from the Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. Iran has been one of the major sources of support for Shia madrisas.
Between Iran and Afghanistan
Syed Taqi Naqvi, vice-president of Tehrik-i-Jafaria, a Shia political party, blames the United States for the rise in sectarian terrorism, because, he says, the United States supported the military regime of Gen. Ziaul Haq and Afghan Sunni groups as part of its effort to counter the Iranian revolution.
Although Naqvi's remarks sound like the usual anti-American rhetoric Iranian-backed groups invariably use, they contain an element of truth. Still, it takes two to tango, and Iran's eagerness to export its radical Shiite Islam in the early days of the revolution was another factor that contributed to the rise in violence between Shia and Sunni extremists in Pakistan.
Doctrinal differences arising from the question of the succession to the Prophet are the basis of the original split between Shias and Sunnis. But despite their doctrinal disagreements, the two sects co-existed peacefully on the subcontinent for centuries. Even after Pakistan was founded on the basis of Muslim religious identity 52 years ago, the two sects had relatively trouble-free relations. But two events in the late 1970s changed everything: the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Students at a religious school in Peshawar, Pakistan, raise their hands when asked who is ready to fight in a jihad against Israel.
Many of the organizations that operate in and from Pakistan pursue the romantic Islamic cause of jihad–a concept that is often translated as “holy war.” According to Islamic principles, armed struggle (jihad bis saif) is secondary to the struggle against the evil within oneself (jihad bin nafs). A holy war can be declared only by a “khalifah” (caliph). But the original Islamic teachings have been distorted to justify the existence and actions of jihadi organizations. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (spelled Taiba in U.S. State Department reports on terrorism); Harkatul Ansar (renamed the Harkatul Mujahideen, or HUM); Al-Faran, responsible for kidnapping and killing four Westerners a few years ago in Indian Kashmir; and Tanzeem Al-Akhwan are among the better known of these groups.
The rise of these jihadi groups and the subsequent sectarian terrorism in Pakistan is not more than 15 years old. In fact, it is one of the most pernicious byproducts of the Afghan war.
Pakistanis, as well as Muslim youth from other parts of the world, were attracted to the conflict in Afghanistan by religious appeals. Pakistan, which was then ruled by Gen. Ziaul Haq, was also a channel for the arms and money the United States and its allies provided for the Afghan struggle against the Soviet army. New mujahideen were recruited by Arab-Afghan “NGOs,” which were established with contributions from Muslim countries assisting in the anti-communist jihad. In the 1980s, an entire generation of Afghan refugees was indoctrinated in the madrisas with the virtues of jihad.
The struggle also made it possible for once-isolated local Islamic fundamentalist groups to form international networks and begin operating across national boundaries.
After the Soviet withdrawal, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, and U.S. arms and money dried up. The mujahideen militias started their own civil war to take control of Afghanistan–the largest opium-producing region in the world. But many of the mujahideen were averse to the idea of fighting against their onetime brothers-in-arms; they looked for other places where they could practice what they had been raised and trained to do–fight battles.
Considering the use the United States made of the mujahideen, it is hard to ignore the irony in official U.S. documents about “Islamic terrorists.” For example, the 1998 State Department report on terrorism, released last April, once again raised the specter of radical Islam. The report listed seven states as “sponsoring” international terrorism. Five of the seven were Muslim states. Although Pakistan escaped the designation of “rogue state,” it was nonetheless blamed because many terrorist organizations were believed to operate from its territory. Afghanistan, under fire for sheltering Osama bin Laden, was also not on the rogue list, but only because the United States does not recognize the Taliban government.
The report recounted threats posed to American interests and its citizens worldwide, especially by Islamic extremist groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It identifies a number of terrorist organizations who have vowed to target American citizens in retaliation for last year's cruise missile attacks against bin Laden's alleged training camp in Afghanistan.
Who is the enemy?
The fears of people in the United States, and in the West in general, are not entirely unfounded. From the hostage crisis in Iran to the bombing last year of U.S. missions in East Africa, Islamic extremists have often chosen American targets.
Then, too, Islamist ideologues as well as Western scholars tend to present movements of Muslim revivalism, which seek to regain the lost glory of Islam by reverting to fundamentals of the religion, as a homogenous, unidirectional “popular mood,” or an antiWestern cultural wave. In their zeal to construct a radical Islam paradigm, however, they fail to take into account the variations within Islamic tradition.
Pakistan, August 28, 1998: Taliban supporters demonstrate against the U.S. attack on an alleged terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
Their misrepresentations of reality have led to grand theories on the clash of civilizations (Oriental Islam v. Judeo-Christianity) that overlook the irreconcilable differences within the various sub-identities in Muslim countries. Islamic extremists are not primarily a threat to the United States, nor has the United States been their only victim. In fact, they have done far more damage to their own Muslim communities than to anyone else.
During the Lebanese civil war (from 1975 to 1989), more Muslims were killed by Muslims than were killed by the Christian militias or by Israeli forces. During the same period, more Shia Muslims lost their lives in combat with other Shia groups than in fighting against the Sunni, Druze, or Christian factions. Between 1990 and 1993, Afghanis slaughtered almost twice as many of their own compatriots as were killed during the 10-year-long jihad against the Soviet Red Army. Even with the success of the Taliban, the carnage of Muslims at the hands of their co-religionists continues without respite. The main victims of the wrath of Algerian fundamentalists are, of course, other Algerian Muslims. And the same 1998 State Department report mentioned earlier notes the upsurge in the Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Pakistan.
The example of Pakistan is instructive in understanding the interplay of domestic and regional political interests with the changes in the international system. Violence may have emerged in the name of religion, but it has little to do with notions of a resurgent Islam.
The United States became a target for a number of reasons. Many Arab groups and their patrons in Pakistan, especially the military intelligence agencies, who had fought in Afghanistan were disillusioned by America's sudden disengagement and by its pro-Israel policies in the Middle East. The arrival of American troops in Saudi Arabia further fueled anti-U.S. sentiments.
Many participants of the Afghan jihad were convinced that their victory over the Soviet Union was a modern day miracle. “One down, the other to go” became a popular slogan. The networks established during the Soviet-Afghan war were still in place and still functioning. The idea of taking on another superpower after wearing down Russia gave a new direction to their fury.
Other holy wars were also not hard to find. It is not by mere chance that the Muslim insurgency in Kashmir gained momentum in 1989–immediately after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. Remnants of the Afghan war could also be seen at work in Chechnya.
A proxy war
Running parallel to the developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the Iranian revolution, which evoked a strong reaction throughout the Muslim world. The spillover effect of the Shia revolution worried many ruling regimes in the Arab world as well as in Pakistan, where the military junta of Gen. Ziaul Haq was trying to achieve legitimacy by resorting to Islamic slogans of another kind. The Pakistani state was courting fundamentalist parties like the Jamaat-i-Islami and favored the puritan Sunni sect, the Deobandi. At the same time, revolutionary Iran was supporting Pakistani Shias. It was political jockeying, not religious differences, that led to bloody confrontation.
As was the case with the Afghani mujahideen, the madrisas served as breeding grounds for the sectarian organizations. Money poured in from Arab countries eager to counter the radical Shia Islam sponsored by Iran's revolutionary regime. In the process, Pakistan became the battlefield in an intra-Islam proxy war.
It was during this period that Shia and Sunni madrisas mushroomed across the country and became militarized. According to official statistics, around 900 religious seminaries of different schools of Islamic thought had been established between 1947 and 1975. But in the last two decades 2,000 new madrisas have been set up, most during the Afghan war. The province of Punjab alone has more than 2,500 madrisas. The sectarian conflict now has a dynamic of its own, and even the original sponsors of these groups exercise little control over their activities.
Enlisting the poor
There is an unmistakable class dimension to jihadi Islam. Although the madrisas are established and controlled by wealthy ideologues, the bulk of those who join the militant organizations are poor or lower middle class. Apart from whatever spiritual satisfaction they gain from fighting for the cause, the more marginalized members of society, especially in rural areas and small towns, are attracted by the sense of empowerment that comes along with guns and a modicum of money.
The majority of madrisa students are poor. Most of them fail to make it into mainstream educational institutions and they are not equipped for other work. Either preaching the version of Islam they were versed in or fighting the “infidels” (even if those infidels are Muslims of another type) is the only vocation they know. In addition to the stipends they receive from their organizations, wielding a gun and belonging to a militant group gives them at least nuisance value in communities that would otherwise treat them as indigents.
It is because of these incentives that intra-Islamic battlelines in Pakistan have gone beyond the well-known Shia-Sunni divide; now sub-sects of Sunni Islam are also pitched against one another in many areas of the country.
Sunni Brelvis, rivals of the Deobandis, are rooted in the mystic traditions of the land. Yet over the last few years they too have developed armed groups and some of their madrisas have begun to train pupils in the art of using guns. Turf wars to gain control of mosques with disputed ownership are common among these two varieties of Sunnis.
Sectarian hostilities are apparent on the regional level as well. The Taliban massacred Shias in Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998, in retaliation for the mass killing of Taliban troops during an early unsuccessful attempt to capture that key town. The Taliban also murdered about a dozen Iranians, most of them embassy staff, during their victory march.
Last year, Iran conducted its largest military exercise ever on the Afghan border. A war with the Taliban was imminent until a U.N. special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, stepped in to defuse tensions.
The influence of the Taliban has grown in the Pashtun tribal belt of Pakistan. Under pressure from the Taliban, the Pakistani government has recently promulgated Shariah laws in two sections of the province. Religious zealots in rural areas of the province and in some parts of Baluchistan frequently enter other people's houses and shops to smash televisions, audio-video players, tapes, and satellite dishes.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's policy on religious strife is ambivalent, if not confusing. On the one hand, the government campaigns to enforce countrywide Shariah laws. But in the same breath, it tries to appease the international community by explaining that its Shariah laws are not like those of the Taliban. Simultaneously, the prime minister often tells the public that the Saudi system of justice is closest to his heart.
Sectarianism is condemned at the highest level, yet the state machinery fails to tackle the terrorists head on. There are special anti-terrorism courts, but many police officers and judges pressing sectarian cases have been murdered. Few cases are decided; most murder cases are settled by tit-for-tat ambushes. In many instances, crime and sectarianism are indistinguishable.
Islam distorted
There are more than two dozen religious political parties and militant organizations in Pakistan. Yet their combined strength in parliament rarely reaches double digits. Clearly, the notion that the majority of the public supports radical Islam is a fallacy. Still, the politics of religion has mired the country, and indeed the entire region, in a seemingly interminable spiral of violence. Devoid of any intellectual input or coherent political manifesto, these militant movements do not represent a spontaneous response of the Muslim masses to either Western modernity or to social injustice at home.
The United States must bear some of the responsibility for nurturing and indirectly promoting jihadi Islam in pursuit of its Cold War interests. And despite its allegiance to democracy, the United States supported a military dictator in Pakistan whose regime was instrumental in transforming peaceful movements of Islamic revivalism into violent outfits for its own short-term goals.
The genial, humane face of Islam has been distorted into a monstrous figure. Militant Islamists may not be able to take over the world by destroying the United States and Western civilization, but they are playing havoc with Pakistani society and the surrounding region.