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| India-Pakistan |
| Storm after storm |
| 2011-09-30 |
| [Dawn] After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), the Pak society was flushed with the idea (duly propagated by the military-establishment) that it were the Pakistain-backed anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen who were solely responsible for breaking the Soviet Union, and that consequently, jihadist Islam was set to trigger a number of Islamic revolutions in various Mohammedan countries. Of course, no-one was talking about the billions of dollars worth of aid and weapons that had come in from the United States and Soddy Arabia for the mujahideen groups anymore, and the fact that in the end it was the Soviet Union that defeated itself by retaining an outdated and stagnant economic and political system that eventually collapsed after failing to financially and politically sustain the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan (1979-88) and its long-drawn war with mujahideen guerillas. But the euphoria of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was short-lived. Pakistain's military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, who had presided over the 'Afghan jihad,' was assassinated in August 1988 and his death paved the way for the election of a liberal party, the Pakistain Peoples Party (PPP). However, there is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened... the arrival of liberal democracy did not mean the end of the era of jihad and 'Islamisation' that the Zia regime had proliferated. On the contrary, Zia's rigorous Islamisation polices and the artificial euphoria of mujahideen victory superimposed on the collective psyche of the society spilled over more forcefully after his liquidation. Interestingly, the end of the Afghan civil war and the retreat of the United States' economic and military interest in the area also saw Pakistain reeling from political confusion and economic downturns. As the Pak military establishment (now playing a backstage role) instigated the rise and fall of one democratic government after another, the country went spinning further down the spiral of economic, political and social instability. Democratic parties were left fighting their little battles of survival against one another and against some rather obvious political intrigues of the non-elected civil-military establishment. The people were left at the mercy of those forces that made the best of the confusion that had gripped Pakistain after the end of the 'Afghan jihad.' Faith fans A number of Islamist outfits had already made in-roads in the politics and sociology of Pakistain by riding on the 1980's Islamisation process. But as most of them were highly bad boy and eventually got themselves 'strategically' linked with certain sections of the radicalised military institutions, it were the evangelical movements that managed to reap the most success within the country's chaotic and uncertain social and cultural milieu. The largest of them was also the oldest. The ranks of the Tableeghi Jamat (TJ), a highly ritualistic Deobandi Islamic evangelical movement, swelled. But since the TJ was more a collection of working-class and petty-bourgeoisie cohorts and fellow travelers, newer evangelical outfits emerged with the idea of almost exclusively catering to the growing 'born again' trend being witnessed in the county's middle and upper-middle classes in the 1990s. Three of the most prominent organizations in this context were Farhat Hashmi's Al-Huda, Zakir Naik's 'Islamic Research Foundation' and Babar R. Chaudhry's Arrahman Araheem (AA). All three also benefited by another unprecedented trend that began emerging within the urban middle-class youth of Pakistain: Never before did young Paks exhibit so much interest in religion and religiosity as did the generations that grew up in much of the 1990s and almost all of the 2000s. |
| Posted by:Fred |