Fear intolerance and violence in the ideological state
Khaled Ahmed's A n a l y s i s
The Friday Times - Jan 8 - 15

Arun Shourie in his The World of Fatwas recounts how after
1919, Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar used to kiss Gandhi's feet
as the leader of the Khilafat Movement, but when it came to
judging Gandhi as a Hindu he rated him lower than an ordinary
Muslim. Shourie is now a BJP mascot in the Rajya Sabha, railing
against secularism; and the BJP-led Hindu parties have dubbed
Dilip Kumar a Pakistani agent 'because he is a Muslim'. Muslim
places of worship are being 'reclaimed' as Hindu shrines and
Christians are being attacked for proselytising the lower caste
Hindus. In Pakistan, Maulana Waheeduddin's book opposing the
Gustakh-e-Rasul law has been banned; and the principal of
Government College has had to defend himself at the Punjab
Assembly for having published an article in the college magazine The
Ravi about Senator Justice (Retd) Javed Iqbal's explanation of why
his father Allama Iqbal opposed the adoption of Hudood punishments in
modern times.

Intolerance as a primal trait: If human beings have an
evolutionary interface with animals, intolerance is the trait that
binds them together. Anyone looking different arouses alarm and
hostility. Anyone living outside the family, tribe or nation triggers
the primal feeling. Less civilised nations are invariably warlike.
Indian Muslims used to say 'One Muslim is equal to ten Hindus in
combat', tacitly admitting that Hindus were more civilised, which was
testified by their high level of education and consequent domination
of the economy. The Afghans are more warlike than the Iranians whose
aggression, since the Islamic Revolution, is based on their passion
for martyrdom. The Serb nation in the Balkans is traditionally
warlike, as opposed to the Bosnian Muslims who have enjoyed a high
level of civilisation across many centuries. The Albanian Muslims on
the other hand are warlike just like the Serbs, and Kosovo is
emblematic of the Christian-Muslim conflict. Former Yugoslavia lived
as a pluralist society before relapsing into the primitive pattern of
intolerance. India took almost the same time to focus on the Babri
Mosque as the symbol of Hindu-Muslim conflict. In Ireland, two
communities have clashed for the past fifty years even as the United
Kingdom survives nextdoor as a tolerant society. Somehow, in all
these cases, religion has been used as the yardstick of
discrimination and intolerance. While human societies achieve
civilisation, an undertow of primitivism continues to haunt them. As
a primal trait, intolerance expresses itself through religion. But
there are other outlets for this animal feeling, too.

Ideology and intolerance: Societies organised on the basis of
ideology manifest opposition to freedom of thought and the
variety of opinion it produces. The Soviet Union was set up as a
haven of workers after a nation-wide elimination of an exploitative
capitalist class. Its ideology contained universalist doctrines that
threatened to export the Communist Revolution and extirpate
capitalist exploitation wherever it was found. The capitalist world,
led by the United States, attacked the nascent state. The ideological
state of the Soviet Union was a 'controlled' experiment in
utopia-building. It outlawed political opposition because the
Communist Party was 'ideologically' correct and any opposition to it
would mean rejection of ideology. On the other hand, capitalist
societies termed themselves the Free World and built up a
counter-ideology of freedom. In the 1950s, the United States tilted
into its darkest period of communist-baiting, undermining its
functioning institutions through an intolerant Congress under
McCarthyism. Indian intellectuals at times point to the rise of
ideology in Pakistan as a cause for the rise of the counter-ideology
of Hindu fundamentalism in India. In Pakistan, anyone opposing the
ideology of Pakistan can be imprisoned for ten years under Section
123-A of the Pakistan Penal Code. This means that anyone writing or
saying anything offensive to the thinking of the ruling party can be
punished under law. Ideology and its strict interpretation has
introduced excessive indoctrination into the textbooks and created a
large section of the population intolerant of views they consider
offensive to the textbook ideas they have absorbed. Freedom of
thought has been curtailed, which has led to a uniformity of
intellectual development among citizens, rendering them uncreative.

Incomplete ideology and chaos: Intolerant societies are usually
formed in the quest of happiness. The Soviet Union and Maoist
China were 'completely' ideological states. They aroused
admiration among other societies of the third world because of
their internal order. Their ideologies became respectable
because of their rapid economic development. Countries becoming
independent after the second world war were attracted to their
economic model; development was a more urgent challenge than
the challenge of human rights. Soviet and Chinese societies were
intolerant of dissent and eradicated it under law. The government did
not need a formalised opposition and ruled without being upset by
elements opposed to it. The utopian dream behind the ideology was
achieved through intolerance of opposition. According to ideologues,
Pakistan was set up as an ideological state, but it adopted a
democratic constitution, legalising opposition. This was a
contradiction in terms, which became more glaring after the decade of
General Zia's Islamisation. Society was made to feel that it was
'incompletely' ideological, that its tryst with destiny was not yet
perfect, that more stringent laws had to be made to achieve complete
ideology. The result is that Pakistan is an 'unhappy' state,
suffering in the limbo of 'incompletion'. In so far as it is
ideological on the basis of religion, it is intolerant of non-Muslims
and secularists. In so far as it is democratic on the basis of its
constitution, it 'delays' the ideological utopia. Society feels
indecisive, cannot interpret life easily, and is therefore extremely
unhappy, longing for more legislation to 'tighten' its ideology. The
post-Maoist China has become unhappy in the same manner. On the other
hand, Iran, with its complete ideological transformation arouses
feelings of envy in Pakistan. Iran's democracy runs without a formal
opposition in the parliament and dissent is suppressed routinely even
though the government is liberal in its outlook.

Religion as intolerant ideology: Ideology attains the status of
religion, even ousts it, as happened in the Soviet Union and China.
The communist ideology was based on science, in other words, on
reason. On the other hand,ideologies based on religion function on
revealed doctrines. In the Soviet Union and China, if an individual
abstained from dissent he could get by, although at the level of
society intolerance based on race and religion was operating the same
way as in the democratic-capitalist West. Religion is 'deductive' in
its discourse and therefore not amenable to rational discourse. Allama
Iqbal was at pains in his Lectures to explain that Islam was a
'rational' religion. In his introduction to the Lectures he posited
that the discourse of the Quran was 'inductive', that is, allowing
truth to be established through empirical evidence. His effort at
'rationalising' Islam in opposition to other religions came to naught
after the creation of Pakistan because the ideological state had to be
'orthodox' rather than 'reinterpretive'. The religious man, relying on
the 'deductive' method, says: 'I know a truth which I can't prove but
if you don't accept it I will coerce you to accept it'. On the other
hand, the scientist, relying on the 'inductive' method, says: 'I know
a truth which I can prove but tomorrow I may discover something else
which may modify the truth I possess'. Many 'rationalists' have tried
to interpret the Quran in a 'tolerant' way: 'the opposite of a truth
may not be falsehood but another truth'. Sir Syed Ahmad, Allama Iqbal,
Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, Maulana Maheed-ud-Din, etc, are all rationalists
who faced intense opposition from the orthodox priestly class in their
time. The ideology of Pakistan under General Zia came to be based on
the orthodox 'fiqh' (jurisprudence), and its incidence can be dated
from the shift in the Constitution from the principles of the 'Quran
and Sunna' to those of 'Shariat'. This has led to society in Pakistan
becoming 'ideologically' more unhappy than in the past. Intolerance
has increased from its level of hostility towards other religions to
hostility towards traditionally accepted Islamic sects.

Failure of ideology to remove intolerance: In the Soviet Union, China
and Yugoslavia, communism succeeded in some measure to overcome latent
intolerances.The homo sovieticus was purged of regional and ethnic
discrimination rife in the Tsarist past; the same kind of 'levelling'
took place in China and Yugoslavia. But ideology is not completely
effective because of its reliance on coercion. In Pakistan, the state
strove to create the homo pakistanicus on the basis of religion but it
reversed the 'normal' process of assimilation of regionalisms,
religious identities and ethnicities by imposing One Unit and separate
electorates on the country.Pakistan today is xenophobic, intolerant of
religious and ethnic identities, and hounded by regionalism because it
has been too ideological and not democratic enough. It is an intensely
unhappy country because its ideology, owing to its 'deductive' nature,
is not amenable to the kind of reform Sir Syed Ahmad and Allama Iqbal
had thought of. The prevalent thinking is: we are unhappy because we
have not enforced the ideology completely. Deduction is a mathematical
method in which the 'proposition' is never modified to remove the
'error' of application. When the world criticises Pakistan for being
irrational and intolerant, Pakistan is unable to 'modify' its ideology
and becomes confrontational. It reacts with great intolerance against
those Pakistanis who recommend reform in ideology. So far, the
ideological state in history has moved inexorably towards its own
destruction because the utopia it envisages cannot be achieved under
coercion and populations victimised by intolerance find it impossible
to reconcile to it.