-- Mubarak Ali --
Last
week when I was passing through the Lahore Mall, I saw a banner flattering with
a bold headline 'We welcome Parvez Musharraf as a modern Muhammad bin Qasim'.
The banner was manifest of historical consciousness of our society. I started
wondering why our nation always thinks in terms of a strong man as a deliverer?
Why do we construct a past that entirely belongs to the conquerors and invaders?
Why do we remember Mah-mud of Ghazna and not al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, or Firdusi?
This attitude and approach to cognate history is reflective of the psyche of our
people shaped by continuous mani- pu-lation of history by the state.
Political history, as a major discipline, dominates our history textbooks.
Popular history fiction by writers like Sharar or Nasim Hijazi contains Muslim
heroic figures who em-body the essentials of a
brave hero to crush the enemy and manifest courage, mag- nanimity, and tolerance
towards the oppressed. Such qualities, by the end of the narrative, are rewarded
by way of marrying the hero off to a beautiful woman, who is generally
non-Muslim.
Equally fascinating is the play of historical films that heighten the drama of
war and con-quest to popularise the past events that gratify the sense of
history in popular conscious-ness. Naturally such
commercial ventures fetch enormous amount of money to producers and film
industry at large.
Muhammad b. Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazna, and Shihabuddin Ghori emerged as powerful
symbols in Muslim politics in the context of the 1930s' communal atmosphere in
India. Interestingly they continue to be used as symbols of perfect Muslim
heroes who have the ability to restore peace
and order through their belligerence. Such manipulation is of course suitable to
those rulers who seize power by force. They legitimate their rule by
manipulating figures of war and power from our past. The grave impact of which
is that our past, not just in popular consciousness, but in
academics and school education, is re-duced to the past of conquerors and
aggressors. Not surprisingly then it has the strongest appeal to the people.
Such a version of history gives our society a temporary sense of pride and a
satisfaction in bygone greatness nurtures self-delusion and escape in the past
that lives no more.
18th Century was the turning point in the history of the Muslim societies. Owing
to the process of colonization the Safavi, the Mughal, and the Ottomons were on
the decline. Having lost the power and prestige, Muslim societies harked back to
their past glories to find images of victors and conquerors who had built great
empires. Such imagination was a kind of redemption from colonial bondage, and a
source of hope that such heroic personas would redeem them from political
enslavement, social and cultural decay.
The Indian Muslims imagined the Ottoman Empire to be a powerful constant.
Undoubtedly it had projected power during the time of Sultan Muhammad Fateh and
Sulaiman the Magnificent, but its position in the political world in the
twentieth century had changed. Not recognizing such a change, the Indian
Muslims acclaimed the Ottoman Caliph as their protector. During the Balkan wars
in 1912-13, Maulana Azad's paper al-Hilal started to publish the heroic
encounters of the Turkish generals who fought against the Christians. It served
as an inspiration to the Muslim community in
India. However, the defeat and surrender of the Caliph in the First World War
greatly disap-pointed them.
In an atmosphere of loss and grief when Ghazi Anwar Pasha got killed in his
mission to unite all the Turkish speaking people in Central Asia, the Indian
Muslims turned him in to a mujahid and later martry. The other hero that emerged
as victor was Mustafa Kamal who restored the lost dignity of the Turkish nation
by defending his country against the allied invasion. Both Pasha and Kamal,
despite their antithetical views, became the he-roes of the Muslims of the
subcontinent. Out of the two, Mustafa Kamal continues to be a model for Muslim
rulers and leaders. Riza Shah, the founder of Pahlawi dynasty of Iran, and Amir
Habibullah of Afghanistan, had the aspiration to emulate him to moder nize their
countries but circumvented the process of modernization due to their involve
ment in corruption. Similarly Jinnah, Ayub, and now Paervez Musharraf aspire to
espo use the values of Ataturk, the great man and hero.
Ataturk, however, is viewed as a destroyer of religion and tradition by the
religious extr- emists. His endeavour to secularize and modernize Turkey is
anathema to the bearers of religious extremism. The religious extremist parties
have rejected Ataturk as their hero and take pride in the figures of Muhammad b.
Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazna, and Shihab uddin Ghori. They also became relevant in
the context of Indian-Pakistani conflict: the conquerors who defeated the Hindus
and propagated and established Islam in the Indian subcontinent. This also shows
that the historical consciousness of our people is still tilted towards the
belief in physical power, not realizing that the days of physical power are over
and intellectual creativeness and technological innovation reign supreme.
The consequences of hero worship have resulted in disaster for Pakistan.
Following the footsteps of the conquerors, the rulers of Pakistan treated it as
a conquered country and, therefore, legitimated plunder and loot of its wealth
and resources. The only difference between them and the model conquerors is that
in the past the wealth was taken away from India and deposited in the state
treasuries of Damascus, Bhagdad, and Ghaznin. Now the Swiss banks or American
and Western countries provide safe haven to the Plundered wealth. How can we
condemn the modern heroes when we admire the ones of the past on the same deeds?
If we justify hero worship, then
we have to condone not only their plunder but also endure their rule and
sacrifice each and everything to make them great and powerful.
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