Laal Masjid 2007

CONTEXTUALIZING LAL MASJID

CONTEXTUALIZING LAL MASJID

One feature of Zia’s regime (1978 to 1988) is continuous efforts for minimizing the effects of pro Shi’a, 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. A significant part was also his material support for anti-Shi’a, pro-jihad firebrands like a certain Maulana Abdullah - the man in charge of one of Islamabad’s central mosque, the Markazi Jamia Masjid (Lal Masjid) founded in 1966.

 Lal Masjid received significant land grants from Zia in Islamabad and the mosque solidified with a large membership of civil society, military brass and state functionaries. It also incorporated an extensive pedagogic and civic relief agenda. Jami’a Faridia - a seminary for young men was present since the inception of the mosque. In 1984, it moved to the exclusive E-7 sector of Islamabad. Jami’a Hafsa was established for the girls in 1992. The curriculum for these seminaries was fairly traditional with Qur’an Studies, Hadi’th, Arabic, Law and, basic Sciences [I.T. was started in the late 90s]. There were about 6000 students in both the seminaries, at the time of show down - no one was charged a fee for attendance. These students not only lived and participated in seminary activities but were also responsible for the extensive food kitchens run by Lal Masjid.

THEOLOGY

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Zia’s proclamations of impending Shari’ah across Pakistan made Maulana Abdullah swing his support firmly for Zia. Having a long history of fanning sectarianism, and being a devout adherent of the Deobandi school, he had very close relationships with the military. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Lal Masjid and Maulana Abdullah remained on the fore-front of Afghani Jihad and, later, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Their support included supplying fighters from the seminary, teaching Afghan students and maintaining funds for the jihad effort. In 1998, he was gunned down by unknown assailants - thought to be from rival Shi’a groups. 

His death put his sons, Abdul Aziz and the younger Abdul Rashid, in  charge of Lal Masjid and the two seminaries associated with it. The two made it a centre for hard line Sunni Deobandi teaching and openly opposing the government.

Abdul Rashid Ghazi was a veteran of the Afghani front and made clear his support for Talibans and Osama b. Laden. Post 9/11 events, including fatwas against Pakistan military put government and Lal Masjid on a collision course.

In early 2007, CDA demolished a number of mosques around Islamabad as illegal settlements. In retaliation, the Shaolin Burqas of Jamia Hafsa occupied a Children’s Library on Feb 22, 2007. As a response, the State agreed to re-construct one of the seven mosques. On March 27th, female seminarians kidnapped (and released after repentance) Auntie Shamim - a madame to some luminaries in Pakistan’s political scene. The clerics told the VOA that they would perform all the functions of the state because they knew the right way, and denounced the government and the democratic system which they said was “un-Islamic”¹. Things escalated from this point. The seminarians kidnapped policemen in order to facilitate a prisoner exchange with the state. On March 31st, Abdul Aziz gave a deadline to impose Sharia in Pakistan and threatened to unleash a wave of suicide bombers if the government took any action to counter it. The government then shut down the website of Lal Masjid [www.lalmasjid.org and www.faridia.org] and revoked their radio broadcast license.

 

 

 

 

OPERATION SILENCE

 

“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.”- Robert Jensen

After the killing of over twenty people, an amnesty was offered on July 4, 2007, for those surrendering. Over 1000 of the major followers surrendered. Abdul Aziz tried to take advantage of the situation by attempting to slip through a tightening siege while wearing a burqa.

Even the arrest of Maulana Aziz could not bring the negotiations between the government and the sanctuary to a peaceful conclusion, and Operation Silence thus began.

Fierce fight continued for more than twenty-four hours, with both sides claiming to have greater casualties. Abdur Rashid Ghazi, too, was amongst the dead ones.

The death toll amounted to a 164, according to ISPR (inter services public relations), whereas independent sources declared it to be soaring high to a massive 1000!

FACTORS LEADING TO SHOWDOWN

A.  PAKISTAN’S AFGHAN JIHAD POLICY IN 1970’S

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.  Aldous Huxley

Lal Masjid was an ally (and a pawn) in Zia’s strategy in Afghanistan [and through that relationship, an ally of then United States foreign policy]. Soviets may have lost and that war may have ended for the United States but it continued on for the Pakistanis and the Afghanis. The immense influx of refugees and fighters into Pakistan during the 90s helped only strengthen the political and material basis for institutions such as Lal Masjid.

B.  AMERICAN OCCUPATION OF AFGHANISTAN & IRAQ:

Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere. Harry Belafonte

The strengthening of miltant forces in Pakistan - and their inward gaze - has not come from any radicalization of Pakistani society but from the incomplete operation of US forces in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq drained away any plan for a viable and functioning Afghanistan. Thus the local defeated troops carried their tribal allegiances back across the border into the Northern and Western regions of Pakistan - and turned their attention onto Pakistani state.

In addition to these, the undeterred support of Israel, and untiring opposition of any Muslim strength by America, has also been a cause of rising extremism in Pakistan, seen as a major U.S. ally.

C.  LIMITED KNOWLEDGE FOR INTERPRETATION:

• OF RELIGION :-

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.  George Santayana

As stated by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, the chairman and professor at the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad,

“The Lal Masjid ideologues did not rouse their followers to action on matters of poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption within the army and bureaucracy, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. Instead their actions were concentrated entirely on improving morality—meaning kidnapping prostitutes and destroying video stores. They did not consider as immoral such things as exploiting workers, cheating customers, bribing officials, beating their wives, not paying taxes, or breaking traffic rules. Their interpretation of religion leads to bizarre failures in logic, moral reasoning, and appreciation of human life.” [1]

• OF MODERNITY:-

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.  Leonard Bernstein

When it comes to defining the enlightened moderation, most of us wrongly draw the equation modernization=westernization.

The concept of modernization is the liberation of mind from the shackles of the contained-in-the-box-thinking. It, by no means, is saying NO to anything and everything religious. Modernization ensures an open mindset towards the intellectual struggle for evolving a new way of seeing and being that marks the defining feature of a knowledgeable society.[2]

Hence, if the bearded clerics are unjustified in their call for jihad against all those who don’t abide by a certain code of conduct, so are all those liberals for whom all those burka-clad shaolin seminarians and the young men with their faces wrapped are all simple enough signifiers for the Great Islamic Threat ®.

One fails to comprehend the logic of both schools of thought, because in the nutshell, on one hand, there were children taken hostage; on the other, there were children dying of thirst and hunger.

D.  ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES:

Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.  Edmund Burke

It makes one wonder at the role played by the numerous intelligence agencies, e.g. ISI, MI, CID, etc, to find that right in the capital there was a mosque with multi storied basement, loaded with enough ammunition to make it appear like, “being inside a military garrison” (as quoted by a foreign delegate to the mosque.)

“It is not enough to ask why the Lal Masjid brothers were trying to run a state within a state, or why they were taking the law into their hands. They had no business to do either but that's hardly the point. Why were they allowed to take the law into their hands? Who allowed them, or facilitated them, to carry on their charade for so long?” [3] writes Ayaz Amir.

E.  LENIENCY ON PART OF GOVERNMENT IN MAINTAINING ITS WRIT:

The secret of getting things done is to act!   Dante Alighieri

A seemingly soft approach taken by the government in dealings with the mosque has led to accusations of leniency on its part. As even after the burqa-clad students of Jamia Hafsa went about their violent rampages to enforce Islamic morality in February, no attempt was made to counter it. The government did not even shut down the mosque’s illegal radio station while operating as a parallel government; the brother duo ran their own Islamic court.

For a state that has not shied from using even artillery and airpower on its citizens, this softness was astonishing.

F.  CONSPIRACY THEORY:

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass

Calling this whole episode a drama is a conspiracy theory but
the government must have been aware for a long time that the students
inside were stocking up on weapons and ammunition.  It seems downright unbelievable to be something otherwise. Could it be that beset on all sides by different problems, did the government simply sleepwalk its way into this mess? Or were hidden hands playing the Red Mosque brothers and pushing them to a point where they could be dealt with in such a manner as to bring maximum advantage to the government?

So, if it really was a drama, then to the hidden hands of this dispensation must fall the glory of staging and directing from behind the scenes a brilliant piece of theatre which at least temporarily drew attention away from other problems; something that the present regime desperately needed!

G.  ILLEGAL LAND OCCUPANCY:

Another 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 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.

H.  LACK OF CONCERN OF THE ELITES:

In his article, “The Siege of the Red Mosque and the Cries of the Suffering”, Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, reports an interview with Farid Esack, one of the world's foremost progressive Muslim theologians, and Junaid Ahmad, a Pakistani-American activist and law student:

“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.

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."

I.  REACTIONARY THEOLOGY:

“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 but 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?”[4]

G.  ECONOMIC FACTOR:

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. 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?"[5]

Tragedy……tragedy is what all happened!!!

Lal masjid saga is a symbol of ideological extremism. For inculcating harmony between the two wings of the society we need to curb the extremist behaviors and NOT the individual. Because, afterall, it’s the dignity of human life which is at stake!

Following is the only opinion poll whose results were made public online.[6] The poll gives an insight into the public sentiments and popular approach regarding the Lal masjid issue.

POLL: Lal Masjid Combat

posted at 5:45 PM on July 15, 2007

Poll Results:

Total votes cast (to the moment): 552

Opinions & Percentages:

Yes, I was waiting for a quick action. 22.5 %
No, they should have tried to do professional negotiations. 21.4 %
I thought it has to be done fast but now I'm not sure if it was justified. 9.4 %
Govt. went crazy.18.3 %
Lal masjid clerics deserved this. 28.3 %
We can't kill our own people like this. 31.0 %

ABRAHAMIC OUTLOOK – BREAKING DOWN RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL IDOLS!

In this era of globalization, where the flows of capital, technology, and information are changing the economy and society as well as the way people live and think, reconciling Islam and modernity is the sole route to a dignified and honourable existence for the 1 billion Muslims around the world.

Irony is that today we talk about enlightened moderation; pretend that we have evolved as an independent nation but our deeds and actions testify our failure to outgrow the medieval mindset. Our inability to outgrow medieval ways of thinking and feeling even as we live in the modern world, lies at the heart of the modernity crisis plaguing the Muslim world. It is the lack of the intellectual infrastructure depicted by our intolerance besides the irrationality in approach towards life. “Suppress the other” happens to be our motto today, where the other is all that is not me, not mine, not according to me or my interpretation so to say.

What does it truly mean to be modern? What does it mean to be a developed and progressive nation? The situation is very clear and so are the answers to these questions. To counter Pakistan’s modernity crisis, the need of the hour is an understanding of Iqbal’s point of view of the “Abrahamic outlook”. We need to learn how to abandon worshipping our thought idols that have been created long ago through the conditioning that we’ve been exposed to.

According to Mr. Suroosh Irfani, a renowned scholar of Rumi-Iqbal school of thought: “Pakistan urgently needs to reclaim Rumi and Iqbal’s message for stemming the slide into the home-grown swamps of aspiring suicide bombers, who are threatening to set the country ablaze in the name of Islam and shariah”[7].

EVOLUTION OR MUTATION?

Lesson for the Government

In addition to 'shariah', the Lal-Masjid brigade also promised social justice, and help to the suppressed - a commodity which is very rare in Pakistan. There is a huge vacuum created by the callous attitude of both the government and NGO’s towards the objective of reinforcing the supremacy of the law, at all levels. This vacuum, as long as it exists, will ignite similar extremist movements, and if the brute-force technique is any further used, its consequences can be even deadlier.

This is hinted by this report of Asia Times Online which reported an Approval ratings/support-poll conducted by an agency, Terror Free Tomorrow:

Al-Qaeda        43%

Taliban           38%

Local extremist groups         37 to 49%.

Bin Laden      46%

Musharraf     38%

The report found support for Musharraf “an astonishing figure, according to Ken Ballen, the director of the polling agency, because it reflects that the Taliban and al-Qaeda "are more popular than our allies like Musharraf".

Lessons for the religious clerics

The simplest lesson to be learnt for religious circles from the Lal-Masjid incident is that truth in any religion is relative. Lal-masjid fight, to me, was a fight between two definitions of Islam, one believed by the authorities and the other by the Lal-Masjid brigade. And future controversies can only be averted if we can unify these definitions, or if that is impossible, let everyone live with his or her definition.

Lessons for the Liberals

There is indeed a need to curb the act and the incentive for anyone to take law into their own hands and enforce their will (lawful or otherwise) on others. Now that we have done that rather forcefully against religious vigilantes, isn't it important to follow it up and act equally forcefully against others doing the same and demonstrate an equality of all types of transgressors in the eyes of law. Or is there a difference between them and the law breakers of the religious variety? Are we as a nation or may I say as the liberals in our country putting too much energy in battling the religious right encroaching on our rights and ignoring everyone else doing pretty much the same thing.

CONCLUSION:

The bottom line is that moving forward means change in attitude and thought for everyone.
According to Farid Esack, the author of Qur'an: Liberation and Pluralism, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School and is a former national commissioner for gender equality in South Africa:

”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."

LAL MASJID: EVENT CHORONOLOGY

[8]

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• Profile:Islamabad's Red Mosque", BBC, 3 July 2007. 
• "Lal Masjid: A name synonymous with radical Islam", Associated Press, 11 July 2007.
• Wife of captured mosque leader Maulana Abdul Aziz rescued" - BBC News 10 July 2007.
• Pakistani soldiers storm mosque - BBC Tuesday, 10 July 2007
• "Siege Update": Tuesday, 10 July 2007.
• Buncombe, Andrew. "Rebel cleric and followers killed as Pakistani police storm mosque", The Independent, 07 July 2007.
• Musharraf vows war on militants" - Thursday, 12 July 2007.
• Ghauri, Irfan. "Families of missing Hafsa students protest govt ‘apathy’", Daily Times, 07-28-2007.
• "Pakistan buries Red Mosque dead" - BBC Thursday, 12 July 2007.
• "Al-Qaeda issues Pakistan threat" - BBC Wednesday, 11 July 2007.
• “Extremism of the few and dereliction of the state”, Daily Times, 21 April 2007.

·         Web exclusive: ‘After Lal Masjid’, by Pervez Hoodbhoy. Prospect Magazine July 2007 Issue 136

·         Suroosh Irfani.  “Benazir, Islam and The Crisis of Globalization”, 25 October 2007

·         DAWN, the internet Edition, http://dawn.com, 6 July 2007

·         Robert Jensen. “Lessons from the Lal Masjid Tragedy - The Siege of the Red Mosque and the Cries of the Suffering,” 12 July 2007

·         http://islamabad.metblogs.com/Lal Masjid Siege Archives

·         “Rumi Iqbal and dynamic Sufism”, the DAILY TIMES, 21 April 2007.

·         http://im.rediff.com/news/ 2007/jul/101lal.gif

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[1] Web exclusive: ‘After Lal Masjid’, by Pervez Hoodbhoy. Prospect Magazine July 2007 Issue 136

[2] benazir, Islam and “The Crisis of Globalization”, by Mr. Suroosh Irfani, dated October 25, 2007

[3] DAWN, the internet Edition, http://dawn.com, dated  July 6, 2007

[4] Lessons from the Lal Masjid Tragedy - The Siege of the Red Mosque and the Cries of the Suffering, by Robert Jensen, dated  July 12, 2007

[5] ref:4.

[6] http://islamabad.metblogs.com/Lal Masjid Siege Archives

[7] “Rumi Iqbal and dynamic Sufism”, the DAILY TIMES, April 21, 2007.

[8] http://im.rediff.com/news/2007/jul/10lal.gif