Shia-killing in Pakistan: Background and Predictions

In the latest gruesome attack on the Shia community in Pakistan a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded ImambaRa (Shia mosque) and killed over 60 people, including several young children. People are still picking up pieces of their loved ones (literally, see video here if you dare). Who are these killers? how do they convince young people (some reports say the killer in this case was a young man  named Abubakr) to go and blow themselves up in a crowd of civilians? For some background, see below.

One question i have not been able to resolve: what is the PROXIMATE cause of individual attacks like these? do the LEJ leaders send bombers to blow up people randomly? or do they have specific tactical objectives? by tactical objective I mean things like "release person X or we kill a lot of people" or "pay us X or we blow up shit"...things like that? Will some knowledgeable people from Pakistan comment? Thanks


On to the background: the following is a slightly edited version of an older post on 3quarksdaily. I have added a few words at the very end about how the response of the state looks ineffectual.

Shias (mostly Twelver Shias, but also including smaller groups of Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras, etc.) make up between 5 and 25% of Pakistan’s population. The exact number is not known because the census does not count them separately and pro and anti-Shia groups routinely exaggerate or downgrade the number of Shias in Pakistan (thus the most militant Sunni group, the Sipah e Sahaba, routinely uses the figure of 2% Shia, which is too low, while Shias sometimes claim they are 30% of the Muslim population, which is probably too high).

Historically Shias were not a “minority group” in Pakistan, in the sense in which modern identity politics talks about “minorities” (a definition that, includes some sense of being oppressed/marginalized by the majority). Shias were part and parcel of the Pakistan movement and a central component of the ruling elite. The “great leader” himself was at least nominally Shia. He was not a conventionally observant Muslim (e.g. he regularly drank alcohol and may have eaten pork) and was for the most part a fairly typical upper-class “Brown sahib”, English in dress and manners, but Indian in origin.

 

He was born Ismaili Khoja but switched to the more mainstream Twelver Shia sect; a conversion that he attested to in a written affidavit in court. According to Jinnah-scholar Yasser Latif Hamdani, his conversion was due to the Khoja Ismaili sect excommunicating his sisters when they married non-Khojas.

The Pakistan Army 2014-15

Mr Hamid Hussein, one of the best and most well-informed commentators on the Pakistan army (and the British Indian army and it's other daughter armies) has sent in this piece:

Year in Review and Year Ahead– Pakistan Army in 2014-15
Hamid Hussain

“A general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing the disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service to his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.”          Sun Tzu      

General Raheel Sharif was appointed Chief of Army Staff (COAS) in November 2013.  He decided to work with the existing team of senior officers and didn’t embark on  a major re-shuffle right after assuming charge.  The responsibilities of COAS of Pakistan army are not limited to the army and he invariably gets involved in domestic politics as well as foreign relations.  The argument whether  the COAS pushes the door or politicians through their own incompetence opens doors as well as  the windows for him to enter the corridors of power is as old as  the emergence of Pakistan as an independent state in 1947.

In 2014, General Sharif worked to take control of his own institution, gently pushing civilians on some areas of interest of the army and mediated among quarrelling politicians.  This trend will likely continue in 2015.  General Sharif opted for a different approach and decided to work with  the senior brass put in place by his predecessor, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani rather than bringing about a new team immediately. This meant that he was first among the equals at the decision making table.  I was not expecting forceful decisions from General Sharif, but I was pleasantly surprised when he took  the decision about launching operation in North Waziristan quite early in his tenure.
In the last ten years, there has been a gradual shift in the thought processes of  the officer corps.  Earlier there was debate amongst the senior brass regarding  the balance between negotiations and military operations.  In recent years, there has been a decisive shift towards clearing all the swamps.  In the last year of General Kayani’s tenure,  the majority opinion among the inner core was in favor of clearing North Waziristan.   The army had completed all their preparations but General Kayani demurred due to reasons best known to him (since his retirement, many are now critical on many of  his decisions during his extended tenure).  Now with a new COAS, the consensus amongst the existing team and  the new chief being first among the equals at the table made the decision about  the operation easy.

In 2014, General Sharif used  the normal retirement process to bring about a new team.  This prevents friction amongst the senior brass and was  the correct approach.  Newly promoted officers were appointed to important command and staff positions, that included four Corps commanders.  General Sharif will be now be presiding at conferences where other members around the table are quite junior to him.  This will enable him to carry the team easily with him.

In 2014, there were three main areas of friction with   the new civilian government headed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif;  the decision on a military operation in North Waziristan,  the trial of former army chief General Pervez Musharraf and  the large scale demonstrations in the capital by a cleric, Tahir ul Qadri and recently empowered political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) led by Imran Khan with  the clear goal of ousting the elected government.

Sights & sounds of Cambodia

 I just tweeted a few photos of Angkor Wat- https://twitter.com/zacharylatif/status/561025346586169344.

It really is a spectacular complex and the Khmer are the ultimate originators of the Indo-Chinese South Eastern Asian Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim sub-culture that is both very hybridised but also very distinctive.

I find interesting to note that Cambodia (Kampuchea's) name ultimately derives from an Iranian tribe (The Kambojas) mentioned in the Vedas who ruled over parts of India (I could be wrong but the pallavas - Parthians- were also prominent in the South).

Iran, Turan & India go back a very long way prefigured by this intermingling even among the ancients.

The Management of Savagery

 Ahmed Humayun, an analyst at the "Institute of Social Policy and Understanding" has a post up about the "management of savagery", a central text in the Islamist militant movement.

Read the whole thing here (at 3quarksdaily).

Excerpts:

Yet it also outlines a clear, coherent worldview, a theory of geopolitical change, and, when it is not recycling superficial clichés about Western decadence, offers penetrating insight into how terrorist tactics can succeed, even when they appear to fail. It is a call to action that outlines a series of concrete, often diabolically clever steps that have been followed by a wide range of militant groups. -

..Such a transitional state prevails in the Muslim world today. Militant groups should therefore seek to 'vex' and 'exhaust' the enemy- the regimes ruling their societies, or their Western allies. This will catalyze the breakout of chaos - the weakening of political authority across the land, creating opportunities for militants to 'manage the savagery' successfully, so that the ultimate goal, an Islamic state, may be realized. -

..Finally, the West can try to live up to its values. The militants correctly identify that concepts like freedom, liberty, and justice resonate in Muslim majority societies, and see them as competing with the ideology they seek to implement. But when we unflinchingly back autocrats in Muslim majority societies instead of defending our stated values, when we support the stultifying status quo instead of encouraging critical political reform, we shrink the space for progressive ideas to emerge and expand opportunities for militant notions. We will never persuade the militants, of course but we might be able to persuade others if we tried. -

See the whole thing at 3qd. It is worth a read. I had the following "off the top of my head" comment on it:

I would add a few minor notes to this excellent analysis of the "management of savagery":

1. The authors of the Islamist narrative are not self-sufficient in their creation of this narrative. They rely on Islamicate tradition for a lot of their cherry-picked theological quotes and for historical references about events like the early Arab invasion and colonization of the “near East”, the crusades, the invasions of Europe and even the sea-jihad of the Barbary pirates, ..interestingly the Pakistani ones at least seem to make more references to the conquest and loss of Spain and the subsequent centuries of conflict in the Western Mediterranean region than to the Ottoman conquests and subsequent losses in South-Eastern Europe, reflecting perhaps the relative value of the two regions in the eyes of Islamists and in the eyes of broader contemporary audiences; Spain, France and Italy being worthy prizes and the Balkans being mostly a nameless mess. They (surprisingly) do not seem to use a lot of Islamic source material for their polemic about early 20th century European interventions. A lot of THAT narrative is lifted straight from Robert Fisk and other Western writers. SOAS seems to have contributed more to that story than the Ulama and authors of the blessed dar-ul-Islam. This is an interesting sidelight and worth at least one good PhD thesis someday.

2. The author’s final prescriptions (“But when we unflinchingly back autocrats in Muslim majority societies instead of defending our stated values, when we support the stultifying status quo instead of encouraging critical political reform, we shrink the space for progressive ideas to emerge and expand opportunities for militant notions. We will never persuade the militants, of course but we might be able to persuade others if we tried”) are boiler-plate left-liberal talking points, but depending on what actual steps the author has in mind, may be even more unrealistic than the Islamist’s dream of utopia-after-savagery. Of course, the author may have specifics in mind that are far different from what I have heard from other progressive friends. This is always the risk when one imagines details based on a few brief lines of text. But we all rely on such heuristic devices and I get nervous when I hear “progressive ideas” and American foreign policy mentioned in one paragraph. I may be completely misreading the author (and I apologize in advance if I am clubbing him unfairly with people who occasionally read Arundhati Roy as if she is a serious analyst), but these days, I get nervous easily :) ... I am afraid that the neo-cons half-baked, ahistorical, poorly thought out creation of neo-liberal Iraq was not far enough from “progressive ideas” for us to feel safe. American support for “progressive ideas” may turn out to be no more helpful than American support of the “stultifying status quo” if it is based on equally superficial notions of history and of the origins of states and of modern society (for better and for worse).   Just a thought…

3. There is no single correct thing to do everywhere and at all times and the answer (as always) is “it depends”, but the author’s desire that the US avoid militarily invading far away countries (to save them, or to destroy them) is one we can all agree with and say “Amen”.

Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo..

I just picked this out of a past post about the cruel blasphemy execution (by being burned alive) of a Christian couple in Pakistan. I am posting this here because blasphemy is in the news again and I cannot count the number of times someone has managed to say "colonial era blasphemy laws in Pakistan" in a misleading manner. I wanted to have a post handy where I could direct them, so here it is, a quick overview of the blasphemy issue in Pakistan (some thoughts about the Hebdo events are at the end of this post, you can jump to that if all this familiar to you):

A blasphemy law was part of the 19th century Indian Penal code as section 295.. It was not a bad law at all and the lazy habit of blaming it for later blasphemy law crap in the Indian subcontinent is just that: a lazy habit. 
Here is section 295 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860: 
 Injuring or defiling place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any class.—Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defile­ment as an insult to their religion, shall be punishable with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.

The aim of the law was to prevent/punish things like someone throwing a dead pig into a mosque or a cow's head into a temple. An actual physical desecration is to be punished. 
This seems like an eminently sensible law  and cannot really be blamed for all the evils that came later. But in the 1920s there was a famous case in Lahore where a Hindu publisher was arrested by the colonial authorities after Muslims agitated against him for having published a book called Rangila Rasul ("merry prophet"). The British colonial authorities tried to prosecute him for hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims, but the high court in Lahore (quite properly) found him innocent because there was no law on the books against just publishing a book, no matter how offensive it may be to some religious group. Fearing future communal discord from such provocations, the British then had the legislative assembly add section 295A to the law in order to criminalize deliberate attempts to "outrage the religious feelings of any community". This section states: 

Slaughter of blonde Muslims

"So, in Bosnia, the case was there were white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims who were being slaughtered and identified as Muslims. That really touched me."

The great brown hope for every British Pakistan, local Essex lad Maajid Nawaz, talks about how Animal Farm turned him away from extremism (he needs to join a post-apocalyptic book club).

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/15/377442344/how-orwells-animal-farm-led-a-radical-muslim-to-moderation

The power of blasphemy

There is never a point to deliberately offend; in fact BP is a perennial victim of that.

There was a time in our first year when we were hitting a tipping point and then we became a target, which led to several website issues. Ever since we moved from WordPress to Blogger our user engagement is a fraction of what it was.

Who reads BP anymore?

Leave a comment if you do; I'm not expecting many to be honest even if we do have robust viewing figures.

The first couple years of the blog had an excellent comments section especially when we were WordPress.

Is Showering a white people thing?

http://uk.eonline.com/news/614318/naya-rivera-says-showering-daily-is-a-white-people-thing-watch-now

After her comments, Rosie O'Donnell proceeded to call upon a stunned African-American woman in the audience, who insisted she is a "frequent showerer" before Rivera defended her remarks. 

"My mom is half black, half Puerto Rican. She showers every day, so I can say this. But I'm now married to a white man," she said, referring to husband Ryan Dorsey, whom she secretly wed in July 2014. "And he showers a lot, like two, three times a day.

Unreal Islam

The word “takfīr” (pronounced “tuck – feer”) is one of the most fearsome words in the Islamic lexicon. Deriving from the same root as “kāfir” – infidel – it refers to the act of declaring someone who is nominally a Muslim to be an infidel. And, of course, as the whole world knows by now, a Muslim who has become an infidel is worthy of being killed as an apostate under strict Islamic law. The institution of takfir is not new in Muslim societies, but it has generally been a marginal one. Today, it is at the core of the jihadi extremism that has set the world on fire from Nigeria to India and from Peshawar to Paris. The extremists do not kill based only on takfir – the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not Muslims to begin with – but this idea is central to their ideology, which specifically targets Muslims who, in their opinion, have lost the right to live because of their infidelity. Among these are numbered the 136 innocent children gunned down in Peshawar and the soldiers of the largest army of any Muslim majority country in the world. More broadly, its remit extends to entire sects, such as the Shi’as and the Ahmadis, who have been targeted repeatedly in Pakistan.

However, another version of takfir is now afoot in the world. Call it “reverse takfir”. Unlike the militant version, it is well-intentioned and self-consciously humane, but it is also dangerous. This “benign” version of takfir is epitomized by the idea that the acts of violence being committed by self-proclaimed holier-than-thou Muslims are not the acts of “real Muslims” and do not represent “real Islam”. In effect, it declares the terrorists to be infidels! The idea is widespread, and is espoused in four different contexts: By well-meaning non-Muslims (such as Presidents Bush and Obama) seeking to avoid stereotyping and the implication of collective guilt; by ordinary Muslims wishing to dissociate themselves from the beheaders; by Muslim sectarians wishing to separate their brand of orthodoxy from that espoused by terrorists; and – most ironically – by Muslim governments and security forces seeking an “Islamic” justification for attacking extremist fellow Muslims, thus implicitly buying into the central jihadi argument of apostasy as a capital offense. The urge to do this reverse takfir is understandable and not without factual basis: Most Muslims are indeed not violent extremists who wish to kill infidels. And it does help protect innocent Muslims from backlash, which is rather important. The problem, however, is that it also feeds the narrative of denial and deniability that allows the militancy to thrive.

As with most organized religions, the foundational texts and beliefs of Islam can support both peaceful versions and violent ones. Until people recognize and admit that all of these are, in fact, “real Islam”, the issues underlying the problem of jihadi militancy cannot be addressed. If the violence is “not real Islam”, the implication is that Islam – as practiced by most Muslims – needs no reform. But that is manifestly not the case. The scourge of violence in the name of Islam will be removed only when Muslims in general come to reject all instances of violence in the name of Islam, including those that are celebrated in scripture and history. When conquerors who killed “infidels” are regarded as heroes of the faith; when the world is seen as divided into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war”; when dying for God is considered better than living for the sake of fellow humans; when non-Muslims are regarded as morally inferior; when many standard prayers end by asking God for “victory against the infidels”; and when apostasy and blasphemy are regarded as capital crimes – how can jihadi violence be seen as anything but the logical conclusion of such ideas and practices? And yet, these are all part of “mainstream” Islam – some of them derived directly from holy texts. What the extremists are doing is merely taking these ideas more literally and acting on them. The main thing separating most ordinary believing Muslims from the extremists is not so much the narrowness of belief – which they both share – but the willingness to match that belief with action. Small wonder, then, that the militants see non-violent Muslims as hypocrites, which in many ways is worse than being an infidel.

 This raises a painful question: Can true Muslims only be either militants or hypocrites? Is there no other alternative? And that’s where the solution must begin. The only way to find an alternative – “third way”, so to speak – is to move away from literalism and absolute interpretations. Muslims must ask themselves why Jews don’t still stone adulterers or Christians still conduct witch burnings. They made these changes, not by rewriting holy texts, but by reinterpreting them for a different time and context. If Islam and its texts are indeed “guidance for all times” as Muslims believe, surely their interpretation must change with changing times, or they will become obsolete. What we see unfolding before us is the refusal of a whole faith to recognize the fact of such obsolescence and the need for reinterpretation, which has to be the first step on the path to reformation. And this cannot be done by outsiders preaching humanism at Muslims; it requires Muslims themselves to liberate their faith from the clutches of regressive clerics and begin viewing it more rationally. They can continue to be good Muslims and revere the unchanging words of scripture, but they cannot continue to be literalist reactionaries enforcing orthodoxy by force. That just isn’t compatible with the real world – especially the modern world. People will have to be allowed to make individual decisions with regard to their faith and live! In other words, religion will need to become a private matter, and certainly not something for the State to legislate or vigilantes to enforce.

The interesting – and tragic – fact is that this dilemma is mainly a modern one. For the first few centuries of Islam, Muslims were far less inhibited about practical reinterpretation. Indeed, much of what is regarded today as Islamic law (the shari’ah) is derived from the interpretation of holy texts by early leaders, jurists and scholars. They were certainly not liberal humanists by today’s standards, but they were eminently practical people. Over time, this practicality gradually gave way to rigidity, until the so-called “door of interpretation” was officially declared shut. Even so, Muslim rulers were seldom willing to be bound by rigid religious edicts, and significant movement continued, albeit at royal whim. Some among the royalty, such as Akbar and Dara Shikoh in India, went further, trying actively to move towards more syncretic and humanistic interpretations of Islam.

 

Prince Dara Shikoh with three sages (Ascribed to Dal Chand India, Mughal scool, c. 1650)

The roots of the current fundamentalism lie not so much in the early history of Islam as in its recent history of disempowerment and revivalism. As Muslim societies lost power in the face of modernity, the role of ruling elites in reinterpreting religious edicts (mainly for selfish political reasons) diminished or disappeared, and the process of reform became intertwined with Westernization and modernization. This produced various responses, two of which are especially relevant today. First, during the colonial period and immediately after, a re-emerging class of Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Jamaluddin Afghani, and later Sayyid Qutb and Mawdudi, sought a revival through variations on the same theme: Creating a semi-mythological and idealized version of a glorious Muslim past where near-perfect men acted as the instruments of God’s will. And, in their own ways, all of them converged on the notion of a single, ideal Islamic state – a “house of Islam” – ruled over by the righteous. One concrete result of these neo-revivalist ideas was the creation of Pakistan as an ideological Muslim homeland, though many ultra-orthodox Muslim scholars opposed it. Another was the emergence of trans-national ideological organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e Islami. All this laid the theoretical framework for today’s trans-national militancy.

The second response was the empowerment of more fundamentalist schools of Islamic thought that already existed but had generally been held in check by Muslim rulers and societies. A fateful moment occurred when one such movement – led by the originalist cleric Ibn Abdul-Wahhab in Western Arabia – made a political alliance with a regional ruling family: The future House of Saud. Over two centuries, a nexus of mutually-influencing ultra-orthodox ideologies developed from India to Morocco, but remained largely without political or economic power. All that changed with the rise of Saudi Arabia as a rich kingdom with an interest in exporting both oil and ideology. The ideal opportunity arose – less by planning than chance – in the form of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the revival of global Islamic zealotry as fuel for the Afghan jihad, the empowering of seminaries preaching ultra-orthodox ideologies, and the inevitable seeping of these toxins into the body politic of Muslim societies. The rest is a history that is too well-known – and painful – to repeat.

Today, the two threads generated in response to Muslim disempowerment and modernity have merged. The resulting movement has inherited the trans-national character, anti-humanist ethos and regressive ideology of its parent movements. It has also been strengthened by the strategic calculus of the Great Game that has been afoot in South and Central Asia for several decades. Some may consider it natural that the movement’s most vocal expression has occurred in Pakistan, given its founding vision. However, such an assumption would be incorrect. The areas that form Pakistan were, in fact, not very amenable a priori to an exclusivist ideology, and were pervaded by a much more syncretic and humanistic version of Islam. It took several decades and great geopolitical events – such as the Afghan jihad – to bring Pakistan to the point it is at today. All appearances notwithstanding, it is not a natural home for a militant, ahistoric ideology. Obscurantism? yes; militancy? no.

Which brings us back to the issue of “real Islam”. As someone in love with the cultural traditions of Islam and as a diligent student of its history, I agree that the acts of the jihadis do not represent the vast majority of Muslims today or in history. Humans are a violent species and Muslims have contributed their share, but it is completely asinine to think that Muslims have been, historically, any more violent than other groups. However, it is equally absurd to deny that the ideology underlying jihadism draws upon mainstream Islamic beliefs and is, therefore, undeniably a form of “real Islam” – albeit of a very extreme form. It is more accurate to say that this extremism is “not the only Islam”, and, by historical standards, it is a version very different from what the vast majority of Muslims have practiced. That’s why groups espousing such puritanical and rigid attitudes were traditionally called “khawarij” – the alienated ones. At the same time, Muslims should acknowledge that they have not constructed the logical and theoretical framework within which extremism can be rejected formally. If anything, the opposite has happened in the last century, with increasingly literalist attitudes gaining strength for political reasons. And that is the core problem: A literal reading of even moderate Muslim beliefs can, and does, lead to behaviors incompatible with modern society. Like Christians, Jews, Hindus and others, Muslims have to turn towards a less literal, more inspirational and humanistic reading of their sacred traditions, drawing from them principles that can stand the test of time rather than literal, ahistorical prescriptions. This does not require the invention of a “new Islam”, or the imposition of an “official Islam” by states. Nor does it require a rewriting of Muslim sacred texts any more than the Enlightenment needed a rewriting of the Old Testament – Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding. What is needed is a change of attitude, of how people relate to the texts and traditions. Strong strands of humanism, compassion, diversity of ideas and acceptance of differences already exist within the Islamic tradition – among Sufis, among poets, and even among scholars. The trick is to rediscover, re-emphasize and reinterpret them for our times. And even as we wring our hands in despair, brave individuals within Muslim societies are trying to ignite just such a change at great risk to their lives. The least we can do is to add our voices to theirs.