The Republic

Until and unless there’s a basic recognition of another human being’s fundamental civil rights, our dream of becoming a modern Islamic republic will continue to remain an issue consumed by idealistic reflections of influential intellectuals.

If we are ever to come closer to identifying how a mere disapproval towards someone’s religious preference has the tendency to evolve into outright violent intolerance in a country like Pakistan, we shouldn’t look elsewhere but deep into our own past.

It would not be unfair to say that our ’republic’ was created in a very unorthodox manner, by people of unorthodox religious views, but for a people of strict orthodox ethos.

The ignorance of this simple fact was the first phenomenal failure of our founders.

At the fortnight of our inception, which is naively referred to as ’independence’, an overdose of nationalistic and religious narcotic was foolishly injected into our collective Pakistani psyche. We were masterfully orchestrated into bracing for tough times ahead. We were momentarily intoxicated into blissfully forgetting what deep divisions we really had.

All this was done in justification, which seemed very realistic at the time, to create a homeland for the oppressed Muslim brotherhood of the subcontinent.

However, as dust settled and the adrenalin pumping freedom fighters retired to their abodes, the rest of us have begun to recognize each other’s true colours.

We have become increasingly aware of our dissimilar, incompatible religious preferences. We had of course realized this way back after ’independence’, that for the first time we were looking at each other outside secular state bounds.

Needless to say, this small, newly forced, and cosmopolitan Islamic island drew some very interested gazes from all around the gnashing neighborhood. A neighborhood so alien to the cosmopolitan nature of our previous ’dependent’ brand of secular religious liberties, it just could not resist pouncing on us from all directions: Arab, Persian, Afghan, etc.

Having triumphantly declared a new ’nation’, we were molested by a totally alien set of social values and nationalistic influences - carefully wrapped under an Islamic doctrine that was repeatedly touted boundary-independent by divided Islamic ideologies themselves.

Aided generously by opportunistic insiders, we were experimented thoroughly into becoming pseudo-Arabs, pseudo-Persians, pseudo-this and pseudo-that. Everything we weren’t, we aren’t, and we never will be.

In consequence, we were rendered into a ’nation’ without a nationality. We became an Islamic state without a drop of the Islamic spirit.

Ironically, the only compatible social infrastructure, probably the best advisor in our predicament, was long since forbidden as our enemy. Of course the enemy responded in ’kind’ to every belligerence we could muster as a smaller rabble-rouser.

People have spent their entire careers looking for seeds of hatred amongst different cultural divisions we employ: sometimes known as religious, sometimes racial, sometimes just sectarian. Their conclusions, it seems, have not been taken into any account - if status quo is to be a witness.

Wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of Islam that an individual’s religious liberty is guaranteed by the state, instead of the state guaranteeing Islam?

Wouldn’t the nation called Pakistan be more governable if all its individuals are governed not by a state preferred Islam but by their own state-independant Islam?

Wouldn’t there be no cause for a militant to expunge a heretic, a non-believer, a less-believer, a different-believer, an errant-believer from ’his’ Islamic land when the land is not Islamic but all the people are?

Until and unless we are able to provide a level playing field for everyone’s religious beliefs, and the state fears everyone’s God, not impose its own, we shall continue to evade our quixotic dream of becoming a Modern Islamic State.

Which, ironically, will truly be an Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and not Republic of Islamic Pakistan.