Dealing with the “Taliban” requires starting with a moral high ground

Dealing with the “Taliban” requires starting with a moral high ground

Who in Pakistan does not know of the fierce loyalty and honor of the brave people of our border areas and the mujahideen that have fought the Islamic wars on our borders for the last several decades. These people are brave, they cherish honor, truth and their way of life as Muslims (as they understand it)…..say what you will about them but these are qualities that nobody in Pakistan can deny that they have.

I have spoken about the pathan domestic servants who take care of my home before in a previous ilog. Their families are Taliban and they also identify themselves Taliban. Although they’re mostly too young to grow beards, they have very deeply held beliefs about Islam that entail ensuring that they are governed according to Sharia and that their Islamic identity is never compromised. This is the core of their sentiment. They held deep distrusts about people who seem to be irreligious liberals with whom they cannot relate. After speaking to these kids for a long time, I noticed many inconsistencies with respect to their stated belief in Islam and the actual practice. For example, most of their families rely on a system of usury to buy anything and everything from groceries to their mobile phones. The local grocery store owners in their areas base their prices on the amount of time till payment which usually involves a great deal of usury. With respect to marriage, they told me that a man cannot marry he has a sister who can also get married in exchange for the woman that he will get from the other family. There were also many other stories which they told me which are completely inconsistent with an Islamic society. I realized that these people hold the utmost respect for Islam and are only doing what they know and they don’t know any better. So over a period of time, I have been educating them on everything from the basic tenets of Islam, to things like integrating with modern society. Over a period of two years, these boys (from these same dangerous border areas who still have family there) have actually completely integrated themselves into society and now participate in everything…..even a beach clean up I attended a few months ago. They respected what I told them because I spoke to them about the true religion that was practiced by the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) and is still practiced in Makkah and Madina without the adulterations of the sub-continent. They respected the fact that someone who knew more about Islam, practiced it, and actually lived in Saudi Arabia and knew how it was practiced there was showing them how to be better Muslims in the modern world. I know one thing about these boys…their loyalties are legendary and I know I can trust them blindly with anything of value….theft is not a thought that they could even conceive of because it is such a dishonorable act in their eyes. I would never think of having any other people look after my home.

Recently I noticed headlines stating that a mosque on the outskirts of Karachi in a hardcore pathan refugee area was being targeted by the authorities. They had foreign students studying there and the government revoked their visas and wanted them sent back abroad. This mosque is undoubtedly a hotbed of Taliban since on my last visit I met I man who was actually inside a well-known jail in Mazar-e-Sharif when the Americans were bombing it with daisy cutters. He escaped and fled to Karachi. I and a few people I know decided that we must take steps to get them to understand the realities of the modern world and how they should live in it. We helped them set up a computer lab and provided them with a teacher and curriculum with express instructions that their religion is for their soul while their income must be generated from some other means. They accepted what we said because they knew that we were Muslims with good intentions. They established their labs and their students have since been learning and getting basic jobs in industries….its a good first step. Before we started helping these people out…this mosque was so much more radical and was in constant battle with one government agency after another.

What I have noticed is that there is a large segment among the people who are now being termed as extremists who are actually poor and lack proper knowledge of Islam, but distrust the secular-liberal establishment and the agencies that work with it to deal with them on any issue. For them, Islam is their way of life and they would rather die than live any other way and they will not deal with people who they perceive to be sell-outs. I am not suggesting that the Islamic parties such as JI or JUI are credible to any extent, but I am suggesting that the religious establishment is the only solution to the problem of militancy. The religious establishment must be engaged by the government to deal with the “militants” and work out a solution to the problems. Who is the religious establishment? That would be the Muftis and accredited scholars of Islam in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. That would be people like Shaykh Bin Baaz, Shaykh Albani, Mufti Taqi Usmani, and the leaders of the Salafi school of thought….which by the way is not the bogeyman the extremist lunatics in the west (and here at home) make it out to be.

We also have to be fair and realistic about some issues;

1. Collateral damage is not acceptable….no use of military force in our own country either by us or by anyone else. I don’t think its too much to ask for the government to NOT BOMB YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. How about sending in a limited ground force to apprehend people or kill those who fight? What about the police? Why must these people deliver justice from the skies in such an indiscriminate way? Why do the people of Karachi, New York, or any major city get to go to court and these people get no such luxury of habeus corpus, trial by a jury of peers, and any of that other “Fundamental Rights” stuff that democracies tell their citizens they’re supposed to get?
2. No renditions…..anyone who is suspected of anything should be tried in a court of law.
3. No separation movements or challenging the writ of the state…but…the government should respect the right of the people of an area to choose to be ruled by Sharia, but again that Sharia must be of the standard that is taught by the University of Madina and administered by the appropriate authorities. This by the way is also a great opportunity to remove some horrendous practices which also contradict Islam, i.e. barbaric executions, convictions on flimsy evidence, jirga system, feudalism, karo-kari, drug trafficking, usury, kidnapping, etc. In short, it would actually help in bringing some law and order to these lawless areas…and nobody in those areas would dare argue that the proper Sharia would not be implemented.
4. The right to armed struggle against a foreign occupying power, i.e. the US in Afghanistan, is enshrined in international law and it is totally unjust to deny them this basic and fundamental right. The Durand Line has no relevance in this case since Afghanistan is a brother Muslim nation and if they feel obligated to go and fight, then it is their right to do so and this artificial boundary set by the British should not mean that they are foreigners to Afghanistan and therefore do not have this fundamental right….all Muslims have that right all over the Muslim world.

Some extremists will refuse to even deal with the religious establishment….but that’s where the moral superiority of our approach wins and we get to SEND THEM TO COURT for trial rather than send in a drone loaded with hell-fire missiles to blast them to smithereens. When we start becoming hypocrites and using a different standard for these people even by our own flimsy democratic norms, we lose any hope of a moral high ground.

The solution is not to shut madrassas down…because the moment you try that you will have more enemies than you can count. The solution is that madrassas must teach the proper Islam that is practiced in Makkah and Madina….and they must be accredited by the religious establishment which must in turn be affiliated with the University of Madina and/or Makkah. Unless we do this….any joker can get up and claim to be a scholar of Islam and give all kinds of messed up fatwas…and if we go to the other extreme and try to eliminate madrassas…well then you will even have moderates for enemies so that is only a recipe for confrontation.

This instability that we see today is a symptom of the identity crisis of the ISLAMIC REPUBLIC of Pakistan and the fact that the limited corrupt secular elite that rule Pakistan are totally out of touch with the reality of conservative and religious Pakistan. The only way to deal with militancy in Pakistan is to start from a moral high ground which unfortunately our bhay-ghayrat politicians totally lack. They lack the vision that is required to bring an Islamic moral high ground to Pakistan. A high ground which requires that they embrace Islam and Sharia rather than take the US’s warnings to abstain from anything remotely Islamic…..because that would mean having the honor to stand up on other moral issues also such as the war in Afghanistan, renditions and other crimes against our part of the world. There are very simple solutions to these seemingly overwhelming problems, but the solution is a problem for our masters who prefer the confrontation because they get to achieve their goals at our expense.