Amjad Sabri shooting is tip of iceberg in terror attacks on civilians in Pakistan

Amjad Sabri, the qawwal, was shot dead in broad daylight in Karachi, the southern city of Sindh — the land of the Sufis who once practiced interfaith harmony and spread love. Alas, gone are the days when Sindh in particular, and Pakistan in general, could have claimed to sustain and present a peaceful society and culture.

With the creation of the country in 1947, trans-regional political Islam gradually found its way into the corridors of power whereby the early elite, both because of ideological and political reasons, embraced and preferred religion to reason in the matter of the state — which, however, was pretty modern in its outlook in terms of inheriting secular institutions such as civil-military bureaucracy, parliament and an overall secular system of justice.

Little wonder then, that with the passage of the Objectives Resolution in 1949, institutional and socio-economic space for especially the minorities was comprehensively constrained — to the effect that the country’s first labour and law minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Hindu, left for India in November 1950.

The following decades only witnessed a cumulative process of ideology-sation of the state and society with the result that, under the terms of the 1973 Constitution, Pakistan became a religious republic where a non-Muslim is constitutionally disqualified to assume, for instance, the office of the President. Indubitably, such provisions are not only discriminatory but also contradictory with other provisions related to fundamental human rights.

As a consequence of the establishment of Pakistan as an Islamic state — and by empowering the state to directly interfere in matters related to faith — all those religious and cultural communities whose belief structure was arbitrarily determined to be shaky, suspected and heretical were ultimately ousted from the domain of Islam legally, politically and socio-economically. Thus, it was Ahmedis in the 1970s, the Shias in 1980s/1990s and the Brelvis (of which Sufis are a significant part) in the late 2000s, who bore the brunt at the hands of state-led puritanical forces that were already empowered financially and militarily since the Afghan Jihad.

It is to be noted that, in the context of trans-regional political Islam and its militant networks in and around South Asia, Pakistan has been a hub where a variety of such organisations implemented its version of Islam whereby anybody who did not comply with its interpretation was decreed a kafir and hence liable to be killed, ruthlessly. For these forces, Indian and Iranians were already kafir, so it was a religious obligation to attack, annihilate and establish an Islamic state in place of an infidel governing structure.

Paradoxically, however, after the attack on the Twin Towers in the US in September 2001, the Pakistan state pronounced to have shifted its foreign policy against some of the militant forces which initially and ultimately were nourished by the former. Interestingly, having been cheated by the Pakistani security establishment, the ideological fathers of such organisations wasted no time in judging Pakistan a kafir country, hence to be attacked militarily. This may also explain the frequency of the incidents of terror attacks on innocent and unarmed civilians in Pakistan — of which Amjad Sabri is just tip of the iceberg.

Nonetheless, Amjad Sabri can be taken as a case study to understand and explain the intricacies and complexities central to state, society, religion and culture in contemporary Pakistan where puritanical forces are still alive and partly protected by the religious republic. In the eyes of the so-called “mainstream’’ Islamic thought, Sabri was a practicing Sufi who used music (prohibited by the high church) to spread polythesism (shirk) to otherwise pious and righteous Muslims of Islamic Pakistan. To add to his misfortunate was the fateful music event at a private TV channel in 2014, where Sabri along with a female host was termed a blasphemer by puritanical forces that enjoy a huge following across width and breadth of the country. The woman had to flee the country to save her skin. Though she recently got back to business, living and working in Pakistan for such persons is a herculean task.

Tragically, however, the qawwal — the voice of peace, harmony and love — has been silenced forever. More will be killed in the name of God in the land of the pure for Pakistani state and society host laws, norms and mindset which overall is rejectionist in nature and militant in character. For such a mindset, it is a matter of convenience either to give or take a life. And there are recent cases to support this claim empirically. A week before the killing of the qawwal, an Ahmedi medical practitioner was killed in Attock; the son of the Chief Justice of Sindh High Court was kidnapped just a few days ago; Hindu girls have been forcibly converted to Islam in Sindh, and an octogenarian Hindu man was brutally beaten in rural Sindh for allegedly disrespecting Ramazan.

Pakistani state and society have to do a lot at all levels to reform itself in order to be able to shun intolerance, bigotry and religious extremism. At the moment, though certain militant organizations are chased and targeted by the security establishment, there are those which still roam about freely, propagating hate and intolerance. Our educational system is four-tier and needs reforms urgently.

The Pakistani media is quasi-professional, promoting intolerance towards non-Muslims, Muslim minorities and other marginalised communities. Moreover, Pakistani state still views certain militant organisations strategically. If Pakistan ever desires to gain a respectable place regionally and extra-regionally, it has to put its house in order, timely and meaningfully. Any lapse will lead to further hate, bigotry and killings — of qawwals!

Ejaz Hussain has taught politics, religion and foreign policy at different universities in Pakistan. He tweets @ejazbhatty