Religious ultra-conservatism has a field day in Pakistan. It puts Saudi Arabia on the Spot
By James M. Dorsey
Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism is having a field day.
Barely three months after the Taliban claimed victory
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the second most populous Muslim-majority state, is moving
to join Kabul in becoming an outpost of religious intolerance and Muslim
supremacy.
In doing so, Pakistan, alongside Afghanistan, has come
down on the side of countries like Turkey and Iran that advocate various forms
of political Islam and public adherence to the faith as opposed to Gulf states
and movements such as Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama that project themselves with
various degrees of sincerity as beacons of a tolerant and pluralistic
interpretation of the faith.
That has not stopped Pakistan from forging ties with
both sides of the divide. In doing so, Pakistan benefits from shifting
battlefields in the Middle East as rivals seek to dial down tensions to avoid
conflicts from spinning out of control.
In the latest move, Saudi Arabia revived
its financial support to Pakistan, including US$3 billion in
deposits to the central bank and up to $1.5 billion worth of oil supplies with
deferred payments. Saudi Arabia had suspended
aid last year because of Pakistani criticism of the
kingdom’s lack of support in its dispute with India over Kashmir.
However, the kingdom’s renewed support results from a
desire to counter tightening military and cultural relations between Pakistan
and Turkey as well as Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban in the wake of
the group’s victory in Afghanistan.
Pakistan is
reportedly giving the Taliban intelligence and
technical support in
its fight against the Islamic State’s South Asian affiliate, Islamic
State-Khorasan. Much of the international community is concerned about the
Islamic State but has been unwilling to engage with the Taliban publicly to
counter the jihadist group.
Writing in
The Wall Street Journal, Javid Ahmad, who was Afghanistan’s ambassador to the
United Arab Emirates until the Taliban takeover, suggested that Pakistan was well-positioned to do so because of “its tactical presence in
the Taliban units, especially the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network.”
Quoting
pre-Taliban Afghan intelligence, Mr. Ahmed said that its Pakistani counterpart
had an “elaborate network of human informants in major cities, involving local
travel agencies, commercial banks, restaurants, hotels, bakeries and taxi
drivers.”
The renewed Saudi support calls into question Saudi
aspirations to lead the Muslim world in its embrace of tolerance and
moderation. It came a couple of days after the Pakistani government caved in to
demands of a supposedly banned, militant ultraconservative group that advocates
draconian implementation of an archaic blasphemy law.
Saudi Arabia competes
for leadership in the Muslim world and the ability to define Islam in the 21st
century with the UAE, Qatar and Nahdlatul Ulama. The latter is the only
non-state actor in the mix and the only
entity to have taken practical steps to anchor
principles of tolerance in Islamic jurisprudence.
The competition has particular significance for the
kingdom that for decades waged the world’s largest public diplomacy campaign, investing
some $100 billion globally in support of ultra-conservative, anti-Shiite,
anti-Iranian strands of Islam. Pakistan’s history from the state’s
creation in 1947 positioned it to be the foremost success story of the campaign
that was designed to counter Iran’s revolutionary Islam.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, since coming
to power in 2015, has sought to steer the kingdom away from its global support
from ultra-conservatism by sharply reducing funding, liberalising some social
mores at home and seeking to replace a religion-infused Saudi identity with one
that emphasises nationalism.
However, Prince Mohammed has stopped short of putting
into practice his promotion of religious tolerance and inter-faith dialogue by
failing to legalise non-Muslim worship and the building of non-Muslim houses of
worship in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia’s renewed financial aid package throws
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan a temporary lifeline as he seeks to ensure
continued support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for his country’s
troubled economy.
Stabilising Pakistan’s finances and reforming its
economy is, however, likely to prove an uphill battle without significantly
upgrading the country’s education system and creating an environment that
encourages creative and free thinking. Mr. Khan’s recent moves appear to be
designed to achieve the exact opposite.
This week’s backtracking
by the government on an agreement with militant Islamists
who threatened to storm the capital, leading to violent
clashes in which four police officers were killed and about
250 people wounded, may have laid down a temporary marker but the government’s
inclinations are evident.
The initial agreement handed victory to the
purportedly outlawed far-right group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) that has
leveraged its self-declared position as a defender of Islam and the Prophet
Mohammed to repeatedly persuade the government to meet its demands. The group
uses mass protests that besiege Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, as its
battering ram.
The religious cloak has turned the TLP into the
Pakistani version of populist far-right movements and politicians in Europe and
elsewhere. The “TLP has packaged this appeal as an unassailable religious tenet
- but the
white hot core of TLP is rage against the elites,” tweeted
columnist Mosharraf Zaidi. He added that the group’s support was “anchored
in real socioeconomic appeal.”
In the latest government cave-in, Interior Minister Sheikh
Rashid Ahmed had agreed to release from prison members of the group, including
those responsible for past killings of law enforcement personnel as well as its
leader, Saad Rizvi, and unfreeze its bank accounts.
The only demand rejected by the government was that
Pakistan should expel the French ambassador because of cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed published in 2015 by a satiric magazine. Mr. Ahmed said the government
would put the issue to parliament.
Militants attacked the
magazine’s Paris offices in 2015 and killed 12 of the
publication’s staff. The online Pakistan edition of Saudi Arabia’s Arab News
appeared to be seeking to undermine anger at France by reporting that French
companies wanted to invest in Pakistani tourism infrastructure
despite the volatility in the country.
“It is not the job of the state to use the stick,” Mr.
Rashid said in justifying the government’s initial surrender.
The government’s handling of the crisis, despite its
reversal, was unlikely to inspire confidence in its ability to either reign in
the Taliban in Afghanistan as demanded by Pakistan’s partners or properly
counter money laundering and funding of militancy and political violence.
Pakistan has since 2018 been on the
grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF),
an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog, because
it failed to meet the group’s standards.
With Mr. Khan’s government seeking to Islamicise
Pakistani education and establish a body to monitor the
curriculum, syllabi and social media for "blasphemous" content,
columnist Zahid Hussain noted that “there seems to be little difference between
the TLP’s religious extremism and the PTI government’s policy of encouraging
religiosity,” Mr. Hussain was referring to Mr. Khan’s ruling Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party.
Mr. Hussain went on to warn that the “government’s
policy of appeasement has increased the terrorist threat to the country. Surrendering
to terrorist groups will have very serious consequences
for the country’s security and stability.”
With the Taliban installed in Kabul, that amounts to a
field day for ultraconservatives whether they are jihadist or not.
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr,
Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon
and Castbox.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar and a Senior Fellow at the National University of
Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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