The Pakistani Spectator

Washington, DC. In last May, an Asia Program event at the Woodrow Wilson Center cosponsored and featured Khaled Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Yitzhak Nakash, a Jew and an Islamic history expert of the Middle East and former fellow at Wilson Center.

Ahmed said that, fortunately or unfortunately, most Pakistani Shias do not read their Hadidhs and do not care much about their religious leaders. Ahmed added that this might not be a bad phenomenon, because Sunni and Shia Hadidhs do not necessarily help much in reconciling Shia-Sunni theological differences.

He revealed to his audience that the late grand AitUllaha Rouhulla Kamanie, through former Pakistani foreign Minster Agha Shahi, had threatened the former Pakistani dictator general Zia-Ul Haq. Specifically, he warned that Zia would be made into an example like the late Iranian Shah unless he stopped playing the role of American lackey in South Asia and the killing of so many Shias in Pakistan.

However, in the same breath Ahmed asserted that the dictator was killed because of his determination to accomplish the Pakistani atomic project, rather than for his serious support of some extremist Sunni elements.

Ahmed emphasized that even though the Shia population is a minority in Pakistan, compared to Sunni they are being killed at a very high rate.

For some Shias, Ahmed added, it could be experienced as condescending for the Shia population to be represented in the Pakistani flag by a white area. This sort of distinction might suggest a kind of second class citizenship. Nevertheless, Ahmed pointed out that the Shia Pakistani population long to live in brotherly harmony with the majority Sunni population of their countrymen.

Ahmed also said that the Pakistani Shia population’s trend of not being very assertive of their Shia identity has not helped Sunni extremists to become more accommodating of their Shia cousins.

Absent from Ahmed’s account was an analysis of the Saudi financial incentives that encourage Sunni extremists to victimize the Shia population regardless of what the Shia may do. Indeed, something like a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for influence in Pakistan is being played out in the conflict between the Sunni and Shia there.

In responding to a question from Robert Hathaway of the Woodrow Wilson Center on Musharaff’s role in helping to smooth out Shia-Sunni differences, Ahmed said that Musharraf has been trying to purge anti-Shia religious and legal provisions from the laws, but his  secular personality didn’t help him much, especially because of the strenuous opposition from the dominant Sunni religious leadership.

Nakash, gave a gloomy scenario of the possibility of future harmony between Sunni-Shia sects of Islam. He argued that the historical animosity of the Wahabi Ulma toward the Shia had left historical ‘fatwas’ as precedent for Sunni fighters, that allowed for the killing of the local Shia population before commencing attacks against the forces of a foreign occupation.

Giving an example of this ‘fatwa,’ Nakash pointed out that at the beginning of his ‘career,’ the Sunni fighter Zarqavi in Iraq had a hard time persuading Usama Bin Ladin (UBL) to support the hadidh supporting the massacre of the Iraqi Shia population.

However, I suspect that UBL did not want to go after the Shia population in Iraq, perhaps because, being raised in a financially privileged environment, he did not develop strong feelings against Shias, or his family or elders were too busy making money rather than developing animosity toward Shias. UBL’s hatred was directed much more against Americans and Jews, but not finding them very vulnerable, UBL gave a green light to Zarqawi to begin his assault against the Shia.

I asked Nakash about the suspicions harbored by some Muslims regarding covert American involvement behind the Shia-Sunni killings in Iraq. These Muslims allege that by getting violent Shia-Sunni elements killing each other, Americans plan to save some of their own lives from the ruthless Islamic extremist fighters.

Nakash rejected that notion and said that the American government has nothing to do with the Shia-Sunni killings in Iraq. I then asked Ahmed if the Shia-Sunni communities, broadly speaking, have relatively better understanding of each other in Pakistan, why haven’t  they resolved their differences by talking with each other, instead of continuing killings that validate some Westerns notion of Islam as an inherently violent religion and of Muslims as incapable of resolving even their internal problems without killing each other.

Ahmed responded by saying that some religious leaders don’t encourage peaceful resolution because some of them make their living by keeping the two communities at each others’ throats. He further stated that Pakistani Shias tend to follow political leaders or trends rather than their religious leaders.

In responding to a question from an audience member named David Smith on the role of intelligence agencies in the fissure between Shia-Sunni and the sectarian differences in the Pakistani army, Ahmed said that there might be some pockets more conscientious of these differences, but as a whole the Pakistani army is not sectarian at all.

Like some other folks in the seminar, a former Pakistani ambassador in Washington named Tauqeer Hussain and Mohammad Ali of Voice of America drew a correlation between foreign intervention and sectarian violence in Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq. After all, there was no serious Shia-Sunni conflict before we invaded Iraq, the mostly Muslim audience argued.

It’s interesting that almost all Muslims in the seminar, including me, tried to blame the Americans and Israelis for the eternal Shia-Suni conflict.

My opinion about blaming Jews for every Muslim problems changes when I am in Pakistan, however.

Let me give an example of the current gun culture in Pakistan. I have not seen civilians carrying firearms in public within last twenty years in Washington, and the same was true in Pakistan prior to 1985, when I came to the States. However, during my two visits back to Pakistan (1996-97 and 2005), I was surprised to see so many people carrying guns on their shoulders or in their hands on Pakistani streets.

In 2005, my second visit to Pakistan, I spent a couple of months in Islamabad where I would kill some of my time by working for Mushahid Hussain at the Pakistan Muslim League House. Sometimes I would walk from PML house to the G/6 sector where I was staying. On my way, I would see some gunmen guarding a Shia Mosque. This touched my sensibilities seriously.

How could these people communicate with their Creator when they don’t have peace of mind about keeping their lives safe, and this at a place supposed to be a house of God, in a country claiming to be an Islamic republic. Could the children of these poor worshiper differentiate between a war zone and the place of their worship? When these children become adults, would this gun environment help them to become very insecure, or even violent, in their own country of birth?

In America, I tend not to reject completely to some of the Muslims blaming Jews for Muslim ‘ummaha’ (nation) misery

But while walking by that Shia mosque in Islamabad I would ask myself if Israelis or Jews had anything to do with making those Shias feel so insecure.

Being in that seminar in Washington, DC, and not in Islamabad, I felt the way every Muslim in the room felt: Somehow it’s an American and/or Israeli conspiracy that is fueling the Shia-Suni killing in Iraq.

No matter how long some of us Muslims live in this pluralist society, our prejudices against Jews never really go away completely.

For me, my instinct to blame Jews for Muslims’ misery is deeply rooted, and its something I learned from the Pakistani media as a child. It seems to me that my life of poverty carried with it a lot of misery, and having a common enemy or an outsider (Jews) to blame was a way for me to channel my anger.

This prejudiced response is encouraged by some authorities in the Muslim world, who would rather have their people angry about the Jews’ actions in Palestine than about their leaders’ oppressive actions at home.

Nakash, nonetheless, argued that American and other foreign interventions in Islamic countries do not trigger Sunni-Shia Violence; rather, they reinforce it. Maybe we Muslims need to give consideration to what Nakash said about our internal, but very serious, Shia-Sunni problem.

I was told by a Jewish participant that prejudices are crippling understanding on both sides. American Jews are terrified by the reports they hear regarding instruction in Muslim schools, where Jews are supposedly compared unfavorably to pigs. They fear that generations of children are being reared who will regard Jews as less than human.  This kind of report, however untruthful, only hardens their political opinions.

Although I attended the event to learn about the Sunni-Shia split, I came away preoccupied with my own prejudices and the cultural displacement I experience in both Islamabad and Washington. In Pakistan, I tend to be more an American, looking with discomfort on violence and prejudices against Shias, even though I am Sunni. In Washington, on the other hand, I am a Pakistani-American, blaming Jews and Israelis for the Shia-Sunni problem in Pakistan and Iraq. The division I see in myself is a microcosm of larger cultural gulfs that continue to generate misunderstandings on all sides.

We, as Muslims, could reject Nakash’ interpretation completely, but we ought to actively listen it first.  There might be little truth into it.

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