by Kim Ghattas
Miles away, in Pakistan, the rise of religious fervor fed by another dictator was also transforming the lives of millions, especially the women.
6
NO DUPATTA
PAKISTAN
1978–86
There is no doubt in the sanctity of Mecca,
but a donkey won’t become a Hajj pilgrim
by just going through the motions.
—Rahman Baba, sixteenth-century Pashtun Sufi poet, Peshawar
When Mehtab Channa flew to the United States in 1976 to complete her master’s degree at Amherst College, the Pakistan she left behind was a young, imperfect democracy. When she returned home two years later, in the summer of 1978, it was a dictatorship. She noticed the changes around her, in the way people dressed or how news anchors started their evening broadcast—small, strange details that could not be explained by the simple fact that the country was under martial law.
The twenty-nine-year-old Mehtab had heard the news about the military coup while she was in the United States. In the early hours of July 5, 1977, Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, popular and charismatic, was arrested and thrown in jail. The man who had ousted Bhutto was his own army chief, General Zia ul-Haq. Zia, as he would come to be known, promised this was temporary. “My sole aim is to organize free and fair elections which would be held in October this year,” he had declared on television. “Soon after the polls, power will be transferred to the elected representatives of the people. I give a solemn assurance that I will not deviate from this schedule.” There would be no elections. In September 1978, Zia declared himself president. Bhutto was still in jail.
Before her studies of International Relations in the United States, Mehtab had been a radio and television presenter and had taught at Sindh University, her alma mater. Petite and pretty with a determined look, she was the youngest child in a lower-middle-class family. Her father was a teacher and wanted all his children, his son and five daughters, to get an education. There was no high school for girls in their small village of Naudero, near Larkana, in the southern Sindh province, so he moved the family to the city of Hyderabad and then pushed all his children to go to university. And Mehtab had somehow made it all the way to America: big, fabulous, full-of-promise America. Single, practically a spinster at that age in a conservative society, and living alone in a faraway country, she had the support of her family. She had felt free growing up, empowered by her progressive father. She didn’t feel she stood out; she felt she was swimming with the times. In the mid-1970s, more than 50 percent of university students in this developing nation were women. Purdah, the traditional separation of women from the world of men, was never really an option for working-class women, too busy in the fields or in servitude in urban homes. But it was now also receding in the cities. Mehtab’s grandmother had never worn a veil or a burqa, the all-in-one face veil and body cloak with a mesh in front of the eyes. Her mother put on the burqa only to visit the village. Her eldest sister wore and then discarded it as she rose to become a teacher and eventually a school principal. The sisters rode bikes, their colorful traditional dupatta scarves draped around their necks blowing behind them. Their father let them be, proud of the places they were going.
When Zia took over, he described himself as a “soldier of Islam.” Few paused to think about what this meant in a Muslim country. Mehtab began to wonder about it when she went to visit the beloved vice chancellor of Sindh University, Shaikh Ayaz. She knew instantly that something was wrong. Shaikh Ayaz was a renowned poet, both a revolutionary and a romantic whose verses spoke to the soul of Sindh, a province with a long tradition of Sufism and home to Pakistan’s first capital and seaport city, Karachi. That day, Ayaz looked sheepish, almost embarrassed. He was not wearing pants and a shirt, but the traditional kurta and salwar, a long tunic over baggy trousers. Ayaz had written fiery verses against the colonial powers of his youth in British India and infused his poetry with Sindhi nationalism under the rulers of newborn Pakistan, but he had never worn the salwar at university, nor had it ever been brandished as an act of cultural resistance or a symbol of Islam. But Zia had imposed the salwar as national dress for government officials, students, and schoolchildren. Kids across Pakistan threw fits every morning before putting on their new uncool, baggy uniform. And here was Ayaz, the rebel, trying to adapt to the new fashion constraints while his poetry spoke of freedom.
Who can say there is no freedom here?
Jackals are free; flies are free;
Here the intellectuals are free; poets are free to hold devotional recitations on TV.
The farmer is free; he can pick out lice from his head or not.
Everybody is free on this land cracking up
Where snakes hide in the crevices and wolves dig out dens for their cubs.
Prayer time was now being enforced in government offices and public institutions (including Sindh University) during working hours. So Ayaz, the secular, liberal poet who wrote about Sufi saints and women’s breasts, had to lead the daytime prayers for his department staff. Piety had become exhibitionism, a competition. Mehtab felt her heart tighten in her chest. She couldn’t believe what she was witnessing.
* * *
The changes had been small and slow at first. After he seized power, the general had promised to implement Islamic law, but few people paid him much mind. And even though he had not held elections when he said he would, no one believed Zia would last. The Islamist lobby in Pakistan had been busy for decades, but the country was too boisterous, too diverse, conservative but progressive, with a long tradition of secular politicians. People liked their liquor, their poetry, their colorful, unorthodox celebrations of religious festivals. A huge casino was being built in Karachi to lure some of the Middle East revelers who had lost their playground in war-torn Lebanon. But in the heat of August 1978, a year into Zia’s rule, and for the first time in the country’s history, the holy month of Muslim fasting was strictly enforced, and all eating and drinking places were shut between sunrise and sunset. Government letters, news broadcasts, and Zia’s speeches now all began with Bismillah al-Rahman al- Raheem—in the name of God the Beneficent the Merciful the Compassionate.
Pakistan was founded in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, born out of the partition of India, but it was also a home for many minorities. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, was a secular Shia who nominated other Shias and an Ahmadi Muslim to his cabinet. His first law minister was a Hindu, to make clear that laws were to be written by secular jurists, not clerics and theologians. In his first presidential address marking the birth of the nation, at midnight on August 11, 1947, Jinnah told his new compatriots “you are free to go to your temples, free to go to your mosques, or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or case or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” Jinnah had spelled out a vision for religious pluralism in a secular Muslim-majority democracy, where Muslims and non-Muslims were equal citizens. He did not speak of an Islamic state, not even of an Islamic republic. But his vision for tolerant diversity was never fulfilled. He died a year later, and though his successors tried to uphold this nuanced narrative, they soon fell back on the more straightforward raison d’être of the country: Islam.
Pakistan was born amid horrendous violence and indescribable dislocation—around 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to Pakistan, while 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs left for India. Activist, revivalist Islam had grown in British India in part as a reaction to colonial rule, but also in opposition to Hindus, the majority. The name Pakistan was an acronym combining the first letters of the different provinces that made up the new country. But in Urdu, the language of the new nation, it also means “the land of the pure,” and there were many who wanted to purify it further. In 1956, Pakistan’s constitution declared the country an Islamic republic and prohibited non-Muslims from holding the office of head of state. In the 1960s, military dictators used r
eligion as a rallying cry against India, feeding further intolerance against Hindus and appeasing Islamists. Social and cultural life continued unperturbed, but some now brandished Pakistan as a citadel of Islam.
The architect of that citadel would be Abu A’la al-Mawdudi, the man who had inspired Qutb in Egypt and Khomeini in Iran. Mawdudi had not always been a religious fundamentalist. Born in 1903 in British India, he was a journalist, a poet, and newspaper editor whose intellectual, mystical, theological journey made him the twentieth century’s greatest revivalist Islamic thinker. He transformed from a young man in a suit with a round face and a mustache to a preacher with a traditional karakul (curly lambskin) hat and a beard. Mawdudi dabbled in Marxism and Western philosophy, and was inspired to become a writer by a poet friend. He admired Mahatma Gandhi and was even briefly an Indian nationalist. But like his contemporary Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mawdudi was dismayed by the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 and the secularism of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mawdudi’s ideas about Islam and Muslim identity reflected his own existential questioning and evolved at a time of deep flux for Muslims in India. In a landscape littered with the vestiges of a collapsed Muslim power, the Mughal Empire, Muslims were caught between the uncertainty caused by a departing colonial power and growing Hindu nationalism. Mawdudi believed that the rise of the Western concept of nationalism among Muslims had led to the downfall of the Ottomans, allowing European powers to enter the region. He believed the answer lay not in more nationalism, or in a new country for Muslims, but in reviving Islam and implementing true Islamic rule.
In 1932, Mawdudi was still writing very earthly poetry, rejecting the promise of heavenly rewards.
Give to the drinkers, O wine bearer, the wine that promotes rapture.
Disturb the wine shop with every drunkard slip …
We believe in cash, not in credit
So why narrate to us the story of paradise?
By 1941, in Lahore, he had founded Jamaat-e Islami, the vanguard of the Islamic revolution of his dreams. His followers would deny he had ever written such heathen verses. Mawdudi had opposed the creation of Pakistan. But once it came into existence, he worked relentlessly to turn it into his utopian Islamic state. From philosopher and ideologue, he became a strategist, a politician with a program. The Jamaat organized a highly structured network of activists to spread the message, pushing to institutionalize Islamic values at every level of society and public life, including politics. According to Mawdudi, no ruler, no system had ever been truly Islamic, because Muslims had become estranged from the true precepts of their religion, and governments that did not strictly apply the shari’a, Islamic law, were apostates. The jahiliyya, the pre-Islam age of ignorance, therefore continued, and Mawdudi’s response was the hukm, sovereign rule, of God over earth through the rule of shari’a. In its Arabic root declination, the word hukm led to the word and concept of hakimiyya: an Islamic state that was the result of the Islamization of society and state through education, the Islamization of private and public life, a totalitarian model in which God’s law was supreme and elected officials governed only under the guidance of clerics.
These were the ideas that would later be attributed to the Egyptian thinker Qutb, but they were unmistakably Mawdudi’s. He was the missing link between Banna’s vague vision for an Islamic society and Qutb’s urgent political manifesto, Milestones. Novel and radical in their day, Mawdudi’s ideas are at the root of modern-day political Islam, radical Salafism, and jihadism. He inspired his contemporaries and the generations since, both Shia and Sunni. His profound influence on Pakistani politics is the bridge that connects the mujahedeen of Afghanistan in the 1980s to the jihadists of the Middle East. Decades later, when Western authors and journalists went looking for the clues that led to 9/11, they would settle on Qutb as the source of much of the evil, providing only a partial understanding of what had happened and why. Mawdudi’s key influence would be mostly forgotten, including his connections with revolutionary Iran.
Mawdudi’s work had begun to appear in Iran, translated into Persian, in the early 1960s. The Pakistani scholar and Khomeini met in 1963 in Mecca, where Mawdudi delivered a lecture about the duties of Muslim youth that impressed Khomeini. The two men talked for a half hour at their hotel with a translator. Khomeini explained his campaign against the shah. This was the year of protests against the White Revolution, and Khomeini would soon be exiled to Iraq. Mawdudi did not believe in a revolution for Pakistan; he preached for the Islamization of society as the natural path to an Islamic state. But the majority of Pakistanis were indifferent to his message. He was also unpopular with the country’s leaders. Mawdudi was jailed four times, only narrowly escaping a death sentence thanks to the intervention of Saudi Arabia in 1953. During the elections of 1970, the Jamaat won only four of the three hundred seats in the National Assembly. But in Zia’s Pakistan, Mawdudi was suddenly useful. The pious general sought his advice, and the scholar’s views were now published on the front page of newspapers.
Just as in Egypt, the rise of Islam as a political force and a social trend in Pakistan was not the result of one moment, or even the work of one person—it was a slow build that came in waves and ebbed and flowed. It was sometimes bolstered by weak leaders who used the Islamists to shore up their own legitimacy, like Sadat in Egypt, or even secular, socialist Bhutto, who first introduced the ban on alcohol and instituted Friday as the weekly holiday instead of Sunday. In both Egypt and Pakistan, leaders used religion as a balm after the national trauma of a military defeat. For Pakistan it was the 1971 loss of East Pakistan, today’s Bangladesh. And just as in Egypt before the assassination of Sadat, the relentless work of Islamists in Pakistan had not yet delivered a sea change—they toiled on the margins, and they converted people to their cause one by one.
Even when Zia spoke, in the spring of 1978, about his mission to purify the country, Pakistani society was far from being gripped by Islamic fervor. For this to happen it required the incredibly powerful, violent, and moneyed convergence of a number of people and events: Mawdudi’s groundwork over decades, Zia’s rise to power and brutal rule, but also the generous support of Saudi Arabia.
* * *
Saudi influence in Pakistan was not new. So far it had taken the form of benevolent generosity for grand projects, like a national mosque for which King Faisal had donated $120 million in the 1960s. But the subcontinent was steeped in Indo-Persian culture, and Pakistan’s heritage was layered with centuries of Persian influence, from literature and poetry to food and music—and also its national language. Urdu is filled with thousands of Persian words and the national anthem is almost entirely in Persian. Historically and culturally, Pakistan felt closer to Iran, on its western border, than to the countries across the Arabian Sea. Religious scholars with connections in Mecca and Medina, like Mawdudi, felt differently. The scholar had long impressed Saudi kings, his books had been read in the kingdom since the 1950s, the Jamaat had long-standing ties with Saudi clerics, and Mawdudi sat on the board of the Islamic University of Medina, where the blind sheikh Bin Baz was vice rector.
On September 25, 1978, as the revolution was taking hold of Iran and Khomeini was about to head to France, a small item appeared in Pakistan’s biggest English-language daily, Dawn, announcing the arrival of the “special assistant to King Khaled of Saudi Arabia” to advise the Council of Islamic Ideology on the “Islamization of laws in Pakistan” at the special request of Zia. Maarouf Dawalibi was a former Syrian prime minister, ousted from Syria and jailed in 1963. He had also served as a foreign minister and struck up a friendship with his Saudi counterpart Prince Faisal. Released from prison in 1964, Dawalibi was invited to serve in the Saudi royal court by his friend Faisal, who had become king. A statesman and a professor of Islamic law, educated at the Sorbonne, Dawalibi was exactly the kind of learned man that Saudi kings surrounded themselves with at the time, from Egypt and the Levant, eventually appoi
nting some as governors, emissaries, or ambassadors. Dawalibi, married to a French woman he’d met while studying in Paris, was pious but progressive, and King Faisal had often used him to reason with retrograde clerics like Bin Baz. Dawalibi despised Bin Baz and thought of him as nothing more than a mediocre village preacher. And yet, in 1978, Dawalibi, then serving as an adviser to King Khaled, was about to play a key role in imposing on Pakistan a system of life closer to Bin Baz’s vision for society, propelling Pakistan into its darkest decade.
Newspapers reported on Dawalibi’s meeting with various officials, including the justice minister, the members of the Council of Islamic Ideology, and of course Mawdudi. There was flowery coverage of the “renowned Muslim jurist” coming from the land blessed with the message of Islam and with the riches of oil, the land where several hundred thousand Pakistanis now worked in everything from construction to mining to services, sending millions of rupees back home in remittances. But for most Pakistanis reading the news, there was not much more to it. The context was clear only in private, during meetings and at a reception held by the Saudi ambassador for Dawalibi. At those, there was grandiose talk as Dawalibi described “the elimination of secular systems and of their replacement by shari’a law as the greatest hope for all mankind.” He praised Zia as a sincere Muslim and expressed his hope that countries like Egypt could emulate Pakistan. In their missives back to Washington, somewhat perplexed American diplomats described what seemed to be a fad to them, “Islamania,” adding that there were no concrete proposals: “implementation remains elusive.”
