It is generally believed that the share of the religious vote bank in Pakistan is roughly about 15%. This is a fallacy. The 15% share attributed to the religious vote bank takes into account only the ‘following’ of those religious parties which are headed by the bearded clerics of one or the other school of thought. They represent religious orthodoxy and can conveniently be put under the banner of the ‘bearded Islam’. The MMA of today effectively represents this segment of the Political Islam that the Western thinkers quite often refer to. But this clerical Islam does not give the whole picture of Islam as a political force. Allama Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah were not clerics. Nor were they bearded. Yet their role in the emergence of Political Islam is of paramount importance. Allama Iqbal’s Islamic credentials are unquestionable and undisputed. The Quaid however has been a subject of controversy in this respect. Some quarters argue that he was essentially a secular democrat and had no intentions to make Islam central to Pakistani Nationhood.
This is an issue that requires very detailed analysis; yet a simple answer is enough to establish the Islamic credentials of Jinnah’s political thought. What was meant by the Two-Nation theory on which Jinnah based his demand for Pakistan? Didn’t he mean that one was the Nation of Islam and the other the Nation of the Rest (Non-Islam)?
The Islamic credentials of the Nation of Islam were fully reflected in the Objectives Resolution presented by Liaqat Ali Khan in 1949.
What I mean to say here is that the Nation of Islam constituting Pakistan is not represented just by the bearded orthodoxy, but also by all those who voted against the PPP in 1970 elections. Let it be accepted that Pro-Bhutto and Anti-Bhutto divide was based on this perception that the PPP was seeking exclusion of Islam from the political landscape of the country. Right or wrong, this perception has remained central to the thinking of the anti-PPP vote bank. This is despite the fact that, Bhutto while launching his campaign against social, economic and political injustice, from the platform of Socialism, had not forgotten to make Islam the base of his three-dimensional vision. The Red of his flag stood for socialism, the Black for democracy and the Green for Islam.
Yet the forces which were severely hit by Bhutto’s agenda for reform assembled under the banner of Islam.
The climatic point of this divide arrived in the elections of 1990 when the PPP was made to look like representing “lack of religiosity” and the IJI stood for the “defense of Islamic credentials”. The name Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) itself was indicative of the political divide on religious lines.
That divide now has widened because of the introduction of the 9/11 factor, and the popular perception that America’s war is not against terrorism as claimed, but against Islam (as a defiant political force).
Who will be the beneficiary of this pro-Islam and anti-America vote in the forthcoming elections?
(This Column was first published on 10-08-2007)
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