Pakistani fundamentalists closer to controlling state. Now the battle is over baby milk bank

Islamic clerics push back against human milk banks as Shari’a proscribes marriages between so-called milk siblings. But several Islamic countries, including Iran, operate them.

The milk bank was inaugurated by Dr. Azra Pechuho, the provincial health minister of Sindh, along with officials from UNICEF and the Pakistan Paediatric Association | UNICEF Pakistan

The judges had decided their punishment before the trial began: Like Jesus, the Persian-born mystic Abu al-Mughis al-Husayn bin Mansur al-Hallaj, known to the world as Mansur al-Hallaj, was crucified, and his body burned together with his books. From Gujarat and Kashmir, to Mecca and Medina, al-Hallaj had relentlessly campaigned against the Abbasid Caliphate’s harsh oppression of the working poor, preaching the radical idea that the pursuit of kashf, or enlightenment, could unite the human soul with God.

For a while, the scholar Shemeem Burney Abbas has written, al-Hallaj was defended by Shaghab, mother of the caliph al-Muqtadir—but by 922 C.E., all his protectors had been marginalised in court. The word of God belonged, after all, to the state and its servants, not heretics.

Last week, newspaper headlines around the world documented the brutal lynching of Muhammad Ismail, a tourist from Punjab who was tortured and then set on fire by a cheering mob in Pakistan’s idyllic Swat. The savage killing is part of a grinding campaign of violence against alleged blasphemers, spearheaded by the far-Right Tehreek Labbaik-e-Pakistan, or TLP.

Even as the horror in Swat unfolded, religious fundamentalists were registering an even more significant success. Karachi’s prestigious Sindh Institute of Child Health and Neonatology shut down the country’s first human milk bank after the powerful Jami’a Dar-ul-Uloom seminary withdrew theological sanction for its operations. The decision, doctors say, endangers the lives of preterm babies whose mothers are unable to breastfeed them.

The battle over milk banks, part of a bitter debate within Islam, has pitted modernisers against fundamentalists in many countries. The case of Pakistan is unique, though: Nowhere else has the decision to open, or close, a medical facility been delegated to clerics with no legal or constitutional authority.

Fundamentalists have proved willing to sacrifice infants for the cause of building a theocratic dystopia, while the nation-state has demonstrated it can do nothing but stand by and watch.

The baby milk battle

Ever since the mid-1980s, when milk banks began to establish themselves as a key tool of advanced neonatal care, Islamic clerics pushed back against the concept. Islamic theology, doctors Sonia Subudhi and Natasha Sriraman note, mandates the existence of rida’a, or so-called milk kinship between the non-biological infant and the woman who breastfeeds them, as well as her biological children. The shari’a, or religious law, proscribes marriages between so-called milk brothers and sisters.

Islam recognised the critical importance of breastfeeding, and wet nursing was a well-established practice among the Bedouin communities where the religion first emerged.

The Organisation of Islamic Countries’ bioethics panel, doctors Mohammed Ali al-Bar Hassan Chamsi-Pasha wrote, proscribed milk banks in 1985, arguing that it was impossible for them to maintain the sanctity of milk kin relationships. That hasn’t ended the debate though. Some theologians, like Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, argue that the milk-kinship relationship applies only when children are suckled, not by milk itself.

Iran thus has several milk banks, together with Bangladesh and Kuwait, each operating under somewhat different kinds of religious compliance. In Singapore and the United States, where there are significant Muslim communities, some clerics have given theological approval to existing milk banks.

Giving preterm babies pasteurised donor breast milk instead of formula, experts have said, gives significant protection against dangerous conditions like necrotising enterocolitis.

Earlier this year, when the Sindh Institute of Child Health decided to open a United Nations Children’s Fund-aided breast milk facility, it reached out to clerics at the Dar-ul-Uloom, which traces its origins to the famous seminary of Deoband. The seminary responded with a Fatwa, or opinion, giving conditional permission.

The Fatwa stipulates, among other things, that records be maintained of donors so milk kinship relationships could be established, and that milk only be given from Muslim mothers to Muslim children—a record-keeping provision that, interestingly, is not applied to organ transplants or blood transfusions.

The facility was inaugurated by Dr. Azra Pechuho, the provincial health minister of Sindh, together with officials from UNICEF and the Pakistan Paediatric Association.

The theology of death

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear—likely tied to ideological power struggles within the institution—the Dar-ul-Uloom suddenly changed course last week, amid the renewed blasphemy mobilisation. The institution now declared, in a new Fatwa, that the terms it had laid out were impossible to observe. There was, it argued, no way to ensure the traceability of all donors. There were also wider problems: Letting poor mothers sell milk might deprive their own babies, while elite women would shirk their religious obligation to their children.

The hospital promptly shut down the milk bank; one spokesperson for the institution bitterly told media, “Our society has lost the ability to debate like educated people.” The issue has now been referred to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a body founded in 1962 to advise the state on religious issues. The body, political scientist political scientist Sarah Holz has noted, has come to be dominated by small-town clerics with reactionary views.

Ever since the Lahore carpenter Ilm-ud-Din murdered the anti-Islam polemicist Mahashe Rajpal in 1927—possibly seeking to expiate guilt over homoerotic longing, documents show—this cowing-down has characterised the course of the project of Pakistan. Lacking legitimacy, elites sought to recruit the clerics and faith to their cause, with tragic consequences.

In the late 1970s, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime backed clerical demands for a theocratic state, in return for their declaring that Nizam-e-Mustafa, the order ordained by Islam, demanded the centralisation of power in a despot. Following 9/11, General Pervez Musharraf created his own clerical army, backing reactionary elements in the Barelvi sect in the hope of outmanoeuvring his jihadist opponents.

The state and God

Islam isn’t unique in promoting antiscience. MK Gandhi resisted life-saving smallpox vaccinations, historian Nandini Oza reminds us, arguing they involved cells harvested from cows’ udders. For years, doctors in the West have been compelled to turn to courts to battle parents belonging to the Jehovah’s Witness sect, who refuse to allow their children to be given blood transfusions. Ethical debates rage around issues like circumcision and abortion.

The issue with the Karachi milk bank, though, isn’t the conflict between medicine and faith: It is whether clerics or the state and its democratic institutions should have the power to judge issues of bioethics. In this case, a degraded state has surrendered its authority to decide.

Late one afternoon in August 1948, as military doctor Major Mahmud Ahmad desperately tried to restart his stalled car on a Quetta road, someone in an angry mob of cleric-led anti-Ahmadi protestors noticed he had a neatly trimmed beard. That was, to them, enough proof Ahmad was an apostate. The doctor’s body was found days later, one lung pierced with a knife, and guts carved out of his body. The very first blasphemy murder in Pakistan was of a man charged with protecting its nationhood.

From Surriya Shafi, charged with blasphemy for using pictures of mermaids in a college-level English textbook, to High Court judge Arif Husain Bhatti, killed for acquitting a blasphemy-accused, and Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, assassinated by a fanatic: The victims of Pakistan’s theocracy have not just been religious minorities, but the upholders of its state.

Today, the mob in Swat, and the jihadists who murder Pakistani soldiers each day, aren’t just destroying the state: They’re also coming for the country’s children.

Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)