Less than an hour earlier, William Putscher had been lunching on a hot dog by the poolside, in the congenial environment of the American Embassy’s club in Islamabad, nestled inside a 32-acre campus. Now, he was being held hostage in the dormitories of the élite Quaid-e-Azam University, facing trial for unspecified crimes “against the Islamic movement.” The students who had attacked the embassy had thrown a brick at Putscher’s face, and then hit him on the back of the head with a pipe. The young accountant had been relieved of his wallet and his two rings by the mob: “Kill the Americans,” the crowd sang.
Twenty kilometres away in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was being showered with rose petals by women strategically positioned along the route of his open jeep ride. Everywhere he stopped, his staff handed out sacks of flour, quilts and copies of the Quran.
Lieutenant-General Faiz Ali Chishti, the executor of the coup that brought Zia to power, watched as Zia addressed the crowds at Warris Khan Chowk. A question was asked about the storming of the Masjid al-Haram at Mecca the previous night. Either intentionally or otherwise, General Chishti later wrote, Zia replied, “the Americans had inspired the attack on the Holy Kaaba.” This was untrue: the Masjid al-Haram had in fact been occupied by Saudi rebels. Zia, however, fuelled the rumours.
As Zia’s soldiers watched, the American flag at the Embassy was brought down and burned. An American military guard was shot in the head and died.
Last week, Field-Marshal Asim Munir did what General Zia wouldn’t: Troops chased down and shot fleeing protestors of the far-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan party, sometimes at point blank range, after they marched on the American Embassy to protest the Gaza peace plan. Figures like Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s son-in-law, Muhammad Safdar Awan, openly backed TLP causes, like the persecution of the Ahmadiyya minority, and the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer. Today, the PML-N is pushing for the TLP to be banned.
Field-Marshal Asim, like Zia, has recruited political Islam to his cause—but where Zia wheedled, inveigled and bought out the clerics, the Field Marshal is trying to keep them under his jackboots.
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Biting their masters
The decision to crush the TLP marks a remarkable turn in Pakistani politics. Two years ago, just months after then-General Asim’s term as chief, Tehreek-e-Taliban attacks began to surge, marking the unravelling of the Pakistan Army’s long-standing alliance with Afghanistan-based jihadists. To make things worse, Asim’s efforts to stamp out support for former Prime Minister Imran Khan were flailing. Though the government succeeded in incarcerating Imran, widespread violence demonstrated a new willingness among the public to take on the armed forces.
Faced with a protest march by the TLP’s clerics two years ago, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government agreed to set up a counter-blasphemy department, issue a diplomatic letter to demand the release of incarcerated terrorist Aafia Siddiqui, and reduce fuel prices, endangering the economy.
Ever since 9/11, the TLP had been cultivated by the Generals as a bulwark against revolutionary Islamist organisations like al-Qaeda, which sought to overthrow the existing political order. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler, saw clerics of the Barelvi order as tools of his policy of Enlightened Moderation—in essence, an accommodation between the clerics, the army, and America.
The clerics of the Ahl-e-Sunnat, as the Barelvis were properly known, represented deeply illiberal values, mired in misogyny and intolerance of religious minorities. Their pietist conservatism, though, was also ideologically opposed to the radicalism inspired by the eighteenth-century mystic Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareli, which informed jihadism across the Indian subcontinent.
In essence, General Musharraf offered the Ahl-e-Sunnat clerics a simple deal: in return for opposing jihadism, they could have an outsize share of state patronage and power. Even as Barelvi seminaries harvested massive counter-extremism funding, a Barelvi cleric was appointed federal minister for religious affairs and six more to the Council of Islamic Ideology, responsible for making law consonant with faith.
Things didn’t quite run to script, though. The Barelvi cleric Pir Afzal Qadri soon built up a massive following around his campaign to eradicate the Ahmadiyya and other purported blasphemers. The assassination of Governor Taseer in 2011, because of his opposition to the misuse of the blasphemy laws, demonstrated the threat. The political order buckled under, though. The grave of Taseer’s assassin—his own bodyguard—emerged as a popular shrine.
Late in 2018, when Pakistan’s supreme court acquitted Asiya Noreen, a Christian accused of blasphemy, TLP leader Afzal Qadri declared the judges wajib-ul-qatl, or deserving of murder. The law of god held that the Prime Minister and the Generals were also accountable, he insisted: “Their drivers or their security guards should kill them.”
The Barelvis had begun to bite the hand that fed them. There was no one willing to try putting a muzzle on the beast General Musharraf had unleashed.
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The clerical guard dogs
The emergence of the TLP as a threat to the Pakistani state was remarkably predictable. Founded in 1981, the Dawat-e-Islami had grown into the largest of modern Barelvi proselytising organisations, preaching an obsessive pietism that governed everything from appropriate behaviours for young women to the propriety of ritual ablutions in bathrooms with an attached toilet. The Dawat-e-Islami principally served as a network offering mobility to its adherents, much like a large social organisation or caste association.
From 1988, as religious feuds grew more intense in Pakistan, members of the Dawat-e-Islami also demonstrated a considerable talent for killing. The adherents of the group engaged in tit-for-tat assassinations of their rivals in other religious orders, and killed hundreds of Shi’a in bombings and shootings, scholar SVR Nasr has recorded.
The Dawat-e-Islami voiced bitter hostility to polytheists, who it warned would be cursed in the afterlife by having “the birds tear up their flesh into small pieces or the wind separate their body parts and throw them into a distant valley”. The organisation’s members were implicated in blasphemy murders, from France to the United Kingdom and India.
Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the founder of the movement that went on to become the TLP, warned Muslims not to associate with non-Muslims or adopt Western social norms, scholars Arslan Ahmed and Bilal Zafar Ranjha wrote.
The Pakistani state cowered. When Khadim Hussain Rizvi passed away at Lahore’s Farooq Hospital in 2020, his mourners constituted one of the largest public gatherings in Pakistan’s history. Leaders of political parties attended the event, and then-Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa took the opportunity to extend his condolences.
Even though politicians hoped Khadim Hussain’s son and successor, Saad Hussain Rizvi, would prove more moderate, the TLP proved relentless. In the winter of 2020, the party unleashed yet another round of anti-blasphemy mobilisation, this time to protest against caricatures of the Prophet published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo years earlier.
Imran Khan’s government responded by embracing elements of the TTP’s core demand, a Shari’a-governed State. The flamboyant leader set up a high-level committee to promote Islam in public life, screen media for purported blasphemy, and help create an “Islamic welfare State.”
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God’s own general
All this ran true to pattern. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq lavished funding on clerics linked to the Jama’at-e-Islami. The General’s clerics declared that Nizam-e-Mustafa, the order ordained by the Prophet Muhammad, demanded the centralisation of power in a president with absolute powers, and the abolition of political parties. Zia’s clerics, however, ended up sparking off the embassy burning of 1979—a crisis that could have precipitated a rupture with America, had the Soviet Union not invaded Afghanistan the next month.
Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan had, in the 1960s, appointed the theologian Fazlur Rehman to head the Institute of Islamic Research, hoping to give his modernising policies religious foundations. The project didn’t end well. The theologian was forced into exile by religious hardliners before the hard-drinking Field Marshal was himself deposed by his Generals.
Now, the crackdown on the TLP shows Field-Marshal Munir is trying a new path. Instead of coddling clerics, as Generals did in the past, he is crushing movements of the religious Right which challenge the state’s authority. This should not be confused, though, with a modernising impulse. The Field-Marshal instead bases his authority on his own religious credentials, marketing himself as a source of both spiritual and temporal authority. Like the TLP, the General himself has insisted that the project of Pakistan is irreconcilable with Hinduism.
To America, Field-Marshal Munir seems to offer a convenient means to crush Islamism in Pakistan and take on jihadists in Afghanistan and beyond. In reality, as the experience of the Zia and Musharraf years shows, his authoritarianism and the choking of democratic institutions will serve only to consolidate religious fundamentalism as the sole language of protest against the state.
America imagines Asim to be the kind of authoritarian that the doctor ordered to crush the virus of jihadism. He is, in fact, the disease.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)