Wajib-ul-qatl,” raged the elderly cleric, “deserving of execution”. Weeks earlier, in late 2018, Pakistan’s Supreme Court had acquitted Asiya Noreen, a Christian accused of blasphemy. The law of God demanded that the prime minister, the supreme court judges, and the Pakistan Army chief all pay, thundered Pir Afzal Qadri, leader of the powerful Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan movement. “Either their drivers or their security guards should kill them,” he said, “Muslim Generals should start a rebellion.”
Like blaspheming God, treasonous talk in Pakistan—especially involving powerful men in uniform—can lead to an early appointment with the gallows. The leaders of the TLP were imprisoned but said sorry and were let off.
Last week, little noticed amid the chaos of an imploding Pakistan, that the TLP was back on the country’s streets. Faced with a protest march by the Islamist clerical group, 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.
Even if it doesn’t call them by their name, Pakistan is being quietly run by its own Ayatollahs, who negotiate with the State on behalf of a higher sovereign. They are laying the foundations for turning the country into a Shari’a-run Islamic State, more surely than jihadists who have escalated violent operations across Pakistan.
The pious State
Like so many stories about modern Pakistan, the rise of the TLP is entwined with 9/11. Following his decision to back the United States in its war on terror, scholar Iqbal Sevea has noted, General Pervez Musharraf’s military regime threw its weight behind the Barelvi religious order to promote what he called “Enlightened Moderation.” 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.
The pietist conservatism of the Barelvi movement, also known as the Ahl-e-Sunnat, was seen as a counterweight to the Islamist radicalism of Sayyid Ahmad of Raebareli—the leader of a failed insurrection against the Sikh empire, which inspired many jihadists, including Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar.
Even though Ahl-e-Sunnat was misogynist and illiberal in its values, it opposed al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. That was reason enough for Barelvi seminaries and leaders to receive millions of dollars in counter-extremism funding.
There was a second, deeper reason for Pakistan to back the Barelvis, though: military regimes in the country had always sought legitimacy by cloaking their uniforms in the robes of the clerics.
Field Marshal Muhammad 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. Rehman was forced into exile by religious hardliners before the hard-drinking Field Marshal was himself deposed by his Generals.
Then, in the late 1970s, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq lavished funding on clerics willing to legitimise his rule. The General’s clerics declared that Nizam-e-Mustafa, the order ordained by the Prophet Muhammad, demanded the centralisation of power in a presidency, and the abolition of political parties.
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The Barelvi backlash
General Zia’s patronage of the religious Right, though, contained the seeds of theocratic warfare in Pakistan. Zia patronised, in the main, clerics affiliated with the Jamaat-e-Islami, which opposed folk-Islamic practices like worship at shrines and the veneration of relics. Finding themselves under attack, the Barelvi movement began mobilising. These violent Barelvi tendencies consolidated in a jihadist group under Saleem Qadri, the Sunni Tehreek.
Far from being a madrasa-educated fanatic, Qadri was a semi-literate rickshaw driver who was attracted by the teachings of the Dawat-e-Islami—a proselytising group that has inspired hundreds of blasphemy murders, all the way from France and the United Kingdom to India. The Dawat-e-Islami is bitterly hostile to polytheists, who it says will 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”.
From 1988, scholar SVR Nasr has recorded, Qadri and his associates demonstrated a formidable talent for terror, assassinating their rivals on the Islamist Right wing and massacring hundreds of members of the Shi’a minority.
Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the founding leader 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 record. Leaders of the TLP canonised Mumtaz Qadri, a police officer who, in 2011, assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer for seeking reform of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws. Following Taseer’s murder, the TLP unleashed repeated mass movements—bringing the government to its knees.
Even though the Army had patronised the TLP, hoping it would challenge jihadist beliefs, Hussain made clear he was unwilling to be a tool of the West. Terrorism and extremism, he claimed, were being used as pretexts for “waging war against Islam.” “They want us to bring a moderate version of Islam, which does not carry the teachings of jihad.”
The TLP leader gleefully witnessed the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic in China—bucking Pakistan’s long-standing reverence for the country. “The Chinese had made two million Muslims captive, and now it is suffering from God’s wrath,” he said. “They forced millions of Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol. Oh Allah, destroy them.”
Also read: Pakistani Generals have a history of censoring media. Imran Khan is just the latest victim
The devil’s breath
Hussain passed away at Lahore’s Farooq Hospital in 2020—possibly because of Covid—leading to one of the largest public gatherings in Pakistan’s history. Leaders of political parties attended the event, and even former Pakistan Army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, took the opportunity to extend his condolences. In private, many leaders hoped the cleric’s son, Saad Hussain Rizvi, would prove less intransigent on the blasphemy issue than his father. Former PM Imran Khan, in particular, hoped to recruit the TLP to his own promise of building a Shari’a-inspired State.
The TLP proved more determined—and cunning—than the establishment. 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. Even though the TLP failed to secure the expulsion of the French ambassador in Islamabad, its stated aim, the government agreed to end the prosecution of hundreds of its cadre, and end the proscription of the organisation.
PM Imran also showed a willingness to embrace elements of the TTP’s core demand, a Shari’a governed State. Last year, he set up a high-level committee, which was to promote Islam in public life, screen school curricula and media for blasphemy, and help create an “Islamic welfare State.”
Facing an economic implosion it is unable to contain, growing terrorist violence spearheaded by the Tehreek-e-Taliban that has metastasised across the country’s north-west, and the ongoing political challenge from Imran, PM Shehbaz and Pakistan’s Generals can’t risk opening a fourth front. Their surrender to the TLP last week demonstrates just how fragile the foundations of the State itself have become.
Seventy years ago, a cleric-led movement demanded the creation of an Islamic State, where the fate of apostates and blasphemers would be judged by the regime, not God. The TLP has brought that movement closer than ever before to success.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)