Like Galileo Galilei, the young biologist Sher Ali Wazir decided against martyrdom. “I consider all scientific and rational ideas and theories against the divine law to be invalid, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, among others,” reads his declaration, on signed one hundred rupee judicial stamp paper, and attested by the deputy commissioner of Bannu. “I renounce them and repent from all the things that I have said against the above stated, on all occasions including the seminars, lectures, posts, and comments.”
“A woman’s intelligence is less than that of men as per the divine law: This I consider to be the truth and the final word.”
Almost four hundred years ago, in 1633 CE, Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and warned they would be used if he chose not to recant his advocacy of a heliocentric universe. Eppur si muove, ‘and yet, it moves,’ Galileo is said—without historical evidence—to have rebelliously muttered after the end of his trial. The earth, with the Pope and all his cardinals on it, did indeed rotate around the sun.
The college teacher from Bannu demonstrated, in the videotape made of his recantation, that human beings can retain their dignity even in the face of terror. Exactly what Ali might have muttered when the camera ended filming, and the clerics surrounding him dispersed, we do not know.
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returned home to Pakistan this weekend after four years in self-imposed exile, promising to arrest the country’s economic implosion. Nawaz said nothing, though, on rising jihadist violence in the country’s northwest, and the growing power of Islamists.
The little-known story of Sher Ali demonstrates that how Pakistan now deals with religious fundamentalism is the most consequential issue that will define its future.
Also Read: Nawaz Sharif is on his way back to Pakistan. But history shows he must prove his ‘piety’ first
Ali’s war against the jihadists
Following a massive terrorist attack on Karachi’s international airport in 2014, Pakistan’s army reluctantly went to war in North Waziristan. Though the military inflicted devastation on the region, the problem of terrorism did not end. Leaders of Tehreek-e-Taliban slipped into adjoining districts, like Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. Taliban-linked warlords, like Jalaluddin Haqqani, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Sadiq Noor, remained untouched.
Local pro-government warlords were handed swathes of territory by the military, the International Crisis Group reported in 2018, and continued “to target opponents and indulge in criminal activity, including drug and arms smuggling, with few restrictions”. From 2018, violence grew—targeting opponents of jihadism, though, not the military.
Then, something unprecedented happened. Educated youth in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, researcher Qamar Jafri has recorded, began a non-violent mobilisation against the jihadists and the state apparatus which supported them. Inspired by the Independence movement-era Pashtun nationalist leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement used music, art and literature to cut past traditional tribal rivalries, and demand peace.
Educated at universities in Peshawar and Islamabad, Bannu Government Post Graduate College assistant professor Ali involved himself in this nationalist renaissance, advocating for science and reason. The price for this activism was soon paid. In the summer of 2022, on his way home from lecturing students in North Waziristan’s Mirali, a bomb went off inside Ali’s car. The professor lost a leg in the bombing.
“It has often been seen that whenever a police constable or a soldier, leave alone an officer, is injured or martyred, the chief minister not only pays a visit to his residence but also announces compensation for them,” his cousin Guldar Ali Khan Wazir noted in a letter to The Dawn. “But no one from the provincial government has so far bothered to even contact the family of the injured professor.”
This surprised no one. The military was deeply suspicious of the PTM, seeing its secular nationalism as a threat to the entrenched relationship between the State and the jihadists. In spite of the injury, though, Ali kept up his work.
Also Read: Nawaz Sharif has spoken. But can he change the Pakistan Army’s game?
The counter-Enlightenment in Khyber
Events came to a head two months ago, journalist Farzana Ali has reported, when women in the town of Domel were prevented by clerics from visiting the office of the government-run Benazir Income Support Scheme. Ali and others organised a seminar, where he among other things decried the idea that men were superior to women. The professor and his colleague Shabina Gul also noted that the all-enveloping burqa was not mandated by Islam and that women had held high office in the course of the religion’s history.
Local clerics—many, their signatures show, trained at the Haqqani network’s fountainhead, the Darul Uloom in Akora Khattak—rounded on Ali. His defence of the rights of women was grounded, among other things, on the himself-sexist Darwin’s biological work—just as early feminists did, biologist Sarah Richardson reminds us.
Faced with a clerical agitation charging Ali with heresy—and warning of violence—the professor was summoned by deputy commissioner Zaman Khan Marwat, and compelled to sign on a recantation.
The scholar Martin Reixinger has noted that opposition to science—particularly Darwin—has been part of a powerful counter-Enlightenment current in Islam across South Asia. Although modernisers like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Abdul Kalam Azad sought to reconcile science with religious revelation, their position found little support among clerics. Instead, the clerical class supported ideologues like the Jama’at-e-Islami founder Abul Ala’ Maududi, who decried Enlightenment values and western science as part of “a civilisation of doubt”.
Islamist pop preachers like Tahir-ul-Qadri and Zakir Naik popularised this anti-science posture—largely relying on pseudoscientific arguments—and helped embed it in mass culture.
The columnist and eminent physicist Pervez Hoodhbhoy has written that in 2016, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa introduced a biology textbook decrying evolution as “one of the most unbelievable and irrational claims in history”. “‘A person in a stable and proper state of mind’ cannot accept the wild theories of Western science,” Hoodhbhoy reported another textbook asserting. “A physics textbook of the Sindh Textbook Board categorically states that the universe sprang instantly into existence when a certain divine phrase was uttered.”
Also Read: I am an Indian Muslim watching Pakistan fall apart. I am glad my family didn’t migrate in 1947
Surrendering to fundamentalism
Ever since the moment of its birth as a nation-state, Pakistan has slowly surrendered to fundamentalism: Lynchings, assassinations and state-authorised persecution of so-called blasphemers have steadily grown, jihadist violence has escalated, and fanatical organisations like the Tehreek Labbaik-e-Pakistan have grown in influence. Like his predecessor, Imran Khan, Shehbaz Sharif pandered to Islamists.
Nawaz himself, journalist Sohail Warraich records, has a long record of cultivating ties with reactionary clerics to buttress his political position. For its part, other political parties, as well as the military, have sought alliances with the clerics’ reactionary Islamism to secure their own power, scholars Sidra Karamat and Ali Shan Shah have explained.
Even though Nawaz savagely turned on elements of the jihadist movement after the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi challenged his authority in Punjab, and even attempted to assassinate him, he maintained channels to other terrorist groups including al-Qaeda.
Earlier this year, tens of thousands of supporters of secular parties, like the Pakhtun Tahafuz Movement and the Awami National Party, gathered in Bannu to demand the state act against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and other jihadist groups who have overrun the region since the fall of Kabul. The State paid no attention
Nawaz, and other politicians, are headed towards a moment of decision, where they must choose between a secular Pakistanis and the infinite darkness of theocracy. Little they have done so far, though, gives reason for optimism.
The author is a contributing editor. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)