An incident happened in Nankana Sahib where a man accused of blasphemy was taken out of the police station and tortured to death. In another incident, in Sialkot, a Sri Lankan factory manager was killed on an accusation of blasphemy.
The country which was a secular country till 1955, how this transformation and deterioration in the society occurred.
Religious fundamentalism is the approach of those religious groups that look for the literal interpretation of original religious texts or books, believing that teachings obtained from this kind of reading must be used in all social, economic, and political aspects.
Several names are associated with its evolution. There is no single founder of fundamentalism. American Evangelist Dwight L. Moody and British preacher John Nelson Darby.
Its manifestations are sometimes shocking. Fundamentalists have gunned down worshipers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in hospitals, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a powerful government.
Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, in their landmark study The Fundamental Project, summarized that fundamentalism has appeared as a tendency, a habit of mind, found within religious communities and paradigmatically embodied in certain representative individuals and movements, which manifests itself as a strategy or set of strategies, by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve distinctive identity as a people or group. Finding this identity to be at risk in the contemporary era, they fortify it by a selective retrieval of doctrines, beliefs, and practices from a sacred past.
The most well‐known fundamentalist denominations in the United States are the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Seventh‐Day Adventists. Organizations such as these often become politically active and support the conservative political right, including groups like the Moral Majority.
Fundamentalists also commonly believe that their way of life is under attack by the forces of liberalism and secularism.
The descent of Muslim fortunes started with the West’s penetration into the hub of Islam, the area between Morocco and Indonesia. The process started with the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt in 1789. Then came the Russian wars with Turkey and the conquest of Central Asia in the 19th century, followed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and occupation by Britain and the reshaping of the Middle East by the Imperialist powers, motivated by their quest for oil.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Western powers carved up the Middle east into new States like entities that had nothing to do with the character and aspirations of the indigenous people but also imposed new and ruling elites, whether Royal families, propped by the Western colonial or Communist elites propped up by the Soviets.
In the aftermath of World War II, the various Muslim States experimented with the ideologies and legitimization strategies borrowed from the east and west, all of which led to the establishment of oppressive military dictatorships that abused their countries and oppressed their peoples in the name of the quest for glory, modernization and military might. As a result, leading Islamist theorists sought alternative methods for waging jihad.
The first of these theorists was Hassan al Banna (1906-49), who established the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. He rejected Nationalism and European-inspired legal codes. He regarded these as un-Islamic and a threat to Islamic identity and called instead for an Islamic State to be governed by the Sharia.
Another theorist who came to similar conclusions was Maulana Maudoodi, who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in Punjab of undivided India in 1941. Maudoodi initially refused to accept the creation of Pakistan, believing in the universality of the Umma.
Three schools developed in India had parallel thinking. The first was the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, founded at Deoband UP at the beginning of the century. After Pakistan was founded, a branch went there as the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, which later spawned the Taliban. The second fundamentalist group was the Tablighi Jamaat, founded in Nizamuddin, Delhi, in 1927. The third and the most rigid was the Jamiat-e-Ahle Hadith, also founded in Delhi in 1912. Its branch in Pakistan inspired the most virulent jihadi group in the Islamic world, the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Another reformer Syed Qutub who from within the Islamic Brotherhood had modern education, but on a visit to the West was appalled by the materialism, sexual promiscuity, and racism of the West. He equated the pre-Islamic Arabian society Jahilliyah with modern western society. He felt that jihad was the only way to implement the new Islamic order.
The crisis reached its first boiling point in the mid-seventies when the Muslim world empowered by the new petrodollar wealth was exposed to western civilization as never before. The shock was immense, leading intellectuals who had studied in the West concluded that the personal liberties and materialism that they had experienced in the West constituted a threat to traditional Islamic society that is regimented and bound by strict codes of behavior.
The Islam of Ibn Taimiyya and Muhammad Ibn Abdal Wahab stipulated that the Sharia, the law governing mankind was of divine origin. In contrast, the essence of western democracy lies in the citizenry who elects a few of their own to legislate for them and govern them by humanly exacted laws.
Fully aware of the might and accelerating spread of western powers, the Islamists sought an indirect form of confrontation with the West. They defined a form of total war in which the Muslim world’s inferiority in technology and military power would not affect the outcome of jihad. Brigadier SK Malik of the Pakistan Army formulated this strategy in his country in 1979 in ‘The Quranic Concept of War’. The Quranic way of war, is infinitely supreme, because in Islam war is fought for the cause of Allah, and, therefore, all means and forms are justified and righteous. Terrorism is the quintessence of the Islamic concept of war.
Two events that led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism are the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. The revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini led to the first wave of suicide bombers by Hezbollah in Lebanon. And the rise of Shia power in the region.
The invasion of Afghanistan led to the creation of the jihad against the Russian Army by the soldiers of Islam, selected from the hub of Islam, extending from Morocco to the Philippines, masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency of the US.
For Islamists, the concept of a secular Muslim state is impossible. The division of the world into two mutually exclusive camps the city of war, Dar al Harb, and the city of faith Dar al-Iman lie at the heart of Islam’s traditional view of existence. Places where Islam rules supreme and its laws are strictly obeyed are known as the Dar al-Iman. The rest of the world is signified as the Dar al Harb.
With nearly 800000 youth who had left the country in the last year, and 80000 lives lost in the war against terror we had to decide which path to choose for our future generation. Investment in human resources, an increase in the education budget, and rule of law are the way forward.
Mob justice has no place in a civilized society.
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