'Umma' as subversion of the state
by Khaled Ahmed

Who could have thought that General Musharraf’s slogan of ‘Pakistan first’ would ever become controversial? It simply reiterated the universally accepted parameters of the nation-state and the ‘realistic’ theory of international affairs that no one questions any more. But the reaction to ‘Pakistan first’ has been quite surprising. It has been labelled an unforgivable heresy because it negates the ‘Islam first’ slogan. For a foreigner, this would be a mixing of categories, but in Pakistan religion can be used to prove all kind of points. The ‘Islam first’ slogan is embedded in the constitution of Pakistan, but the new debate evoked by it centres on the concept of the umma and brings to mind another period of anomie and disorder in the life of the Muslims of South Asia: the Khilafat Movement.

‘Pakistan first’ or ‘Islam first’? Former president Rafiq Tarar said in Lahore on 13 Match 2003 that the thinking behind the idea of ‘Islam first’ was opposed to the basic Islamic tenet of Muslim akhuwat (brotherhood). Pakistan’s foremost thinker Ashfaque Ahmad declared that the slogan of ‘Pakistan first’ was produced by inferiority complex and fear. He said Pakistan was a part of the Islamic world and was a big power. Putting Pakistan first would lead to the putting of the provinces first and ultimately putting one’s town first, which would be destructive of the state. Other opponents of the ‘Pakistan first’ slogan interpreted it as a flight from the clash of civilisations in which the Islamic world was pitted against the West. The people of Pakistan were told that America would not only grab the Iraqi oil, it would also occupy the most sacred city of Islam, Madina in Saudi Arabia.
Muslims have a sense of the world Muslim community like no other religious population. Among the Muslims of the world, the South Asian Muslims have always felt ‘outward’ rather than ‘inward’. A pan-Islamic sense has always pervaded their worldview, and Pakistan, after emerging as a nation-state, had to acknowledge it as a part of its ideology. The ‘transnational’ feeling is integral to the idea of the grand Muslim diaspora after the seventh century. It emerged from the pattern of the spread of Islam through hijrah (migration) and conversion. During the days of subjugation to foreign empires, the transnational feeling contributed to the organisation of resistance among local Muslim populations. In India, Muslim existence was deemed a kind of permanent emergency (dar-ul-harb) and migration was considered an option in the defiance of British raj.

Extroversion of Muslim community: The Khilafat Movement from the second decade of the 20th century was an anti-imperialist agitation that could be described as the climax of transnationalism in Muslim thinking. It activated and mobilised the Muslim population of India like no other movement in the past or since. It was based on the concept of the umma and relegated the sense of nationhood to a lower status at a time when the nationalist emotion was at its highest point in the world. That the religious leaders of the Muslims of India thought it less important was proved by their acceptance of a single Muslim-Hindu nation in the Subcontinent. Unfortunately this ran counter to the Pakistan Movement that arose in the third decade of the 20th century based on the ‘separation’ of Muslims from the Hindus. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who conceptualised a separate Muslim community in India in the 19th century, went into eclipse during the Khilafat Movement, but was revived by the Pakistan Movement.

Pakistan’s ideology after 1947 did subsume the transnational feeling inherent in the Khilafat Movement even though the Pakistani nation-state was only possible after rejecting the idea of the ‘pluralist’ nation advocated by the Khilafat leadership. A kind of compromise was reached with the Khilafat jurisprudence by a textbook acceptance of all the religious leaders that had rejected Pakistan. The new nation-state entered the community of nations with a worldview that can best be described as half-cocked. It accepted the idea of sovereignty of the nation-state in international law while declaring solidarity with the other Islamic states. This ‘solidarity’ was not always interpreted positively by other Islamic states. During the days of the Khilafat Movement the House of Saud thought that the Indian Muslim leaders leaned too much in favour of Turkey and sought to water down their Wahhabi faith. The rise of pan-Arabism in the mid-20th century and the direction of Pakistan’s foreign policy under pressure from India, alienated the Islamic world from Pakistan.

‘Islam first’ as irredentism: The feeling for the umma or pursuit of pan-Islamism in foreign policy has not led to much solidarity. In fact it has been interpreted as ‘interference’ on the part of one Islamic state in the affairs of another Islamic state. Within the matrix of the nation-state all ‘pan’ movement have been interpreted as irredentist, contributing to war. The pan-Serb movement caused the war in Bosnia, pan-Albanianism complicated the crisis of Kosovo, and the pan-Arab movement climaxed in a war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Pan-Turkism in the third decade of the 20th century, which resulted in the persecution of the Muslims inside the Soviet Union, contained the seeds of pan-Islamism. In our times pan-Islamist Afghanistan has caused alarms within the Central Asian states who are all members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and thus qualify as Islamic states. Iran, likewise challenged, was persuaded to join the Central Asian states to resist the irredentist edge of the ‘transnational’ feeling radiating from the Afghan utopia under the Taliban.

The Afghan pan-Islamism was not a little assisted by Pakistan through its private soldiers and its premier intelligence agency, the ISI. The fighters were fired by the feeling of the umma while Pakistan in fact pursued its self-interest as a nation-state. Iran, itself just finished with its own pan-Islamist threat to the Arab nations across the Gulf, defended its national interest, aligning deftly with India, Russia and the Central Asian states in a move to isolate Pakistan. There is no doubt that the ‘Islam first’ slogan was strengthened by the interregnum of jehad, but if you look closely it was the ‘nation-first’ strategy that finally decided its fate. Jehad began to be interpreted not as the cutting edge of the transnational ‘Islam first’ feeling but as a force of disorder that threatened the nation-state. In Pakistan today it is the indoctrination of the transnational jehad that rules the minds of the people and any focus on the primacy of the nation-state is regarded as heresy. On ground, this orientation has put the nation-state under threat. The need to raise the slogan of ‘Pakistan first’ arose because of the perception of this threat.
Dangerous revisionism of the ‘Islam first’ idea: Let us see how the ‘Islam first’ view threatens the civilisational nation-state solidarity within the Islamic world. Its outward focus is not entirely positive as its exponents would have us believe. It is in fact highly critical and revisionist. Take the Pakistani perception of the Islamic community state by state. The Pakistani Islamist view of Saudi Arabia is extremely critical, almost subversive in its intensity. It is considered a monarchy defying the basic tenets of Islam, which must be overthrown if the umma is to be saved. The same kind of criticism is applied to the Gulf States where princely rulers allegedly look to their own personal interest rather than the Islamic cause. This view ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of Pakistani expatriate workers have found jobs in the region and Pakistan’s economy is not a little dependent on their remittances. The nation-state of Pakistan doesn’t tire of expressing its gratitude to these states, but the common man in Pakistan would rather have the monarchies removed, which would probably lead to despotic republicanism, in turn leading to the ouster of all Pakistani workers from there.

A similar disjunction between the view of the nation-state and the ‘Islam first’ school comes to the fore when discussing Turkey. The nation-state of Pakistan rates its solidarity with secular Turkey as a pillar of its foreign policy, but the average Pakistani would like the present constitution of Turkey subverted in favour of the Islamist parties there. That Turkey feels threatened by the ‘Islam first’ lobby in Pakistan was manifested during the Taliban war in Afghanistan when the Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit travelled to India reciting the Baghwat Gita. Elements within the Pakistani military establishment nursed an expansionist scheme behind the pan-Islamic war of the Taliban and the jehadi organisations mustered by the ISI. The frontiers of Pakistan, it was said, would not stop at the Durand Line but go beyond Amudarya into Central Asia. (A well-known exponent of this idea was one Brigadier Sagheer, last seen doing duty in the offices of NAB in Islamabad.) The bearded military officers had not abandoned the idea of the nation-state, thus allowing pan-Islamism to take on the lineaments of Pakistani expansionism.

In the Khilafat Movement there was the idea of a ‘central’ Islamic state that would bind the umma. Today there is no such epicentre that will cause the revisionist explosion prior to binding the umma together. In the past such epicentres were imperialistic. Today this crucial centre-piece of the Islamic jigsaw is politically unacceptable even to the Pakistani clergy. The OIC cannot be this epicentre because it is a gathering of the nation-states willing to make it neither a military organisation nor an executive entity laying down the law of state behaviour. The scorn with which the OIC is greeted by the ‘Islam first’ advocates hides their intent of its coercive manipulation by one ideologically ‘immaculate’ state. The world order is wedded to the idea of the nation-state and all ‘pan’ movements are seen as subversive interventions.

The truth is that even the Islamic states tend to get destabilised by the idea of the umma and its claims of irredentist revisionism. And those who oppose the ‘Pakistan first’ slogan should know that just as they seek to change the Islamic world to their liking, there are forces emanating from the Islamic world that wish to change Pakistan to their liking. Pakistan’s current instability is not a little owed to the activity of these elements. The ‘Islam first’ slogan seems to be directed at the unification of the Islamic states as an umma, but in actual fact it is a force of disorder threatening the nation-state.