Dr. Qadri is a former failed politician but who, in the last 15 years or so, worked relentlessly to build a loyal network of pious Pakistani and Indian Muslims around the world who belong to the Sunni Barelvi strain of Islam.
Barelvi Islam is the evolutionary outcome of a 19th century Islamic reformist movement that emerged in undivided India.
Three such movements emerged among the Muslims of the region, especially after the fall of the Muslim empire in India.
One advocated a return to the original Islam of the ‘rightly guided Caliphs’, and the exorcising of ‘innovations’ introduced in the Islam practiced by Indian Muslims.
The second movement pleaded a more rational and practical understanding of the Qu’ran and Shariah and for the adoption of ‘western education and sciences’.
The third was a reaction to the first movement that found Islamic strains like Sufism repulsive and the practice of visiting Sufi shrines heretical.
Barelvi Islam is a continuation of the third movement that fuses Sufism with the centuries-old sub-continental traditions of Muslims visiting and worshipping at shrines of Sufi saints and incorporating many practices that emerged due to the interaction of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism in undivided India.
This strain of Islam that has always been seen as being more tolerant, flexible and inclusive compared to some other strains of the faith present in region, became the dominant faith among Pakistan’s Sunni Muslims.
Even today, a majority of Pakistanis follow this strain, in spite of the fact that ever since the 1980s Saudi Arabia has been funneling in huge amounts of money and resources to prop up Islamic seminaries, mosques, clerics and leaders associated with the more puritanical, aggressive and anti-Barelvi schools of thought.
Though Barelvi Islamic leaders and outfits have often been accommodated and flirted with by secular parties, and are squarely against puritanical Sunni Islamic outfits such as the Taliban, al Qaeda and various anti-Shia sectarian organisations, they have been staunchly and at times, violently inclined to blunt any moves attempting to relax the controversial Blasphemy Laws first introduced in the 1980s during the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship.
Dr. Qadri is a former student activist who in the 1970s belonged to the moderate Barelvi youth organisation, the Anjuman Taleba Islam, at the Punjab University.
His group usually allied itself with various progressive and leftist student groups during student union elections against the student wing of the fundamentalist Jamat-e-Islami.
After graduating in 1974, he enrolled as a lecturer at the same university and then went on to get his PhD in Islamic sciences.
Details of Dr. Qadri’s political career between 1978 and 1989 are rather muggy.
Some of his critics describe Qadri as a political charlatan who in the 1980s was close to PML-N chief, Nawaz Sharif, the man whose family in those days were staunch supporters of military dictator, General Ziaul Haq.
During a 2008 lecture on the Barelvi Islamic TV channel, QTV, Qadri claimed that it was he who forced General Ziaul Haq to formulate the Blasphemy Laws, whereas he then denied doing this (on a British TV channel), and in fact claimed that he doesn’t agree with the law.
There are three views about what Qadri was up to during the Zia dictatorship.
One view is that Qadri opposed the dictatorship’s pro-Deobandi orientation and was dismissed from the faculty of the Punjab University for his opposition to the Zia regime.
The second view is that Qadri became close to the Zia regime and helped it formulate a number of controversial ‘Islamic laws.’
The third view is propagated by Qadri himself in which he claims that in spite of the fact that Zia offered him many political posts, he refused to accept them and instead spent his time on becoming an Islamic scholar.
What is certain though is that Qadri formed his Barelvi organisation, the Minhajul Quran (MQ), in 1981.
In 1988 Qadri formed his own party, the Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT). He described it as a party that would strive to bring a ‘spiritual revolution’ (Roohani Inquilaab) in Pakistan.
He allied his party with the left-leaning PPP during the 1990 election, but after facing defeats, he almost vanished from the political scene.
This is when he seriously worked to turn MQ into a large Islamic evangelical outfit, preaching Sufism and trying to regenerate Barelvi Islam that had experienced a tough challenge from the more conservative schools of faith in the 1980s.
Qadri reappeared on the political scene as a supporter of Pakistan’s last military dictator, General Parvez Musharraf, who toppled the second PML-N government in 1999.
Calling himself an ‘enlightened moderate’, Musharraf wanted to bank on Qadri’s MQ to find a middle ground for his dictatorship between Zia’s radical Islam and secularism.
During this period Qadri became a Canadian citizen. In 2010, when suicide bombings against the military, police and common civilians grew alarmingly in Pakistan, Qadri, who by now had gathered a huge following among the more religious minded Barelvi Muslims, wrote a 600-page fatwa against suicide bombings.
To him and his followers, he had become the moderate face of Islam and the defender of the peaceful injunctions and spirit of the faith in a world reeling from Islamist violence.
Reemergence and aftermath
In Pakistan, he was mostly forgotten as a politician, but among pious Barelvis he became popular as an Islamic scholar, and a televangelist on QTV.
Neutral viewers found his style to be rather eccentric, especially when he shared with his followers the many divine visions he’s had and the colorful way he interpreted his followers’ dreams.
Barelvi Islam is rich in symbolism, extroverted in its liking for devotional dances and music, and of behavior that the modernists describe as being superstitious.
To its more conservative sub-sectarian Sunni opponents such as the Deobandis and the ‘Wahabis’, it is downright heretical.
It is Barelvi Islam’s colorful, emotive, inclusive and largely non-jihadist nature that has kept it thriving as Pakistan’s ‘folk religion’, especially among the rural and semi-rural peasantry and sections of the urban petty-bourgeoisie.
The hypnotic eastern music genre, Qawali, is an extremely popular ritual and art-form among the Barelvis.
Though Qadri, seeming egoistical and at times somewhat maniacal in his attitude during his ‘long march,’ and most probably pushed to the fore by the usual anti-politician ‘establishment,’ did manage to demonstrate a rather refreshing angle in the already multi-angular politics of Pakistan.
Over the last decade, Pakistanis seem to be fatigued by not only the toothlessness of their elected representatives, especially in the face of a collapsing economy, deteriorating law and order situation and extremist violence; they now seem equally weary of the animated alarmists in politics, media and the establishment who always seem to be threatening bloody revolutions, and warnings about conspiracies of ‘anti-Pakistan/Islam’ forces and ‘nefarious designs of India and the US.’
In spite of the fact that Qadri launched his rhetoric against the country’s two main democratic parties, he was equally open in his condemnation of those Islamist terrorist outfits that have succeeded in scaring even the most animated and ‘revolutionary’ media personnel and leaders.
When cornered in this respect, these personalities at once launch into anti-US tirades that have now become a kind of self-parody of sorts.
Though Qadri ended his march by accepting negotiations with the same ruling coalition he had vowed to topple, his was perhaps one of the most spectacularly peaceful ‘revolts’ ever seen in a violent country like Pakistan.
Qadri shares a joke with the government’s negotiation team that met him on the fourth day of his ‘long march.’
Now the question is, was he really a stooge of the establishment? Someone propped up but failed to deliver?
Everyone believes that he was. But his backers underestimated two vital facts:
1. The democratic parties are now willing to come together like never before in the face of a threat posed to the democratic system by the establishment.
2. The Sunni denomination that Qadri belongs to is neither jihadist nor revolutionary.
Or who knows, there might even be another possibility: With the way he in the end softened up with the members of the coalition, maybe it was Qadri who manipulated the establishment so he could return to the political arena with a bang … ?
No comments:
Post a Comment