Jamaat-e-Islami at a crossroads of openness in Pakistan

LAHORE. About a month and a half ago, when I received an invitation to Pakistan to attend the annual congress of the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan (JI) and the international conference to follow it, I was excited and said that I would accept without any hesitation. Indeed, this was a different kind of organization from its earlier customary congresses. As far as I remember, it would be the first congress at which international participation was given this much importance and special sessions would be held for it.

The day came and we set out for the Pakistani city of Lahore. Posters bearing portraits of JI and its new leader Naeem ur Rehman appear along all of Lahore's streets and on the backs of cars. The congress is being experienced as the most important event of the entire city of 18 million. As I had expected, there is great demand for the congress from Muslim scholars, politicians and intellectuals from every part of the Islamic world. Here I meet many people I have known for years, and of course many more, and over 4 days we come together on different occasions and chat.

JI, founded by Abul A'la al-Mawdudi and which has undoubtedly made a very important contribution to the formation of Pakistan's religious identity and cultural makeup, is a movement whose development I have tried to follow for as long as I can remember. It is still one of the most important, organized, deep-rooted and institutional movements of the Islamic world. I have mentioned this many times before. After the abolition of the Caliphate in Turkey in 1924, the world's Muslims, left without a head, tried not to be helpless in this process by bringing forth, within a short time, two international civil society structures. One was the Muslim Brotherhood movement, founded in Egypt in 1928 and soon organized across the whole Middle Eastern geography. The other was the Jamaat-e-Islami, founded in India in 1941 by Mawdudi.

In fact, both movements are an example of nobility that spits in the face of those who invented the story of a few marauding Arabs who "stabbed us in the back." Against an Ottoman state that withdrew from the field by abolishing the Caliphate, they are in themselves proof of the existence of a very strong social base that stubbornly and perseveringly tried to carry on the mission the Ottomans had represented for a full 600 years.

Everyone now knows how the Indian Khilafat Movement, which forms the base of JI, contributed to the National Struggle with life, head and wealth. The existence of the Indian Muslims whom the British had brought in enslaved and forced to fight against the Ottomans at Gallipoli (Çanakkale) or on other fronts did not invalidate this social base. What fell to the Ottomans, or perhaps to the Republic of Turkey founded afterwards, in the name of this Caliphate responsibility was to set them free, not to destroy the ground on which they had pinned their hopes.

Among the founding principles of JI, established under Mawdudi's leadership, were building an Islamic model of society and state, being a movement of "tajdid" (renewal) and "ihya" (revival) against the moral collapse of modern Indo-Islamic society, defending "Islamic ideological unity" instead of secular nationalism, and developing an independent civilizational stance against Western modernity. Mawdudi was a scholar and intellectual who struggled directly in the field and a person with initiative at the level of a mujaddid in the field of Islamic thought.

This quality of his was, of course, the great good fortune of this movement, but the ground on which he struggled also constituted one of the most volatile and slippery grounds of modern Islamic history. On the one hand, the state of Israel was being founded on the post-war occupied lands of the Ottoman state; on the other, a partition was emerging from the long-term post-colonial conflicts in India, and Pakistan was being founded as a state whose purpose of founding was Islam.

Considering that none of the Islamic countries founded after the Caliphate had Islam as its purpose of founding and existence, and that all of them took shape as nation-states, the Pakistani state constituted an interesting exception. At the time the Pakistani state was founded under the political leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the intellectual leadership of Muhammad Iqbal, JI took its place as one of the active actors of this process. But when India was partitioned, JI was likewise split in two along the same line. This led JI to put forth, in its discourse and policy production, a path of its own, one that at times diverged both from Pakistan and from India. Although in this period Islam was declared to be Pakistan's reason for existence, the tension in Pakistan between the Islamic state and the nation-state, and the question of how far the Pakistani state met the requirements of being an Islamic state within this tension, in a way brought JI's position as a moral overseer to the fore.

Of course, it was not an officially recognized oversight, and because of the divergences on this subject Mawdudi was arrested and imprisoned many times. He launched the first major Islamic opposition against Pakistan's secularizing tendencies, and was arrested, for example, in 1953 on account of the movement conducted against the Qadianis. With the transition to a constitutional order in 1956, the Jamaat moved from being a "movement of da'wa" to being a political party. It took part in elections for the first time, but its vote share remained low. Even so, its intellectual sphere of influence was very strong; it gained serious influence in universities, the press and the education system. Although popular support in elections was quite limited, the disproportionate size of its ideological influence has constituted a characteristic situation in JI's history.

Especially during the era of General Zia-ul-Haq, who came to power in 1977, JI gave great support to the Islamization policy launched by the state; in return its cadres gained power within the state, and the university youth movement (IJT) worked in harmony with the state. This is the period when the Jamaat was closest to the state in its history. But this closeness also led, on the one hand, to the Jamaat partially losing its identity as an "independent Islamic movement" and, on the other, in consequence, to its beginning to be seen in the public eye as a partner of the military regime. In the long run this created a psychological barrier that limited its vote support.

After Zia-ul-Haq, JI's influence in the state diminished, parliamentary politics gained priority, and the party moved more into a position of "moral opposition." In this period the Jamaat faced the fact that its base was weak among rural voters; it had difficulty attracting masses even when there were no populist movements around. Its only strong area, by contrast, was the student movement (IJT).

During our visit we visited the Student Movement's center and its current chairman. The center is built on a plot of land adjoining his own house that the late scholar Mawdudi donated, and is a complete training and organizing center. It has trained within itself all the names who have led JI up to now, and all of them presided over JI's Youth Branches in their youth. The current leader hosting the congress, Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, also served as president of the youth organization in 1998-2000.

Viewed from within this general history of the Jamaat, the current chairman, with his urban, young and engineer identity, is seen to represent a new cadre movement. We can say that, both in terms of education and in terms of sociological base, he has already given a new opening to the Jamaat's orientation up to now. While most of the earlier chairmen were politicians who were traditional, of rural origin, and came from the classical madrasa tradition, Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman draws the profile of a leader who grew up in urban politics, young and activist, with a charismatic profile. His influence over university youth, the urban middle class and civil society is quite strong, and he is known especially for his success in organizing in a highly complex megacity like Karachi.

Do these features constitute a new opportunity for JI, which, although it has represented an intellectual hegemony until now, has been unable to convert it into voter support? That question remains open. Let us continue conveying our impressions of Pakistan and JI later.