The long road to Talibanisation

test01 · May 6, 2009, 11:25pm

Nosheen Ali tries to clarify misunderstanding that causes for Talibanisation are rooted in the recent past.

The crisis in FATA and Swat has increasingly become reduced to a narrative of the evil Taliban versus the helpless state and society. That the Taliban have instituted a horrendous regime of terror is beyond question. But it is evasive and dangerous to think that the Taliban are the only bogeymen. We need to understand the ongoing crisis in terms of Talibanization as a historical process of Islamist moral policing and militancy, which has been an established part of state policy in Pakistan since its inception. Until we refuse to acknowledge this reality, and tackle it head on, we will be unable to address the existential mess in which we find ourselves today.

As early as the 1950s, senior government officials in Pakistan had begun to authorize hypocritical and intolerant religious policies in the name of promoting an Islamic identity for the new nation. For example, in The State of Martial Rule, Ayesha Jalal discusses how Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan issued an official injunction urging Muslims to fast, which subsequently paved the way for populist Islamist moral policing – mobs stormed restaurants that did not close during fasting hours, non-fasters were paraded through bazaars in NWFP with the support of the local police, and the judiciary in Haripur sentenced people for eating in public.

In such an environment, fundamentalist parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami flexed their muscles even more. By 1953, we had already succumbed to certain aspects of religious terror that we associate with the Taliban: in organized riots all over Punjab, religious parties as well as the Muslim League government collaborated in the extensive looting, arson, and murder of fellow Ahmadi Pakistani citizens.

Both the Pakistani state and society have thus been implicated in the process of Talibanization right from the start, reducing politics to cynical uses of religion instead of substantive citizenship, and encouraging a singular and authoritarian interpretation of Islam which is now being brought to its logical conclusion by the Taliban. Civilian and military governments have pandered to the fundamentalist lobby at every step for short-sighted political gains, and introduced Islamist policies themselves to strengthen their power.