Terrible transformations ahead?

—Rafia Zakaria

No one is untouched and no one is clean. All political contenders from the president to the deposed judges to the opposition leaders all have their own histories of inside deals, corruption and surreptitious self-serving agreements with military generals or Saudi princes

When the men in long black robes descended on Iran several decades ago, the world was stunned. Few knew what to expect, the dénouement of the revolution was swift: within a short span of time, the cosmopolitan Persia envisioned by the Shah had been transformed into the grim Islamic Republic. Women slid under black chadors, television showed only religious programmes and morality became the province of law enforcement over individual conscience.

Ensconced as we are in particular historical eras, it is trying and perhaps impossible to go beyond our faith in normalcy and evaluate the incremental changes taking place around us. As many historical records and memoirs now show, the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution were marked by a similar obstinacy as people continued to believe that after the demonstrations had ceased and the Shah had left, life would return to a familiar normal.

There would be dance parties, women would go to work, drinks would be poured and poetry and art exhibited. Indeed, at our smug end of history, it is possible to see how misplaced this belief in the constancy of the present was at the time. There was of course no return after 1979, the course of politics had changed and Iran was altered forever. The mullahs assumed to be archaic, medieval and generally incapable of governance not only took over the state but transformed it into something nearly unrecognisable from its liberal constitutional predecessor.

There are many differences between Iran in the 1970s and the condition of Pakistan in this first decade of the new millennium. The Islamist movement that roars at our footsteps has many marked differences from the one that wracked Iran decades ago. Indeed, the Taliban, with their shaggy beards and their cave-based militarism, are not the erudite mullahs of Qom, and Mullah Omar bears not even a scant resemblance to the Ayatollah.

But marking as we are several years of an insurgency that only grows in fervour and a political and legal system that is all but collapsed, it is perhaps pertinent to question whether we are indeed as duped in believing in the unchanging constancy of the present as the Iranians were at the precipice of the 1979 Revolution.

One argument that substantiates the above is our preoccupation with genealogy, which insists that the Taliban, being a creation of the Cold War, have nothing substantive to offer in terms of an attractive moral ideology. While sociological, economic and geopolitical explanations of the rise of the Taliban are important, the ascription of these factors as the sole basis for the ascendancy of the group may well be misguided.

It is indeed true that the rise of the Taliban is symptomatic of a cornucopia of failures: of the state to provide security; of legal institutions; and of civilian political institutions to exercise control over the intelligence apparatus of the country.

However, there is also something substantive in the moral ideology offered by the group. While admittedly repugnant to the country’s liberal elite, the stark clarity of an unassailable moral code that very literally allows no dissent, the elimination of all criminality by threat of the most draconian punishment, the elimination of temptation of any form and most notably of all the deliberately designed and very visible anti-modernism, all present a platform designed quite specifically to respond to key confusions within the Pakistani psyche.

In doing so, they represent a substantive post-modern reconstruction of a pre-colonial era, with an invented brand of sharia that is pristine in its simplicity and accessible to even the most barely educated mullah, and an anti-intellectual vitriol that is violently anti-Western. They have made an effective pitch at presenting what an authentic Pakistan rid of corruption, elitism and Western pandering would look like and in their success lies the tragedy confronting the Pakistani nation.

And then there are the seemingly endless political opportunities provided by the weakening of the Pakistani state apparatus in Islamabad. Plagued as it is by illegitimacy, and harassed and cornered by political actors loath to giving up any opportunity to subvert state power, the Pakistani state has lost ground not simply to the Taliban but also to the political forces operating within the democratic mainstream.

The most recent cataclysm, exposing once again the illegitimacies of the NRO that begot the current government and the inability of sustaining its fledgling power against political enemies wanting their own turn at extorting resources from the state, presents precisely the kind of breakdown of constitutionalism that makes the macabre “otherness” of the Taliban look like a departure from the corruption and general moral depravity of Islamabad.

No one is untouched and no one is clean. All political contenders from the president to the deposed judges to the opposition leaders all have their own histories of inside deals, corruption and surreptitious self-serving agreements with military generals or Saudi princes.

In the midst of such moral degeneracy, ordinary people on the streets of Quetta and Lahore are left to wonder whether a packed court that curries favour with particular governments is really better than a stadium where barely educated mullahs hack off hands and hand out whippings to alleged criminals.

So while bands may play in Karachi and Lahore and weddings may continue and resilient school children may continue to study for exams, the devolution of the state and the march of anarchy in Pakistan continue. There was a time when the army was the only usurping force waiting in the murky shadows to capture the reigns of power.

With the arrival of the Taliban, the increasing extension of their territorial power from the tribal areas to Swat and even the villages around Peshawar suggests the beginning of a new game that promises to be far bloodier and a far greater challenge than the civil-military jousts of old.

Perhaps a decade hence, Pakistanis too may look back at these days and wonder how and when we could have been able to predict the terrible and tremendous transformation ahead.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com