The 9/11 Wars (61 page)

The oft-heard argument that the
medressas
only thrived because they filled a vital gap left by the state by offering free education to the most miserable was only partially accurate. Statistics showed little correlation between the relative wealth of a family and the decision to send children to a
medressa
. This suggested that parents sent their children to
medressas
for reasons other than poverty.
⁵⁴
Such a conclusion was further reinforced by research showing that around a quarter of religious students came from the richer families who could afford to send their children to any type of educational establishment they chose.
⁵⁵
Equally, three-quarters of families with children in religious schools also sent other siblings to private or public schools. It was true that some families might only have sufficient funds to pay the albeit minimal school fees for one of their offspring but the figures nonetheless indicated fairly unequivocally that millions of parents across Pakistan simply sent their children to
medressas
because they wanted to have at least one child educated religiously and, crucially, because they agreed with what their offspring would be taught in a religious school about the world, about religion and about life.
⁵⁶
This was of very great importance. For further statistical studies revealed that, even if levels of support for militancy or violence in the name of causes such as Kashmir or Palestine were higher among the students and teachers of religious schools, they were still at very significant levels in the supposedly non-religious educational establishments in which the overwhelming majority of Pakistani children were being educated.
⁵⁷
One study found that graduates from state public schools, particularly Urdu-medium institutions, were only ‘moderately more tolerant’ than
medressa
graduates, with very significant numbers of the former favouring either open war or support for Islamic militant groups as means of ‘liberating Kashmir’, for example.
⁵⁸
A study of the backgrounds of 517 Pakistani militants in 2003 found that most had relatively high levels of literacy and had been educated not in
medressas
but in government schools.
⁵⁹
Similar studies five years later found that this had not changed.
⁶⁰
Together, all these statistics reveal an unpleasant truth: that the gap between the broad political and religious culture of many of the religious schools and that of most Pakistanis, at least in late 2007, was much narrower than many in the West liked to think.
⁶¹

MIDDLE PAKISTAN

Nowhere was this more clear than in Multan, once simply a sleepy provincial town famous for its shrines but in November 2007 a city with a population swollen to nearly 1.5 million by migration from the poor rural zones around and still growing by an estimated 50,000 every year. On the outskirts, past the army garrison and the new hotels, shops and offices that were springing up along the potholed streets, past the occasional sports car and the crumbling public buildings, was the Bahauddin Zakariya University, founded in 1975 and one of scores of similar private institutions offering graduate-level further education to the children of Pakistan’s new middle classes. It was here that the result of the various elements discussed above – the new wealth, the new urbanization, the impact of the new media, the new lack of deference, the consequences of decades of Islamist activism, the failure of successive alternative ideologies, the indirect impact of the 9/11 Wars – came together in a very obvious way.

On a late autumn morning, a few months after Bhutto had returned to Pakistan, some of the 14,000 students of the university were sitting on the grass in between the college’s brick and concrete buildings, their books and files spread around them. A small queue had formed at the tiny kiosk selling small cups of sweet tea. A knot of young men inspected the motorbike one of them had recently bought. These young people were ordinary young Pakistanis, studying in a middle-ranking college, in a middling-sized town, in the geographic centre of the country. They were neither activists for secular parties nor Islamists. They were neither as Westernized as the elite youth of Lahore or Karachi, with their American college or exclusive English-medium local education, their cars and parties, nor as aggressively conservative as the Jamaat Islami members. Instead they were representative of a Pakistan that was rarely reported in the international media and had little place in conventional analysis of the country as a battleground between Westernized, democratic ‘moderates’ and fanatical ‘fundamentalists’. They comprised the middle ground, what could be termed ‘Middle Pakistan’, a diverse yet definite body of people with a diverse yet definite worldview and value system who had been as active in building a coherent and authentic identity as any other group in the country. If not immediately, in a few years’ time, they would be ‘the Pakistani street’, the people whose views and values would determine the country’s course.

Visually, the scene at the Bahauddin Zakariya University revealed many of the essential elements of this new evolving identity. So, for example, the students sitting on the grass all maintained a strict and voluntary gender segregation. The girls were uniformly veiled – several wore a full Gulf-style
niqab
– and many of their male counterparts were bearded. Both veils and beards had been very rare a decade or so before, one teacher, a former student at the university himself, remembered.
⁶²
The students’ conservatism extended to more than where they sat or what they wore. The West’s material conditions were undoubtedly attractive, many told the author during a long day of conversations and arguments, but there was no respect for women or the old in Europe or America and there was pornography, prostitution and AIDS too. Though they agreed that people should be able to chose whom they married and that women were, of course, the equal of men and could and should work – 70 per cent of the university’s business studies students were female – women nonetheless had their roles in the home and a balance had to be kept. Though the students had a lucid view of their nation’s problems, their patriotism was assertive and unabashed. Pakistan, a peace-seeking nation beset by Indian aggression and Western antipathy from its birth, was a great nation, a leader among Muslim states and deserved greater respect from the international community, they said, insisting too that Kashmir was illegally occupied and the Muslims there were ‘as oppressed’ as they were in Palestine. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani atomic scientist who had first built his country a bomb and then, with successive governments’ encouragement, sold its nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, North Korea and a range of other clients, was ‘a Pakistani patriot’. The blame for the problems in their country, they said, lay with corrupt politicians, self-seeking bureaucrats and religious leaders who were far from religious. Democracy, which they all supported as a concept, could only work when there was a political class of sufficient honesty and quality to lead. They were therefore less convinced that it could work – at least now – for Pakistan. The constant interventions of the army were a problem but comprehensible, though now it was time for Musharraf to move on. Above all, Pakistan’s government should give way neither to terrorism – which they maintained was unIslamic, though suicide bombings in Israel were ‘legitimate resistance’ – nor to bullying by America. The students wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, business people and journalists. Their parents, who paid their fees of between 48,000 and 60,000 rupees a year ($770 to $970, £340 to £550 at 2007 rates), were senior teachers, middling-ranking bureaucrats, pharmacists, farmers, traders. The family car was usually simply a Mehran (though some had recently traded up to a Corolla). For the students’ questions about whether Pakistan was an Islamic state or not were almost nonsensical. Their nation was the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. They did not want their government to be composed of elderly clerics but they did want their leaders to reflect their identity, values and views.

That those young men and women were representative of Pakistan was beyond doubt. Firstly, they were young – and in 2008 the
median
age in Pakistan was twenty-one. Half the country’s population were aged under twenty, with two-thirds still to reach their thirtieth birthday.
⁶³
Secondly, as discussed above, they were from the urban middle class, the fastest-growing sector of Pakistani society. Thirdly, their views were distinctly uncontroversial for the vast proportion of Pakistanis. The students had called themselves ‘moderates’, and by local standards, if not for most in the West, they were. Their views on more or less every subject were exactly those which polls said, again and again, were shared by most of their compatriots. Their more overt religiosity was typical of much of the nation. Their views of the West too were representative of those of almost all Pakistanis in late 2007: overwhelmingly negative, coloured by conspiracy theories about the true perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, by anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and deep resentment. A survey by the independent think-tank Terror Free Tomorrow in 2007 found that around a half of Pakistanis viewed Osama bin Laden and militant groups fighting in Kashmir favourably, two-thirds were against the American military operating in Pakistan, and more than half blamed America for the violence in Pakistan at the time.
⁶⁴
Other polls found that around three-quarters of Pakistanis wanted their country to be ruled by Islamic laws and that only 15 per cent of Pakistanis believed that ‘Arabs’ were responsible for 9/11. A further poll, on patriotism, asked: ‘How proud do you feel to call yourself a Pakistani?’ Nearly 80 per cent said they were ‘very proud’, particularly citing the country’s nuclear capability.
⁶⁵
Another found that 89 per cent of Pakistanis did not want their country to cooperate with the United States in the War on Terror, many more than in previous years. The overseas country that was most admired was Saudi Arabia.
⁶⁶
Much of this had been anecdotally obvious to those visiting Pakistan regularly since 2001 and particularly to those who had known the country during the 1990s or before.

The new identity was built on long-developing trends that had gradually seen Pakistan shuck off the heritage of British rule and turn further and further towards the Middle East. It was not just investment flows or the ever-growing number of pilgrims travelling on Haj that increasingly linked Pakistan to the Gulf. Names of children had become more Islamic and more Arabicized from the turn of the millennium on. After 9/11, Osama had become popular; later in the decade it was Areeba, Malaika, Uzair, Emal which became widespread. Some 90 per cent of boys were named Mohammed following Middle Eastern practice.
⁶⁷
Trends in clothes and language, crucial signifiers, were also revealing. The vast proportion of Pakistanis had kept their traditional
shalwar kameez
, leaving jeans and T-shirts to the Westernized elite.
⁶⁸
Bollywood maintained its dominant position in terms of cinema and music, mitigating the bile directed at India in the mainstream media, but where dreamed-of holiday destinations had once been Europe or the USA, now they were Malaysia or the Gulf, partly out of a new sense of pan-Islamic solidarity, partly due to the difficulty of getting visas to visit the West and the suspicion that Pakistanis faced when they arrived there. A ‘books section’ in a new superstore in Karachi’s wealthy Clifton area was entirely devoted to Islamic titles. In a Nike shop, speakers played recitations from the Koran. Mobile phone companies offered the call to prayer as a ring tone and Koranic recitations as free downloads. During the month of Ramadan international banks offered preferred clients boxes containing prayer beads, dates and miniature Korans.
⁶⁹
When one Urdu-language columnist pointed out that there had never been a demonstration in Pakistan against ‘Islamic terrorist’ attacks in the West, he was vilified.
⁷⁰

This emerging identity was as politically conservative as it was socially and religiously conservative – which was one reason why revolution in Pakistan, Islamist or otherwise, did not seem likely in the immediate future. A factor in the failure of the violent radicalism of the militants or even their supporters among the Deobandi or Ahl-e-Hadith clerics to appeal to this emerging Middle Pakistan was because few, least of all junior bureaucrats, shopkeepers, teachers and doctors, wanted radical, sudden upheaval. If there was to be a revolution, it would be a gradual one that would not threaten too much disruption. That the identity of Middle Pakistan owed much to the influence of Jamaat Islami and the idea of its founder, Maududi, was undoubted. Despite the continued lack of electoral success of his organization over the decades, Maududi’s ideas had eventually permeated whole sections of society. Now almost forty years after his death, what had once been seen as radically right-wing was now entirely normalized. This was often difficult for outsiders to see. The lawyers who received so much attention for resisting Musharraf’s clumsy attempts at intimidation of the judiciary in this period, certainly beyond the upper layer of smoother English-speaking and UK-educated older leaders, shared many of the values and ideas described above, for example. So too did many of the millions who voted for the nominally secular MQM in Karachi. These vast constituencies were rarely counted in analyses of Pakistan overseas but were hugely important internally. The lessons of Maududi and other Islamists had become so internalized as to have become utterly unremarkable.