The following is not edited very well but I have included a link:
centerforsecuritypolicy.org
The Center for Security Policy
OCCASIONAL PAPERS SERIES
June 2004 No. 1
Muslim on Muslim Violence:
What Drives It?
by Salim Mansur
Center for Security Policy
1920 L Street, NW, Suite 210, Washington, DC 20036
centerforsecuritypolicy.org
Muslim on Muslim Violence: What Drives It?
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From the Editor’s Desk
Prof. Mansur’s paper “Muslim on Muslim Violence: What Drives It?” is an example of the kind
of analysis that is of high policy relevance, albeit seemingly esoteric at first look.
He deals with the subject of violence by Muslim against Muslim. A subject that is seldom
addressed by reputable Islamic scholars, let alone by exponents of more extremist viewpoints
despite the overwhelming evidence that violence among Muslims has become endemic ever
since the death the Prophet. In just one example, of the more than 150,000 victims of modern
Islamic terrorism some 90% are estimated to have been other Muslims.
The author bases much of his analysis on the incredibly violent history of the breakup of
Pakistan in 1971, but also delves much further back in the historical record to the first fifty years
of Islam after the Prophet, a period known as that of the “rightly-guided” (rashidun) khalifs and
universally venerated by fundamentalists as part of the golden age of the faith. Indeed, a call for
a return to this ostensibly pure Islam is the one thing all Islamic extremists and terrorists seem to
share in common. Yet, as Prof. Mansur shows conclusively, the immediate post-prophetic period
was marked by bloody fratricidal campaigns in a dramatic departure from the Muhammad’s
prohibition of violence by Muslims against their brothers in faith. What emerged was, in fact, a
victory of neo-tribalism over the bonds of faith and the exploitation of religion for providing
legitimacy to the tribe. This established the practice of using religion to justify tribal and group
interests and authoritarian rule over the rights of the individual that has remained the norm in
most Muslim societies to this day.
It is this early and continuing politicization and corruption of Islam that has become the
prescription for violence by Muslim against Muslim. And the inability or unwillingness of
Muslims to acknowledge and learn from their history is not only an obstacle to setting the record
straight, but, more importantly, it prevents them from reforming their group solidarity so as not
to repeat the errors of the past. As the author puts it, one result of this group denial is “the
continuing inability to reform their society in keeping with the demands of the modern world.”
Alex Alexiev is Editor of the “Occasional Papers” series and CSP’s Vice-President for Research.
He could be reached at alexiev@centerforsecuritypolicy.org.
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Muslim on Muslim Violence: What Drives It?
By Salim Mansur*
Since Samuel Huntington’s widely read Foreign Affairs’ essay, published in the summer
1993 issue of the journal, the idea of “the clash of civilizations” has come to be the most handy
explanation of the troubled relationship between the Muslim world and the West. Huntington’s
phrase, “Islam has bloody borders,” was provocative and yet not inaccurate. Islamic or, more
appropriately, Muslim militancy has fuelled a mindless and bigoted conflict, civilizational in
nature, that sort of peaked with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September
11, 2001.
But what Huntington’s essay, and later his book on the same theme, and other writings of
similar kind does not mention, and the subject remains largely unexplored, is the bloodier
conflict within the Muslim world. The phenomenon of Muslim violence against Muslims
demands attention, for it is primarily this inner conflict which periodically spills over beyond the
borders of the Muslim world. More Muslims have been killed by Muslims, more Muslims
continue to be victimized by Muslims, and more Muslims are in danger of dying at the hands of
Muslims than non-Muslims. This is a subject that demands a wider examination and attention
than has been given by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Of Muslim violence against Muslims, we are concerned here primarily with the
politically organized violence of those in power against those who are contesting that power, and
the appeal to Islam is made in common by all parties in the conflict. In writing about this
subject, we do not need to look at the record of Muslim violence against Muslims from archives,
for the subject continues to be part of the experience of contemporary Muslims and in many
instances is part of their living memory. In my case, I was both a victim and a witness to
organized violence of a Muslim majority state against its own population with the result that one
out of seven people, nearly ten million, were forced from their homes to take refuge in a
neighbouring country as refugees and over half-million were killed.
I am referring to the actions of the military government of Pakistan against the people of
former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971. This was a politically catastrophic event of
genocidal proportions in the modern history of the Muslim world. A brief description of the
culture and politics surrounding the founding of Pakistan in 1947, and the manner in which it
broke apart 24 years later, can well illustrate that aspect of Muslim history, Muslim violence
against Muslims, that has received insufficient notice in the writings about Muslims and Islam.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a
syndicated columnist in Canada and the United Kingdom. A Muslim native to Calcutta, India,
and a noted Islamic scholar, Prof. Mansur has written extensively on Islamic extremism and the
challenges facing contemporary Islam.
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Here I will merely provide a brief overview of Pakistan within the larger context of
Indian history, or more appropriately, the history of Islam and Muslims in India. The more
interesting aspect of the subject of this paper is explaining the nature of Muslim on Muslim
violence that makes a mockery of Islam.
The case of Pakistan is not unique in Muslim history. The violence that has
characterized much of its history is quite common and persistent within most Muslim societies
since the very early years of Islam. In recent times, in the three decades following the violent
break up of Pakistan in 1971, we may cite from a long list of similar violence a few examples of
Muslims engaged in brutal conflicts within a state, or inter-state conflicts of two or more Muslim
majority states. Within Pakistan sectarian violence has continued since 1971; the politics of
Islamization under the military dictator General Zia ul-Haq added another dimension to this
violence with the execution of an elected president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1979. Other
examples of similar kind are: state-directed violence and counter-violence of Muslim extremists
in Egypt, the killing of Anwar Sadat; the repression of Palestinians inside Jordan in 1970-71; the
sectarian strife in Lebanon during the 1970s; the seizure of the holy mosque in Mecca in 1979
and the violence that followed; the violence in Iran since 1979 between followers and opponents
of the late Ayatollah Khomeini; the nearly decade long Iran-Iraq war; the civil war inside Syria
culminating in the Hama uprising of 1982 and its severe repression by Hafez Asad; the civil war
in Algeria since at least early 1992; the unsettled situation in Afghanistan following the brutal
rule of the Talibans. And then there is the case of
Iraq.
In all of the violence and counter-violence
among Muslims, between those who control the
state and those who are in opposition, the one
common element has been the appeal to Islam as
Muslims have engaged in the killings of Muslims. The abuse of religion in such a manner is not
confined to Muslims only; Christians have their own history of violence. But
the intensity and persistence of Muslim violence against Muslims – the intra-Christian violence
is now an exception when it occurs and not the norm – requires an explanation. Muslims need to
confront their record on this matter, if they are going to break out of this cycle, by
acknowledging the problem, understanding what are the sources of such violence, and then
engaging in that brand of politics which will guide them into a democratic future and allow them
to construct an alternative vision of Islam than the one that has been so destructive and counterproductive
in the making of their history.
I return to the example of Pakistan. Any description of Pakistan's history will need to
take account of its making; of the prior history of Muslims and Islam in India; of the failure right
at the outset in constitution-making and the transformation of Pakistan into a praetorian state; of
its ethnic divisions; and of the causes leading to the break up of the country. What followed was
the subsequent history of internal strife, the program of Islamization, sectarian violence, the war
in Afghanistan and the Talibanization of Pakistan.1
In all of the violence and counterviolence
among Muslims, between those
who control the state and those who are
in opposition, the one common element
has been the appeal to Islam as Muslims
have engaged in the killings of Muslims.
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A detailed description of these events is beyond the scope of this paper. Here I will limit
myself to the proposition that the record thus far of Pakistan as a Muslim majority country, its
state of unsettled politics with accompanying violence of Muslim against Muslims, is bound by
the history of its founding.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan was based on his “two-nation” theory that
Muslims of India constitute a nation, separate and distinct from non-Muslim Indians It was an
unprecedented innovation in Muslim history. This invention of a nation caught hold of the
imagination of a sufficiently large number of Indian Muslims and the religious nationalism that
followed led to the division of India.2
Jinnah’s demand did not go unchallenged by those Indian Muslims who viewed the idea
of a separate Muslim state as impractical, and its consequences hugely tragic for Muslims and
non-Muslims alike. A majority of Indian Muslim scholars, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
belonging to the Indian National Congress being most prominent among them, repudiated
Jinnah’s nationalist claim as being contrary to the traditional teachings of Islam and argued that
the history of Muslims in India did not warrant such a division of a country that had been their
watan, home, for over a thousand years.3
Jinnah prevailed, and those Muslims who followed him turned their backs on a history of
Hindu-Muslim coexistence that represented for Muslims of India an alternative to the politics of
exclusion and separation within a religiously defined nationalism. The politics of Muslims
opting for Pakistan had a broader implication for Muslim history beyond the Indian
subcontinent; such separatism suggested that for Muslims the idea of coexistence as a minority
with a non-Muslim majority was untenable, – that Muslims as a minority population preferred
separating from non-Muslims within an existing larger political territory to form a majority in a
smaller political territory – when the global reality is Muslims are a minority in the world at
large as they were within India, and the main challenge confronting them politically and
culturally remains that of coming to terms with the modern world in all its complexity.
The demand for Pakistan was accompanied with the battle cry that “Islam is in danger
within a Hindu majority India.” The politics of the “two-nations” theory was laden with
emotionalism, and the partition of India exploded in an unprecedented explosion of communal
carnage. Once the dust settled, the question of what sort of state Pakistan would be, an Islamic
state or a secular-national Muslim majority state, emerged as a highly divisive issue.
Jinnah interestingly observed in a speech delivered a few days before the date of formal
independence of Pakistan, that in the new state “Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims
would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each
individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”4 Jinnah’s thinking was remarkable
given the carnage his “two-nations” theory had wrought, but he died a year later and those who
had been mobilized in the name of Islam were not prepared to see their sacrifices denied. The
struggle to make Pakistan an Islamic state began with the first sitting of the Constituent
Assembly.
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The initial confrontation between the defenders of Jinnah’s legacy and the proponents of
Islamic state took place over the demand made by religious parties, most notably the Jamaat-i-
Islami of Maulana Maududi, to declare Ahmadis, a relatively new sect in Islam, as being non-
Muslims. The anti-Ahmadiyya movement became violent and led to the imposition of martial
law in Lahore and adjoining areas of Punjab in 1953. It was the precursor of what would follow
in terms of sectarian violence and ethnic conflict leading eventually to the crisis of 1971.
The word “Pakistan” interestingly means “the land of the pure.” Pure here signifies
Muslims being pure in their monotheistic faith. The sub-text of the Pakistan movement was the
many-layered meaning of “Islam in danger.” It meant the Muslim minority community in a
Hindu majority India was vulnerable to the creeping impurity of polytheism undermining their
faith. There were moments in the long history of Muslims in India when the cry of “Islam in
danger” was used by Muslim rulers to consolidate their power against rivals as Aurangzeb, the
Mughal prince and later emperor, did in his bid for power against his brothers; or such a cry was
raised by religious leaders against a Muslim ruler who seemed to be too accommodating of
Hindus as was Akbar, the Mughal emperor, renowned for his openness to all faiths in his
empire.5
Once Pakistan was attained, the demand for an Islamic state also meant to keep the
country “pure” and uncontaminated by alien impurities. The anti-Ahmadiyya movement was
indicative of this mind-set, and eventually the Ahmadis were declared non-Muslims. The same
sort of thinking went into describing one group of Muslims being ethnically purer than another
on the basis of geographical location, or origin, of ethnicity being close to or distant from Arab
lands. In this scheme of purity and impurity, the faith of Bengalis was held suspect since their
language was Sanskrit in origin and did not belong to the family of languages, Arabic-Persian-
Urdu, considered Islamic, and the ethno-geography of Bengali Muslims was furthest in the
Indian subcontinent from Arab lands.6 Hence the military campaign in East Pakistan in 1971
was justified by Pakistani authorities in religious and racial terms, that the faith of Bengali
Muslims was doubtful since they were converts from Hinduism, and they were racially inferior
as a people to those Pakistanis who claimed belonging to martial races as descendants of Arabs,
Persians, Turks and Afghans.7
The violence surrounding the effort to make Pakistan an Islamic state, whether initiated
by religious parties challenging the authority of those who viewed themselves as heirs to
Jinnah’s quest to make the country a modern nation-state, or resulting from the effort of those in
power as in the case of General Zia ul-Haq’s program of Islamization, is indicative of an absence
of consensus on what is meant by an Islamic state. One of the most fascinating records of
probing into the thinking of those demanding an Islamic state is provided in the Report of the
Court of Inquiry into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953, also known as the Munir Report after
Justice Munir who headed the inquiry. The Court of Inquiry engaged in questioning all the
leading religious leaders involved in the agitation against the Ahmadis, and in its Report
concluded that on the question of what constitutes an Islamic state, of how it would be instituted
and governed, there existed much confusion among those who were its most determined
proponents. Justice Munir wrote: “If there is one thing which has been conclusively
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demonstrated in this inquiry, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that
something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to
any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or
civic sense.” These words were remarkably prescient of things to come in Pakistan, and
elsewhere in the Muslim world.
How are we to explain Muslim violence against Muslims within the framework of Islam
and Muslim history? The task is not difficult, but there is peril in pursuing such an explanation.
The task of re-reading Muslim history, specially the earliest years of the post-Prophetic period, is
not one of retrospectively reading our standards into what was narrated in the formative period,
but finding clues in that narrative to explain the subsequent development of Muslim politics into
our time. The peril in this endeavor is in running afoul of those Muslims, a great majority, who
view the history of early Islam and Muslims as sacred and closed to any further interpretation
apart from that provided by Muslims most proximate to that period.
But the earliest narrators of Arab-Muslim history were not reluctant to record events
surrounding the lives of the Prophet and his companions and of the difficulties and conflicts
encountered in their effort to establish Islam among their people. These narrators, most notable
among them, for instance, are Ibn Ishaq (d. 761), Bukhari (d.870), Muslim (d. 875) and al-
Baladhuri (d. c.892), provided the raw material for those who came later and sought to
systematize the historical record and provide commentaries of their own on the earliest
developments of Arab-Muslim history and Islamic civilization. The voluminous writings of al-
Tabari (d. 923) remain a unequal resource for all subsequent historians – for instance the
celebrated philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), in their efforts to understand and
interpret the formative period of Islam between 632, the year of the Prophet’s demise in Medina,
and 680, the year of Husain’s martyrdom at Karbala in Iraq.
The record of this earliest period of Arab-Muslim history is troubling to most Muslims,
and the best they can do is gloss over it, remain silent, or reach for no judgment. But without
unraveling the record of this period and making an effort to critically understand what it tells us,
Muslims will remain stuck in apologetics, or worse denial. The recent work of Wilferd
Madelung, based on the earliest available records and later commentaries, in analyzing the
violent nature of the succession struggle that followed the demise of the Prophet is a most
welcome effort in shedding light on that period with tools of modern historiography.8
The history of Pakistan is indicative of the causes of Muslim violence against Muslims.
In the first instance there is the appropriation of religion for politics, of bending faith for power,
and then the rest follows. In the ascribing of ethnicity in politics we may note the flavor of
tribalism; in the arguments over purity of faith among Muslims we may discern the custom of
establishing genealogical connections among believers of their respective closeness and distance
to the Prophet; and in the securing or denial of authority to rule we find the appeal to Islam and
the preparedness to use violence against opponents as the one constant theme of politics in
Muslim history right from the beginning of the post-Prophetic period.
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The Prophet of Islam’s death was barely announced when the struggle to succeed him as
the temporal leader of a community defined by faith emerged among his followers. Muhammad
had renewed the faith of Abraham in One God among Arabs of the desert. In the process of
rekindling the faith of Abraham, to be known as Islam, Muhammad had established a state, and
made of Muslims a political community.
While returning to Medina from his farewell pilgrimage to the Ka’aba in Mecca,
Muhammad addressed his followers for the last time and told them, as narrated by Ibn Ishaq, the
earliest biographer of the Prophet from the 8th century, “Know that every Muslim is a Muslim's
brother, and that the Muslims are brethren.” The message was unambiguous, that Islam had cut
loose the tribal bonds of the age of ignorance (jahiliyya) and replaced them by a new fraternity of
a universal faith. Then he halted at a place called Ghadir al-Khumm and taking Ali, his cousin
and son-in-law by hand, he gathered all his companions and prayed, “O God, be the friend of
him who is his friend, and the foe of him who is his foe.” Once again the message was clear, that
the Prophet was indicating to his followers his affection for one he considered to be nearest to
him, and that he felt the need to make a public show of this affection because of some
dissatisfaction towards Ali he had observed. Then some time later in Medina the Prophet fell ill,
requested Abu Bakr to lead the public prayers in his place, his illness took a turn for the worse
and he died while being tended by his wife A`isha.
Right at the beginning of the post-Prophetic period in the history of Islam and Muslims
there was a fork on the road, and the manner in which the path to go ahead was chosen selecting
Abu Bakr as the successor of the Prophet of God, Khalifat Rasul Allah, was burdened with grief
and discontent. The events at the portico of the Banu Sa`idah – where the Ansars, Helpers, who
had welcomed the Prophet to their midst in Medina when he fled from Mecca into exile, made a
bid for electing one of their own to authority and then were defeated by the claims made by
Umar and Abu Bakr on behalf of the Muhajiruns, Emigrants from Mecca, that appointed Abu
Bakr as the khalif – laid the seeds of Muslim violence against Muslims by dividing the
community of believers the Prophet had brought together.
An axiom of Muslim belief is that the Prophet's life is a resplendent example for believers
to emulate. It means taking every aspect of the Prophetic conduct as a lesson to be reflected
upon and followed. During his lifetime all the wars the Prophet engaged in were between
believers put under duress by non-believers, and he set the modality of settling differences
among believers through consultation and mediation. He consulted widely among his
companions, and the message of Islam forbade a believer from killing another believer at the risk
of damnation as a punishment for the transgressor. He united Arabs of the desert under his
divinely guided leadership, yet the question remains: was this unity the foundation for a state as
we understand it – of authority in Islam representing the joining of religion and politics (din wa
siyasa) as it was constructed in the post-Prophetic period by his immediate successors – or was
this unity a unique function of the Prophet limited to his person. The striving of his successors to
emulate him in authority could only be emulation, and not an article of faith for posterity.
Moreover, there is the tantalizing possibility that the Prophet indicated the realm of religious
quest for God stands physically apart from the realm of politics by his decision to return to
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Medina after the conquest of Mecca, instead of establishing Mecca – the City of God and the
spiritual centre of Islam – as the political center of Islam by once again taking residence in the
city of his ancestors and of his birth.
During the first fifty years of the post-Prophetic period in Muslim history, bracketed by
the events in the portico of Banu Sa`idah even as the Prophet awaited burial (632) and the brutal
killing of Husain, son of Ali and the grandson of the Prophet from his daughter Fatimah at
Karbala in Iraq (680), the template of Muslim politics that remains dominant in practice was
fashioned.
In this period the extraordinary departure took place from what was forbidden and
scrupulously followed during the lifetime of the Prophet, the ban on Muslim violence against
Muslims. There followed the wars or campaigns against apostasy; the first civil war after the
murder of Uthman, the third khalif; the disputed leadership of Ali, the fourth khalif, and his
murder; the political triumph of the clan of the Abdu Shams, to which Abu Sufyan belonged,
over the clan of Hashim, to which the Prophet belonged; the transformation of a consensus-based
leadership of the Muslim community into a Roman-Byzantium type dynastic rule, and its most
significant first victims were Husain and his family, the direct descendants of the Prophet.
All of this took place even as the message of the Prophet, Islam, was glorified and the
physical boundaries of Islam were rapidly extended beyond the confines of Arabia into Palestine
and Syria, into Africa, and into Persia. But there was a huge disconnect between the expansion
of Islam and the evolving nature of leadership among Muslims. The tribe prevailed over the
fragile bonds of fraternity based on faith that the Prophet spoke about in his farewell message,
and what emerged and became consolidated over the years, was politics of the tribe. The fusion
of religion and politics was in effect religion providing legitimacy to tribal authority. Rulership
over Muslims required reference to Islam; consequently, there emerged an “official” Islam as a
legitimating function of the tribal ruler and, inevitably, an “Islam” of the opponents of those in
power.
Muslims in general have refused to critically examine this period to understand how the
evolution of their history was shaped by events of those fifty years. Instead a culture of denial
took shape, and the majority of Muslims have continued to live in a traditional world of politics
where tribal instincts of clan solidarity prevail and politics is predominantly a calculus of
honour-shame that binds one clan, one tribe, one nation against another. In tribal politics an
individual is inconsequential, and the highest regard is placed for maintaining the collective
reputation of the tribe in respect to other tribes. This politics of denial and of group solidarity
allowed the murder of Husain and his family go unanswered might be labeled as the Karbala
Syndrome.
Ibn Khaldun wrote his penetrating works on the philosophy of history some 700 years
after Karbala. In Al-Muqaddimah he offered his theory of `asabiya, or group solidarity, to
explain the rise and fall of Arab dynasties. In Aziz Al-Azmeh’s reading of Ibn Khaldun, there is
a teleological destiny of `asabiya to establish rule of the group, the clan, the tribe over others:
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The nature of rulership that
emerged in the early post-
Prophetic period, despite the
terribly bloody history of the
first fifty years following the
demise of Muhammad,
became the norm for all later
generations of Muslims.
Islam became politicized and
corrupted to serve the needs
of rulers unaccountable to
Muslims, except those whose
support was essential in the
maintenance of `asabiya
(group solidarity). A
politicized Islam became a
prescription for Muslim
violence against Muslims.
“the subjugation to its will of an ever-widening circle of groups with a progressively more
obscure and higher tie of kin to the central group which is exercising leadership, a subjugation as
if by suction into a vortex whose centre is progressively elevated from headship to kingship to
the state.”9 This is a fine description of the `asabiya of Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti clan that
squeezed Iraq and its people for all their worth.
In Ibn Khaldun’s view the transformation of the office of the successors to the Prophet,
the khalifat, into kingship occurred as a natural decline in the quality of faith among believers
and the compensating increase of `asabiya. Ibn Khaldun wrote: “A change became apparent
only in the restraining influence that had been Islam and now came to be group feeling and the
sword...Then, the characteristic traits of the caliphate disappeared, and only its name remained.
The form of government came to be royal authority pure and simple.”10 The Quran is, however,
categorical about the nature of faith among the Arabs of the desert (49:14). The Quran declared
that the desert Arabs merely submitted to the reality of power, since faith had not penetrated their
hearts.
Those among believers who understood Islam as an inner journey towards God gradually
distanced themselves from the world of power and politics. They came to be known as sufis by
reference to their simple garments of wool (suf), and through their efforts Islam was carried deep
into the lands of Asia and Africa.11 The spread of Islam in India, for instance, was more the
work of sufis than men who wielded swords.
The nature of rulership that emerged in the early post-Prophetic period, despite the
terribly bloody history of the first fifty years following the demise of Muhammad, became the
norm for all later generations of Muslims. Islam became politicized and corrupted to serve the
needs of rulers unaccountable to Muslims, except those whose support was essential in the
maintenance of `asabiya (group solidarity). A politicized Islam became a prescription for
Muslim violence against Muslims. The history of Pakistan is indicative of this problem
persisting into modern times.
The Karbala Syndrome prevents Muslims from
confronting their unpleasant past, and this, in turn, prevents
them from reforming their group behavior so as not to repeat
the errors of the past. Reform hinges on a critical
understanding of the past, but the Karbala Syndrome is the
group behavior of denying the unpleasantness of the past, of
escaping responsibility for history by blaming others.
In the years since 1971, no official effort of any public
sort has been made in Pakistan to explain and understand the
reasons for the break up of a country, nor any official apology
has been given to the people of Bangladesh for the atrocities
committed by the Pakistani military and its surrogates. The
refusal to publicly acknowledge the events of 1971 is
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indicative of the Karbala Syndrome at work in the Pakistani society. The far more consequential
harm to politics in the country from such a practice of group denial is the continuing inability of
the people to reform their society in keeping with the demands of the modern world.
In conclusion, Muslim violence against Muslims is a symptom of politics whose origins
may be traced back to the earliest years of the history of Islam and Muslims. This history
became a closed cycle of group solidarity and tribal politics, and its victims continue to be
Muslims who accept this history as the norm. An escape from this history is possible if Muslims
can imagine what the alternative history of Islam and Muslims might have been if the successors
to the Prophet had chosen a different path than the one that led from the portico of Banu Sa`idah
to Karbala.
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1. For an overview of Pakistan’s history and politics, see Owen Bennet Jones, Pakistan: The Eye of the
Storm. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
2. On the making of Pakistan, see Khalid B. Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase 1857-1948.
London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Also H. Malik, Moslem Nationalism in India and Pakistan.
Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1963.
3. See Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence. Boulder,Co.:
Westview Press, 1997; see chapters 1-4.
4. Cited in Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, p. 340. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
5. On the history of the Mughals see Abraham Eraly, The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of the Great
Mughals. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1997.
6. On Muslims in Bengal, see R.M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
7. On 1971 see G.W. Choudhury, The Last Days of United Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1993. Also see Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh. New Delhi: Vikas Publications, n.d.
8. W. Madelung, The succession to Muhammad: A study of the early Caliphate. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
9. Aziz Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun, p. 32. London: Routledge, 1990.
10. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, p. 166. Translated from the Arabic by
Franz Rosenthal. Edited and abridged by N.J. Dawood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen
Series, 1967.
11. See A. Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980. |
