An insightful and inspiring article by Sophia Chawala

Islam vs. “islam” –An Expat’s Perspective on Religion and Pakistan
When I came home for spring break, my father urged me to read a pile of novels. One that I am reading right now is called “Moving the Mountain” by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf. Responsible for the plans to build a mosque three blocks away from ground zero, Rauf seeks to improve relations between the Muslim world and the West with his novel by speaking on behalf of disenfranchised Muslims in America and around the world and by calling for a progressive, pluralistic kind of religion as a bedrock of tolerance and understanding, one that would melt away hateful stereotypes like stubborn iced snow sliding off an onrushing car and collapsing into glittery dust upon impact.

Few nights ago, amid the bombastic syncopated beats from my sister’s drum playing, the hissing of the pressure cooker from the kitchen, and the belting of debaters from Pakistani news, I was particularly engrossed by Rauf’s first chapter, which explored two sides of the Muslim-based religion: capital “I” Islam and lowercased “i” islam. The former is the one Rauf believes many Muslims today inadvertently act upon: a proper noun that calls for a solid state-of-mind, a construct of mere belief to give followers that extra pizzazz of identifying themselves from the point of view of outsiders. The latter, conversely, is the one Rauf champions. It is a verbal noun, the more humanistic approach of the religion that consists of a set of actions people should utilize as a supplement to every sect of their life. To explain the actions needed in islam, Rauf sets up an interfaith dialogue between the actions and first two commandments of the Christian faith. To believe in one God and to love others as ourselves are the core principles and intentions Muslims should always keep in mind when doing any kind of action—religious or non-religious—to ensure the best spiritual experience as possible for not only themselves, but for others as well. We gain understanding through our actions and through understanding, we could finally achieve the entity of “us”, defined not by otherness, but by inclusiveness of believers, one that steers away from establishing differences between “us” and “them” as a cause of hostility, one that fosters communities of faith as opposed to sectarian hierarchies situated in a vacuum, tightly sealed from any kind of interfaith dialogue or interaction.

Now, I am new to the realm of questioning religion. Nevertheless, Rauf’s connection managed to dazzle me to a point where all the surrounding drumming, hissing and yelling lowered to a sedative hum. For a second, I actually imagined a scene of Christians, Muslims, Jews and other faiths convening and confiding in one another to create tighter-knit bonds, deeper understandings, new crucial layers of meaning to morality and righteousness. I thought of a scene where for once political disagreements did not trump relationships with faith, which runs much deeper than any opinion or fact. Even further, I thought of a religion not named Islam, Christianity or Judaism, but just a religion known as the Religion of God.

But all of a sudden, a glare fires up in the periphery. Caustic red font splashed across the flat screen screaming “BREAKING NEWS.” It was there when I learned about mobs burning over 40 Christian houses in the Badami Bagh area of Lahore in response to alleged blasphemy towards the Prophet Muhammad. From there, my sister’s drumming crescendos into a seismic tremble, my mother’s pressure cooker hiss turns into a deafening sizzle, the voices of the news anchors became more rapt with loud, chaotic excitement. Ears shot, I looked up and down frantically from Rauf’s words to the TV screen, from islam to an obnoxiously capitalized ISLAM plastered in front of me. Then I thought to myself, where do Muslims go from here? Or put generally, where do Pakistanis go from here?

Call this coincidence painfully convenient, but it shows something that I am trying to make sense of when it comes to Pakistan, to religion, to the ways of human nature in general. I am only an expat witnessing at the periphery, fathoming the land of my parents through limited media sources and a plethora of books. I am only the novice inspector under the bridge trying to see what beams are deteriorating. I can only say so much about these riots and religious hate-based attacks on Pakistan, for the arguments against such a crime is as implicit as the dangers of fire. But what I can say is that Muslims are not the only ones marginalized in this world. Muslims victimize themselves too much and accredit themselves too much pity. Culture and colonialism has infiltrated the religion, morphing it into a fuzzy adjective. No wonder non-Muslims also extend Islam to include terrorism. These terms hurt, but we Muslims are partly responsible for their creation.
This country was founded as an “Islamic Republic”, a place where Muslims could become the majority by basking in a land of the religious free and by creating ideas and fostering innovations they never had the chance to do in British India. But just by looking at this title—a title that hangs above Pakistani heads like a shrill fluorescent light bulb—Islam is indeed capitalized, not only orthographically but politically as well. Pakistanis need to regain the true grasp of faith. But in order to do that, they must de-capitalize literally and figuratively, their views of religion and most importantly, their pride.

Sophia Chawala

“A Serenade of Self-Destruction “ By Sophia Chawla

March 3rd, 2012. KARACHI, PAKISTAN: A deadly bomb blast ripped through shops and dwellings in a Shia village, killing about 49 Shia Muslims and wounding 135. We see here, once again, an example of the onrushing Sunni-Shia conflict in Pakistan. Now, my knowledge about the causes behind this conflict is highly lacking (except for the fact that, like all other Sunni-Shia conflicts in the Muslim world, there is a dispute over the heir of the Prophet Muhammad), but such conflict further exhumes the troubled role of religion in the founding foundations of Pakistan.

Pakistan was founded in the year 1947 by Karachi-native Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. A Shia and “non-devout” Muslim himself (people ascribed this title due to him drinking alcohol and eating pork, two “haram”, or forbidden elements in Islam), Jinnah claimed Pakistan as an “Islamic Republic”, a place where Muslims–who were serious minorities in India at the time–could become the majority by basking in a land of the religious free and by creating ideas and fostering innovations they never had the chance to do in British India because of the surrounding religious-fueled hatred that would suppress them. Although Jinnah’s motives seemed vague and innocent in nature, little did he know that his creation would remain to be one of the biggest political groundbreakers and blunders of modern Muslim history.

The blunders began its slow, slithering course after the Qaid-a-Azam died. His death left the Pakistani people with the title “Islamic Republic” hanging over their heads like a shrill fluorescent light bulb. So to maintain this title of “Islamic Republic”, Pakistan did not exactly enact Sharia law, but instead, tried to “grape pick” select concepts from the Quran to preserve Muslim culture and pride. One of them—which were brewing in the minds of British rulers and Indian Muslim politicians even before Pakistan was created—was the Blasphemy Law. The Blasphemy Law under the British prescribed punishments for intentionally destroying or defiling a place or an object of religion and trespassing on religious beliefs through oral, written and physical action. These Laws were inherited by Pakistan the day it was founded. Departing from a seemingly secular air into the murky waters of a religious zone. The law was morphed and proliferated by “Quranizaiton”. The pinnacle of this Quranizaiton was achieved after 1980, thanks to the notorious Zia-ul-Haq setting off the spark with his Islamizaiton policies. A slew of clauses were added to the chapter of religious offences in the Pakistan Penal Code. Clauses like the anti-Ahmadi laws, the anti-derogatory laws, the anti-Quran laws, the anti-Quran defamation laws, the prophet blasphemy laws and many others were piled on more and more to this measure that the law must be as long as a mini-constitution by now.

Now keep this radically mutated law in mind and drag in the current Shia killings into the picture. We can see that blasphemy is a clumsy finger and concept of shifting blame. And even worse, one can blasphemize their religion by using their own religion. That is the very problem of religious sectarianism: it tears the meaning of blasphemy asunder, leaving it as a disembodied shard of mosaic lying in each sect and these shard have nooks and crannies so inconvenient that never shall they puzzle back together with their lost counterpart. One can be a weapon and victim simultaneously.
Same can be applied in the Shia killings in Pakistan. Their religion is not the religion of Pakistan…

…or, whatever that means.

Right now there is nothing but a serenade of self-destruction in Pakistan, a composition of expressive love by the means of violence and hatred. Muslims kill Muslims. Commonly, religion is meant to be a collective unit of believers to create one, collective identity, a flock of sheep shepherding their way through life. And collectivism calls for interdependence. Interdependence is a rosary that says that you are my other me, my brother, my sister. Therefore, killing you would mean I am killing myself. Given this widely known idea, we can see what exactly the “Islamic Republic” of Pakistan is undergoing. Its people self destruct as they destruct others.