The web of holy deceit

When the much-hyped peace process with the Taliban began, this is what I wrote in this space on February 5: “If the Taliban do not want peace short of capturing the state, not physically but in a social-psychological sense, and if for doing that they need to buy more time, then it is safe to argue that they would like the process to stay in limbo – continue talking peace while raising technicalities and when need be accusing the state of bad faith. This could be interspersed with some acts of terrorism which they do not necessarily have to own. It is always easy to raise the spectre of someone trying to sabotage talks. Pakistanis are suckers for all kinds of conspiracies.”

On Feb 16, the Taliban from Mohmand Agency issued a letter and a minute-and-half-long video, informing Pakistan that they had killed 23 Frontier Corps soldiers because the government and its intelligence agencies were killing and dumping the bodies of their captured men even as Islamabad talked about talks.

As if on cue, clerics and ‘analysts’ from the right began raising the spectre of a ‘third force’ bent upon sabotaging talks. This despite the fact that the video clearly showed one Omar Khorasani and Ehsanullah Ehsan of the Tehreek-e-Taliban fulminating against the government and taking responsibility for the claimed killing. What ‘third force’ are we talking about? Or is it that the Mohmand chapter of the TTP is trying to sabotage the peace efforts that the TTP headquarters, presumably, is trying hard to achieve?

If that is indeed the case then shouldn’t the TTP HQ condemn the killings and string upside down Khorasani as well as Ehsan to signal to all that they want peace? And if that doesn’t happen, as it surely won’t, shouldn’t the charlatans on the right who start off like shysters in defence of the TTP slink in shame-faced silence?

No, they won’t. They have invested too much and for too long in this deception to give it up when they are within an arm’s length of victory. There’s no dearth of suckers for their poppycock, raised on a daily diet of holy lies and promises of a utopia that never was and will never be.

Muslims can never kill Muslims, they thunder. Perish the thought that Muslims have not only killed Muslims but with great abandon and often gruesomely. Who killed the third and the fourth caliphs? Why was he killed? Why were the Battles of Camel and Siffeen fought and between whom?

To the best of my knowledge, there was no Blackwater-Xe at the time.

One can go on from early Islamic history, quoting from Tabari down to many scholars including Maudoodi, to prove that Muslims not only have sufficient capacity to kill each other but can lie about and fudge and confuse the most obvious issues in the name of the Quran and Sunnah. And lest anyone say – as clerics are wont to tell us – that we have degenerated today because of less Islam, let me remind them that Jamal and Siffeen were fought by early Muslims, many of them companions of the Prophet (pbuh) and not because there was too little Islam but because there was too much of it and all sides, including the khawarij – most certainly the forerunners of today’s murderous Taliban – thought God was on their side.

The point of this is simple. We cloak politics in holy garbs today, just as the early Muslims did. It doesn’t sacralise the garb but it definitely sullies the holy until we begin to wallow in our own filth while acting sanctimonious.

If we want to get out of the royal mess in which we have placed ourselves, we need to stop living in our self-created deception. The khateeb of Lal Masjid told me that all Muslims are agreed on the application of the Quran and Sunnah. And he said it with a straight face. When I told him that Islamic history, for the most part, is about the differences – often bloody – on the exegesis of the Quran and Sunnah, he wouldn’t accept a truth that anyone with any interest can find discussed in great detail in thousands of books.

Abdul Aziz reminded me of the famous opening line from Francis Bacon’s essay on Of Truth: “What is truth? said jesting [Pontius] Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” But Aziz is not the only charlatan. The tribe is a big one and growing bigger by the day. In this it is helped by certain political parties and the average Pakistani who is scarily incapable of disengaging himself from the web of deceit woven by the clerics. There is dual causality in this, what Orwell described as an effect becoming “a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”.

There is no easy way out of this Daedalian labyrinth. But those who think that the waxen wings of talks can help them fly off fail to realise that they might just be flying too close to the sun already. Fighting has a cost. But to think that talking, especially to those who want to conquer a people, will be sans cost is naiveté at its most naive.

Let’s be clear: we want peace because we are tired of killings. But are we prepared to live under a dispensation that reduces life to uncultured nothingness in order that our lives be spared by marauding savages? I don’t think so.

The writer is a newspaper man. He tweets @ejazhaider.