This blog is part 2 of a four-part series that attempts to understand the enemy within; and why and how our establishment has fed this monster for decades. 

See Part 1: Coexistence with India

See Part 3: Coexistence with India – II

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Unfortunately it is not yet clear whether our army and leaders really believe that “the enemy within” actually means those who use Islam for their power and support in their mission to destroy this state and society. So far neither the state nor the society seems to realise that these forces will destroy both of them as they exist today. In fact, the killer is a darling, a hero, a holy destroyer because he is fighting to implement in practice what the state and society profess as their ideal but do not implement.

While the state and society pretend to love Arabian Mullah’s Islam as a theory, they lack the readiness to live it. This society was told for generations that the state and all its resources must serve only Islam and fight the enemies of Islam. The “westernised” men in power believed this slogan would serve them well, without demanding any change in their Officer’s Mess culture. But political Ulema like Maudoodi, Mufti and Usmani were not their slaves; they had great ambitions with the Holy Arab Empire behind them. As generals and bureaucrats plunged in their prosperity drive and property deals, organised Islam steadily entered lower ranks in all centers of power and lashed at the semi liberal patterns of society, calling it depravity, perversion and shameless rebellion against Allah. Dichotomy of conviction and conduct creates a crushing sense of guilt. The entire society and its rulers stood like truant boys before the godly maulana. Pakistan’s teeming millions of working masses had no sense of guilt, but Bhutto, their dearly loved leader, found his own iron melting and went to Maudoodi’s den to seek forgiveness. His later decision to lay down his life, however, brought him back to the simple-hearted masses, perhaps because they love simple and liberal Islam and do not feel the guilt of dichotomy which so molests our affluent middle class.

Everybody of importance soon realised that externalisation of guilt in public and repentance in private were good ways to wash dirty hands, while keeping what they had grabbed. The emergence of Zia was natural while that of Musharraf was so unnatural that an armed invasion of the Islamic Republic became possible to cleanse it of un-islamic “filth”. When holy warriors today attack our troops or explode our people, resentment is not directed towards the warrior, it simply turns to the “hypocrite” in power. The holy warrior’s destructiveness, therefore, is not so hateful as to deserve the treatment that India or America deserves. This perhaps explains why the “enemy within” is so single-minded and so organised while our leaders, generals and middle classes vacillate like overgrown stalks in wind.

Our first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan panicked when he received an invitation from the Soviets and requested the Americans to save him by sending an invitation. Thus, we assumed our interesting role that spelled gradual disaster: Islam for America to fight the Soviets + Islam for our army to fight India. Much later when the East wing was gone and the two nation theory almost done, Z A Bhutto added another enemy to the list of our eternal enemies. Now we had Hindus and Jews in addition to atheists, a thousand years to fight for a thousand miles on the East and a thousand miles across the Holy Lands. We injected our nation’s blood in the nukes till the intoxicated nation lost its consciousness due to anemia. How rewarding was it to have the Islamic bomb? We lost Bhutto as a punishment from our Western mentor who knew our nuclear prowess was meaningless against the Soviets while dangerous in the hands of an emotionally charged religious state against India and Israel. We fought India each time to lose, because the US did not support us but we won against the Soviets because the Free World stood behind. We consistently refused to see that not only America but the whole world valued India and Israel. Only China supported us for a while against India till we showed her our holy teeth in Sinkiang, and Saudi Arabia encouraged us against Israel only by occasionally permitting us to kiss the holy royal hands.

The enemy within is a breed of crude, unreasoning tyrants who have no respect for life and law, not even their own. The mindset which created this self-righteous specie is strongly negative. It negates and excludes all that is “the others”, so that what remains to be admired is “we” and “ours”. Everything we do is right and just. Unfortunately, for more than a millennium, we, the Muslims of the world, served our ruling elite as their power base, as their soldiers, their police and agricultural work force. Perpetual conflict with the subject people, excessive emphasis on faith and dominance of the dogmatic Ulema dried up the positive human creativity of Muslims, as well as their subjects.