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Radio ReOrient 14.2: State of the Ummah – Authoritarianism and Resistance: Bangladesh and Pakistan, Hosted by SherAli Tahreen and Shehla Khan, with Tanzeen Doha and Salman Sayyid
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Tanzim Doha
Welcome to the new books network,
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Sulman Syed
sam.
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Tanzim Doha
Listeners, and welcome back to Radio Reorient,
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Sulman Syed
the podcast where we explore the Islamosphere and illuminate the post Western. Your hosts this season are Chella Ward, Claudia Radovan, Saeed Khan, Izamir, and Amina Isaat Das.
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Sheila Khan
Today we have the second part of our State of the Ummah series. This episode features guest hosts Shela Khan and Sher Ali Tarim with Tanzim Doha and Salman Saeed.
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Sulman Syed
This episode will be a study in contrasts. Why was Bangladesh able to overthrow Sheikh Hasina's authoritarian rule while Pakistan continues to be occupied by harsh authoritarian regime? One example of the many cruelties by the regime is the continued inhumane imprisonment of the deposed Prime Minister Imran Khan. So without further ado, let's listen in.
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Sheila Khan
Assalamu Alaikum, Ramadan Mubarak, and hello to our listeners at WE Radio Reorient.
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Tanzim Doha
Today.
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Sheila Khan
We are back with a special episode that addresses recent developments in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In keeping with the broader reorientation of critical Muslim studies, the conversation seeks to avoid the inducements of methodological nationalism and exceptionalism on the one hand, and Orientalism and indology on the other. Instead, the aim is to develop a relational analysis that grounds the interconnections specifically the ways in which varied political Trajectories are linked through their entanglement in broader configurations of power. In this way, by looking past ready made common sense constructions of concepts such as ethnicity, religion, secularity, sectarianism, all inherited from the from colonial epistemologies. Critical Muslim Studies seeks to open space for thinking anew about what needs to be done in the Islamosphere. Our discussion today aims to excavate long enduring structural factors that reproduce cycles of repression, reform and recuperation in the two countries. But firstly, let's begin with introduction. So I'm Sheila Khan, I'm a lecturer in international relations and with me are three distinguished panelists. Would you like to introduce yourselves, please?
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Sulman Syed
I'm Sulman Syed. I'm a professor of decolonial thought and rhetoric at the University of Paints.
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Tanzim Doha
I am Tanzin Doha and I'm a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm an anthropologist here.
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Sher Ali Tarim
Ali Tarin. I teach religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College.
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Sheila Khan
Okay, brilliant. So to start our discussion, let's have some context and background about recent terms of events in the two countries, beginning with Bangladesh. Dr. Tanzindo, how would you like to begin?
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Tanzim Doha
Sure, sure, yes. Assalamualaikum and thank you very much for having me. And I'd like to say that the, the way to think about Bangladesh is to begin sort of with the present. And I will begin with 2024, the July uprising, the rebellion, the revolt that did not become a revolution in Bangladesh, which was spearheaded by a university movement against a particular kind of affirmative action for the pro freedom fighters, families and so on, which was discriminating against other students and so on. So it was a movement that started off that way, which again later on became a mass uprising against the entire regiment. What I would call a secular, necropolitical war on terror regime of Sheikh Hasina that's been there for more than a decade. And some people are using fascism as a way to articulate it, which within Bangladesh has gained a popular term to kind of classify the Sheikh Hasina's regime. It was a very important movement because of the transformation from being a student led movement to a student set of concerns to a larger struggle against the war on terror and the inherited legacies of the war on terror, which was very specifically organized by the security personnel and the intelligence elements in Bangladesh and became a truly specifically sort of anti Indian hegemonic struggle. The entirety of the struggle was about questioning a particular kind of historiography which was articulated by the Bengali nationalists from 71 onwards to classify Bangladesh as a counter thesis to the Pakistan movement to classify Bangladesh as secular. And in 71, between 71 and 72, by the time the original constitution was drafted up, it was done in consultation with India. So it was at the time Indira Gandhi's approach was very, very practical, which is to make sure that they don't have another Pakistan on the other side to continue. And so they wanted to make sure that it was self declared as a secular republic. And so the values of the doctrinal values that were placed into the constitution, secularism became one of the pillars. So it is very, very important to understand the formation of Bangladesh from the beginning, Even though the struggle itself had a kind of contested history about how to think about that. And there were different articulations about how to think about whether it should be looked at as a civil war, whether it should looked at as an independence movement, etc. By the time 72 comes in, by the time Sheikh Muji becomes formally in power, it becomes a very, very ideologically aligned with the Indian state. And so that's part of the sort of political constitutional history and the 2024 struggle. And I'm going to talk about this more as we go along, but I just want to say that it was fundamentally a struggle in which the students, there are slogans that they've used that who are we? We are the rajakar. And rajakar was a derogatory term used against those Bengalis who was working against the independence of Bangladesh. And so it was a term also labeled as the term that addresses the Islamists, meaning the Islamists at the time, particularly Jamaat e Islami, because ideologically they were for the continuation of Pakistan, they were called rajakar, meaning they wanted to keep on collaborating with the Pakistani army and continue with the atrocities that took place. So what happened was the students actually started to say after the Prime Minister said, so if the freedom fighters kids are not going to get these, these, these quotas, then who are they gonna. Who are we gonna give it to? The children of the Rajakars. So that was her, her kind of joking. And that became actually like a triggering point where the students started to say, who are, who am I? Who are you? I'm a Rajakar. I'm a rajakar. As an affirmative statement, reusing it against the prime minister saying that. So that's a very foundational at the level of language, questioning the entire historiography of a particular kind of political philosophy of the state and a particular kind of political philosophy of the civil society in Bangladesh, which is culturally dominated by nationalists for decades now. And so the other thing I would quickly highlight before just this introductory prefatory remarks is that the students who represented this struggle, who led the struggle, were all what I would call the children of Shapla massacre. 2013 was a Shapla massacre, which is what I do my first primary research on, my first book, which I'm working on, is about this massacre of Islamic practitioners of the Deobandi tradition. But it became a movement, a struggle, which was not a political party of Hafazati Islam, which was a platform of all the major Qaomi madrasas in the country, against denigrating sort of blog posts and et cetera, and cartoonists who were making fun of the prophet Sallallahu alaihi wasallam. So there was a mass mobilization. Million people showed up. It created a panic in the regime, it created panic in the intelligence agents. It created a serious concern for the Indians. So there was a killing that took place in May of 2013. The young people who took part in the Shapla in massacre were now older. So they were like madrasa students who were like 12, 13 years old. So now after a decade, they were in their twenties. So it's very, very important to understand some of the key figures from the Shapla massacre who witnessed that became university students by the time it was July 2024. And they engaged in a radical struggle. And they understood that the primary antagonism that they were going to address was this question of secularism and against what I would call various forms of Islamically oriented ways of thinking, even some of the ones that are more secular now. Students were formerly Islamists in the past. So there is the debate that's also happening internally within the discourse of Islamism. So I would leave it at that. And there are other questions, I'm sure.
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Sheila Khan
Okay, great, thank you.
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Sulman Syed
Can I just come on there, just to reflect on just what you said for a minute there? In a way, what you've described is really a tension, which I would say it's been part of the picture of politics involving Muslim communities since at least the early part of the 20th century, if not a little bit earlier than that. Because in a way, the description we have about fascists and Westernizers and infantry, I mean, in my work, I would call them Kemalists. They range from whether they're authoritarian or non authoritarian, but their main antagonism, the primary antagonism, is any kind of political subjectivity which makes any kind of gesture towards the Islamicate and what that means in Muslim Context is precisely any kind of opening that allows for a popular mandate anywhere. And so in nearly, if you go to look at Egypt, who among the people who are asking for the rule of the military to come and intervene is these same group of people who meet, you know, they call themselves liberals when they're abroad, but they want to, you know, ensure a very kind of, you know, what's toxicated is a very good description of them. And you would meet them in person. And I mean, I know Sheikh in his books, you can see some of the kind of. In his introduction, other groups are asking for the bombing. And many of those who are asking for the bombing are part of that kind of diasporic look. So I think it is something that we should see this antagonism between these kind of whether Islam in any shape, way or form has some space. And what does that mean in particular places? And here, I think charity, when you talk about Imran Khan's kind of thing, you can see in a less organized, a similar kind of tension going on. Because to be sovereign requires a space for Islam in these societies. And I would argue that you cannot have any kind of democratic accountability or democracy without sovereignty. So these things cannot be disarticulated like they want to be. In nearly every single case where you have the kind of reduction or suppression of the notion of Muslimness as being active, you have Islamophobia and wherever you have Islamophobia, you also then have basically a collaboration or some kind of retreat or defeatism in relation to imperial or foreign control and things like that. And I think that's just something that I wanted to draw out in that experience because 2014 happened at the same time as what happens in Syria. So we are looking at different kinds of articulations of similar kinds of logics, trying to produce a new kind of beginning in very different circumstances.
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Tanzim Doha
Yeah, I mean, agreed. I do want to emphasize that Kemalism is a term that is being used now. And Professor Said, I mean, your work has been quite critically important. Many people are translating it. I mean, I don't want to take credit, but I was one of the first ones who actually used the fundamental fear in reading groups in 2008, around that time where we were working with various texts in various sort of study circles in which the Islamic oriented groups were very, very involved. So your work, Tall Al Assad's work to an extent, while Halak's work now have become kind of relevant, and Sheryl's work, of course, because the one day tradition is so involved in various debates and conversations we are having within what is really lively and rich is a conversation within various forms of Islamism. There are various kinds of tensions, but also productive tension, I would say, which is very, very interesting and of space. We used to hide and do these things in the Hasinas era. Now the fact that there is an opening up and what you call in your text availability of Islam, that that has been increased because of this treme push from this new generation of thinkers. And I would like to think of myself as one who was slightly before this generation in carrying that kind of legacy. And again, looking back at even the fundamental terms like rajakar and making it our own, making it a useful term to rethink the question of Pakistan and to understand that the whole process of reconciliation in Bangladesh is going to require a reanalysis of these originary terms that were used by Indian agents to think about the splitting of Pakistan. So we're very, very engaged in that kind of debate. I mean, I use polycharmalism less than some of the others. I probably use more directly secularism. But it has been. And whether we use the term or not, the whole idea of that, you know, like abolition of the caliphate is so critically important to think about 20th century Islamism, the influence of Mawlana Maududi in the region, Said Qutb and Hassan Al Banna and so on, it's just tremendously important for the spirit of the movement that we see in Bangladesh now.
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Sheila Khan
Shirley, would you like to weigh in on.
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Sher Ali Tarim
Yeah, I'll very briefly maybe jump in here. Bismillahumad Rahim. Well, first of all, I really want to thank Radio Orient, the Reorient network. It's one of the few places one go to to actually have these kinds of discussions that do an analysis of this critical moment, especially in relation to Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir and so on. And I think Radio Reorient really is one of the few places where one can in fact do this kind of beyond nationalistic analysis, which also is not imprisoned to secular frameworks. Right. And it's, I think, quite interesting to think about the paucity of such venues where you can do this kind of work. I'm so glad that Salman suggested that we triangulate this discussion by bringing in the context of Bangladesh. And to have Tanzeen here is such a delight. Logistically, I was a bit skeptical. If we include the two contexts, etc. Would it work or not? But already I can tell that like most cases, Salman's sensibility was quite accurate, that I think it's very important to in fact think about the Pakistani context in this larger framework. Very briefly, what I would say is that it's a very interesting comparison. If we compare two moments in 2024, there is a July 2024 moment. And of course I also want to begin by paying my tributes and adoas to the martyrs of the July revolution. And I also want to pay my tributes to the people who have suffered through paying the ultimate price and in many cases have suffered tremendous losses in the Pakistani context as well as they have tried to resist a very brutal regime of different constituencies who have come under fire for many years, but especially the last few years. If we make a comparison between February 2024 in Pakistan and July 2024 in Bangladesh, I think that makes for an interesting comparison. And I think any conversation on Pakistan, the current moment, I mean, there could be a much longer context and conversation with. But if you want to talk about the current moment and the current political dispensation in Pakistan, I think one important point of departure has to be February 8, 2024. And just how momentous what happened on February 8, 2024 was. Here we had a moment where you had a brutal, essentially martial law regime which continues until today, that has a political leader imprisoned with no possibility of any advertisements. Even the visual image of Imran Khan was unavailable in the public sphere, in the news, in, you know, any kind of media, people being rounded up, people being brutalized even to bring out a PTI flag in the public sphere. You know, Salman mentioned earlier that we should focus more on analysis and not news bits. But I think these facts are useful in the sense that one should not forget that you had a differently abled young man sexually brutalized and murdered in jail in 2023. Zillish, I'm talking about and multiple other cases of the things, kinds of things that happened to brutalize this political party. Their sign was taken out, the political sign for, you know, the voting booth in an electorate which really relies on election symbols once they go into the voting booth. But despite all of that, come February 8th, people came out and people overwhelmingly voted for Imran Khan. And in all, you know, any kind of a reason analysis would tell you that the Imran Khan and his political party won over 180 seats. And the current political dispensation currently in quote, unquote power, won maybe only 17. And there can be different opinions on this thing, but most reasonable people would agree to that. So I think what happened there was really momentous and important. What that did was that it Forever showed that this current political dispensation is an illegitimate political dispensation. And that I think kind of resistance was really critical. But if we compare it to what happened in Bangladesh, there is still an absence of actually the resistance reaching a point where political power is actually arrogated from, from this brutal secular elite. And the reason why I think the category of the secular is really appropriate in the Pakistani context right now really is crystallized by what is happening with the Board of Peace, which of course I think we might title this podcast the Board of Violence, which is the Board of Violence at this stage. I mean, for someone like Shabaz Sharif and his master Asim Munir, the kind of length they have gone to try to please Donald Trump and join this board and the way in which it has legitimated in some ways Israel. And that I think is a really massive event. And who would have thought that in Pakistan Israel would be legitimated in this kind of a blatant fashion, that this would be the level of obsequiousness with which this would unfold. And that clearly shows that. Again, to connect this to Salman's comment here as well, that you know, regardless of what opinion you might have of Imran Khan and his political trajectory and ideology, complicated figure, interestingly, a Muslim modernist, so not someone from the traditionalist class. So it's an interesting case study that even an Anglophone, essentially an Anglophone Muslim modernist, because he raises the question of some notion of Muslim political sovereignty, because he said, are we your slaves? In the, in the famous speech before he was taken out through a US backed coup, essentially because he talks about the state of Medina as a role model. Now there might be some contradictions, intentions in terms of how he may have fulfilled or not fulfilled that mandate. But even someone like him, a Muslim modernist, essentially an English speaking Muslim modernist, is so unpalatable that even if someone who hints at the possibility that he would not give us air bases so they could attack Afghanistan, who is very forthright on the question of Palestine, who raised the question of injuring prophetic honor and the question of blasphemy. So even that kind of a Muslim figure is unpalatable to the point that a whole coup data was orchestrated and illegitimate government was put in place, which is only in place right now, the only form of authority that it does have is that of thaggery is brute violence. And brute thuggery is basically the only basis on which this current dispensation is in power. So I think it makes for an interesting comparison for why what was Possible in Bangladesh is not possible. Yet in Pakistan, people might say that it's the fractures in terms of the internal factors. So the student movement is not as organized, that the lack of student unions, perhaps. Some people say that it basically might boil down to the brutality of the military and the way in which it is operating in Pakistan. Could be multiple explanations. But I think that might be an interesting analysis to do in terms of how the possibilities of Bangladesh are perhaps in the future or are realizable or not realizable. That I think behooves for some analysis in terms of that comparison. But I think February 8 and July 2024 in Bangladesh, those are an interesting point of comparison for analysis for our purposes here.
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Sulman Syed
Jerry, can I take you up on that, just to pick up that point that you just mentioned? I think it's really, really interesting. So, as you said, there are many ways of looking at what might have been, what is different, what the different factors are. And they can range from the brutality of the military, how extensive it is, et cetera, to factors like almost kind of geographical factors that in a sense, in Bangladesh, there's one center in Dhaka, whereas the Pakistan, the. The political center, Islamabad, is diffused away, separated from Karachi and Lahore and all these kinds of, you know, these are logistical issues as well about organizing it. And some of them are not something that we can do. But what I'd like to suggest is perhaps we should look at what is it that the successful rebellion was able to do or did compared to what those attempts have not been possible in Pakistan. So in a sense, rather than looking at what they're facing, is to see what are the structures and things that are going on. And Tanzin, I just want to pick up the point that you made before about this. And something that I've sort of gathered is, you know, the idea of the intellectual development of these groups, these student groups, the study circles, et cetera, that already there was some kind of. And it's not surprising that so many of them were either from JAMAIC or close to Jamaat or in that conversation, in a way, which kind of suggests to me at least, that there was some kind of intellectual horizon going beyond simply replicating a liberal outcome. And the question, I suppose I would have, Shirley, is to what extent the PTI and the other oppositional groups have a similar capacity for understanding and then for intellectual development, which leads to organizational forms which are able to do that. And maybe you could both comment on that. That might be. I don't know if Shalaf, he wants to come in as well about the people in Islo and whether they stand on this kind of issue, about the possibility of a alternative educational or intellectual theoretical formation that allows you to start thinking, well, this is what's possible, this is not. And the reclaiming of those kind of particular narratives becomes really encounter histography. And I'm wondering, you know, Shera and Sherleaf, you see that in the opposition to the current dispensation in Pakistan, and maybe Tanzine, you could comment on a little bit about whether that. How critical you thought that was and how well developed you thought that was.
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Sheila Khan
I think let's let Tanzeen begin, because again, we begin with Bangladesh and then we carry on.
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Tanzim Doha
I thought the question was for Shelley.
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Sulman Syed
Sorry, no, no question for both of you. The question is really about the role of the intellectual development in the organizational forms that made possible because student movement to overthrow the entrenched regime with intelligence and all these things is a major achievement. And we need to recognize that whatever happens afterwards, it is a major undertaking. And what were the conditionality in terms of the internal organization of these. Rather than looking just, oh, what they were facing. Because in the end, you have to face what you have to face. But you should also look at what they were able to do differently or what they were able to do that allowed them to be in that position. And then Shela and Sher Ali to maybe say something about where does their opposition in Pakistan stand in relation to some of the points that you might make.
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Tanzim Doha
Yes. So that's a very tough and difficult question in terms of the successful. The success of the struggle. One of the things that I've recently written in Bengali for a collection, on July, I wrote the epilogue. And I kind of focus on Chatroshibir, which is the student wing, but it's an independent organization from Jamaat e Islami, but it's a cadre organization. And Chhatro Shabir has a long tradition of following Maulana Maududi's ideology. And they're much more, to use it in a proper way, radical compared to Jamaati Islami, the senior organization. And Jamaati Islami, unlike secular political parties, do not have any control over their student wing. As a result, in Bangladesh, as you know, a much more interesting election results were all the student elections in all the universities. Chhatra Shabir won decisively, including secular Bengalis, and particularly women were like, we feel better when Shabir is going to be in power. None of them, all of them are good students. None of them are Thugs and none of them are engaged in drugs and other kinds of criminal activities on campus. None of them ever committed any crimes against women on campus. We feel better. And so even minorities felt better. When Chhat El Shabir came to power in student politics immediately after July, all of the campuses, including campuses that have more Hindu students as well. So this was a tremendous force of power. This created a serious anxiety attack both on the residual kind of Hasina regime's military power as well as what's going to be the future BNP and their wings. Right. Their student organizations are unpopular because they're directly connected to the actual broader political party. One of the things that happened, which is a very concrete thing, I know we're talking about intellectualism, but politically concrete actions turned the student movement into a mass movement against the regime where specific actions by Shabir and his allies that were militant against the Aulmilee thugs on campus and other areas where they took part in specific interventions, physically speaking, in which they displace police forces, security forces. Because it's a cadre organization, they were able to pull that off. It's not randomly, sort of spontaneously. Oh, let's just the spontaneous was the people, large amounts of people. But in specific, all this vanguard activity, I would call it, let's say an advanced minority of political actors who did not say we're the, this is a Shabir movement. So they let it be universal. But at various points in various campuses, they were the ones who said, and there were specific meetings I heard of in specific campuses where they said, listen, in their actual meetings with the larger groups, even though the spokespersons of the students were mostly ex Islamists, it was the Islamists who engaged in the actual acts that displaced the police forces that went after the security forces when they attacked them. So this kind of self defensive militant activism actually is what caused the Hasina regime to fall apart. And then the people saw that there were martyrs and certain figures emerged and it became a really massive kind of movement that was universalizable for masses of people. And so I think Shabir and their allies who have training and sort of cadre organizations have played a very critical role in transforming the struggle. And it became something that any larger political parties, including Jamaat, could not control. It was up to this kind of ability to intervene militarily basically against the security personnel of the regime. At which point they were, they had to literally airlift Hasina and send her to India because they were coming for the Ghanobhabun, which is where Hasina's office is. So masses of people were moving in that direction. And without, I think, Shabir's. I know some people are going to be annoyed at me for saying this, but I'll say nonetheless, I'm talking about in Bangladesh or ex Islamists. But without those interventions in specific moments in the struggle, this would have been limited to a student movement because Hasina already compromised. They said, okay, no more. We're not going to do this freedom fighter thing. Don't worry. We accepted all the blah, blah, blah. But they were like, no, it's too late. It was actually those specific campuses in which there were more radical elements who were saying. And the slogans of Azadi became very, very significant. The question of Palestine became extremely significant. The question of the Rohingya became extremely significant. And Kashmir became central kind of demand in the way they articulated and envisioned a kind of future. And they looked at Hasina as that kind of a figure, an Indian figure who. Who occupied internally our entire imagination and what we could do. So that was a very electric kind of transformation. And I would say intellectually, because there is a legacy in Bangladesh, but it took a long time. I would say. This is why I mentioned 2008. Around that time, when I was going back home a lot after 2001, because of what had happened in the U.S. there was an increased intellectual inquiry, both from the far ultra left, who were former Maoists, and. And Islamists, about learning about Islamism theoretically and very seriously going back to certain texts to understand what's going on, that's actually shaking up the world order. And that became a tradition. So Bangladesh used to have East Bengal, you can say, or East Pakistan have a long history actually of Maoist radical politics, even in its intellectual kind of history. And so that actually had a transformation in many ways towards Islamism. And because there is that history of actually questioning power, that transformation took some time. But people were going back to figures like Maulana Maududi and others to kind of articulate a very interesting kind of politics. And of course, it's still a debate. We're still, you know, within these circles, there is a lot of back and forth. And so I would, you know, I don't know if I gave you a clear answer, but I would say that the capture organizations have played a very critical role in actually concretely stopping certain things and reversing certain kinds of violence against the security personnel. And that kind of militancy allowed for it because normally, unfortunately, the mainstream speakers even within the movement speak of it as like, oh, people were just observing and they got you know, and the figure of Abu Said raising his hands up. Right. Those are very important figures. That seems like a very mass nonviolent movement against a brutal regime. Yes, mass level nonviolent movement. But they fought against the police. Shabir gave lives. They engaged. And some of the Salafi movements also engaged in actual struggle. It was not just hands up and we are not going to do anything. No, they fought against the security organizations and they fought against the Aomel student wings who were terrorizing the campus. And the amount of participation from women were really significant. And they felt much safer around the Shibi brothers for very specific reasons that we can discuss. It actually comes to certain norms. Unfortunately, the civil society now in Bangladesh have completely reversed the conversation back to a kind of vulgar Western feminist conversation about men and Islamism, et cetera, et cetera. And that's a whole nother kind of rhetorical ploy that they're using against the Islamists.
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Sheila Khan
I mean, I think, I think that's kind of where Pakistan is at the moment. And that's largely as a result of the very long, pernicious and extensive chokehold of the military over Pakistani politics. That really took a new turn with the war on terror from 2001 under Musharraf. Musharraf, of course, launched his notorious enlightened moderation project, in which he beat back quite harshly at any sort of political expressions of Islamism. However, the student movement in Pakistan had already been pacified long before that, and there was simply no space then for it to reemerge. So even when Musharraf fell, I think the dominant idiom of opposition was still liberal. So we saw the lawyers movement of, I think it was 2007, and it was very much cast in, you know, in a liberal idiom, a restoration of the Constitution, a restoration of civil rights and fundamental liberties, et cetera. So when the Musharraf regime eventually did fall power, then was the, was the, you know, power then transitioned to the so called civilian leader, as like Zardari, the husband of the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. And Zardari perhaps rivaled or even outstripped Musharraf in terms of his allegiance to empire. So really not a lot changed, except on the surface. I mean, if you, you know, Zardari is on record as having sanctioned any number of drone attacks on Pakistani soil. So that is what liberalism really means in the context of Pakistan as a discourse of opposition. In other words, it means there is no opposition, you know, to, to, to the military, no meaningful opposition. And we see to an extent, we see some of this filtering through even to the pti. So the pti, it definitely presents itself as a reformist party, very interested in the rule of law, in restoring justice. But again, the dominant idiom is liberal. And even though, as Sheryl Lee has pointed out, you do have these gestures towards the Riyasati Madri, Madinah, and you do certainly have, you know, Imran Khan's very sort of firm commitments to Palestine and to keeping Pakistan out of Washington's dirty wars in Afghanistan. However, in terms of a political project, an intellectual project, we don't really get much of an advance. We do get something. We do get something, but I wouldn't say that it constitutes a radical rupture from the kind of liberal, you know, the sort of liberal frameworks that have dominated Pakistan for many, many years. I don't know. What would you say?
- [38:24]
Sher Ali Tarim
Sherali well, the first thing I would say is that, you know, we're reaching around half an hour mark of our podcast. So I know that the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi liberals listening to this, although the secular sensibilities who, of course, as we know, also populate the academy quite broadly, would be framing this by this point as some kind of an endorsement for Islamism. So I just wanted to quickly I should not need to say this in an academic podcast, but I will, because that's where we're at, that analyzing a phenomenon is not to undermine its ambiguities. And each of the people that I've spoken so far at Tandin, Salman and Shaila, yourself as well, we have talked about the tensions and the ambiguities as well. So you can look at the tensions and ambiguities and even the contradictions of a phenomenon without dehumanizing it, without approaching it through a secular framework. So I just wanted to clarify that this is not some kind of an endorsement of Islamism happening here. If that is how you read these kinds of attempts to engage in a critical secular studies framework, then you need to work on your reading list. So I just wanted to preempt that critique because I've realized sometimes preempting is more useful than, you know, post and getting into any kind of a conversation on this front. Couple of things in relation to what you just mentioned here, Shaila and Salman, the first thing is that in fairness, there have been attempts. People have come out and protested the military and this kind of a current the brutal regime. And we should not forget what happened in November of 2024 when people came out literally there Were snipers stationed at the top of roof buildings and people were shot. According to one count, at least 15 to 20 people were shot dead. And literally, whenever there is some kind of a mass protest, the state and its complete brutality comes out. And they have been clamped down through absolute brutal thuggery and use of state violence. So there have been moments where people have assembled and come out, but they have literally been quashed through violence, through brute violence. So I think that's something to acknowledge that it's not as if these moments have not happened in Pakistan, but they have not been able to take some kind of a broad coalition. They have not been able to take some kind of a broad enough support such that it would actually challenge the political status quo. I think part of the reason is the kind of internal fractures within a political organization like pti. Of course, its followers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwaab among the Patan populations, have a very different kind of sensibility when it comes to critique of the military and the extent to which it is willing to go versus some other sectors. Although I have to say that in terms of the brutality, in terms of the state brutality, no place perhaps has been more under the state fire than Punjab and actually Lahore. The kinds of things that have happened in Punjab in terms of rounding people up through cooked up charges and families being separated and just the horror stories that have happened are quite staggering. But still there is internal fracture. But I think the thing to also notice here is if we are to do a critique of what is happening, is the kind of language which is used by state actors. And I think that's something where we can be most useful in terms of the kind of work we're trying to do here through the medium of a podcast. So if you look at this category that this current field marshal of Pakistan uses, that he wants to maintain and keep Pakistan a hard state, I mean, the word hard state, the category of hard state, if someone begins to use it, I think that's a great advertisement for our undergraduate students that when you don't take classes in the humanities or the humanistic social sciences, this is the kind of ridiculousness that will be coming out of your mouth. A hard state. What exactly does that mean? Basically what he means is a state in which critique is clamped down upon, in which recently, even currently, a Canadian Pakistani researcher, a PG student, is in jail because of critiquing the military on Twitter. Still, we don't know exactly what tweets. He was just picked up from Lahore a few weeks ago. When he sits in a six by nine cell with a number of other prisoners. So just the level of thuggery that is happening in Pakistan is just staggering. Absolutely staggering. But the hard state, right, so this is a clear kind of a liberal notion of violence. The exceptionalism of the state in terms of its exceptional right to violence, how that is used then, coupled with colonial laws of public order. So what is the most common law which is invoked when people are rounded up, when any kind of protest is quashed? The maintenance of public order.
- [43:01]
Sulman Syed
Right.
- [43:02]
Sher Ali Tarim
Can there be any more colonial law than that? And connected to mpo, this idea of maintaining a hard state. So you maintain a hard state, like just day before yesterday, or even if it was yesterday, a woman, I think it was Lahore, was arrested, this came on video, actually was arrested to just say, long live Palestine and death to Israel. And she was arrested by a female constable. This was a woman yesterday in Lahore. So in Lahore, you get arrested for saying long live Palestine. You cannot have Palestine flags in cricket matches or any kind of public venues. This is. And then you're part of this Board of Peace where you're going out of your way to try to nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Prize. I mean, Shahad Sharif, you know, wins the prize for the corruption, but he also, I think, does win the gold medal for. I mean, it's Ramadan and Iftar hasn't happened yet. So I have to watch my language here. So we see a clear collusion between colonial laws, liberal, secular notions of a nation state which basically clamps down upon its people to try to maintain its sovereignty. And the more fragile that sovereignty is, the more fragile its popularity is, the more violent it gets. And that's the underlying contradiction here. So at this point, this ruling regime absolutely has no public backing, no public support. If there is any kind of loosening of this hard power and brute power, they will be deceited in a matter of days. So I think this really is a story of the contradictions and the violence of the contemporary nation state and how it is beholden to an underlying secular ideology and notion that when it comes to clamping down upon any actors that even hint at some notion of a Muslim political subjectivity, this is the violence that they will meet. And that's the kind of violence which will not be picked up by the BBC, by the Guardian, by the New York Times, by the Washington Post, and unfortunately, it will not really be picked up much, even in the academy, even among scholars who go out of their way in wearing the keffiyeh and showing all their solidarities with Palestine, but doing that through a thoroughly secular idiom. And the reason that they use for that is that if we don't use a secular idiom, then the Islamists will come into power and that will cause absolute ravaging for gender and for minority rights. Now you can critique Islamist politics. You can critique any kind of traditionalist Muslim positions on questions of gender, minority rights and so on. You can in fact do a thorough critique of any kind of fiqh, you know, opinions on these questions. But the way to do this critique is actually through the tradition. The way to do the critique is actually to have some kind of at least proficiency in the tradition so that you can launch a critique not in this kind of secular violent way whereby you are critical of the military, but you are okay with drone strikes. I mean, that's the kind of contradictions that we see in this liberal secular elite. But I think I just want. Last thing I would say is that it's beyond just the caricatured liberal secular elite. It's beyond just the Perveze hood boys of the world. Tanzir, you must know this character who is an expert on everything under the sun except his own specialization of physics, but he knows everything about Islam and so on, who very recently at a think fest in Lahore called Ghazali's famous text the Incoherence of the Philosophers as Tahafat Al Falafal instead of philosopher. So that's the level of expertise we have. But anyways, the, the point I wanted to make was that it's beyond just these caricatured liberal elites. In fact, I think we need to open up the critique also to the academy. How many South Asian Muslim academics, or South Asian academics actually I should not just say Muslim. How many even for that matter South Asian Muslim academics have raised their voice for Sherjil Imam in India, have actually spoken out against the current brutality of the Pakistani military regime. Not just against the Baloch and the Patan, which is also very true. I myself am a Bhatan and this is very much a long running state violence. But not the kind of fashionable critique that would make you, you know, comfortable in these elite circles and cocktail hours, but in fact critiqued the violence that they've launched on middle class Pakistanis in Punjab against the pti, rounding up, you know, people like Yasmin Rashid, this gynecologist who beat Nawaz Sharika by, by a heavy margin and has been in prison for the last three years at least. Now if I'm not mistaken how many Pakistani academics have raised their voice against these actors. So clearly there is a secular shield there. There is some kind of a secular hesitance there that if we raise our voice against these kinds of actors who then have some hint of Islam and Muslim politics connected to how they operate, clearly there is a secular hesitance connected to the global power operations of empire. And that's the kind of collusion that I think we need to highlight. We need to make these people uncomfortable, not for the sake of being polemical, but for the sake of analysis, for the sake of having an analysis of the secular, which actually has implications for current politics on the ground in Pakistan, Bangladesh and in India, and especially in Kashmir.
- [48:04]
Sulman Syed
Let me give you one example of the secular shield. And that is basically the one way of describing, is to call it a secular shield. It is actually Islamophobia. And I think that becomes even much more clearer when you look at happening to the west of Pakistan. When you look at, for example, the contortions that many people have in relation to the war against Iran or the bombing, that now that the field Marshal has taken upon themselves to carry out the continuation of the American mission and merely try and liberate Afghanistan by air, I mean, these kinds of acts of violence. And it shouldn't surprise us, Shirali, because the academy is still completely saturated with a kind of Orientalism, which they will reject. They all have read Edward Said and they will all tell you that they don't. Not all. Many of them will say that we don't agree with Orientalism. But when you start going a bit further, what does that actually mean? It means a recuperation and a redescription of the same sentiments, but with slightly different kind of vocabulary around that. So it's not on these issues or just on these specific issues. If you look at, even on the issue of Palestine, it took a very long time. So, for example, there's a debate in parts of North America about should we be calling what's happening to the Palestinian activists Islamophobia or anti Palestinian racism? Part of that debate is to deny the fact that Islamophobia covers more than just anything to do with Islam. Many people who are involved in Palestinian activism, including Palestinians themselves, are not Muslims, the Himalayan Christians, but the way that they are being treated is through complete Islamophobic logics. But rather than have another category called anti Palestinian racism, what you do is try and separate that element out there to make yourself comfortable with this. And I think this is a part of the problem that comes back to the thing. And I think, Tantin, you mentioned the role of cadre organizations. And I'll take what Sher Ali said about being more critical about or at least bringing more of the ambiguities of the Islamicist movements and projects here. I think the role of the Jama' at is really, really perplexing and interesting at the same time. It's perplexing because all the three South Asian countries have a very large jamaat presence. It's perplexing that the role that jama' at actually plays in these issues is not what you would expect from many other actors in relation to both the kind of liberatory and emancipatory project that they constantly retreat into a certain kind of quietism when it comes to how they are actually articulate themselves. And I guess the thing about is that, you know, it's not just the question about not having criticism because of course, look, people have taken tremendous risks and are incredibly courageous in doing these in individual and even systematic ways. But the problem here is one of strategy. And here I think another criticism is to the extent whether that kind of liberal reading of the situation meant that many of the decisions that the PTI has made, and you mentioned Imran Khan as being a kind of a modernist, is that there is a kind of an instinctive way that they make the right choices. But to the extent that they can actually articulate these in a systematic fashion and deal with the problem of the primary antagonism or the problem of how do you actually transform societies in which the Kemalist elites are well supported externally, so well funded internally, and are absolutely ruthless now, unless you have a solution for that, they will not play by the rules. We know this and this is what's interesting. Hasina was often presented throughout. She gave you Bangladesh economic growth. She was democratically elected. She was wonderful. Her family members were members of parliaments in many countries and many places and things like that. But the point is that the logic here is, so how do you work with this? And this is one of the things when Imran Khan has been a well known figure, as you mentioned, in Anglophone circles, et cetera. But look at the level of support that he has been able to generate outside even the diaspora, which you completely supported. I've not been able to leverage that. And part of it is this, that the narrative around him completely gets thrown into this almost a kind of, you know, we like him run farm. When the Australian cricket captains say that the way he's being Treated is appalling, but there's no articulation of a project around that. And here I think it's really, really different. And look at the exotic circles. Look at, for example, the way in which the anc, which has also suffered incredible brutality. Let's not underestimate the brutality they suffered and the fact that they had to carry out all these things in AXA exile as well, creating the conditions for those. So I think I go back to the question, is this, not to underestimate those challenges, but to go back to the question about what is to be done, what can be done around this. And here I think you're absolutely right. Why is it that so many academics, maybe they're concerned about the Waning Crescent, maybe they're kind of worried about how it's articulated. There's different kind of possibilities, but you have to understand that there is also analytical inability to see the future. So part of it is this kind of inability to imagine a future different than the present. And the present is already Orientalist in that way. So I think this is why I would argue there's both an intellectual and a moral failing. And I don't hold academics separate from that because as we've seen, and we know this, on issues of Islamophobia, how many academics take the front foot?
- [53:57]
Sheila Khan
I think a question that I'd like to ask both of you is we're sort of at a moment when the kind of pretensions or the veneer of the liberal international order have completely crumbled and it's been exposed as nothing more than an excessively violent genocidal order managed by what one could say, those sort of, you know, the consorts of Epstein, the Epstein elite. Given this sort of delegitimation, which is in progress, what are the prospects for sort of liberalism enduring in the countries that we spoke now, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, as the kind of, you know, the sort of the happening, the go to for the secular elites. Do you think they will continue to cling to the liberal frameworks and grammars, or will they see that? Well, maybe they need to look somewhere else.
- [54:56]
Sulman Syed
I think the prospects are really, really good for it because in a way, their condition has become the world global condition. So their support of liberal intent order was always a kind of a liberal idea that didn't impinge on their autonomy to exercise brutality, injustice, et cetera. So what's happened now is that that kind of international global order has reached the same level of position. And I think the falling of legitimacy in itself doesn't do anything. And I think, Sherily, you make a really good point here. It increases the level of violence. And the only way is this, that you have to. Because in a sense, hegemony doesn't rely on consent. It relies on the disorganization of dissent. That dissent always seems individualistic, it seems impractical, it seems incapable of providing any future on this. So here we have a situation, and here's how many people in Pakistan would support the current dispensation? Very few. But then let's look at the military. And again, it's interesting what you said, Shirley, about the military. We know that the military often is recruited not disproportionately, but at least 50% of the military, if not more, come from Punjab. And in a sense, why is it that the military, again, has always had. Part of it has been Islamicist, part of it's been patriotic, and part of it's been completely instrumental. It's not one size fits all. I mean, this is. I think we need to recognize the ambiguity within the kind of military. Why is it that that military organization is not able to restrain other elements of their military organization? Why is it that we don't have this kind of capacity to say, look, what you are doing, regardless of what you may think individually, is actually detrimental to the country itself Here I think these are the questions we cannot avoid in a way that until delegitimizing just makes everyone miserable because it just basically says they the king has no clothes, but so they're making. So now we are being ruled by naked power. That doesn't make life better. The point is that we need to have ways of thinking beyond how is it that we can remove these instances of naked power? That is the only kind of solution in a way. Otherwise either you become cynical and retreat into that. And again, we've looked at the experience of East Germany or in Iraq under the Baathists, you basically retreat into family, you retreat into gossip, you retreat into a life in which you try and live as small life as you possibly can and don't involve yourself in anything else. And that kind of failure of empathy becomes institutionalized. And I think in a way this is what we should be challenging is this, that, okay, how is it that we've got ourselves into these situations? And what I would, where we have this west toxicated elite supported by security structures, imposing itself almost a recolonization or continuation of colonial rule. And what are the mechanisms? And here I think the tragedy for me, and I know we're running out of time A little bit. And perhaps we should have a second episode if people are up for it at some other point because we haven't touched everything is also to do with the fact that what's happened with the election. And again, Shirley, you made the point about the colonial inheritance that you're getting here. Most of the countries which became independent after the class of Soviet Union picked an electoral system which allowed a degree of proportionality. One of the things that the Bangladesh interim government did not manage to change and again Kanzim, I don't know if they didn't want to change or they couldn't change it is the electoral system in which case you basically had a situation where you have a disproportionate majority coming in, whereas parties which are actually more nationally orientated here, you know, this people say in Pakistan case that jamaat never gets more than 10, 15% of the vote. Whereas parties which are concentrated in one area who get 15% of the vote can actually have a presence members of parliament and who almost kind of district kind of model which of course is what. And most of the countries in the world now have moved away from first past the post. This looks like a technical thing, but it would have produced a different outcome. It would not have produced a 2/3 majority for the return of dynastic politics. And again, Tanzibu could correct me if I'm wrong about that return. But it also shows that the lack of intellectual depth is what I think one of the and again theoretical depth is that it meant that the PTI made many, many movements that weakened it because it thought it would shame its opposition into behaving well. And we know these people have no shame. And similarly, handing over these kinds of returning to dynastic politics without changing the structures meant that you haven't really thought through how can the structures be really changed.
- [59:52]
Tanzim Doha
I can just add a little bit about the elections really quickly, which is that even though Bangladesh is sort of returned to with Tariq Rahman and BNP to a kind of older, let's call it good secular versus the bad secular or something like that. And even though BNP activists were also part of July in certain ways, and BNP as an opposition, particularly the figure of Khalidaziya was a national figure of opposition because of the way she suffered, the way she was imprisoned for so many years. So you know, she was considered not a party person anymore. The July fighters were all using her as a figure as well. But what is really significant, even though I could say a lot of things about the way the Election was handled. The various factors that made Jamaat lose quite a bit of seats. Our estimates were that there were may not win the election, but it would be around 130 out of 300 that Jamaat and the Jamaat allied. The students would get. They got 77. So there were at least 30 to 40 seats that they did not get in which they're more popular. What this shows is this is the party of Maulana Maududi in a major South Asian constituency is the major opposition party of the country. This didn't happen in Pakistan. This did not happen in India. This is becoming a major concern for the security apparatus, a major concern for intelligence and civil society, which remains strictly secular. They're very, very concerned. Tariq Rahman came to countries to. Came to the country so late after Indian permission and negotiations. The new. The residual regime of Hasina has been changed into sort of a BNP format, but it is still the old kind of politics. However, there are certain kinds of historical transformations that took place. So Tariq Rahman cannot say things Hasina was saying. He still has to say things that is consistent to an extent by the. What the public wants to hear. So even though he sounds sort of like a CEO who's running a country, like he's always talking about how are we going to have more, you know, plants? And always talking about logistics and never something that is significantly important to sovereignty of the country. Never something that's going to actually question Indian hegemony in the country. Those are the key questions that he never addresses. He's always talking about development. So that's the. That's the approach that he's been taking. What is really fascinating is that Jamarti Islami has the students allied with the Jamarti Islami in the elections because the students do not have an organizational vehicle to participate in the election. So they had to get that and they got that from Jamaat. So that's a big plus for Jamaat e Islami into the future. And the fact that if as opposition they can do certain things and create certain kinds of pressure and they're of course questioning the election as well. Yesterday, one of the interim government, the Environment, who was in charge of the Environment Ministry, actually said in an interview that we were the ones who made sure that we did not allow Islamism to be mainstream in terms of political sphere. She literally stated that. So now the Jamaati Amir and others in Jama' at are talking about election engineering in a very strategic way in particular ways that took place. I would say that the fact that in Bangladesh, concretely on the ground, all the universities are under Islamist student groups card carry self declared and that in the mass national election that Jamaat took so many seats, it's a massive success even though in the national election it's a loss and BNP's days are numbered. And I think it's great because in some ways the kind of things, the responsibility and burden that BNP has now given the economic condition of the country, the blame is going to be on the government and they cannot be successful with what they have in their hands. And I would prefer the Islamists to not have that burden at this moment and build much better. And the fact is Jamati Islami received a kind of historical responsibility after July because there was no other mass vehicle for the organize to transform the movement into election movement. So they received a burden that was larger for them to handle. They were also the part who used to get five seats, have strategic alliance with BNP to get like 10, et cetera, et cetera. Now it's like easily 77 in a kind of engineered election. So if it was real, it probably would have been 120, 130, which would have made a very serious parliamentary kind of presence. But even now it will be so they can do have a very serious influence in terms of representing the constituency of the July movement in many ways. And there are other things to say, but I would just say that that was like the, the positive from the election. The negative is also the fact that Bangladeshi secularism still at the end of the day is in many ways in power. And it's a particular kind brand of secularism which fashions itself to not to be against Aomi League, but they're the preferred agents now that Hasina has gone for India because you got to remember that only right before Tariq Rahman came to the country, the Indian parliament recognized Khalid Aiya, their biggest hated figure. They said, oh, we recognize Khalidasiya because they want to cut a deal with the bnp. They're like, we don't want this Islamist, we want to deal with Tariq Rahman now, you know, And Tariq Rahman is very clear because Army League's interim government, because of social and historical and political pressure, banned the activities of Ahmad League. Even though it's called Ahmad League is not banned. Their activities are banned. We wanted those of us who are further more critical complete de alamification of society. We don't just want a ban of a party and their activity. We want what Frankfurt sewall wanted denazification. We want dehumification. They're scared of us. They call us the mob. They call us radical mullahs and all these other names because that's the demand on the street. And so, and one thing I want to say before I end it, this is my last is Sharif Usman Hadi, one of the key figures of the July movement. I would, I was looking forward to meeting him. When I would go there, I never got the chance to is an independent organizer of a platform called Inkilab Moncho, who was a major figure of the July. In my view the most important figure. Even though we're not focusing on iconic figures who was assassinated in broad daylight by ruling party by the H. Regime thugs, we know their faces. It got, there's footage and CC camera escaped back. The rumor is they drove their bike and went back into India. Literally an assassination in broad daylight and they still could not get them back. They forgot about him. So there has been a movement to get his killers back and give him justice. And we said, we, we said to the regime, we don't want any fake crossfire deal where they always kill somebody. So we want an actual justice where we bring the killers, we see them and they're taken care of through a legal process, et cetera. So that's something that happened in broad daylight this December. And that's a major. That was one of the key figures of the student movement and he was becoming a national figure and, and he was going to participate in the elections. And so it's very, very critical to see that pro Indian forces are a very, very part of the Bengali civil society who are now siding with BNP and creating all sorts of nonsense rhetoric and tropes against Jamaat E Islami. And not that Jamaat is not making mistakes. I don't want to paint them as like they're making logistical mistakes. They're. They're being naive in multiple ways when it comes to mainstream politics centers. They were expecting, oh, it's going to be fair election, we're going to get at least 130. No, they're going to run all of these centers. There are BNP thugs are going to be there control who, who gets to cast their votes, etc. Etc. In multiple different techniques. So anyway, so that's sort of something I wanted to say that there has been a slow conversation. They're going to allow Al Malik to get back into politics and that's going to be a big loss. That's going to be a sign where we want a complete dehumnification, not just of the political party of the entire history that we have. And that has been a huge challenge for us.
- [68:58]
Sheila Khan
So can I just ask, in this scenario, what happens to the protest movement which was led by the youth? Has it been pacified? Is it still active and vigilant and ready to sort of make very active if needed?
- [69:12]
Tanzim Doha
Yeah, it was very active during the elections and it's still very active now. Every now and then, there are always gatherings and protests, especially after Osman was killed and assassinated. There has been massive. The country was shut down. Tariq Rahman was forced to come and pay his respects at the, at the site, and they allowed him to come there when he returned from, from England. So there has been. So the various independent platforms, the student movements, the. The Shiba activists and other Islamists have all been very, very active on the streets. And so I think Bangladesh concretely has become on the ground, very, very anti Indian hegemonic. So it's been very difficult for the state apparatus to control that. And yes, you're right, there has been programs to pacify that, but I think it has been such a tremendous transformation that now it's going to be very, very hard for any regime to do pro Indian things that's not going to be challenged by protests and struggle. And I think that's the whole game now as to how to control that, how to pacify that, how to do this and that. And so I think we're going to have to see. It's always possible that there will be another movement. People are talking about another July if they go so far as to allow Al Malik to get back into politics and so on. So we'll have to see how that goes.
- [70:38]
Sher Ali Tarim
I'll just make three very brief points, picking on what Tandin was just saying, and to connect to the larger purpose of our podcast today, to think about frameworks of analysis that are not beholden to secular nationalist forms of operation. How often I've seen, even in academic conferences, was the July revolution, this insistence, this almost kind of anxiety that you saw among academics, in some cases even Bangladeshi academics based in the west, to frame it as a secular revolution, to really this, the worry on the faces would be very visible to not give it some kind of an Islamic coloring and how connected this is. For example, the same kind of anxiety that we see in terms of Palestine and the attempts that, oh, don't talk about this in terms of religion, in terms of Islam, there is a significant population of Christians also in Palestine. So this secular anxiety, I think is really useful to highlight, and it is useful to highlight so that we can think about frameworks of analysis where you engage in critique which is not reducible or beholden to nationalist frameworks. So you can, for example, critique Pakistan, the Pakistani state, the military, in a fashion which would not be indological, to use one of Salman's very useful categories in a way that you don't just use the framework of the failed Islamic State, you know, the failure of the partition. You can even be critical of the partition actually in ways which are not indological or secular in its orientation. So again, I just want to again repeat, since we're talking about political issues and so on, our underlying motivation in doing this is analytical. And this is what critical Muslim studies is how I read it, the aspiration for these kinds of post secular, post nationalist frameworks of analysis. So that's point number one. Second point, Salman raised a very interesting question about within the military. I mean, it's very heterogeneous and you know, it's not a monolith. Why has there not been more attempts to actually curtail this kind of thuggery, this kind of immorality and so on? And I think the point to this is a question of morality. This is a question of theology. Actually, when you have, for example, this famous case of someone who was praying on the top of a container while the protests were going on at a very high height, and you basically had these people from the police, the military, I believe, who actually threw this person from the crane. I'm not sure if he survived or not, but this is a famous scene in which this worshipper was actually thrown down. Or you're planting cameras in the bedrooms of sitting senators so that you can catch them in a compromised position so you can then blackmail them. I'm talking about Azim Swati, a PTI sitting senator, because he critiqued the previous military chief, Kamar Javid Bajwa, who by the way, once said to the Americans that we are so close to you that I don't even like Chinese food. That's how much I'm in line with the US So this is a level of servility that we're talking about in terms of. So why has there not been this kind of a critique from within the military? I think one of the reasons for that is precisely the ways in which the power structures work. This is such a colonial framework. And I think here, this other moment, key moment in relation to Pakistan, the May 9, 2023, the so called May 9 tragedy, et cetera, where we still don't know whether it was a false flag operation, an inside job or not, where people basically destroyed some military installations and statues because they were angry that Imran Khan was taken out from the biometrics facility while he was, you know, undergoing his trials for these sham cases. And there was this protest and still we don't know exactly what happened. But under the pretext that people basically tore down installations, thousands of people have been rounded up and all kinds of brutality were unleashed on them. So the thing that I want to notice though is precisely this kind of a colonial mentality. How dare these common people come close to our cantonments? How dare they destroy our, quote, unquote, statues, right? Where does this whole idea of building monuments and statues to venerate and exalt a military which will sit in cantonment separated from the common people, where is this coming from? It clearly has a colonial legacy. And then you clamp down upon them precisely through invoking laws such as the maintenance of public order, a thoroughly colonial law. So I think the power structures, the coloniality of the power structures that make this kind of violence possible is again very important to highlight the third thing, and the final thing I would say in the Pakistani context is that so much of the analysis becomes muddled by presenting this as some kind of a generalized thing that always happens. This is the most common kind of Western or even Pakistani liberal reading of the situation that, well, this always happens. The military basically brings their people in, it throws their people out, whoever is not in favor. And this has been happening at one point. Imran Khan was a beneficiary. Now he's in jail with his people and so on. So this is nothing new. There is nothing unprecedented about this. Well, the problem with that kind of analysis is that in fact, things are quite unprecedented at this moment. No one from the PMLN was murdered. And here you have countless scores of people who actually have been killed and murdered. There has been nothing close to the kind of political repression which has taken place in the last three years that has happened. So this is not some kind of a continuity from previous political formations. This is something quite new in terms of what has happened here. And the other problem with the Pakistani context is that so much of the analysis then becomes pro versus anti Imran Khan, that either you, you know, hero worship this person, or if you, if you have any kind of sympathy or any kind of even a critical analysis which does not fully dehumanize this person as this raging Islamist. Right? And that is the most common category used to Dehumanize him. He's a raging Islamist, a closet Islamist. What did Musharraf call Imran Khan? The Islamist without the beard.
- [76:19]
Sulman Syed
Right.
- [76:20]
Sher Ali Tarim
That's clearly this kind of a secular, Kemalist way in which you dehumanize a political figure. The problem is that you can, of course, look at his contradictions, the ambiguities. Again, I do agree with Salman that there is an absence of a more nuanced and well grounded political philosophy. Perhaps. But on the other hand, you also have to admit that this was a person who, when the Pulwama episode happened, did talk about the unforeseen circumstances of war and took a very useful and important position at that point. This is the person who, I think had a very sophisticated position on the question of blasphemy, on the question of dishonoring the Prophet, peace be upon him, where he talked about ways in which that pain that Muslims feel is untranslatable for the Western elite. I think he was quite sophisticated in talking about that. This is the person who, when Covid happened and everyone said lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, even, you know, famous anthropologists wanted to lock down. He had the sensibility that no lockdown will have catastrophic consequences. He has some kind of a theology of catering to the dispossessed, for which he established shelter homes and so on. So he's a complicated figure and we have to look at the complexities. His three and a half year rule was not some kind of absolute, you know, political mess. And hence he deserves what he's getting. And hence he deserves to have his eyesight be lost. And I just. The final thing I want to say is the number of Pakistani academics who basically went haywire after 2018, the 2018 elections, everything was going down the drain. There was a Washington Post article which had literally had the title who's Afraid of Imran Khan's Pakistan question mark? And the answer was everyone. So that's the kind of theatrics that were developed here. How many of those academics have actually spoken out against the current military dispensation? How many have actually raised their voice for the kind of victims of state brutality in the last two years? How many are talking about the current PhD student, Hamza Khan, who's in jail for some critical tweets? So it's very interesting. The kind of subjects who get liberal sympathy versus those who can't and those who don't. And even the sympathy of the liberal elite, which of course seeps the academy as well, is oftentimes refracted. Through where they stand on the secular hierarchy of good religion, proper religion. This is Colonialism 101, a hierarchy of world religions where some notion of a liberal, secular Protestant Christianity sits at the top, where you keep religion inside you, where you don't bring out your religion in terms of any political action. And the more Islam mixes with politics, the lower you will be on that hierarchy. That's why Rashid Ghanoushi is in jail. That's why Imran Khan is in jail. And we can't just undermine this underlying secular violence by just saying, oh, this was always a military Imran Khan spat. This is an internal spatial he's just in jail because he was no longer in favor with Tamar Javid Baj. But there is something much more philosophically significant at work here which connects Palestine, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Tunisia, and that is this ongoing secular violence against any hint of Muslim political subjectivity. And again, we are not here calling for some kind of an unfiltered, uncritical Islamism, but what we are calling for is a critique of the secular, which is analytically robust, but that is also quite explicit in terms of its object of critique. So I would end by just saying that at least scholars of anthropology and religious studies. What exactly are you waiting for? Before you speak up, let me just
- [79:43]
Sulman Syed
say something very quickly, just to pick up some of the points we've made here. So I think one of the things about doing this exercise is partly being to show some of these things are not reducible to these kind of moments in the cycle that you said of Pakistani politics or Bangladeshi politics. So, for example, Tanzim, when you were talking about the if the Jama' at won, you have no guarantee that they would not have had the fate of what happened in Egypt or Morsi or what happened with the feast in Algeria earlier or in Tunisia. So we have to understand these logics are operating at a global scale in terms of making Muslimness and its articulation of political incredibly challenging and unsustainable. I mean, that's we need to understand that framework on that. I still think that this is really, really the key here. We should not be surprised anymore. Between the fact that take, for example, how the universities took on the mandate of decolonization, except when Palestine started being anti genocide, nearly every single one of them started to roll back on this issue here. It is not surprising that so many people in the demonstrations, as you mentioned, Tahin, and we saw in our eyes in July 2024, carried the Palestinian flag as well as the Bangladeshi flag. It is not surprising that the Palestinian flag cannot be raised anywhere. The Palestinian flag cannot be raised, especially in Muslim context. You know that there is a logic here of rule by the west toxicated. And it's not about saying oh, Islamism is, you know, the only has no. Is undifferentiated. There are huge, huge problems. But ultimately here the question becomes is the level of brutality. And here even at the level of human empathy, the treatment of Imran Khan at this point in time is extraordinarily violent in a way. And leaving aside that this is a person that is being known in South Asia if not elsewhere for all you know, for what seven since he was in his 18, 20 years basically. So it's not someone who's completely unknown. It's someone who's always had some kind of attachment, at least at a certain level. And also his journey is in many ways not an unknown journey, that this is where the complications come in in many ways. But the point that I would make is this, that if you look at the kind of the Islamicist openings that have occurred, one of them has often involved having individuals who are instinctively and as he is worth surely having a theology of care, a theology of concept of sovereignty. But the problem has often been the case that they have not been able to articulate this in a way that allows them to imagine how to sustain themselves and sustain the project they've been involved in. Rashid Ghanushi and the Tunisians tried to do everything that they thought the opposite of what the Muslim Brotherhood did. That was their kind of we will not even form a government, we will do all of this. And Rashid Ganushi 80 year old man is now still in prison. So I think we need to understand Islamophobia not as only just a kind of a. A prejudice that happens in the street, but it is institutionalized globally, it's institutionalized in the academy. And unless we think of our. So one way is that really the struggle against Islamophobia is the only way that you can have a struggle for accountable governance in Muslim communities, wherever they are. Because if you don't oppose Islamophobia you will not be able to have any accountable government. And we know that every single west toxicated elite in these communities will support authoritarianism, foreign imperial rule, everything to prevent a countable governance. Because that means opening of space for Islam Khabi And I don't think it's completely instrumental. I think it's actually quite intrinsic to their sense of their selves as well. In many cases. I think it'd be wrong for us to dismiss it as simply instrumental in a way. And I think unless we recognize that challenges that if you are in favor of accountability, if you want to call it democracy, you then have to find a space for the and you have to find a space which is not resting on the intuitive reflexes of key individuals. It has to be part of a broader theoretical narrative. And here I think the failings of the Jamak in many ways is important to note because it's not bad intention and it'd be great to see how the Jama' at in India or Pakistan are looking at the Jama' at in Bangladesh and seeing what they can learn, which are good practices and what are bad practices. But I will make that more general point, but I think we are running out of time for based in there. It's been a really great conversation and perhaps we should continue this panel because I think the many issues that we could have touched up if we didn't have time to. But Chiara, I don't know if you want to say anything and at this
- [84:32]
Sheila Khan
point in time I think it's just again, going back to the point about the sort of stripping away and the fraying of the liberal international order. Point is, as we can see, recent events in the Gulf have shown that relying on the security umbrella of Zionism and of US Empire is ultimately a failing strategy. And whether that will be sufficient to wake up elites in these countries, I do not know. I mean, that would presume a certain amount of wisdom on their part and a certain amount of self reflection, which I very much doubt that they have. But if they can't, then surely, surely this is something that oppositional actors, whether it's the PTI or student movements in Bangladesh or any protest movement needs to highlight that ultimately this is a failing strategy. I mean, we've already seen sort of noises made by the US establishment that after Iran it's Turkey and after Turkey it's Pakistan. So sooner or later, I mean, somebody needs to play catch up very, very quickly before things get completely, completely out of hand.
- [85:38]
Sulman Syed
On that sobering note, and of course we want to be sober, as it's still, for many of us, we haven't opened up fast yet. By the way, just to be clear to the audience, I'm not suggesting that after Iftahari we stop being sober. Thank you everyone, to say these things nowadays.
- [85:58]
Sher Ali Tarim
All right, thank you so much.
- [86:00]
Sheila Khan
Thank you for your time. It's been great chatting to you and inshallah, we will continue the conversation Inshallah.
- [86:12]
Sulman Syed
It.