Non-rational motivations

A South Asian friend pointed us to this article printed in the Dawn:

Non-rational motivations

By Anwar Syed

INDIVIDUALS can be wise and foolish, good and bad, in different respects and in varying measure. They can likewise be rational, non-rational, and even irrational in certain situations.

The same holds, I think, for nations. We in Pakistan have an inclination that may not be quite as common in most other countries. That is prejudice rooted in extremist versions of religious persuasions. Translating into militancy and violence, it is wrecking law and order, peace and stability in this country and beyond.

I do not deny that certain types of prejudice may work as energising and constructive forces in individual and societal development. Let us take the case of a wealthy man who thinks his late mother was the greatest woman that ever lived, and he builds a hospital to honour her memory, where the poor are provided free medical care. He was evidently prejudiced in favour of his mother. But this was a prejudice that did his community a lot of good and it did nobody any harm. The same may be said of certain non-rational motivations. Passion, as distinguished from reason, has often wrought radical change that improved the human condition and made lives more fulfilling.

But then there are prejudices and non-rational motivations that lead persons to hate others and seek to destroy them. It is this frame of mind that produces militancy and violence and uproots the social order.

The distinction between �we� and �they� has worked in different ways. Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics did not intermarry and many of them still don�t. They and some other ethnic groups � the Irish and the Italians, Latinos, persons of Chinese and Japanese origins � lived in their separate and almost exclusive neighbourhoods in American cities. Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent did the same and most of them did not even eat food coming out of each others� kitchens. They discriminated against one another in areas of employment, housing and distribution of various social amenities.

It was not their normal practice to kill persons of groups other than their own. There were, however, state-sponsored killings of Jews in Czarist Russia and Nazi Germany; in our own time, Israel does the same with the Palestinians, and some of the state governments in India (Gujarat and Maharashtra) have encouraged the killings of their Muslim citizens.

Fanaticism, extremism, and intolerance of the dissident have existed, more or less, in all societies in all ages. The problem in the case of Pakistan is that all of these states of mind exist here in such a large measure and with such great intensity as to rip its society apart. They arise from ethnic, linguistic and religious differences.

Conflict between distinct groups may in many cases be traced to the desire of one group�s managers to drive members of another group out of the job market and exclude them from access to the social infrastructure. Some kind of a justification has to be found for these exclusions and denials. The argument is made that �they� are not the same as �we�, and that their presence in our midst is unwholesome because it generates frictions. Being different, they are not entitled to any part of the resources available in the territory that is rightfully ours.

During the last 40 years or so, thousands of men, women, and children � all of them Pakistanis � have been killed in riots between Sindhis and Mohajirs over the language issue and between Mohajirs and Pashtuns in Karachi over issues of space and access to jobs and social amenities. Sunni and Shia Muslims have periodically bombed each others� places of worship, funeral processions, and other congregations.

Rivalry for economic benefits does not explain sectarian conflict such as the one between the Sunni and the Shia. Here the prejudice derives from differing readings and interpretations of early Islamic history. Involving abstract distinctions of right and wrong, the issues between these two groups are not amenable to negotiation, compromise and resolution. The prejudice is intense enough in some cases to border upon hatred. Those possessed regard members of the other group as heretics and quite often as infidels. These attitudes persist in spite of the fact that the major points at issues between them (such as, for instance, the identity of the person who should have been the caliph following the Prophet�s (PBUH) death) have no bearing on the course of events in the Muslim world today.

A group has emerged within Sunni Islam whose members are extremists in their orthodoxy. They are the ones who want to deny education to women and confine them to their homes. They want to banish from our lives all those interests and pursuits which are fun and give us joy. They are convinced that their version of Islam is the only right one and all others are heresies or perversions that deserve to be eradicated along with their followers. They are waging war against the state and society of Pakistan in the course of which they are not only destroying public property and killing government functionaries, they are bombing and murdering non-combatant innocent citizens.

I used to think that they are a small minority, the proverbial lunatic fringe, in our society. I am having second thoughts. I see that our Islamic parties, such as the Jamaat-i-Islami and Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam, do not condemn the Taliban and their murderous campaigns. Nor do I see the prayer leaders and khatibs in our mosques speaking against them. Many of the opinion-makers in this country � editorial writers and columnists in the Urdu press, hosts on TV talk shows � tend to focus on the Taliban�s anti-American campaigns and ignore their anti-Pakistan activities. Considering those who are sympathetic to them and those who are tolerant of them, it may be said that the Taliban exercise power and influence out of all proportion to their own actual number.

All of this leads me to think that a substantial proportion of our population may have become, for all practical purposes, well-disposed towards extremism and militancy. If that indeed is the case, we as a state and society are in a great deal of trouble. Nor should it then be surprising that the international community is beginning to view Pakistan with considerable apprehension and shun it, and that the country is getting to be isolated. Pakistan is being seen as the epicentre of terrorism, a source of threat to international peace and good order.

The writer, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk