MeisterEckhart wrote on Nov 13
th, 2023 at 8:57am:
While the Shia-Sunni conflict is by far the greatest schism in Islam, it's by no means the only one.
One of the most ludicrous was the debate Pakistan had with itself when it became a Muslim nation-state.
What should have seemed like obvious questions - 'What is a Muslim?' and, 'What is the definitive text by which a Muslim should live?' quickly degenerated into farcical debate because, not only was there the Shia-Sunni schism, there were a myriad of competeing Islamic doctrines that head developed across central Aisa over millennia.
To date, Pakistan has not been able to define conclusively what it means to be a ctizen of its Islamic state.
V.S. Naipaul,
Among the Believers is an excellent review of the minds and souls of the people's who converted to Islam.
The ambivalence toward the West that agitates the hearts and minds of the Iranian Shia carries over, so Naipaul discovered, into the next Islamic republic to which his travels took him—Pakistan, founded as a Sunni Muslim state at the time of the breakup of the former British Indian empire in 1947. Here he found an equally pervasive though slightly different brand of illogicality. Whereas in Iran people appeared to Naipaul to be maddened by anger and frustration, expending their energies in a continual round of demonstrations and outpourings of hatred (but not in hard work, as he tartly remarks, which was the only means by which the revolution might possibly have succeeded), in Pakistan he saw a populace cast down and debilitated by the failure of the original experiment of a modern Muslim state.
Since its inception, Pakistan has never developed the political or economic institutions necessary for the progress and prosperity of its people. The general reaction to this failure has been to blame, not the concept of the Islamic republic but the inadequacies and faults of the citizens themselves:
Failure only led back to the faith. . . . If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute—the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship—men lost sight of the political origins of their state.To sustain its tottering economy, Pakistan now largely depends upon the export of its own citizens and upon the earnings they remit from abroad—notably from the Gulf oil states and from the infidel West. The many ironies implicit in the recourse to this economic expedient are captured by Naipaul in a passage which brilliantly encapsulates the whole Muslim dilemma of treating with a civilization held to be anathema by the true believer but whose liberties and institutions he is only too ready to exploit:
All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to. Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. . . . [So] the emigrants pour out from the land of the faith: thirty thousand Pakistanis shipped by the manpower-export experts to West Berlin alone, to claim the political asylum meant for the people of East Germany.https://www.commentary.org/articles/j-b-kelly/among-the-believers-an-islamic-jou...From as Granular review:
Islam, he claimed, had both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures."It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'."
Sir Vidia claimed what he called "this abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing." He argued that Pakistan was the living proof of the damage Islam could wreak.
"The story of Pakistan is a terror story actually. It started with a poet who thought that Muslims were so highly evolved that they should have a special place in India for themselves. This wish to sift countries of unnecessary and irrelevant populations is terrible and this is exactly what happened in Pakistan."
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