The rocky road to modernity: an assessment of Pakistan’s 75 years

Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy

Introduction

Has Pakistan moved closer to modernity since 1947 or is it now further away from it? Humanity as a whole – with many parts, some moving forward others backward – is on average bettering itself. Can the same be said about Pakistan? Of course, this is a value laden question and will require clear definitions of what is ‘modern’ and what is ‘better’. All judgements must perforce be normative and individual. Many speak wistfully of long- gone ages as absolutely the best. To the class of progress-deniers one must add cultural relativists and post-modernists who stoutly maintain the impossibility of rating and ranking different cultures, or the possibility of cultural progress.In my opinion, such relativism is not factually tenable. Among those who imagine all glories lie in history, no one I know is actually willing to travel on horses or camels any more, have a bad tooth pulled out without anaesthesia, or send smoke signals instead of using a cell phone. Load-shedding or gas-shedding leads to a collective nervous break-down across society. Humanity’s social progress is equally factual. Unlike in earlier ages, by present standards a civilised people cannot permit the buying and selling of slaves, the burning of widows, trading of women as war booty, or public spectacles of death by torture. So, yes, even if global climate change and nuclear war threaten the world, we have moved into better times and a higher stage of evolution in myriad ways.

Definitional challenges

A meaningful discussion of the question in hand requires at the outset a clear definition of modernity. Arguably, the idea of separating society into old and new, and into separate compartments – economy, political organisation, social relations – cannot be rigorously defended. An inter-penetrating gestalt may be closer to the truth but this muddies up things and so prevents us getting deeper insights. We must therefore seek a minimum set of assumptions. At the outset one should rule out as a criterion the quantity of modern gadgetry or imported technology a country possesses. Instead, this term must be under-stood in terms of orientations, attitudes and world views held by members of society and, particularly, by the governing classes. Accepting this, I will disaggregate modernity into three essential components, the definition of each being precise enough to allow a qualitative assessment of changes over Pakistan’s seventy five years. These are:

(a) The epistemological (or knowledge) system: modernity accepts as valid knowledge that which is acquired through the senses (whether or not augmented by instru-ments), and which is subject to testability and logical consistency.

(b) The political system: modernity dispenses with pre-modern notions of governance such as the divine right of kings and caliphs, or a set of rules given from above that are valid into eternity. Instead it espouses rule by addressing realities as they come and through popular consensus. A rational mode of government involves writing down constitutions, laws, and rules. These can be amended, adapted, and changed from time to time.

(c) Cultural system: modernity implies a set of mental attitudes encompassing beliefs, social mores, the role of sexuality, and other general assumptions.

In all societies these components are carried over from the past. To make sense of the question posed above, how far back should one begin Pakistan’s history? We need to keep in mind that within the South Asian context, a modern outlook is normally associated with the system of European rationality – with all its plusses and minuses – because it was imposed upon the native peoples of India by the colonising power, Britain. Correspondingly the resistance to rationality is conflated with resistance to imperialism and colonialism. In post-colonial studies colonialism is portrayed as an offshoot of the Enlightenment. Europeans, convinced of their moral and material superiority, justified imperialism as a moral duty and a kind of Christian jihad aimed at liberating the world from medieval, heathen thought.

This is a weighty argument and must not to be dismissed. Many peoples and countries have experienced colonial rule and suffered quite severely. Yet, although Enlightenment thought and values arrived on the shoulders of imperialism, some conquered peoples were quick to adopt what they saw as universal truths. Others rejected all things western. Thus, for example, in the poetry and prose of Allama Iqbal, reason is denigrated and posed as the antithesis to faith and revelation. In Pakistan, a country formed on the basis of Muslim identity, Iqbal’s point of view is so overwhelming that almost forgotten is the tradition of rational thought which once existed within Arab Islam.

This suggests that a good beginning point for us is the rationalist movement within Islam which dates from roughly 850 AD, some two centuries after the death of Prophet Muhammad. More relevant to South Asia are the Muslim invasions of India where, eventually, one of Islam’s greatest empires, the Mughal Empire, was formed. Lasting for over three hundred years, it was noted for many great achievements but not for scholar-ship or original thought. Its reluctance to depart from traditional modes of government became the cause of its decay and decline. This began even before the arrival of the British but the formal end came after the 1857 rebellion against the British East India Company. Crushed with extreme brutality, a new phase began for the Muslims of India after they became subjects of the Crown.

In the post-1857 period British-imposed modernity sharpened religious identities in northern parts of India. Muslims and Hindus were to respond differently to modern education, the gap widening with every passing decade. The demand for Pakistan, conceived principally by the Urdu-speaking Muslim elite of northern India, was the result of differential development and access to jobs. Political organisations took advan-tage of the communal divides and added to them. Descendants of Mughal privilege feared that they would be severely disadvantaged once the British left and so they demanded privileges over and above those to be awarded on merit. How this panned out in the education system at the time of Partition will be indicated below; under-standing this is crucial for understanding the trajectory of Pakistan in the decades after independence.

With this bit of history behind us, we can start looking at Pakistan’s particular history and how closely it has followed the general trend of the times. For its first two or three decades, in spite of occasional detours, Pakistan sought to modernise and was ready to join other countries on the road to progress. But shortly after seizing power in 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq explicitly repudiated the modernist paradigm and sought to recreate Pakistan as a theocratic state. His death in an air crash was a significant interruption in a trend shared by many other Muslim countries. Subsequent Pakistani rulers made various attempts – with mixed degrees of success – to dilute or reverse the changes effected by Zia. How that panned out will require drawing up a final balance sheet towards the end of this article.

Modernity and rationalism

Modernity has a very definite epistemological requirement. All modern peoples – Europeans, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, etc. – believe that valid knowledge is that which flows from empirical evidence. Appropriate observation, the devising of experiments, and the application of the scientific method to approve or discard hypoth-eses alone can generate positive knowledge. Philosophical speculations, or divine texts and holy men cannot be substitutes. Modernism cannot accept that the physical world is run by capricious forces beyond the human ken. Instead it insists that definite physical laws determine outcomes and, further, believes that these laws can be deduced by humans. Historically this was the 16th century leap that ushered in the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. By this token, every form of inanimate matter from the scale of the atom to that of the universe obeys discoverable physical laws. Geophysical phenomena such as earthquakes and floods, or astrophysical phenomena such as eclipses and planetary motion, are consequences of physical laws determining the movement of matter. These can be precisely calculated using mathematics as a tool. All technology, whether it is the steam engine or today’s instant communications via satellites and fibre optics, flows from the application of these principles.

In contrast to modern epistemology, the Abrahamic religions consider all truths to be revealed by God. Let us now turn to the history of thought within Islam.

A thousand years before Islam, classical Greece had developed a secular system of scientific and philosophic thought that emphasised the power of education and human reason to understand the world in nonreligious terms. Ionian thinkers held as their goal collecting facts and systematising phenomena on the basis of evidence. There is a long list of Greek thinkers – Thales, Pythagoras, Archimedes, etc. – who insisted that one must trust nothing beyond what is told by one’s own senses. This was a departure away from capricious gods who hurled thunderbolts at each other and imprisoned young females in underground vaults. With the decline of Greece and the rise of Rome, Greek advances in learning fell into obscurity.

There was no philosophy or science in tribal Arab culture during the initial period of Islam, circa 610 AD. But in the mid-8th century, Islam expanded rapidly and Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. The rise of Islam brought back Greek knowledge to centre-stage. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the Greek-inspired rationalist Mutazilites who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam – such as on the issue of free will versus predestination – became intense and turned bloody.

A resurgent religious orthodoxy inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.2 The rejection of causality by Imam Al- Ghazali (1058–1111) led to a closing of the Muslim mind and ended the Islamic Golden era. This happened in two ways. One was to insist that one cannot know the world through exercise of reason, i.e., it is fundamentally unknowable. The other was to insist that what happens next is in the hands of God and hence, given what is presently known, one cannot predict the future. While Ibn-e-Rushd’s riposte was strong and tore apart Ghazali’s arguments, science and secular learning receded. Scholarship was increasingly confined to religious matters. For narrowly doctrinal reasons, zealots persecuted and hounded those very Muslim scholars to whom Islamic civilisation owes much of its former brilliance and greatness.

Pakistanis tend to conflate their national history with the history of Islam. But, in fact, this is quite inaccurate. Few choose to understand that the history of thought in Islam on the Indian subcontinent is very different from that in Arabia, Persia or Spain. We must remember that the first Muslim invasion was that of Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD. This was about two centuries before the beginning of the Islamic Golden Age. In spite of a religious justification, as with most wars of history, bin Qasim came for booty and conquest. He brought no new ideas or technology to India. The first contact at the level of the intellect was through the polymath Al-Beruni (973–1052) who followed the maraud-ing Mahmud Ghazni on his expeditions to India.

Beruni’s memoirs are readily available on the internet and make for fascinating reading.3 They are significant because they record the very first interaction between a Muslim scholar belonging to the Islamic Golden Age and the locals of India. His aim was to understand how Hindus regarded the natural world and to make it possible for Muslims ‘to converse with the Hindus, and to discuss with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization’. Beruni took back with him many ideas that fed into a voracious Muslim appetite to seek and combine knowledge from all different sources but, as I have emphasised, it was a one-way street: nothing flowed from Muslim lands to India by way of knowledge and ideas. It was only the newly awakened European minds that could benefit from the knowledge generated by Arab and Persian Muslims.

From Beruni to the Mughals is a good five hundred years. By this time the Scientific Revolution in Europe was under way. But there was little interest in learning from a Europe that, at the time, was in a state of intellectual ferment. In 1615 the British ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, brought barometers, telescopes and reading spectacles to Emperor Jehangir’s court as a gift.5 Jehangir was delighted to see how far and how clearly he could now see. Acquiring optical items soon became a matter of prestige with many rich nobles lining up to buy them. But, as in Pakistan today the emphasis was on buying and selling, not creating technology that could compete with what the foreigners had invented. No emperor or high noble asked what made the gadgets work or sought to duplicate them. There was no university or centre of learning. Institutionalised curiosity was absent from the courts and from the madrasas (religious schools). Even the printing press did not stir excitement.

Knowledge acquisition and generation was the Achilles heel of Muslim rule over India. There were excellent local artisans in places, including those who could make high quality guns and cannons. For example, Tipu Sultan’s rockets, used during the Anglo-Mysore wars (1770–1799), were extraordinarily long-ranged. Yet there was no desire to learn the mathematics developed by Newton a century earlier with which trajectories could be calculated or improved. The strategic importance of the tele-scope was also lost upon the Mughals. The high points of the era are marked by mosques and tombs. Mughal culture had beautiful gardens, dancing girls and boys, poetry and colourful clothing, but not much scholarship. Art, particularly under Jehangir, featured exotic birds and animals. However no attempt was made to systematically document, categorise and study their habits and breeding patterns. A great empire that lasted over three centuries showed little scholarly or scientific inclination. This weakness would one day spill over into Pakistan.

Role of the British

The first injection of rationalism into Indian Muslim thinking was administered by the imperial British. After the 1857 rebellion they had dispensed with even token Muslim rule over India. Jobs in government were reserved for the educated and so few Muslims qualified. The plight of the once-powerful elite was documented by a civil service officer William Wilson Hunter assigned to Bengal. He famously wrote: ‘A hundred and seventy years ago it was almost impossible for a well-born Musalman in Bengal to become poor; at present it is almost impossible for him to continue rich’.6 Hunter compiled statistics showing that Muslims were almost absent from the professions – accounting, law, medicine and engineering – and showed this to be a consequence of the rejection of modern education by Muslims. The most important and influential convert into this way of thinking was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898). Muslims, he said, had no alternative but to engage with the modern world and meet the challenges of western science and philosophy. In his famous Tahzeeb-ul-Akhlaq essays he argued that desperate new remedies were needed if Indian Muslims were ever to become anything more than ‘stable boys, cooks, servants, hewers of wood, and drawers of water’7 To wallow in self-pity and hark back at vanished Islamic glories is pointless. No other Muslim reformer has ever been so loud, unequivocal and clear.

Sir Syed did make a difference but not enough. Muslim resistance to modern education was far greater than that of Hindus, who kept surging ahead. The promise of employment in the British administration did win over some Muslims, but this was the exception rather than the norm and limited to men. Of these, hardly any ventured into the sciences or mathematics, choosing the soft path of liberal arts or law instead. In 1872 the University of Bombay listed one Muslim who had earned his Master of Arts and two who earned the Bachelor of Arts. The Table 1 below shows the depressed situation of Muslims in colleges and schools around 1872 in the Bombay province (Gujrat, Khandesh and Nagaur, Deccan and Bombay, Canarese Country, and Sindh):

Allama Iqbal (1877–1938), seen by most Pakistanis as beyond reproach, saw the intrusion of Greek thought into Muslim civilisation as polluting the message of the Qur’an. He wrote emphatically against Al-Farabi and Ibn-e-Sina, two of the outstand-ing rationalists of the Golden Age. This suspicion of modernity was shared by the Muslims of his time who placed their trust largely in madrassa education. As the mainstay of Muslim education in colonial India, madrassas were the antithesis of modernity and rationalism and remain so today. Lack of well-qualified Muslim pro-fessors in professional fields turned out to be a big handicap when Pakistan emerged in 1947. It inherited several colleges but only one teaching university, i.e., Punjab University in Lahore. After Partition most of its well-qualified teachers were Hindu or Christian, almost all of whom fled. Philosophy and the sciences had only a few professors knowledgeable in their subjects. Clearly this was not a good beginning for a new country.

Modernity and politics

Modernity is generally associated with the rise of the nation-state, a European concept that political scientists trace back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Max Weber famously defined the modern state as being that entity which alone can authorise the use of physical force or has a right to use it. This state does not tolerate, for example, private armies or militias that do not obey the states’ police and army. As for who could head such a state, in pre-modern times, rulers were chosen from within the ruling dynasty and internal power struggles could be bloody. Obviously even today all modern states are not democracies where power is transferred peacefully through free and fair elections. However, well evolved nation states have mechanisms for peaceful transitions and all citizens are treated by the same rules. They have an independent judiciary, responsive governance, and a free press. They are therefore reasonable metrics available for measur-ing degrees of modernity.

With the above in mind, let us briefly look at Muslim rule in pre-colonial India. Muslim conquerors used violence for establishing their hegemony over an alien land. To create acceptance of their rule, conquered peoples were indeed forcibly converted to Islam. But after a stable empire had been created in north India by the Mughals, the proselytising zeal dampened and Hindus remained a large majority. The late Mushirul Hasan noted that medieval sultans may have wanted to erect a uniform religious-cultural system and impose religious authority from ‘great’ or ‘middle’ traditions, but long distances and syncretic beliefs and practices inhibited them from doing so.

Co-option was widely practised: in Mughal courts – even under Aurangzeb – numer-ous Hindus held positions as chief counsellors, governors, and rulers of their states (in accordance with treaties with the Muslim rulers), and there was widespread sharing of customs and traditions. For the first time most of India was unified by Mughal rule, the role of religion was relatively reduced, and individuals had multiple identities. And so, arguably, well before the colonial era a proto-modern state headed by Muslims had begun to emerge. However it was built upon an economy requiring extraction of agricultural produce from peasants and a distributed system of privileges. The problem of succession of hereditary rulers was unsolved and the empire ultimately foundered even before the colonialism made its appearance. Ultimately Moghul rule ended in 1857 without giving birth to a modern, sustainable system of governance.

The rise of Muslim nationalism on the Indian subcontinent in the early 20th century was essentially a modern phenomenon, a consequence of colonial rule. Quite paradoxi-cally it was not Islamic conservatives but Islamic modernists who eventually succeeded in creating the first Muslim state in history. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder, was a modern man, western educated and familiar only with one language – English. He was indifferent to religion in his personal life and yet insistent on separate identities for Muslim and Hindu. But did he have a blueprint for the new state-to-be and would it be modern? And, if so, modern in which way? This has been endlessly argued in both directions because he never wrote a manifesto, draft constitution or book.

Modernity and culture

All cultural sects, religions and sects within religions do not take to modernity with equal speed. The theocentric worldview of medieval Christendom and the humanistic world-view of the early modern West were studied by Max Weber (1864–1920) in his magnum opus, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber documented the traits that made Protestant culture progress-friendly and Catholic culture progress-resistant. This generated the concept of what sociologists call social capital – the tendency of a society to encourage association of its members through networks joined together by shared norms, values and understandings. High social capital is what engendered social and economic progress. Weber’s pioneering work also led to the concept of cultural capital, where a society places emphasis upon education and achievement. High modernity is characterised by high levels of social and cultural capital, resulting in more prosperous and stable societies.

At the level of culture, modernity is about reason, freedom, and control. Women are to be considered equals rather than inferior. As society modernises, historically male- dominated workforces become increasingly penetrated by women. Individual expression, new art forms, and innovative ways of writing are encouraged. Multiple modernities can co-exist, not just of the Western kind. For example, modern-thinking Indians or Chinese draw heavily upon their respective traditional cultures and yet in many other aspects of life they behave similarly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by all 192 United Nations members, is a strong statement of the formal consensus around cultural modernity.

Cultural modernity for the Muslims of British India meant adapting to many strange customs introduced by the British. Some were relatively trivial but nevertheless made religious conservatives deeply uncomfortable. Among the less important ones were eating at a dinner table instead of being seated on the ground, or wearing shirts and trousers. One notes that in order to develop closer links to English officers, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan wrote essays in Tehzeeb-ul-Akhlaq on manners and customs, trying to persuade Muslims that the new ways of behaviour were actually consistent with Islam. In fact he takes matters much further by justifying eating at a table with Christians and shaking hands with them. The latter was no small matter: a student of the Oriental Department of the Delhi College gave some striking illustrations of this attitude.9 He relates how a high British official visiting the Delhi College, to show his respect to the Head Maulvi, shook hands with him. The Maulvi could not refuse the proffered hand-shake, but thereafter he kept his hand aloof as though polluted and after the officer’s departure washed it with great exaggeration several times.

Other elements of cultural conservatism were still bigger impediments to progress. Indian Muslims, by and large, stayed away from using banks or being employed in banks because they operated on the principle of riba (interest). Many avoided jobs in courts because they functioned according to secular law, not sharia. Resistance to learning and speaking the English language was widespread among the Muslim ashrafiyya (privileged classes). Some of the more conservative ones suggested rinsing one’s mouth thrice (kuli) thrice and saying naoozobillah (‘We seek refuge in Allah’) after speaking English to purify themselves. Although the more flexible among Muslims broke through this barrier, relatively few developed facility in the language.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of modernity was the role of Muslim women in society. In her PhD dissertation, Karin Deutsch examines politics, law, and identity of women in 19th century India.10 In the upper classes, purdah (female seclusion) was practised by both Hindu and Muslim women albeit with different kinds of restrictions. Although the burqa (an enveloping outer garment worn by women which fully covers the body and the face) was a marker for Muslims only, it is unclear which form of purdah – Hindu or Muslim – was more restrictive. The seclusion of women was seen as the ideal behaviour for Muslim women. Arguably, the social and legal position of women in Islam was better than in traditional Hinduism, at least such as had existed for a millennium. Under the influence of Hindu reformers, Hindu women were quicker in throwing off the burqa and could argue that this was a Muslim imposition. Muslim women had a rougher time and even progressives like Sir Syed and Allama Iqbal said they should not enjoy the freedoms of western women or even that of modernised Hindu women; their place was at home as wives and mothers. When the government recommended education for girls, the overall Muslim response was hugely negative. Educating girls was seen as a travesty of modesty. The veil and polygamy were seen as parts of culture that must be defended against cultural incursion.11 Allama Iqbal developed verses bitterly attacking the education of girls:

In a culture dominated by conservative values the one escape valve available to Muslims was poetry and, to a lesser extent, music and painting. The favourite theme in Urdu poetry is unrequited love.

Modernism and anti-modernism in Pakistan

With this appropriate context behind us, let us now try to assess Pakistan’s progress over the decades in each of the three categories above: epistemology, political and economic configurations, and cultural mores. Broadly speaking, one can detect greater acceptance of these attributes under Jinnah, Ayub, Musharraf, and Nawaz Sharif (third term only). To varying degrees, they sought modernisation of Pakistani society but soon encountered the forces that come from the deep disequilibrium within Muslim societies and the pushback of religious forces against alien, modern values. Here is a bird’s eye view:

Rational dimensions

As emphasised by Al-Ghazali in his tahafut-al-falsafa (Rejection of the Philosophers), prediction and planning are contrary to the Islamic faith because the universe is governed by Divine Will rather than physical law. Material cause may not be associated with effect because Allah alone is the Cause. One can importune him in the hope of altering some outcome, but science and the rational faculties cannot be relied upon. Ghazali’s thinking came to dominate the Muslim world and coincided with the end of its scientific high point. This thinking is reflected in the ubiquity of the word inshallah (God willing), which, if taken seriously, moves one away from a world running according to material principles. There is little doubt that the word’s use is far more common today in Pakistan than ever before. In some cases dead seriousness is implied while in other cases inshallah acts merely a filler in normal conversation. A radio jockey from an FM station blaring out Beyoncé or Madonna may typically sign off he will be back at such-and-such hour – if Allah so wills. That such religious expression and un-Islamic music go together is a sign of the cultural schizophrenia of our times.

On the other hand, in a rational universe all occurrences – traffic accidents, airplane crashes, illnesses, hyperinflation, famine, etc. – can be attributed to material causes which in, turn, are subject to inviolable natural laws and predictable statistically, if not indivi-dually. Of course, these laws could have been laid down by God or could exist indepen-dently. The very fact that such laws exist and must be obeyed makes planning possible and ways can be devised to avoid certain undesirable situations. The clock is therefore all- important in modern society. Its advance, second by second, is unforgiving. Thus we have definite timetables for arrival and departure of trains and planes. Predetermined schedules exist for banks, offices, factories, schools and colleges. Quite often meetings are scheduled weeks or months in advance. Certainty is assumed, calculations are per-formed – and the results taken seriously. Quantitative measures are given precedence over hunches and intuitive arguments.

Historically, the transition to modernity was the transition towards a rational uni-verse. Which vision of the universe dominates in Pakistan, and what is the trend?

Deciding the criteria for such an assessment requires thought. For example, looking at the belief systems of various heads of different states could be one way. Many of India’s leaders have been deeply superstitious leaders, with Narendra Modi topping the list. While promoting the very latest of Indian technologies – fighter jets, nuclear submarines, bullet trains – he also plumps for infantile pseudoscience, blows conches at supposedly auspicious hours dictated by Vedic numerology, and has made outrageous claims of Earth-Mars travel in ancient India. Cow urine was famously promoted by prime-minister Morarji Desai as a cure for all stomach diseases. By comparison Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif with their pir, Dewana (crazy) Baba, seem almost rational. The born-again Imran Khan, married to the mysterious Bushra Bibi who claims to communicate with jinns (shape-shifting spirits), may, however, be Modi’s direct competitor. Does this mean that India and Pakistan are equally committed to superstitious beliefs?

I do not think so. There is a large modernist section of the Indian elite that is rationalist and strongly pro-science. It does not hesitate to pour scorn on the antics of Hindutva pseudoscience. Reared in Nehru’s India these modernists believe in the scien-tific temper and form the backbone of India’s impressive achievements in science and technology. So, although most ordinary Hindus are temple-goers and prey to ancient irrationalities, the elite core has been large and sturdy enough to prevent India from falling off the cliff of superstition. Among many examples: news that a stone idol of the elephant god, Lord Ganesh, was drinking milk brought India to a standstill as people rushed off to temples to celebrate a miracle. But it brought guffaws from Indian scientists who were quick to establish that the milk moved up the elephant’s trunk because of capillary action. Such exposés never happen in Pakistan. No scientist dared to assert that the 2005 earthquake was a consequence of tectonic movement of the earth’s plates rather than divine retribution; nor did any investigate the Chakwal Miracle where alleged footprints of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) suddenly appeared in 2010, or challenge the regular religious programmes that promote a stationary earth and reject the theory of evolution.

In spite of the huge rise in mosque attendance, most Pakistanis still want to hedge their bets. The world seems rational, but what if it is not? That hedging is ubiquitous: while declaring that only God can save them from sickness, most still swallow antibiotics or other western medicines when sick. Almost all flock to hospitals, not hakeems (traditional healers) or dawakhanas (traditional dispensaries) – the fiery preacher Maulana Tariq Jamil is known to strongly advocate ajwa-khajoor dates as a cure-all14 but wisely chose to have a regular heart bypass surgery instead when faced with a blockage in his arteries. Similarly, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) starts every plane journey with special prayers but also asks passengers to wear their seat-belts anyway. Motorway bus compa-nies take the uncertainty of life still further – even when the destination is in sight, the announcement is that ‘Inshallah we will soon reach the terminal’. And yet, to keep competitive and to facilitate advance seat bookings, they publish bus schedules months in advance.

The hedging is still more apparent when it comes to natural phenomena. Sighting the moon is cause for national distress every year at the time of Eid-ul-Fitr. For physics, this is not a problem – exactly where the moon is at any given time, and whether it can be seen or not from any vantage point on earth, was essentially solved when about 400 years ago Newton wrote down the differential equation governing the motion of heavenly bodies. But religious clerics resolutely reject scientific predictions, insisting that it is for them to decide. This led to the creation of the telescope-equipped Ruet-e-Hilal committee of clerics, Pakistan’s official moon-sighting body. The committee is often at odds with other clerics as well as the lunar almanac. The government, to its credit, did put out a scientific calendar in 2020 but large parts of the public chose to follow the clerics instead.16 Weather prediction is an issue on which there has been a considerable softening of the traditionally hard position that Allah alone knows and decides if and when it will rain. Believers may supplicate him through the prayer namaz-e-istisqa in times of drought, and so large congregations headed by the country’s president or prime-minister have filled the streets praying for rain. However, quite paradoxically, all Muslim countries including Pakistan maintain some form of meteorological department and provide weather information. As yet another example of partial progress towards modernity: the orthodox ulema say it is haram (sin) to dissect cadavers for medical training and that blood transfusions are forbidden. However dissections and transfusions are now com-mon practice although religious inhibitions surrounding organ donation makes Pakistan dependent upon donors from Sri Lanka and other countries.

More modernity means greater reliance on mathematical modelling and prediction. Here Pakistan does not do well compared to other countries at the same level of economic development. There are countless examples where rational planning was not undertaken and fiasco has followed fiasco. For instance, in 2019 national enthusiasm was whipped up for funding construction of the Diamer Bhasha mega-dam through crowd-funding. A simple calculation would have revealed that this could, at best, have led to raising only 5–10% of the amount needed.17 At Reko Diq, massively bad forecasting led to a hugely disadvantageous contract being signed by the government with an interna-tional mining company, Tethyan Copper. When the government ultimately realised its mistake and sought to cancel the contract, the company won $5.9 billion in damages18; Pakistan’s overseas assets are now being seized to pay off this amount. Bad planning also meant that millions of special compressed natural gas (CNG) gas kits for cars became useless because the gas was no longer available. But perhaps the biggest impact of a poor quantitative sense and lousy analytical skills is to be found in the lacklustre performance of Pakistan’s national airlines, railways, ports and shipping, industrial units such as the Karachi Steel Mills, and a generally impoverished industrial sector.

Political-economic dimensions

A first step towards modernity requires dispensing with feudalism. Jinnah, however, never spoke of this nor took any steps towards this end and so, unlike in India, feudalism stayed and consolidated itself. The grand winners of Partition were feudal families to whom the British had gifted large tracts of lands in Sind, Punjab and the NWFP. In return for these land gifts, nawabs and khan bahadurs (feudal lords) had helped the British in collecting taxes from the peasantry. About 70% of those in the Second Constituent Assembly (1954–56) were feudal lords. Many grabbed the opportunity to seize evacuee property left behind by fleeing Hindus and Sikhs. A nominal agriculture reform committee of the Muslim League was headed by Mumtaz Daultana, the Oxford educated scion of a large landlord clan. Nevertheless, even according to his landlord- friendly committee’s report,19 more than 80% of the land in Sind, over 50% in Punjab, and slightly less in the NWFP was owned by big landlords. One individual owned a staggering 300,000 acres while the more usual holdings in Sind and Punjab were around 3000–5000 acres. A UNDP report released in April 2021 reveals that Pakistan’s feudal land-owning class, which constitutes 1.1% of the population, owns 22% of all arable farmland. This figure represents the present situation; in the intervening decades lands have been divided and subdivided between the generations.

Jinnah was ambiguous on another key matter as well: secularism and modernity go together and Jinnah was personally secular. His famous 11 August 1947 speech calls for separating religion from matters of the state. But at other times he called for an Islamic state governed according to the sharia. Addressing the State Bank of Pakistan, he demanded ‘banking practices compatible with Islamic ideals of social and economic life’ and to ‘work our destiny in our own way and present to the world an economic system based on true Islamic concept of equality of manhood and social justice’20 How? Later years would see Pakistan’s economic direction wavering from the dictates of the Harvard Advisory Group to that of wizards running Imran Khan’s so-called Riyasat- e-Medina.

Modernity has traditionally been associated with the strengthening of national author-ity over all other forms of authority. But the Pew Global Survey reports that, ‘Among most of the Muslim publics polled, Muslims tend to identify with their religion, rather than their nationality. This is particularly true in Pakistan, where 94% think of themselves primarily as Muslim instead of Pakistani’.21 Weakened nationalism is not good news for those who believe in a strong state because it also leads to weakened trust in institutional and social mechanisms. Society needs a high level of trust to build and sustain an economy, develop science, and manage conflicts. In Francis Fukuyama’s terminology, this constitutes social capital.22 Where the national spirit is weak, social capital is small and trust horizons move inward towards family and tribe, away from stable and efficient institutions. Most importantly, God’s laws – as inscribed in the divine text – matter much more than the laws made by the national state.

Modern states have a monopoly of violence over their citizens with the state’s security forces operating lawfully under a legitimate civilian authority. Arguably this was more common during Pakistan’s early years rather than the later ones. Indeed the power of private militias operated by powerful landlords and tribal leaders has diminished and, with power mostly wrested back from control of Islamic groups such as the Tehrik- e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the state has managed to assert its authority. However, the state’s failure to act against groups such as Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) or power-ful mullahs such Maulana Abdul Aziz of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid goes against this trend. Overall there is a lack of trust in the courts and the police system. This makes citizens vulnerable to intimidation, arbitrary arrest, serious criminal activity, and general fear of violence, oppression, and injustice. More fundamentally, state law is considered less important than religious law by a majority and so those crimes that are not specifically mentioned in the Qur’an are not seen as serious crimes. White collar crime, for instance, did not exist in ancient times and there are no specific injunctions against such things as insider trading, money laundering, cybercrime or cheating in exams. The orthodox would never miss a prayer or a day of fasting but see such crimes as minor infractions.

Cultural dimensions

Cultural modernity was once associated with the abandonment of traditional culture and the acquisition of a western one. At Harvard University, sociologists like Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) enthusiastically promoted a Cartesian analysis (whole is sum of the parts) of society and took Norbert Wiener’s new cybernetics as a useful conceptual tool for understanding society itself. The utility of this viewpoint will not be touched upon here. While westernisation may have been a useful way to explore modernisation in past decades, with massive cultural changes happening in the West and the huge impact of post-modernism, there is now no such thing as ‘westernisation’ because these very trends are increasingly seen across the world.23What then could be a useful metric for cultural modernity? The concept of human rights as being natural, constant, inalienable, and possessed by all peoples is quintessen-tially modern. It should be considered as one irreducible component. No traditional system or religion has this notion of naturalness written into it. Natural rights gained popularity as a theoretical goal during the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century when they produced contemporaneous statements of rights – in France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, and in the United States the country’s Constitution. Pakistan was a founder-signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 when it was represented by foreign minister Chaudhri Zafarullah Khan. It was an expression of support for universalism but, since that time, the country has partially retreated from its position. Zafarullah, being an Ahmadi, is a much reviled figure today by virtue of belonging to the Ahmadiyya community.24 Pakistan does poorly on the scale of religious tolerance and cultural plurality

A second useful metric is the degree of equality accorded to men and women. How well does Pakistan treat its women? To an extent this can be quantified using data for female labour force participation. After rising from essentially zero (except agriculture) in 1947, it experienced strong growth in the first three decades. But, according to World Bank statistics, that figure declined from 23.8% in 2016 to 22.2% in 2020, and is well below the rates for countries with similar income levels. Only about 25% of Pakistani women who have a university degree work outside the home. Many find it difficult to get jobs and when they do, as per the Global Gender Parity Report 2021, get paid roughly 34% less than men.25 There are scarcely any women to be found in leadership roles. As in most Arab and African countries, gender equality is a long way off. How much a Pakistani woman should cover up is a hotly disputed matter. The all-encompassing Saudi burqa that leaves even the eyes covered found favour even on university campuses in the late 1980s. ‘Cover up’, ‘stay at home’, and ‘obey your man’ is the message from thousands of Al-Huda centres (Islamic teaching institutions) across the country.

A third metric is cultural freedom or its absence, cultural suffocation. There was considerable freedom in the first few decades after Partition. Those who grew up in those years will recall Pakistan’s cities throbbing with entertainment, night life, and openness that cannot be imagined today. Weddings in some parts of society, for example, were joyous occasions where both girls and boys danced, separately and together. Against this the military dictatorship under Zia-ul-Haq launched a war because it deemed these to be Hindu accretions, to be dispensed with forthwith. In universities, students were discour-aged from traditional singing and dancing, acting and mimicking, as well as any activity that would bring girls and boys together. One major cultural casualty was folk music. Until the late 1970s it was common to have music festivals but that tradition ended abruptly. Playing a musical instrument of any kind is now becoming rarer and rarer. The expulsion and murder of Pashtun traditional musicians by the Taliban led to their flight from the tribal areas. But the move against music was very much within the cities as well. The Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), the well-armed student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, forced the music department at Punjab University to relocate to an off-campus venue; Peshawar University was shut for nearly a month in 2010 after IJT members bludgeoned to death a student who insisted on listening to music in his hostel room; and the music department at Bahauddin Zakaria University in Multan was closed for good in 2009 because, according to the university, there was a lack of interest in music.

Conclusion

Modernity brings with it conditions that are far better than those enjoyed by the vast majority of humanity over the entire period of human history. But, along with the benefits, there are also undeniable negativities. Without a Divine Creator constantly at the helm of affairs many individuals feel robbed of a sense of purpose; families are not the strong and stable institutions that they once were; the rate of change is so fantastically high that we would appear as aliens to our great grandparents; a good society undeserv-edly becomes synonymous with a meritocratic one; and increasing wealth of individuals and states is elevated to the highest point. Modernity in the form of capitalism has created an absurdly uneven distribution of resources between peoples of the world, and within every country. Still more significant negatives: modern science and technology first brought to us weapons with high destructive power and, in 1945, it was practically demonstrated that one single bomb could eliminate an entire city within a few seconds. An insane competition is leading towards the age of robotic warfare with weapons that will choose their own targets guided by artificial intelligence. As for the physical envir-onment, the cost of collective hedonism has been huge: a planet imperilled by climate change.

The path to creating a modern Pakistan that avoids some of the worst traps of modernity is doubtlessly difficult but must be pursued with full vigour. The challenge is to decrease inequalities of wealth and opportunity, create large scale employment, develop democratic institutions, evolve a legal system that works, provide health care to the people, and make peace with neighbours. Above all, modernity requires the creation of an education system that leads to enhanced mental capabilities that can serve the needs of a modern society.