Part 5
By Iqbal Hamza
The fifth factor that may ultimately contribute to Pakistan’s collapse is the deep hostility shown by the country’s military regime toward religious scholars. As mentioned earlier, Pakistan came into existence in the name of Islam, and its population is overwhelmingly Muslim. Yet during the colonial period, the British introduced a non-Islamic system in the country. To enforce this system, they elevated many individuals to positions of power within the army and government who held views hostile to Islam and religion.
If one examines this matter honestly, it becomes difficult to find another government, aside from openly anti-Islamic forces, that has been responsible for the martyrdom of so many religious scholars. Similarly, during the last fifty years, apart from Israel, no other army in Muslim or non-Muslim countries has so directly targeted mosques as the Pakistani military. The tragedies of Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa serve as prominent examples, though they are far from isolated cases. In reality, dozens of other mosques and madrasas have suffered similar attacks and bombardments at the hands of the military.
Even now, videos can still be found online showing the mass killing of teenage madrasa students by Pakistani security forces. More recently, another deeply disturbing video circulated on social media in which, God forbid, soldiers were seen allowing dogs to wander inside a mosque.
In the same manner, the Pakistani military has, under mysterious circumstances, been responsible for the martyrdom of dozens of prominent religious scholars, including Maulana Hasan Jan, across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh. Only days ago, the regime also ordered the closure of dozens of madrasas in Punjab.
These actions have further damaged the credibility of those scholars who are seen as aligned with the military, as ordinary Pakistanis witness with their own eyes how sincere and independent religious figures are targeted, while others who claim to uphold the truth issue religious rulings in favor of the very regime responsible for this oppression.
As genuine scholars have been eliminated through assassination, imprisonment, or silencing, and as state-backed religious scholars have steadily lost their moral authority, the long-proclaimed idea of Pakistan as the fortress of Islam has been exposed. It is now clear to many that this slogan was never more than a tool to preserve the power and dominance of a harsh and authoritarian military establishment. In practice, this very establishment has come to be viewed as one of the fiercest adversaries of Islam itself.
Within Islamic society, the mosque and the madrasa are not merely buildings. They are sacred symbols of Allah. Religious scholars, too, occupy a position of profound intellectual and moral respect. To persecute them, to torture and kill them, and to destroy the institutions of worship and learning is something no believing society can accept. Moreover, such actions invite the wrath of Allah Almighty. For this reason, it is argued that the actions of the Pakistani military have drawn Pakistan even closer to its own downfall.
