| Basy Lys |
8 juli 2007 16:44 |
Pakistan is een verward land. De regio werd in het begin van de 8ste eeuw door de Arabieren te vuur en te zwaard veroverd, een deel van de bevolking als slaven afgevoerd, en alle rijkdommen van de inwoners gestolen.
Omdat de moslims niet kunnen samenleven met andersdenkenden, en zij inzagen dat het niet mogelijk was om de ganse bevolking van India aan hun ideologie te onderwerpen, ontstond de idee van een onafhankelijke zuiver moslimse staat op te richten: Pakistan.
Het land Pakistan is zelf ontstaan in een bloedbad, waarbij bijna alle Hindoes en Sikhs uit het land werden verdreven, en hun bezittingen werden in beslag genomen. Er werden 245 hindoeistische temples afgebroken.
Intussen blijft Pakistan een van de meest onderontwikkelde gebieden in de wereld (plaats 134 van de 177 in de Human Development Index). De volgelingen van Mohammed begrijpen niet dat dit aan de perfiditeit van de mohammedaanse ideologie zou te wijten zijn. We integendeel: het is hun straf omdat zij de "zuivere islam" nooit goed hebben toegepast.
In 1979 en 1980 maakte V.S. Naipaul (Nobeprijs Literatuur 2001) een toch langs diverse mohammedaanse staten, waaronder Pakistan. Ik kan niet niet de volledige tekst brengen die hij over zijn gesprekken in dat land voerde, en de vaststellingen die hij daar deed. Hieronder een klein stukje waaruit blijkt dat er niets nieuws onder de zon is. De situatie van bijna dertig jaar geleden zet zich door.
V.S. NAIPAUL, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, New York, 1981, ISBN 0-394-71195-5
p. 122
Ahmed said: “I will tell you the story of this country in two sentences. In the first quarter of this century the Hindus of India decided that everything that was wrong had to do with foreigners and foreign influence. Then in the second quarter the Muslims of India woke up. They had a double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated the Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was built on hate and nothing else. The people weren’t ready for Pakistan, and people who don’t deserve shouldn’t demand.
It was what many conservative Muslims said: that the Muslims of India, as Muslims, hadn’t been pure enough for a Muslim state.
p. 123
Ahmed said: ”Everybody fools everybody else here. Politicians, civil servants, everybody”.
And Ahmed and his other visitor (who had so far said little) agreed that people were turning to Islam because everything else had failed. Even at the universities the islamic wave was swamping academic life.
But wasn’t that, I asked, the special trap of a place like Pakistan? Couldn’t people now accept that they were Muslims in a Muslim country, and that Pakistan was what the faith had made of it? Did it make sense – after the centuries of Islamic history – to say that Islam hadn’t been tried?
Ahmed became grave. He said, “No, it has never been tried.”
p. 142
So theology complicates history for the people of Pakistan. And for people who feel that their country hasn’t worked, that in the Muslim homeland they are still strangers, of dispossessed, or threatened with dispossession, for such people the wish to claim kinship with a triumphant Islam makes for further disturbance.
In orthodox theology only the first four caliphs were rightly guided. After that the caliphate becomes a dynasty; the Islamic ideals of brotherhood are betrayed. Sind, therefore, was conquered by the Arabs in the bad time; but the Arabs brought the faith, so the bad time becomes a sacred time.The Mongols destroyed the Arab empire in the East. So the Mongols were bad. But the Mongols became Muslims and established the great Mogul empire in India; so that becomes a wonderful time. The Turks displace the Mogols; but the Turks also become Muslims and powerful, and they, too, cease to be bad. So history – which begins as a “pleasant story of conquest” – becomes hopelessly confusing. And out of this more-than-colonial confusion some Pakistanis fabricate personalities for themselves, in which they are Islamic and conquerors and – in Pakistan – a little like people in exile from their glory. They become Turks or Moguls. Or Arabs.
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(AP)