Behind the Chairman’s Door

THE rise of Hamas as a political force in Palestine has not aroused in Pakistan the kind of interest it deserves. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and its sweeping electoral victory in January 2006 should not be viewed merely as a reaction to Fatah’s decline in the post-Oslo accord period; there are more important reasons why Hamas became a viable alternative to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah in the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Hamas’s founders, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who became a cripple at age 11 and remained wheelchair-bound till his murder by Israel, and Abdel Aziz Rantisi once belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) but fell out with it in the late eighties over what they thought was the MB’s lack of a focussed policy on Palestine.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the PLO both posed “problems” for Yassin and Rantisi. Devoted to the idea of uniting the Arab world on an Islamic platform, the MB rejected the boundaries of the Arab states, considered the existence of separate Arab states artificial, and believed in a united struggle by all Arab masses for capturing power. The aims were two – one, undoing the injustices done to the Arab world by the western powers and, two, building an Arab society based on Islamic values and purged of western “impurities”.

Founded in 1929 by Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood existed in Palestine the way it did, say, in Egypt or Algeria, and had no specific line of action for Palestine’s liberation. To it, the Palestinian issue was a problem to be solved, just as there were challenges to the Arab world in the presence of British troops at the Suez Canal and in the French occupation of Algeria. The creation of Israel and the occupation of Palestine by European migrants caused no particular change in the MB’s outlook and philosophy.

The PLO had an altogether different aim, its focus being on Palestine. To Arafat and other PLO leaders, pan-Arabism was useful if it furthered the cause of Palestine’s liberation. Founded in Cairo in 1964 by Gamal Abdel Nasser with Ahmad Shukairi as chairman (Arafat became its third chairman in 1969 and remained so till his death), the PLO could not but stick to a secular path at a time when the world was divided between the western and communist camps, with the vast majority of the Afro-Asian masses struggling for freedom from colonialism.

There were significant Christian populations in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. If he had to emerge as leader of the Arab world, and perhaps of Africa, Nasser was clear in his mind that his struggle and vision would not be confined to Egypt or Palestine.

Having successfully nationalized the Suez Canal and survived the 1956 tripartite attack on Egypt, Nasser aimed at a bigger role that aimed at liberating Arab countries then under British, French and Italian control and changing regimes in countries ruled by pro-western potentates – as those in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, etc.

Trying to unite the Arab masses on an Islamic platform would mean alienating the affiliations of the Arab world’s Christian people. More important, such Islamic fervor would evoke little support from communist powers or from Afro-Asian countries. On the other hand, a secular fight against colonialism would mean fervent support from the communist camp and from Afro-Asian freedom-fighters and non-aligned leaders like Castro, Soekarno, Tito, Nehru, Nkrumah and others.

Ignoring Nasser’s achievements and focusing solely on Arafat, we can see that the strategy worked. By 1994 the “terrorist” leader had won the Nobel Prize for Peace (along with Yitzhak Rabin), and his enemies, who once denied the very existence of a Palestinian people, had conceded the idea of a Palestinian state.

While space does not permit a review of the events following the signing of the declaration of principles (DoP) in September 1993 and Arafat’s return to Palestine, briefly, we can see how Israel’s sabotage of the Oslo peace process and Arafat’s death strengthened the lobby that believed that the DoP was an instrument of capitulation. The post-Oslo period also saw PLO officials vulnerable to corruption charges. This was the vacuum that provided an ideal opportunity for Hamas to make gains at Fatah’s expense

Hamas, acronym for Harkatul Maqavamatul Islamia (Islamic Resistance Movement), came into being in December 1987 a few days after the second intifada, also known as Al Aqsa intifada, began following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Islamic holy sites. Extensive debate preceded Hamas’s formation, for the MB’s Palestinian members were appalled by the Brothers’ failure to take up the cause of Palestinian territories groaning under Israeli occupation.

Yassin and Rantissi and many other Palestinian members of the MB, including Salah Shehada, Mohammad Shama’ah, Isa al-Nashar, Abdul Fattah Dukhan and Ibrahim Yazuri, were outraged that the Brothers relegated the Palestinian cause to a secondary position and attached greater importance to their Islamic agenda – a policy that often exposed the Brotherhood’s central leadership to the charge that it was working for Israel’s benefit. After intense debate, Yassin and Rantisi came to the conclusion that the Brotherhood did not have an answer to the Palestinian question and that what was needed was a party that would combine the Brothers’ Islamic zeal with Fatah’s focus on Palestine. That is what Hamas is.

It is an indication of the Hamas founders’ realism that they gradually moved away from the goal of the “liberation of Palestine” to the more practical task of making Israel quit the Gaza strip and the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

Despite its Islamic commitments, Hamas was careful not to get involved with Al Qaeda or accept its philosophy that believed in terrorist attacks against targets within Muslim countries ruled by perceived pro-western leaders. From this followed a sensible military doctrine that differed in several significant ways from that of the PLO and Al Qaeda. First, Hamas renounced violence against all Muslim countries so as not to expose itself to the charge that it was shedding Muslim blood; second, it did not believe in attacking western targets anywhere in the world; third, it pledged not to carry out military operations outside Palestine.

Hamas’s Islamic philosophy and strong commitment to Palestine and its people are in sharp contrast to the situation in Pakistan where most religious parties pursue policies whose underlying philosophy lacks a focus on Pakistan and shows little consciousness of the country’s sensitive geo-strategic location and its security concerns. This is a tragedy for a country whose foreign policy since independence has been security-centric.

The religious parties’ rhetoric could be the subject of a PhD thesis. But it would not be wrong to assert that most religious leaders’ utterances have served to undermine the Pakistani state by creating contempt among the people for everything Pakistani. They might not have done so deliberately, but their rhetorical outbursts against all Pakistan governments, civilian and military – barring Ziaul Haq’s – have instilled into the people serious doubts about the moral basis of everything Pakistani. Unless they themselves come to power and establish an Islamic “system”, every government department, every NGO, every nurse, every traffic cop and every air-hostess is un-Islamic and therefore must be condemned. Even educational institutions, education itself, and teachers deserve to be reviled and held to contempt.

This philosophy has affected even those who may not be religiously inclined, but one can see its effect on the Pakistani people in the recklessness with which they go about burning public and private property. It is this kind of weird philosophy with extra-territorial loyalties that makes Lal Masjid clerics say that the last rites of Pakistani soldiers killed in battle with Uzbek and other militants should not be performed, because their death was haram. In other words, the loyalty of a segment of our religious leaders is not to Pakistan, but to Osama bin Laden and his militants waging war on the Muslim world’s only nuclear power.

Here we can clearly see the difference between Hamas and whatever is going on in Pakistan in the name of religion. While Hamas stands committed to the peace and prosperity of the Palestinian people, our religious parties lack the same kind of commitment to the Pakistani people whose majority is languishing in poverty and ignorance in a system characterized by gross inequalities in the distribution of national wealth.

That explains why the religious orthodoxy has never tried to mobilize the people’s energies for the stability, growth and consolidation of Pakistan and for its entry into the modern world through progress in science and technology at a rate one sees in China and the Asian tigers. Maybe, this would be an exaggeration to say, but the behavior of certain parties suggests that they would write off Pakistan in return for the Taliban flag to fly on a barren rock in Afghanistan.