Izzat Majeed hits town

Izzat Majeed, Lahore’s London-based millionaire, philanthropist and patron of the arts, was in Washington last week. He was invited to speak at the much respected Middle East Institute and I made it a point to be there, braving a steady drizzle, having left my umbrella on the Metro, as the underground is called here. If I were to add up the value of all the umbrellas I have forgotten on underground trains in London and Washington, I would be a rich man, though admittedly not as rich as Izzat Majeed, who owns a few banks and finances those who prospect for oil and such things.

One thing I will say about Izzat Majeed: He has never been afraid to cross swords with anyone. In the late 1970s, in an article in Mazhar Ali Khan’s Viewpoint, Lahore, he accused Faiz Ahmed Faiz of all people of “cultural terrorism” and of downgrading Punjabi.

Faiz, who never reacted to criticism, reacted this time. In a rejoinder, he wrote that some enthusiasts of Punjabi had come to believe that to prove your love for Punjabi, you must first detest Urdu as the handmaiden of decadent courts. Then there are those who in order to show their love for Urdu, despise Punjabi as the “gobbledegook of illiterate yokels”. This is nothing more than “petit-bourgeois linguistic jingoism”, frequently “veneered with progressive terminology,” Faiz added.

But back to 2008 and Washington. The Middle East Institute noted that Izzat Majeed had managed to put Islamic extremism in a wider historic context and several of his articles had intellectually confronted extremism that turns to violence. One of his pieces, ‘Open letter to Osama Bin Laden’, written in December 2001, became a subject of discussion in the New York Times.

Let me just quote the opening of that famous letter: “Look at what you have done, Osama bin Laden. The carnage in New York, in the full glory of a sunny day and the glare of ever-hungry television, has unleashed forces that are as ambivalent and as conspiratorial as any sea change in the river of history. Ambivalent because, like you, all that these forces of imperial power understand is that clear and present danger, however concocted, can only be met with the exercise of naked military might. But at the same time, sheer force needs to be tempered with political accommodation on a varied and shifting political and ethnic battlefield.”

Izzat Majeed is always provocative and he did not disappoint at the Middle East Institute either. He said the Sharia is a compendium of man-made laws, so no divinity attaches to it, as is mistakenly believed. That being so, Sharia must be brought in line with contemporary requirements. The scholars who codified these laws were obliged to acquiesce to the reigning Khalifa who considered himself God’s deputy on earth. Those who failed to do so, paid dearly for their failing.

He said there was not a single Muslim era of democracy. “And we have seen today what petrodollar Islam has done to us,” he added. He conceded that any move to challenge man-made Sharia is not likely to be tolerated by the “ritual and rote-based practitioners of Islam”. He also rejected the view that there is such a thing as the Muslim Ummah, arguing that the Ummah concept died with the birth of the nation-state. Asked about the infamous Huntington theory of clash of civilisations, he replied, “There is no clash because there is no common Muslim civilisation.”

Answering questions, Izzat Majeed called Pakistan an “essentially military state” that has always protected the Mullah. “There is a symbiosis between the Mullah and the Army,” he pointed out, adding that Islamic Sharia is “obsolete and needs to be reinterpreted”. He said the Pakistani Mullah is used to terrorising all others.

Pakistan seemed to be a lost case, one felt after listening to Izzat Majeed, who drones on in a deadpan voice. He said there are no bookshops in Lahore (next time, I suggest the Editor has him visit Vanguard, right on the Mall). He also declared that there is no civil society in Pakistan. The Mullah, he explained, has terrorised society. He castigated Pakistani textbooks prescribed for students from Class I to Class X, pointing out that they contain no reference to the Andalusian period. He should have added, but did not, that these textbooks date back to the Zia-ul Haq era and that several, if not all, of them have since been revised and much of hate material and obfuscation of history removed from them. He said petrodollars have taken over the madrassa system in Pakistan and promoted religious bigotry. He pointed out that “sabre-rattling” in the West strengthens the hands of extremists and radicals.

When reminded that the recent lawyers’ movement had shown that there was indeed a civil society in Pakistan, which was active and vibrant, he replied that there is no civil society in Pakistan in “generic terms”. What he meant by that, he did not make clear. Although he had insisted earlier that Pakistan is Mullah-infested and the people live under Army-supported clerical terror, he called the results of the February elections in the Frontier province “amazing”. The jihadi elements had been “rejected comprehensively” and the “anger and resentment of the people had manifested themselves,” he added.

He also said that there is no Sharia law in Pakistan as only lip service is paid to it. What Pakistan has is common law. Izzat Majeed regretted that Gen. Musharraf, who had a carte blanche from the United States, failed to bring in reform. Asked about FATA, he described the movement there as “anarchist” that could be fought off with the force of politics. When told that the media were free in Pakistan today, he replied that there are 65 TV channels, out of which 30 are religious outlets that “spew forth utter nonsense all day”. In the end, he called on the United States to interact with Pakistan’s civil society.

I left the Middle East Institute happy because between the time that Izzat Majeed had begun to speak and the time he had ended, I had seen, bingo, Pakistan’s civil society take birth.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent