Warriors of God
In this post I want to address a few main factors that contribute to the growing radical fundamentalism in Pakistan.
- When we do not produce lackeys for the empire we are producing fodder for the Taliban. For one meal a day poor Pakistanis send their kids to madressahs which are religious schools and are supposed to provide a religious education. However, that is not the case, these institutions are places where a cleric asks children to recite verses in Arabic – without any knowledge or understanding of Arabic. Children are regularly beaten up or sexually abused. They have no real education or skills and then these very children are brainwashed into ‘jihad’ and other forms of terrorist behaviour.
2. Our curricula either teaches us that we are still inferior to our colonial masters or that the only life worth pursuing lies outside of Pakistan and this leads to immense brain drain. The next part to that is that these people never feel like they belong, not at home not in their new countries and so we have, as studied in Taseer’s A Stranger to History, a growing number of youth who are bonding over religion as a group identity and getting as passionate as to engage in ‘holy war’ in order to escape their own alienation.
3. Pakistan is still a colony, just on different terms and this manifestation of religion is an effect or Arab colonialism in part fuelled by American interference from the 1970s wherein the US funded the Taliban in Afghanistan/Pakistan in order to fight the USSR.
4. Pakistan is a failing state and people are willing to cling to any and every absurd notion.
In conclusion all of this points to the very urgent and desperate need for an identity which has been denied and negated. Therefore, I believe that my research could play an instrumental role in bridging this gap and helping a new generation formulate an identity on their own terms one that is neither inherited from a colonial past nor driven out of sheer desperation.
