Pak Tea House

By Ishtiaq Ahmed

In a debate article in the Dawn of April 30, 2008, Haider Nizamani seeks to dispel the widely held view that feudalism exists in Pakistan. He asserts that feudalism never existed in South Asia. To consider honour killings and exploitation of peasants by mighty landlords as indicative of feudalism he finds untenable because according to him, by 1999, 88 percent of cultivated land in Pakistan was in farm sizes below 12.5 acres. Just over half the total farms were less than five acres in size. “This would hardly be the hallmark of a feudal society,” he asserts.

This economistic argument is a legitimate one, but too narrow, mechanical and formalistic, because it presupposes that if the economic base changes cultural and ideological changes follow suit. In reality there is never a perfect fit between a mode of production and cultural and ideological forms, otherwise the thoroughly capitalised economies of the Middle East would have no place for tribal norms and behaviour patterns. Marx was acutely aware of the far more complex relationship between the economic base and the superstructure. He famously observed that Christian theology remained the reigning ideology much after classical feudalism had disintegrated and dissolved.

Classical feudalism emerged in Western Europe when the old city-based high cultures of the Greeks and the Romans disintegrated and the locus of social activity moved into local units headed by tiered nobility, which controlled their serfs through a range of economic and extra-economic coercions. The feudal vassals, in turn, rendered services to the superior lords, and that chain of services finally connected to the king, who was named as the “first among the lords.” He claimed a tribute or levy from the lesser nobles, who also provided him with soldiers.

The above description is, of course, an ideal one in the tradition of Max Weber. In reality no two feudalisms anywhere in Europe were the same, except in the essential sense of an agrarian economy providing much of the surplus, as well as the soldiers upon which the ruling classes built their leisured lifestyle.

Christian theology justified social hierarchy, and people knew their place in society – the rule was that the superiors were chosen by God and obeying them was a duty and obligation. (more…)

posted by kinkminos

In a recent piece in the London Review of Books, Gareth Peirce, a celebrated civil rights lawyer in Britain, compares the current plight of British Muslim “terror” suspects with that of their Irish counterparts during the latter part of the last century. In it she recounts a number of high and low profile cases involving Muslims, and the way in which, according to her, the precepts of habeas corpus are being steadily eroded in the name of “freedom.” (If only the legal “problems” in our own benighted land were of such nature!)

The piece is typically LRB-long, but well worth reading (to the bitter end).

Some excerpts below.

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Was it like this for the Irish?
Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain

The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country’s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict…. Just as Irish men and women, wherever they lived, knew every detail of each injustice as if it had been done to them, long before British men and women were even aware that entire Irish families had been wrongly imprisoned in their country for decades, so Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community here, and recognising, too, the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.

……

Claiming that a parallel emergency faced Britain, Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’…. (more…)

By Ishtiaq Ahmed

The barbaric murder of Jagdeesh Kumar, accused of blasphemy by some of his workmates at a garment factory in Karachi, brings out in sharp focus once again the exposed and vulnerable situation of non-Muslims in a Pakistan still wedded to the legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq.

When the police finally intervened, the body of the 22-year-old victim had been mutilated and disfigured beyond recognition: among other things the eyes had been gouged out. The reports published indicate that he was a quiet man, from a poverty-stricken Hindu family belonging to some obscure village in the Sindh desert. People with such a depressed and vulnerable background come to factories to eek out a miserable living, not to engage in religious controversies. In the days and weeks ahead, we will learn that some petty personal quarrel or irrational hatred of a Hindu was the real reason for his murder.

What happened in Karachi was reminiscent of the lynching of African-Americans by white racists in the southern states of the US as late as the early 20th century. Until those laws were changed, black men and women were killed for the flimsiest of reasons. I remember one story when a white shopkeeper took out his gun and shot dead an old black man, who for years had been delivering merchandise to him, when an altercation took place between that man and a white man who had come to the shop for the first time. The white shopkeeper sided with a complete stranger, because the race laws had conditioned him to react in that way.

Anyone who follows the news from Pakistan and reads the reports published regularly by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan would find that violence and brutality against non-Muslims increased exponentially after the blasphemy law was imposed in 1982 and reformulated in 1986. The connection between law and social behaviour is a well-established fact and, quite simply, bad, intolerant and violence-inducing laws produce malevolent behaviour among members of society. Let me quote both the relevant texts on blasphemy in Pakistan:

(more…)

HRCP’s report on May 12, 2007 violence in Karachi

The aftermath of the events of May 12 has been filled with recrimination and bitterness. There were mutually conflicting claims about responsibility and culpability, and attempts at initiating processes of legal and political accountability. This report does not presume to pre-empt or anticipate the outcomes of the processes of accountability that have been initiated in the courts and elsewhere. Its aim is more limited. It attempts to create a record based on newspaper reports, testimonies and accounts provided by eyewitnesses and affidavits relating to the events in Karachi on May 12. Much of the material used in this report is already in the public domain. In the politically charged atmosphere that prevailed in the city, facts became contested almost as soon as they were first reported.

The report makes some useful recommendations as a way forward: (more…)

April 18, 2008
 
Karachi: In a statement issued to the press, Iqbal Haider, Co-Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan welcomes the ratification and signatures of three core UN human rights instruments by Pakistan. (more…)

This is an engaging piece by Ali Eteraz who writes with much intellectual energy and passion. The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily subscribed by the Pak Tea House.

Hindus in Pakistan have suffered grievously since the founding of the nation in 1947. Recently, in the southern province of Sindh, a Hindu man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by his co-workers. This comes at the heels of the abduction and dismemberment of a Hindu engineer. (more…)

* Do large groups in young people ages 15-24 increase the risk of armed conflict, terrorism and riots?

Daily Times Monitor

KARACHI: It has frequently been suggested that exceptionally large youth groups or cohorts, the so-called ‘’youth bulges’’, make countries more susceptible to political violence.

Henrik Urdal from the Centre for the Study of Civil War, The International Peace Research Institute, Oslo examined this in a study titled ‘A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence’ in 2006. (more…)