Deadly Culture Wars in Pakistan

...The pace of change did not satisfy many workers and students...

...Has tragedy again given way to farce or farce to tragedy...

...Many of the same humanities programs that thrive across the street remain barred...

...This particular case garnered international attention, but it was hardly unique in the annals of war...

...The signs of a looming Islamist reaction were visible even at the NSF's peak, a period dominated by the Bengali struggle for self-determination...

...Ahmad attracted a following by proclaiming himself to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi...

...The focal point of that campus, a sculpture of a couple kissing on a swing, embodies the lost soul of Pakistani intellectual life, once thriving and open, now increasingly under attack and hidden...

...The 1947 partition created a Muslim majority state flanking India to the east and west...

...It fails, however, to grapple with the group's collaboration with the forces that abducted 563 of their female classmates from Dhaka University, holding them captive as sex slaves in squalid military cantonments during the 1971 campaign...

...As such they are forbidden by law from identifying themselves as Muslim or reciting Koranic scripture...

...Today, IJT literature heralds the resistance to "savage nationalist reprisals" and fervently denounces "social deviancy...

...I've been told about Ijaz But, a philosophy student almost beaten to death several years ago for a passing conversation with a young woman...

...In the case of the latter, remarks about the Prophet Muhammad could be met with a death sentence and a substantial fine (presumably collected before the offender's execution...

...Almost all were impregnated...

...But increasing productivity and wealth clashed with wages kept artificially depressed by anti-labor statutes...

...PU student Aarya Dogar is unconvinced...

...The LIT and its allies are powerful and well organized...

...Attackers fired assault rifle rounds from atop minarets, threw shrapnel grenades, and exploded suicide vests, killing ninety-four and wounding scores more...

...Even by this standard, it is not clear how we should characterize Pakistan's third overthrow of military rule and fourth proclamation of a bright, democratic future...

...The PU Academic Staff Association and its student allies launched an eighteen-day academic boycott following the assault...

...Butt and others claim that the student Islamists' recent turn from quiet repression to overt acts of criminality and violence reflect the fact that they are losing ground, suffering from a dearth of new recruits and increasingly reliant on support from sympathetic state and intelligence agents...

...Everyone seems to have stories like this: some were accosted for hosting a mixed-gender study group, others after being spotted dining off-campus with their girlfriends...

...In late May, just a few kilometers east of the Mall Road universities, twin teams of gunmen and suicide bombers assaulted two Ahmadi mosques...

...And a defeat for secularism would only embolden a movement with the most international of ambitions...

...Influenced by Ted Grant and the entryist Militant Tendency of the British Labour Party, the group has found a measure of success within the Pakistan Peoples Party, even electing a member of Parliament on an overtly socialist program in 2002...

...The Struggle member Zuhaib Butt was elected provincial president of that body in June...

...I shouldn't have expected my own comparison—that of a motley collection of Trotskyists with their European forerunners—to elicit confidence...

...Not content to merely rule in the fashion of General Khan, Zia expressed his "piety" with a new campaign of "Islamification...

...Throughout its post-independence history, PU was often home to radicals of a different sort...

...A National Students Federation with links to trade unions and left-wing political forces burrowed deeply in student government and figured prominently on campus after its founding in the 1950s...

...There wasn't enough equality, not enough was being done to combat poverty or protect minority rights...

...The mass media nationwide have been careful to describe the massacre sites as "places of worship," not mosques...

...Long considered one of the subcontinent's finest institutes of higher learning, PU, as it is referred to colloquially, was in April the scene of a brutal attack on environmental science professor Iftikhar Baloch...

...Life at PU, a public institution with the same governing rules as the National College of Arts, is everywhere marked by the organization's presence...

...At both PU and the National College of the Arts, instructors and students figured prominently in the opposition movement...

...For poor and working class students struggling to advance in a country with a crippled social safety net and endemic unemployment, the IJT offers an attractive alternative...

...Her own solution is far more simple—escape...

...Drone attacks don't seem to be a remedy to the threats in either locale...

...Local gynecologists were brought en masse to service forced terminations for those not too far along...

...Prosecuted for their apostasy to the tenet of Islam that names Muhammad as the last prophet, the four million Ahmadi were in the 1970s the victims of a successful Islamist campaign to declare them a non-Muslim minority...

...The catharsis of a period of anti-government street violence was followed by more than twenty years of dormancy...

...A victory against fanaticism here would say much about the future of this nuclear-armed nation...

...Amid looming threats, some left stalwarts are undaunted...

...Male and female students sit apart, dine in separate dining halls, and dress conservatively...

...When the East Pakistani Awami League won a landslide victory in the 1970 national elections, West Pakistani elites denied the League power...

...In the cities, workers face double-digit unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and entrenched systems of patronage and nepotism...

...Bhutto supporters, who made up much of the Pakistani intelligentsia, were purged from academia, and many were forced into exile...

...Behind the podium at the front of the room stood a red-on-black banner with a hammer and sickle and a flag with the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and a venerable appeal: "Workers of the world unite...

...The terrorists chose their targets deliberately...

...The spectacle served as sobering reminder to Western observers that Trotsky's call for workers' militias to defend against fascist disruptions of meetings and strike actions still applies to some in the twenty-first century...

...Reminders of the university's unwritten rules are frequent and striking...

...Though the sport of following the splits, theoretical disputes, and general self-immolation of Trotskyist sects is a parlor game for most in the West, here the appeals to class struggle and revolution find a larger audience...

...The welcome attention has made organizing more perilous...

...Deep divisions within the National Students Federation led to the fracturing of the organization into different camps, mimicking the panoply of the Western Left and allowing Islamists to dominate student union elections throughout the mid-1970s...

...These militants, like the Islamists of today, rejected capitalism, but not for its cosmopolitanism or tendency to erode parochial social bonds, rather for its apparent inability to fulfill its own promise...

...As part of this campaign, the paramilitary wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Badr, used IJT members to aid the Pakistani army in the massacre of Bengali intellectuals...

...With a newfound respect for state authority, IJT supporters played a leading role in the violent dislocation of progressive student groups through their paramilitary "Thunder Squad...

...But in Lahore, some see hope for neither tragedy nor farce...

...However, pro-IJT staffers in the communication studies department flouted the ban, a sign that decades of academic fast-tracking and the erection of a powerful shadow administration cannot be undone overnight...

...Within a few decades, debates hosted at the University of Punjab's Senate Hall about gender equality and equal pay would devolve into deliberations on the potential social benefits of Sharia law...

...But with the vacillation and retreat of classical liberal forces, it is increasingly falling upon Pakistani radicals to make the basic case for "bourgeois" democratic values: secularism, the rights of women and minority groups, an end to contract killings and terrorist attacks...

...The integrity of Pakistan—literally "Land of the Pure" in Urdu—had to be preserved at any cost...

...Fearful of civil unrest, the ruling government began Operation Searchlight in an attempt to eliminate political opposition in the East...

...Dogar will try to join relatives in England after she completes her degree in applied psychology and has no qualms in accepting a personal respite as opposed to risking life and limb in what she sees as a futile struggle...

...These past decades have seen Pakistan continue to play host to history's farcical whims: another Bhutto, Benazir, replaced Zia, but just as fervently cultivated the mujahideen and later the Taliban government before becoming, like her father, a victim of fundamentalism...

...The Ahmadiyya religious movement emerged at the end of the nineteenth century with the teachings of cleric Mirza Ghulman Ahmad...

...refugees stream across a porous border from war-torn Afghanistan and again from the Pakistani army's own offensives...

...The situation lasted until Bhutto was ousted and hanged...

...Mainstream politicians vacillate between apathy and complicity...

...Pakistan's Anglo-Saxon-derived common law was amended to enforce Nizam-e-Mustafa...

...General Khan's modernization program exposed Pakistani society to new contradictions...

...Despite this rightward turn, the convulsions of the late 1970s in the rest of the region, first the Communist-led Saur Revolution in Afghanistan and then Iran's Islamic Revolution the following year, led to a redoubling of American support for the dictatorship...

...At the congress, cadre patrolled the grounds and subjected attendees to an improvised security checkpoint...

...After all, the heroics of the 1930s ended in failure, with many an idealist forgotten in gulags, concentration camps, or Catalonian trenches...

...Their alternative, however inchoate, was another form of modernity...

...Islamic fundamentalism has found a willing partner in Pashtun nationalism on the country's western frontier...

...The IJT grew in stature as it formed a core of the opposition against the "anti-Islamic" government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan Peoples Party...

...IJT students in East Pakistan were instructed not only to identify but interrogate and help exterminate those of their teachers whom they suspected of harboring nationalist sympathies...

...As romantic as the prospects for a left-wing revival in Pakistani student politics may seem, activists organize in a climate of fear...

...And yet, there is still laughter at the National College of Arts in Lahore...

...With the strength of a popular mujahideen movement and a well-oiled military dictatorship levied against them, new alliances of progressive student groups organized resistance to Zia...

...He needed more than thirty stitches to the head after an assault by two dozen pipe-wielding young men, all cadre of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT), a student group affiliated with the country's largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami...

...Sharia benches were put into place and prohibition of alcohol introduced along with draconian measures against petty theft and religious blasphemy...

...In March—days after a now routine suicide bombing—more than two thousand activists, many of them women, packed into Lahore's Aiwan-e-Iqbal Hall, occupying every seat on both tiers, forcing many to sit crammed in the aisles...

...Young militants from this organization are active inside the student movement nationwide, including, from the platform of the liberal-left Peoples Students Federation, Punjab University...

...The battles between the two factions were often violent, but in the 1983 student elections a leftist coalition managed to rout the IJT and other Islamists across the nation...

...A foreign occupation and resurgent jihadism once again flow through the Khyber Pass...

...How far can she flee...

...If this is a farce, no one is in on the joke...

...They cite recent protest actions, which featured the mobilization of a disproportionately large number of young women and the fact that the largest student organization in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir is led by devotees of Hal Draper, not Hassan al-Banna, as causes for hope...

...Arms sent to the region to combat the Soviet Union have been turned back toward their makers, much to the chagrin of former champions of the Afghan resistance in Washington...

...By 1977, with General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's bloodless putsch, the second democratic era had passed into another era of military rule...

...Pakistan played an unheralded role in the worldwide student upsurge of the late 1960s, when the NSF struggled against the American-backed military dictatorship of Ayub Khan and the developmental state's reigning crony capitalism...

...IJT veterans are funneled into vacant teaching jobs, supported with financial aid, given access to student association allowances, and kept exempt from campus rules on fund-raising and recruiting...

...Indeed, much of this event—the rhetoric, enthusiasm and most of all, the sense of urgency—evokes Europe of the 1930s, the heyday of the anti-Stalinist left...

...And yet, this fundamentalist stranglehold over Pakistan's student life is a relatively new phenomenon...

...If Pakistani civil society has devolved to the level where throngs of the faithful can be gunned down in prayer without attracting widespread condemnation, what awaits vocal secularists...

...Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape cites estimates that over 300,000 rapes were carried out by West Pakistani forces and their paramilitary allies, specifically as a tactic of terror and intimidation...

...Protests organized to condemn the attacks attracted little attention, even in Lahore and Karachi...

...He serves on the editorial committee of the online magazine The Activist (http://theactivist.org), and the DC-based magazine Jacobin...

...It is not surprising that the outcry in the wake of the mass murder has been far from deafening...

...Bhaskar Sunkara is an undergraduate at the George Washington University...

...For the moment, the scene is tranquil...

...The once dominant student progressives, torn between the supporters of Bhutto and his opponents, could neither reassert themselves as voices of opposition nor unite behind his campaign of nationalizations and land reform...

...If there is any truth behind Asif Ali Zardari's paeans to a new Pakistan—confident, pluralist, and democratic—it resides here...

...Fearing the same forces that had helped to topple Ayub Khan, Zia issued a new ban on all political student organizations...

...Ahmadis, along with Hindu and Christian minorities, are hounded by state-sponsored discrimination and right-wing propaganda campaigns...

...What was newer was the scope of actions targeting women...

...The righteous zeal of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba members accepts no boundaries in their crusade against "delinquency" and "obscenity...

...The attempted murder of Baloch has attracted widespread condemnation and crystallized a new movement against fear and obscurantism...

...Though each part was relatively even in population, political power and government investment were concentrated in the geographically larger Western zone...

...While Soviet tanks were deployed to prop up their own puppet regime, funds and arms from the West flooded to Zia and the anti-Soviet jihadist forces he was helping to assemble...

...The activists were responding to the expulsion of several of their comrades after Baloch, the head of a five-member disciplinary committee, acted upon allegations of vandalism, kidnapping, and the intimidation of students suspected of having "immoral fun...

...Though it was driven out of Bengal after the close of the Bangladeshi Liberation War, the IJT's standing improved in what was left of Pakistan...

...Capital development lured agricultural laborers into cities in search of employment...

...It was here that prior to his assault Baloch courted danger by counting himself among the federation's allies...

...In Islamabad, a city of 1.7 million, a mere dozen turned out to mourn the slain...

...The battles on Lahore's campuses have repercussions that reverberate far beyond the ivory tower...

...Referring to the IJT as "brownshirts," she compares their intimidation on campus to that of the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas...

...The gains are too few and the dangers too great to risk provocation...

...The IJT, ostensibly a religious organization, was included in the ban for a time, but its ideological counterparts were not, further cementing decades of right-wing campus hegemony...

...Students mingle about the commons amid other stunning bronze casts, the smell of marijuana emanates from one corner while in another a student with his prayer mat in one hand distributes fliers for an improvisational theater troupe with the other...

...Though a spirited 1980s campaign kept the National College of the Arts free of their influence, over the past three decades Islamists have become a hegemonic force at Punjab University and others like it...

...In total, almost a thousand academics were targeted, abducted, and very often bayoneted to death before being dumped in mass graves outside Dhaka...

...It was the annual congress of Tabqati Jeddojuhd (The Struggle...

...Across the street from this enclave, past an intersection with monuments of a different sort—the Zamzama Gun, a relic of British imperialism immortalized in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and a mounted fighter jet, a symbol of the military caste that filled the post-partition power vacuum—lies the University of Punjab...