I personally have always favoured a secular state for this very reason — the alternative i.e. Mullah (cleric) Raj promises nothing but continuous strife and gun violence in the name of God. The mullahs, especially the antecedents of Maulana Abdul Aziz and Allama Tahir Ashrafi, such as Ataullah Shah Bokhari and Mufti Mahmood, had opposed the creation of Pakistan precisely because they felt that the Pakistan Movement was dominated by western educated professionals and lawyers. The clash had always been between the orthodoxy and Muslim modernists and reformers. It started when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan first founded the western oriented Aligarh Muslim University, which was later described as the arsenal of Muslim India in the Pakistan Movement. The rejectionist Darul Uloom Deoband believed, on the other hand, that the English language and its laws were the work of the devil. The mullahs had calculated through empirical evidence in history that there is no way for the religious clergy to overthrow the secular Muslim rulers in a Muslim majority society; the main reason being that Islam just does not have a church like Christianity does and, therefore, the question of the clergy presiding over ecclesiastical laws does not apply. Muslim rulers through the 14 centuries have kept a tight control over the clergy, ceding them some space here and there but in the main disallowing them from imposing their will on the people.
Categories: Asia