VIEW: Pakistan, Islam and Indian media stereotypes

Friday, February 03, 2006
VIEW: Pakistan, Islam and Indian media stereotypes —Yoginder Sikand

“[T]he limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes”

Contrary to Indian media representations, the average Pakistani is just about as religious or otherwise as the average Indian. The average Pakistani is certainly not the wild-eyed fanatic baying for non-Muslim blood or waging violent jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony that our media would have us believe. Like the average Indian, he is emotionally attached to and culturally rooted in his religion, but he does not wear it on his sleeve; nor does it dictate every thought or act of his. In fact, the thing that first strikes the Indian visitor to Pakistan is how almost identical the average Pakistani is, looks and behaves to the average north Indian.

Almost all the many people I met in the course of a recent month-long visit to Pakistan that took me to several places in Punjab and Sindh do not even remotely fit the description of the average Pakistani peddled by our media. Islamist radical groups undeniably do have an important presence in parts of Pakistan, but they certainly do not command widespread popular support all over the country. This explains the continual dismal performance of religious parties in every Pakistani election. Despite concerted efforts by Islamist and mullah-based parties to establish a theocracy in the country, Pakistani politics are not dominated by religion as much as by economic, ethnic and regional concerns. It is, therefore, crucial not to exaggerate the influence of radical religious outfits in Pakistan, as the Indian media generally does.

Indian media descriptions of Pakistan tend to portray Islam in the country as a seamless monolith. The variety of local expressions of Islam are consistently overlooked so as to reinforce the image of a single version of Islam that is defined by the most radical of Islamist groups. The fact, however, is, that most Punjabis and Sindhis, that is to say a majority of Pakistanis, ascribe to or are associated with the sufi traditions which are anathema for such Islamists. Popular sufism is deeply-rooted in Pakistani soil and provides a strong counter to radical Islamist groups and their exclusivist agenda. Many sufis were folk heroes, radicals in their own right, bitterly critiquing tyrannical rulers as well as Muslim and Hindu priests. This is why they exercised a powerful influence on the masses, irrespective of religion. This explains, in part, why Islamist radicals are so fiercely opposed to the traditions that have developed over the centuries around such figures.

The popular sufi tradition in large parts of Pakistan thus limits the appeal of radical Islamists, making the chances of an Islamist takeover of the country a remote possibility. In recent years, it is true, these groups have gained particular salience and strength, but this is said to be less a reflection of a growing popular commitment to the Islamist cause than to other factors. One of these is the role of the state. Although the ideological founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged Pakistan as a secular Muslim state, successive Pakistani governments have used Islam to bolster their own frail support base, exactly in the same manner as the Congress and the BJP have done with Hinduism in the Indian case. Islam has also been used to weld together a number of the country’s ethnic groups that have little in common other than their profession of Islam, in the same way in which advocates of both ‘soft’ Hindutva, such as the Congress, and ‘hard’ Hindutva, such as the BJP, have sought to invoke Brahminical Hinduism to define the Indian nation state. Hindutva ideologues propagate a form of Hindu ‘nationalism’ that has no space for Indians of other faiths, and is, in fact, based on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindu ‘others’. Creating a Hindu identity in this fashion is predicated on excising all elements of culture and tradition that Hindus are seen to share with others. The same has happened in the case of official and radical versions of Islam in Pakistan. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, and certainly not the dominant, form of Islam in Pakistan, as my interaction with numerous Pakistanis from different walks of life revealed to me.

“Radical Islamist groups are not a true reflection or representative of Pakistani Islam”, a social activist friend of mine from Sindh explains. “State manipulation of religion”, he argues, “has had a major role to play in promoting radical Islamism in Pakistan”, which, he says, “is largely an expression of elite politics and Western imperialist manipulation”. “To add to state patronage of such groups”, he points out, “there is the fact of mounting economic and social inequalities, sustained military rule, the continued stranglehold of feudal lords and the absence of mechanisms for expressing democratic dissent, all of which have enabled radical Islamist groups to assert the claim of representing normative Islam against other competing versions and visions of the faith.”

In some parts of Pakistan, such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, he says, electoral support for Islamists “reflects anti-American sentiments rather than popular demands for theocratic rule”. Such groups, he says, have gained added strength from the ongoing conflict in Kashmir by “tapping into Pakistani nationalist sentiments on this issue in the same way as Hindutva groups used the Kashmir conflict in India, both seeking to present the issue in religious terms”. “In short”, he claims, “the limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes”.

“The task before Indians and Pakistanis seriously concerned about the future of our common subcontinent”, says another friend of mine, a journalist from Lahore, “is to rescue our religious traditions from the monopolistic claims of the radicals. Islamism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India feed on each other while claiming to be vociferous foes. We need to revive popular forms of religion, such as sufism and bhakti, that are accepting of other faiths and that at the same time are socially engaged and critique the system of domination that produces radicalism as a reaction while at the same time using it as a means of stifling challenges to it.”

The writer is post-doctoral fellow at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden. He also edits a web-magazine called Qalandar, which can be accessed at www.islaminterfaith.org.

Source: Daily Times

Exxon Mobil posts record profit for any U.S. company

By STEVE QUINN, AP Business Writer 50 minutes ago

DALLAS - Exxon Mobil Corp. posted record profits for any U.S. company on Monday — $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter and $36.13 billion for the year — as the world's biggest publicly traded oil company benefited from high oil and gas prices and demand for refined products. The results exceeded Wall Street expectations and Exxon shares rose nearly 3 percent in morning trading.

The company's earnings amounted to $1.71 per share for the October-December quarter, up 27 percent from $8.42 billion, or $1.30 per share, in the year ago quarter. The result topped the then-record quarterly profit of $9.92 billion Exxon posted in the third quarter of 2005.

Exxon's profit for the year was also the largest annual reported net income in U.S. history, according to Howard Silverblatt, a stock market analyst for Standard & Poor's. He said the previous high was Exxon's $25.3 billion profit in 2004.

Exxon's results lifted the combined 2005 profits for the country's three largest integrated oil companies to more than $63 billion.

ConocoPhillips said last Wednesday that its fourth-quarter earnings rose 51 percent to $3.68 billion, while annual income climbed 66 percent to $13.53 billion. Two days later, Chevron Corp. said its fourth-quarter earnings rose 20 percent to $4.14 billion, while annual income jumped 6 percent to $14.1 billion.

The oil industry's stellar results renewed talk among some politicians for a windfall profit tax that would push companies to invest more in new production and refining capacity.

Sen. Babara Boxer, a California Democrat who sharply criticized oil executives appearing before Congress in November, struck again on Friday. She called on the Bush Administration and the Federal Trade Commission to "put an end to gouging," then suggested that FTC stood for "Friend to Chevron."

But John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington-based trade group, said Monday that the political rhetoric was "not a case based on fact."

"We invested somewhere in the order of $86 billion last year," Felmy said. "Then we have to treat investors appropriately otherwise we'd have the Eliott Spitzers of the world coming after us."

The results for Exxon's latest quarter included a $390 million gain related to a litigation settlement. Excluding special items, earnings were $10.32 billion, or $1.65 per share. The result topped Wall Street's expectations. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial predicted earnings of $1.44 per share.

Exxon shares rose $1.87 to $63.16 in morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Quarterly revenue ballooned to $99.66 billion from $83.37 billion a year ago but came in shy of the $100.72 billion Exxon posted in the third quarter, which was the first time a U.S. public company generated more than $100 billion in sales in a single quarter.

By segment, exploration and production earnings rose sharply to $7.04 billion, up $2.15 billion from the 2004 quarter, reflecting higher crude oil and natural gas prices. Production decreased by 1 percent due to the lingering effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which battered the Gulf Coast in August and September.

The company's refining and marketing segment reported $2.39 billion in earnings, as higher refining and marketing margins helped offset the residual effects of the hurricanes.

Exxon's chemicals business saw earnings, excluding special items, decline by $413 million to $835 million, as higher materials costs squeezed margins.

For the full year, net income surged to $5.71 per share from $3.89 per share in 2004. Annual revenue grew to $371 billion from $298.04 billion.

To put that into perspective, Exxon's revenue for the year exceeded Saudi Arabia's estimated 2005 gross domestic product of $340.5 billion, according to statistics maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Source: AP via Yahoo! News