Some thoughts on Iqbal and Jinnah's legacy

Over the course of the last several years, my news feed on the birth anniversary of Jinnah, has always been full of discussion on what the legacy of Quaid-e-Azam is. There are arguments from both the left and the right. For some Jinnah wanted a secular state and those behind the Objectives Resolution have hijacked his vision and the Pakistan state has only kept going in the wrong direction since, particularly during the Zia era. Others argue that the whole point of partition would be defeated if Pakistan was secular, and point to other sayings of Jinnah which could be interpreted to mean he didn't necessarily oppose an Islamic state either. Some in this side of the debate go to the extremes to suggest that the movement to paint Jinnah as a secularist is nothing short of a grand conspiracy to turn Pakistan into a secular state.

As such I am by default skeptical of any grand conspiracy theories especially as many in Pakistan associate everything with them, but my own take on the debate is that I don't really know what Jinnah wanted and may be, he didn't really know either because its not really clear. He said different things at different points in his life and you could sit down and interpret those things to mean a whole lot of different things. Some evidences from both sides of the debate are equally valid, so I really don't want to open up at that hornet's nest here. May be Jinnah did want a secular state, or may he didn't, may be at one point he thought a secular state would be best, but later he realized it would not work out and changed his mind. I don't think either side of the evidences are conclusive.

It would be really nice if there wasn't so much confusion. In fact its almost tragic that in 60 years since independence we haven't even been unable to form a unified national discourse on the kind of state the founder wanted us to become which is no surprise we aren't any kind of state to write home about. That's why I think we should move on. Jinnah played an important role in founding the state, but we shouldn't have to stick to his vision if that's not what we want to be today or if it isn't what is morally correct.

Although I understand and appreciate everything Jinnah did for Pakistan, there's one man from Pakistan's history that inspires me way more than Jinnah and that's Iqbal. This post is actually about him, not Jinnah. To be specific, its about how his legacy compares to that which the liberals claims to be Jinnah's legacy.

For starters, Iqbal's vision is much less ambiguous compared to Jinnah's; he wanted Muslims to peruse an Islamic revival of their community, wrote of the dangers of blind nationalism (noting where it led Europe to), and wrote volumes upon volumes in Urdu and Persian why westernization wasn't going to take Muslims back to their glory days. He spoke passionately of a Muslim identity and of the supremacy and timelessness of Islamic Laws. He was not apologetic but he acknowledged where Muslims had gone wrong, but he didn't spare the West from any blame where they deserved it. 

The most recurrent theme of his poetry is Islam and it is very difficult if not outright impossible to suggest that he was a secularist. Contrast this with the never ending debate about Jinnah which continues to polarize people in Pakistan today (Ansar Abbasi and co. on one hand and Nadeem Paracha and co. on the other hand). In this sense Iqbal's ideas are diametrically opposed to how the liberals of today in Pakistan interpret Jinnah's legacy to be.

Although Iqbal's poetry has been a integral part of Pakistani popular culture (inspiring everyone from the likes of classical singers in Tani Sani to sufi rock artists in Junoon) there are a fair share of Pakistani liberals for whom Iqbal isn't even a considered worthy of being a national hero. In February this year Pervez Hoodbhoy, for example, wrote in an opinion ed in the Tribune that Iqbal's "prescriptions for reconstructing society cannot help us in digging ourselves out of a hole", arguing that Pakistan was much better looking into the legacy of Sir Syed for its revival, who for him was "modernist".

I don't know to what extent Jinnah was influenced by Iqbal, but it was Iqbal who brought him back to India and it was Iqbal who first suggested that idea of Pakistan. I personally find it difficult that he would have been swayed into action  by someone who he would be ideologically in disagreement with. If we should bother finding out what Jinnah's legacy is, we should also bother with what Iqbal believed. Although Iqbal and his poetry are well known amongst the masses most people do not know that Iqbal was skeptical of (although not completely opposed to) democracy, laid emphasis on spirituality and was staunchly opposed to blind westernization; he said that we should search for our renaissance from within our own unique religious, spiritual and cultural traditions (that's why he's not liked by those who want to put forward the idea that Jinnah was secular).

Personally, I am big fan of Iqbal. I will forever be grateful to the people who made me realize the worth of Iqbal's poetry. His work isn't just a literary masterpiece, but a timeless and remarkably accurate critique of the state of Muslims in the world everywhere, not just in Pakistan. I was reading the translations of some of his Persian works today and I suddenly found my self wishing I knew farsi. My Urdu, to my shame, isn't much home to write about either, so I wish had I had a better grasp of the language so I'd be able to appreciate and understand his work more. I'd like to end with these brilliant verses Iqbal wrote on the state of those Muslims who are blinded by their love of the west. I don't know who Iqbal had in mind when he wrote this, but it seems so true to this day for people like Hoodbhoy and their ilk (many of whom seem to write for the Tribune):

Tera wajood sarapa tajal-e-farang
ke to wahan ke imarat garon ke hai tameer
magar ye paiker-e-khaki khudi se hai khali
Faqat nayam hai to zar nagaro be shamsheer

Immunity or Impunity?

Just how little importance America ascribes to International Law and how shallow her cries to other members of the international community are with to respect to obeying international law is often ignored by those who like to champion America as the leader of the free, just and developed world. Here are some related but not identical recent high profile events involving American claims and counter claims of how and where diplomatic immunity is or is not applied:

1. In 2012, An American Civil judge rejected former IMF-head Dominique Strauss-Kahn's s claim of diplomatic immunity in his effort to dismiss a civil suit filed by a hotel housekeeper who claimed that the French leader had sexually assaulted her. The charges against him were eventually dropped by the prosecution it self.

2. Summer of 2013, BBC quoted then British Foreign Secretary William Hague as saying that U.S. Embassy had yet to pay 63,000 congestion fines; American officials claimed diplomatic immunity shielded them from the charges.

2. Hillary Clinton her self received a parking ticket in London in the same year for $125 after her security detail parked her limo near an event but failed to pay the required fee for the spot.

3. This is the same Hillary Clinton who as as a junior senator from New York wrote of her outrage at $21.3 million in unpaid traffic (mostly parking) violations by diplomats who were stationed at the United Nations in New York. She argued that their diplomatic immunity should be revoked but later on as the Secretary of State, she insisted on invoking diplomatic immunity for Mr. Raymond Davis, who murderer two young innocent men in Lahore in broad daylight. Davis was at best a contract employe of American diplomatic staff in Pakistan and had a very weak if any legal basis for claim to diplomatic immunity.

4. After Davis incident, an American diplomatic vehicle which came to escort Davis from the scene of the crime killed another innocent person because of driving at high speed in the wrong direction.

5. Now the American administration is claiming that a much more senior diplomat, in Indian Deputy Counsel General Devyani Khobragade, who they recently arrested on charges of visa fraud (she was not paying her nanny the minimum wage as required by US Law) is not protected by diplomatic immunity, but simply by consular immunity which only gives her protection from crimes she may have committed in the course of her work as a diplomat, but not at any crimes she may have committed outside of her work. This time they may actually have a legal basis.

My point here is not just in highlighting the American double standards in invoking and revoking diplomatic privileges irrespective of the nature of the crimes involved, but I'll make that point first in any case. In more than one example from recent history American officials have insisted on revoking immunity or denying it where it applies for crimes committed on American soil by diplomatic staff of other countries, whether they are as minor as parking violations or more serious as rape or labor abuse . On the other they have insisted that their diplomatic staff and even those who aren't really staff members (but anyone who is involved with American diplomatic staff in anyway) should be protected and forgiven for even the worst kind of crimes such as manslaughter.

My second point here is to assess the whole point of immunity. As International Law students we were told that diplomatic immunity as originally conceived was meant to facilitate the work of a diplomat without undue interference from the host country, and especially to protect them from any kind of persecution if the relations between the states involved turns bitter. It was never meant as license to flagrantly violate universal principles of justice and morality (forget local and international law). But that's exactly how diplomats seemed to have behaved in these examples of abuse of these privileges.

And its not just the Americans really, the abuse of immunity privileges is so rampant every where in the world that you could rack up tons of examples (for a quick glimpse just wikipedia diplomatic immunity for a lengthy list of abuse cases). Although parking violations and car accidents are the most well documented form of immunity abuse, other diplomats have used immunity to get away without paying rents, for smoking in aircraft, domestic abuse against children, physical assault, rape and a host of other fairly serious crimes.

In theory such abuses are against both the letter and spirit of the Vienna Convention which quite explicitly states that "without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State.". But in practicality it seems diplomat treat their immunity as more akin to impunity.

It is high time for some of these absurd and excessive privileges to be either be completely revoked or seriously re-assessed in the light of these abuses, especially as they seem to be applied only selectively by countries and nearly always result in situations where diplomatic back pressure is used to either completely bypass legal protocols and technicalities or overlook or even change the facts of any case. The victims of such crimes (where they exist) are left with very little hope.

No country, America or otherwise, should be in a position where it has to tolerate a criminal amongst its ranks and wait for the whim of the host country before it can persecute it (especially more so if it involved a crime they committed against a citizen of the host state). The idea in theory is that states do this on a reciprocity basis; i.e. you give diplomats of a country these privileges so that your diplomats can enjoy the same privileges in other countries (but the selective way countries, an in particular the Unites States, apply this law) is making a mockery of the whole notion of diplomatic immunity.

Is international law no longer relevant?

Have been trying to do some independent research over the past few months to make sure whatever I learned in four years of university isn't quickly forgotten and here's the one thing I realized, hardly anyone cares about international law.

One of the sources of international law is what is known as "customary practice". In non legal terms this mean that what states normally do can be considered a source of law even though its not written down anywhere. Increasingly, the customary practice of states has been to violate the very laws that have been so painstakingly agreed upon by the international community.

Whether it is the Geneva Protocols or the UN charter, it seems they're only there to be applied when its in favor of the powerful international law flouting countries. Otherwise these laws are just there as documents that international law students should study and memorize and quote in hypothetical examples.

The customary practice of states suggests that its no big deal to carry out extrajudicial killings during war, to subject of prisoners of war to inhumane treatment, or to wage illegal wars themselves, or to give repeated threats of use of force or to negate the doctrine of sovereign equality of all states. All of these things though illegal under international law, are rampant in the practice of states.

So it begs the questions, is international law no longer relevant? Has it been rendered obsolete by the utter disregard of it by most states of the international community? And by extension does the customary practice of states (that you can disregard international law whenever it is convenient) the new default?