Lost Identity

People of Pakistan have nothing in common other than faith. It is their faith that serves as a binding force for a group of people who otherwise belong to diverse ethnic backgrounds. Most of the times, nationalism is defined on the basis of ethnicity. For example, Arabs are an ethnic group, and they have a very strong nationalism. Similarly Turks, Germans, French and majority of all other nations, but Pakistanis are classified as a nation on the basis of religion.

What if someone snatches their religion from them. Would they survive as a nation after that? Or would they just disintegrate into their respective ethnic backgrounds?

Observations show that whenever religion becomes weak, ethnic differences become strong. For example in 1916, it was very easy for Lawrence of Arabia to convince the Arabs to revolt against Ottomans and build an empire of their own. It was a time when Islam was losing its strength and people were slowly unifying as ethnic groups instead of religious groups. So, as long as religion was playing an important role in the lives of the people of middle east, they lived together as a single nation. But as soon as people lost their faith, they got divided. It doesn’t mean that they seized practicing Islam, they just seized giving that much importance to religion as it was given some centuries ago. Same is the case with the people of Pakistan. This nation can easily be disintegrated once someone rips off their faith.

After Pakistan got involved in the war on terror as an ally of The US, its governments had to fight religious extremism on a very basic level. To change the mind set of people, Gen. Musharraf started a media campaign to reduce the influence of religion on the minds of people and persuade them to adopt a more secular mindset. He introduced a term ‘Enlightened Moderation’, which was defined as practicing  Islam moderately, as opposed to practicing fundamentalist version of Islam. But the media campaign that followed the introduction of this ideology wasn’t even ‘moderately Islamic’. Instead of targeting the extremist mindset, it targeted even the moderate Muslims and attempted to marginalize or almost eliminate the factor of religion from the life of the Pakistani people. This bore two major drawbacks. First, it polarized the society and eventually encouraged extremism, indirectly. Secondly, it reduced the influence of religion on the people of Pakistan, and thus they lost their identity. Now there is more ethnic discrimination in Pakistan than it was ever before, because people are slowly forgetting the faith that was holding them together. Besides the extremist mindset has been fueled by this propaganda campaign because fundamentalist Muslims perceive it as a threat to their religion, and thus they get motivation, instead of discouragement. 

A better way to handle this situation was to educate the people of Pakistan about the real Islam. The teachings of Islam can be misinterpreted to fuel terrorism, but they can also be taught in their true sense to end this problem. An extremist Muslim will never turn an ear towards any media campaign that attempts to marginalize Islam, but campaign that preaches peace and tolerance in the light of Islamic teachings will have quite an effect on that person.