The Fanonite

The Jamaat-e-Islami  student wing has a sordid history of collaboration with dictatorships and state repression. On campuses they terrorize students for not adhering to a moral code, which in their own case remains highly flexible. Back when I was studying at the University of Peshawar, I was once issued a threat by the ‘Nazim’ (campus leader for the student wing) for visiting the campus cafeteria with fellow students of the other gender. While he was talking to me, I noticed a little girl who was scavenging through the garbage heap nearby and picking up orange peels which still had some edible traces left. I turned to him and asked if he has ever spared a thought to the condition of girls such as those? “God has assigned all of us our destinies; if she is scavenging for food, than that is her destiny”. I thought the reply was disgusting more than it was baffling. “Then my destiny is to sit there with my classmates”, I said, “whereas yours is to see if one day you can get yourself a life”.

The fellow left in a huff promising to call some people who are going to come and teach me a lesson.At this moment, some of my classmates arrived, and they surrounded the ’sufi-seb’ (pushto slang for someone with a beard, which even a few years back weren’t all too common), and asked him to explain his problem.

As it happened, no one ever came to rough me up. Instead they visited the director of our institute and threatened him that if they see any public interaction between males and females on the campus, they are going to come and trash his building. The director dutifully obliged by discouraging such interaction. The female students were too scared then onwards to visit the cafeteria in male company.

And all this happened before September 11, when the Jamaat-e-Islami had become all but marginal.

It is important to make a distinction here: unlike Hamas and Hizbullah, the subcontinental Islamists do not have any record of social or economic assistance to the poor or an emancipatory rhetoric; they are largely reactionary statists. As the following news confirms, they are always amenable to accomodation with tyrants.

Imran Khan was detained minutes after arriving at a student demonstration against Pakistan’s emergency rule today.

This was the first time the opposition politician had appeared in public since President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule 11 days ago.

Some 200 students cheered and lifted Khan into the air when he appeared at Punjab University in Lahore. But seconds later men in plainclothes grabbed him and pushed him into a nearby building, according to witnesses.

Khan was detained by students from Jamaat-i-Islami, an opposition religious party that also opposes emergency rule but apparently did not want the relatively moderate Khan to be allowed on the campus.

The students later turned him over to police.

Khan is now being held at an undisclosed location, and will be charged with crimes yet to be determined, a senior police official told the Associated Press… 

Khan, who leads a small but outspoken political party, was placed under house arrest on November 3 after the state of emergency was declared, but the cricketer-turned-politician slipped the net days later and had been in hiding ever since.

He earlier said he would launch a joint opposition campaign with Benazir Bhutto if she agreed to boycott Gen Musharraf’s elections.

Ms Bhutto, who returned from eight years of self-imposed exile last month, has yet to announce such a move.