The Tunnel and the Light

There is a peculiar kind of education that fills the head and starves the mind. It hands us degrees, titles and a vocabulary of certainty, yet equips us with nothing but a tunnel vision, a narrow passage through which we see only what we have already decided to see. I learned this not from a book but from a conversation with a friend, a learned man with a doctorate in Islamic studies from a renowned university. We were discussing the Constitution of Pakistan, which stipulates that only a Muslim may become the President or the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic. I asked him, with no intention to provoke and every intention to understand, why not a non-Muslim? To sharpen the question, I offered a contrast, India, a country whose majority is not Muslim, once chose APJ Abdul Kalam, a Muslim, as its president. He was a missile scientist and a teacher who read the Gita and the Quran with equal reverence, and he became known as the People’s President. His faith was neither his qualification nor his disqualification. His character was his credential. My friend’s reply came quickly, like water from a tap left running. “A non-Muslim stands incapacitated to run the affairs of an Islamic country,” he said, “while a Muslim is qualified to head a non-Muslim state.” He was not reasoning. He was regurgitating what he was finding hard to rein in. The sentence was perfectly symmetrical and perfectly empty, because it assumed what it needed to prove. Incapacitated by what? Intellect, integrity, administrative skill? If a Muslim is fit to govern a non-Muslim land, then governing is evidently a matter of competence rather than creed, and the asymmetry collapses under its own weight. Notice the double standard folded inside that answer. When Muslims are a minority, we demand that the majority treat us as citizens first and believers second. We cite pluralism, constitutional equality and the guarantee of opportunity. When we are the majority, the same principle becomes an inconvenience, and we reach for theology to justify what is, at bottom, a politics of exclusion. A principle that applies only when it benefits us is not a principle at all. It is a convenience dressed in robes.

It is worth remembering what the founder of this country imagined. On 11 August 1947, addressing the Constituent Assembly, Jinnah told the nation that religion “has nothing to do with the business of the State.” His first cabinet included Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Hindu, as Minister for Law and Labour, and Sir Zafarullah Khan as Foreign Minister. Justice A. R. Cornelius, a Christian, later served as Chief Justice of Pakistan with a reputation for erudition and incorruptibility that many of his successors might envy. The country began, in other words, with a wider door than the one we have since constructed. Nor does Islamic history support the tunnel. The Charter of Medina bound Muslims, Jews and others into a single political community with mutual obligations. When his persecuted followers needed refuge, the Prophet directed them to Abyssinia, to the court of a Christian king whose realm, he said, was a place where no one was wronged. Caliph Umar, entering Jerusalem, guaranteed the safety of its Christians, their churches and their crosses, and declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lest his followers later claim it as a mosque. Our tradition, read generously, is far more spacious than the interpretations we have placed upon it. There is, of course, a defence of the clause. Its advocates argue that a state founded in the name of Islam should be led by one who believes in its foundational ideals, just as a secular republic expects its leader to uphold secular ones. The argument deserves a hearing, and I do not doubt the sincerity of those who make it. But it conflates two things, the ideology of a state and the identity of its servant. A president swears to uphold the Constitution. He is not asked to be the Imam. A judge, an engineer, a general or a physician is not required to present a certificate of faith to do the work well. Why should the highest office alone treat religion as a credential for governance? Yet, if belief were a guarantee of good rule, our history would not be so crowded with believing rulers who plundered the treasury and trampled the weak.

The cost of this exclusion is not abstract. A child born in Pakistan to a Hindu, Christian or Sikh family grows up knowing that, however brilliant and however devoted to this soil, there are doors in the republic bolted against them. Such a message does not stay confined to the highest offices. It seeps downward into classrooms, workplaces and neighbourhoods, teaching the majority that minorities are guests and teaching the minorities to measure their ambition against a ceiling. A nation that tells a portion of its children they may never lead has already told them they are never wholly home. This brings me back to my friend and his tunnel. He was neither a wicked man nor an unintelligent one. He had read widely, in the narrow sense in which a man reads widely along a single road. His education had taught him to defend rather than to question, to cite rather than to weigh. It had given him answers before it had given him curiosity. That is the mark of a bigoted education. It does not merely fill the mind with wrong things, it closes the door through which better things might enter. A tunnel is, after all, an excellent way to travel in a straight line and a terrible way to see the landscape. What would an education that opens rather than narrows look like? It would teach that the Quran’s insistence on justice, even toward those we dislike, is the beginning of citizenship and not its end. It would invite the student to ask why, and treat the question as an act of faith rather than a threat to it. It would hold up Kalam not as an embarrassment to be explained away but as a mirror in which to examine our own laws. And it would remind us that a state’s greatness is measured not by the religion of its ruler but by whether the weakest citizen can look at that ruler and see a fellow human being obliged to serve them. I put my question to my friend in search of an answer, and I did not receive one. However, I hope, as a writer and as a citizen, that the question will outlive his reply, and that one day a child of this country will ask it and meet not a regurgitated reflex but an honest answer.