Waiting for Imam Mahdi and Development: The Case of ... - Informit

chapter 4

Waiting for Imam Mahdi and Development: The Case of Pakistan Nadeem Malik

During a recent visit to Pakistan, I stayed at my sister’s house in Karachi for a few days. I arrived in the evening. It was extremely pleasant to chat and gossip with my sister, her family members and some, aunts, uncles, and other relatives who joined us. Love, affection, joy and witty exchange pervaded the air. The night was reinvigorating and energising, full of harmonious colours and beauty. The next morning the scene changed. I learned that while we had celebrated my sister’s neighbour had been kidnapped for ransom. A car had followed him as he drove home from his office. When he stopped in his car port, two men kidnapped him at gunpoint. Three days later he was released after a ransom of one million rupees was paid. The warmth of my first night in Karachi had given way to chaos and insecurity. Later, when I met the man’s family, I asked why they had not reported the crime to the police. His wife said: Do you think that the pervasiveness of such criminal activities can exist without police being party to the criminal mafia? Police stations are on open sale. Officers in charge of police stations bid for police stations that offer lucrative

income. When protectors become thieves, what can ordinary citizens do? They can only pay the ransom or die. They are helpless. Only God can do something. Within a few days in Pakistan, it was clear that in addition to an increase in extreme poverty, rising prices of goods, shortages of electricity, gas and petrol, and an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, the security of life and property had become a major concern for citizens. To add to the misery, religious extremists aspiring to change the character of the state and society in accordance with medieval Islamic principles had become more active and stronger. Though in a minority, they were well organised, vocal and equipped with weapons and ammunition. Bomb blasts in major cities including the capital, Islamabad, had become frequent. Neither the writ of the state, nor any political party that might aid people to set things right was visible. In this context, most citizens seemed frustrated, helpless and fretful. They lacked political organisation and direction. Unable to solve their problems through their own actions, and unable to rely on the state, they felt dependent on possibilities offered by more distant external forces. As a rickshaw driver told me, ‘These are the signs of the coming of the day of resurrection, and we are helpless to do anything. The state does not provide security. It is high time that Imam Mahdi must arrive’. The Muslims believe that Imam Mahdi will appear along with Jesus before the coming of the Day of Resurrection (Yaum alQiyamah). He is an eschatological and messianic figure whom God will decree to appear on earth for the purpose of freeing the world of tyranny and injustice. He is twelfth Imam, after whom no-one else will be sent by God. The above anecdotes capture the sense of chaos and helplessness that pervades Pakistan today. In addition, however, they expose the myth of development in countries such as Pakistan where the dream of civility has turned into a nightmare. This essay explores the conjunction of waiting and Imam Mahdi at three levels: as a transcendental religious experience; as a phenomenon that is reinforced through modern development discourse; and as a conjunction of social and political chaos in a society that perpetually waits for the arrival of a messianic figure.

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Waiting and Imam Mahdi: A Transcendental Religious Experience When I asked the rickshaw driver why people keep waiting for Mahdi, he said, ‘Because we have belief in God and he has promised to send Mahdi to alter the world for a better human future’. To wait for Mahdi is to believe in God. It is God who leads people to live a moral life. And it is on the basis of their moral conduct on earth that God will decide how they shall experience life after death. The conjunction of God and waiting displaces people from their time and place and takes them into an imaginary space where there is no time. Waiting, they imagine, ends on the Day of Resurrection. The notion of a present time becomes an experience of fear and of waiting for the Day of Judgment. Thus, as they age, people wish that waiting for death will not end soon. Waiting provides them with relief and the opportunity to correct their moral deeds and be fit for doomsday. People wait for God’s blessings with regard to living a better moral life; they wait also for his blessings with regard to their concerns about poverty, the insecurity of jobs, property and life, and the lack of leadership and of satisfactory political and social organisation. Waiting for a messiah emerges when the state of decline of the moral, social, political and economic life of people become so acute that they find themselves stuck in a mire of helplessness. In such circumstances, an all-merciful God might send Imam Mahdi. The messiah gives meaning to God’s existence and to his powers. If he comes he can solve people’s problems, but people’s problems are endless, and can never be solved in absolute terms. If this were possible, humanity would have been already leading a perfect moral life free from any mundane difficulties. After all, God has already sent so many prophets. The perpetual waiting for a messiah thus gives meaning to the existence of God indefinitely. In Pakistan, therefore, people still wait for Imam Mahdi, despite many powerful religious figures who in the past had claimed to be Imam Mahdi.1 Imam Mahdi as a historical figure may represent the past or as a messianic figure may represent the future. He does not belong to the ‘present’ because he never comes. It is this absence of the ‘present’ that keeps him alive in the subconscious of Muslim communities and it is this ‘absence of the present’ that maintains people’s religious

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faith in the existence and power of God. Waiting, in this context, brings an indefinite hope of a better future.

Waiting for the Messiah and Development in Pakistan In 2005 in a tehsil 2 in Punjab, I asked a peasant what he thought about ‘development’. He shared a joke: Once a prince from one of the Middle Eastern states went to Europe in winter and saw people skiing. He got fascinated and said to his finance minister, ‘Wow … see, this is what we call a modern world. Can’t we have the same sports in our country too?’ The finance minister replied saying that he would get in touch with some development consultants to ask how they could have skiing in their country and become modernised. The minister did get in touch with a consultant and hired him. The consultant told them that it was not a big deal to have skiing in a Middle Eastern country. All they needed was to import a hundred thousand skis. The prince acted upon the recommendation, but when he put on the skis, he found that there was no snow. Instead, there was only sand under a scorching sun. The prince got angry and told his minister that they had been cheated: ‘How could we ski in sand?’ The minister calmed him, saying that he would contact the consultant again. The consultant said not to worry, as he was sending many hundreds of thousands of tons of snow too. The peasant’s jocular story illustrated the irrelevance of development models by allowing the understanding that all too often planned projects never run to completion; the people are kept waiting for the snow.3 The entire discourse of development, therefore, becomes a discourse of waiting for development. Since the inception of the development discourse after 1945, waiting for development has significantly defined the relationship between the first world and the underdeveloped countries. The nature of this relationship is one which equates ‘development’ with adulthood and ‘underdevelopment’ with infancy and immaturity. The temporal


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lag of postcoloniality is inscribed onto developing nations, anthropomorphised as less-then-fully-formed subjects, whose growth and maturity has to be supervised and monitored by those who have reached adulthood—that is, by the West.4 The assumption implied by this outlook was that underdeveloped countries could emulate the West by industrialisation and by following certain social, political and economic models and trajectories. In short, the development paradigm assumes that all countries, and all peoples, share a single ontological time. It does not acknowledge that different societies experience time and space in different ways. The notion of a single, pan-human ontological time is, at best, a hope that everyone may come to live in relative peace and harmony. Even in an age of globalisation with cable networks reaching into some of the remotest communities in the world, that notion is mere illusion; it is far removed from the realty. The following anecdote will illustrate my point. In 2000, while doing research on civil society and governance in Pakistan, I visited a remote village in the province of Sindh. Here I saw a television connected to a cable network that had been placed on a small tea stall to attract customers. Most of the customers were young boys who would spend the evening watching foreign channels. One day while I chatted with the boys a priest from the local mosque joined us and spoke to me: They keep watching nudity and violence on television, waste their time and do not work. They have started living in a world of strange fantasies. They are becoming immoral and no longer respect their parents and elders. They are getting spoiled. The culture of infidels has started dominating us and is affecting our social norms. It seems that doomsday is coming soon and we need Imam Mahdi to come and show the path of pious living to the new generation. The youths, by contrast, had a different view. They said that they did not watch nudity. Rather, they argued, the television informed

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them about what was happening around the world. They learned of various hairstyles, modes of dress, and foods. They could watch news that national television networks did not provide, as a result of state censorship. They agreed that Imam Mahdi should arrive, but only to provide them with what they had been seeing on the foreign television networks. The debate between the priest and the youths highlights their different aspirations and reasons for waiting for Imam Mahdi. But the fact remains that the electronic reach of global information to remote communities in developing countries produces paradoxical outcomes. On one hand, it provides knowledge, entertainment and enlightenment and, on the other, creates ideals and aspirations that can never be achieved. This results in disillusionment. An ideal of a single ontological time that weaves all humanity together is far removed from the real lives of people in developing countries. There is no recognition of the ‘present’ circumstances of people within development policy. The focus of development policy is with either the past or the future. For instance, policy makers often disparage less-developed societies for their adherence to ancient philosophies or to decadent ways of life, which they believe belong to humanity’s past.5 Such disparagement is then followed by prescriptions about ways in which these societies could improve in the future. The emphasis is on either the past or the future. Such premises were implicit in the writings of the architects of development studies—the economist Walt W Rostow, the sociologist Talcott Parsons, and the political scientist Gabriel A Almond—when in 1950s and 1960s they enunciated the modernisation project in an attempt to contain the so-called soviet socialism.6 That project promoted the idea of ‘difference’ between East and West rather than of ‘contradiction’ created by an unjust world economic system. It asserted that the difference could be overcome through technocratic and instrumental means of development. However, this could be achieved only if all people shared a single ontological time, the ultimate standard of which was provided by the West. In other words, the proponents of development stressed that if the ‘rest’ are to develop they should follow the stages of development outlined in the Western development models. Their intentions, however, have been hindered by pressures of internal evolution in several countries in the developing world. And their actions


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have sometimes brought ‘… massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression, the debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence’.7 Moreover, through the decade of the nineties, there has been a 100 per cent increase in the world’s wealth and, simultaneously, a 100 per cent increase in poverty.8 More importantly, in the case of Pakistan, the development paradigms prescribed by aid agencies and followed by the ruling elite have led the country into social and political chaos. The consequences of development based on expectation of a single ontological time are not encouraging. The dream of development has turned into a nightmare9, which belongs to the ‘present’. The ‘wretched of the earth’ are forced to live in a constant state of limbo; they live between the past and the future with no present. Such a state of affairs has considerably strengthened a belief that Imam Mahdi will come some day and renew the world. Keep waiting.

Waiting, Chaos and Imam Mahdi

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), Salvador Dali, 1976.

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The circumstances that eventually led to the Spanish civil war were the subject of Salvador Dali’s 1936 painting Premonition of Civil War. The image reveals what many texts do not. Through a metonymic association of the human body with that of a nation state, Dali shows how social and political chaos leading to civil war may destroy the very structure of a nation state. The chaos emerges when various parts of the same body start destroying each other. A conjunction of chaos and waiting can be articulated in the light of this painting. Chaos may lead to either ‘waiting for a new order’, or to further chaos. In the former case, it could be an outcome of conscious political activity; in the latter case, it could be an outcome of a spontaneous process leading to a series of further disruptions. I am not implying that the world is certain, linear and predictable. As Nietzsche2 proposed, for ‘all eternity’ it might be ‘chaos’ and it might be fruitless to search for an underlying logic, rationality and certainty that is based on modern ideologies, rather than focusing on the unexpected, the surprise and the emergent3. But, as depicted in Dali’s painting, the world has form and structure. It is not ahistorical. Thus I argue, chaos arises through dialectic of the predictable and unpredictable. Dali’s painting represents raw nature and the absence of any conscious social and political endeavour. It provided a premonition of civil war in Spain. It could equally provide a metaphor for the outcomes of irrelevant development models. It reveals that where chaos arises spontaneously and lacks direction then waiting for chaos is dreadful. The story of chaos in Pakistan may be appreciated in the light of Dali’s painting. Currently, two out of four provinces, North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, after endlessly waiting to be free of the central state’s unjust excesses, have commenced armed struggles for autonomy. Thousands of people have been killed. Uneven development, and an unjust allocation of national resources, have given birth to hatred and to a lack of trust among people of different provinces, and an uncertain law and order situation is becoming worse. The economy is in a state of constant decline. Daily newspapers are filled with reports on crimes. Social chaos has been compounded by the widespread increase in the new kinds


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of crime—especially related to illegal drugs—and criminals have substantially greater fire power. Since the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been awash with guns. Kalashnikov and other automatic weapons have become ubiquitous; many are available to rent in Karachi on an hourly basis. According to some estimates, Pakistan has approximately 7400 convicted killers awaiting execution.4 Crimes against women are at a historic high nationwide and have affected women’s mobility. During my recent visit to Pakistan my mother showed my daughter our old family album. There was a picture of my mother, aged 14 years, riding a bicycle on a main road. My daughter was surprised and shocked because, today, it is unimaginable that women of any age would ride a bicycle on the road. The nation state of Pakistan was born in a context of chaos. Hundreds and thousands of migrant Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims both in India and Pakistan were killed as a consequence of the largest human migration after Aryans. Later, the policy makers (mostly military elite) laid down the foundations of the country based on conflicting ideals. On the one hand, they followed the colonial legacy of a modern nation state while, at the same time, they tried to give it the semblance of a medieval Islamic state. The conflict gave birth to a parallel judicial system in the long run—one colonial and the other based on Islamic Shariah. The same was true of the educational system. Some children who studied in elite and other good schools were exposed to a broad, open-minded, inclusive and religiously tolerant world view; others who studied in madrassahs were encouraged to aspire to the establishment of a medieval Islamic state in Pakistan. The conflicting ideals of the state and society hindered the process of state formation. Even today Pakistan lacks a constitution agreed by all political actors in all its provinces. There is an ongoing dispute over amendments introduced by the military during its direct rule over several years in Pakistan. It seems that the state that emerged from chaos has been taken over by it. The writ of law is no longer visible. Both the poor and the rich suffer. The latter have resources, which they fear could be taken away from them. They have no solutions and feel helpless to set things right. The military has dominated the state and politics through the entire history of Pakistan. It has systematically dismantled all political and civil societal institutions that could give meaning

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to people’s lives and provide direction for the resolution of their problems. The consequence is significant social and political chaos. The paradox citizens face is that their dependence on the militarydominated state is almost complete, and yet they have no faith in the state because it has never delivered Chaos has made the ‘present’ an unliveable experience and people wait for further cycles of chaos. For those who lose hope, suicide becomes destiny; there are hundreds of such individual suicides every year. They are ubiquitous in poor neighbourhoods but occur among the rich as well. An essential condition for living in Pakistan today is, therefore, a hope in the future and the possibility of pleasure in past memories. Though future peace is considered an essential aspect of development, longing and constant waiting for it to come is intense. A comment by an educated, jobless young man illustrates the point. When asked whether he would prefer development or peace and security, he responded: I would choose peace, as I might be able to live on the minimum possible resources, but I don’t want to wait to be killed in a bomb blast, or by a petty thief snatching a meagre 100 rupees while walking on a street. Moreover, a deteriorating law and order situation takes away local as well as foreign investment. You must have observed that a lot of local industrialists and those who have wealth are investing abroad in the Middle East and elsewhere. Foreign investment is already on a decline. When asked, further, what solution he would propose and what role he thought people could play, he replied that only God might know about solutions. All strategies to solve problems have failed in Pakistan and there is no leadership that could show some light. The dis-empowered and marginalized people can only wait for Imam Mahdi. While the conjunction of waiting, development and Imam Mahdi and that of waiting, chaos and Imam Mahdi appears similar in terms of the absence of the ‘present’ and the displacement of people from time and space, the urgency of waiting for Imam Mahdi is more acute in the latter case.


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Conclusion The essay has demonstrated the conjunction of waiting and Imam Mahdi at three levels: religious, developmental and chaos. In the first case, Imam Mahdi, as messiah, represents the future: he is always absent from the ‘present’ because he never comes. Faith in a perpetual waiting for Imam Mahdi gives meaning to the existence of God indefinitely. For many people Imam Mahdi offers an ultimate sense of security in an environment of chaos and underdevelopment. Waiting for development in developing countries may further strengthen belief in a messiah for, as in the previous discourse, people are forever situated between ‘past’ and the ‘future’. The ‘present’ is absent and this absence is felt as helplessness, as an inability to set things right. People become indifferent to the ‘present’. Finally, the prevailing chaos in Pakistan as an outcome of various political and historical circumstances that cannot be managed through development not only strengthens the belief in a messianic figure but also increases the intensity of waiting for such a figure. Waiting and helplessness go together. The latter at a collective level can itself be a product of a state of displacement of people from their time and place such that they lose a sense of the ‘present’. One explanation of waiting, therefore, could be that it entails loss of the notion of the ‘present’. The people’s displacement from their time and place and the loss of a sense of the ‘present’ gives birth to the phenomenon of waiting for Imam Mahdi. Another aspect of waiting is associated with the fact that at each phase of development there is something that has yet to be developed—as absolute development does not exist. This ‘something’ exists in ‘present time’ but is ambiguous; it is, in the final analysis, nothingness. In this sense development without waiting is not conceivable. One of the tragedies of the world, I argue, is that, despite the promises of modernisation and development by the ruling elites of both the First World and developing nations, people in developing countries such as Pakistan still live in a ‘world of waiting’, a world in which they lose the sense of the ‘present’. It is this concept of waiting that underlies the chaos of present-day Pakistan and, ultimately, impacts the entire region of South Asia and reaches further to the globe.

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Notes 1

For example: Bab (founder of the religion of Babism) in 1844 and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad during the British period in India have claimed to be Imam Mahdi. 2 A tehsil is an administrative unit smaller than a district in the localgovernment system in Pakistan. 3 The joke also reflects the peasant’s (who did not have any formal education) organic intellectual ability to reflect on such a complicated phenomenon in simple words. It is important to note in this context that the Dubai government in the UAE even brought ice for skating in a small indoor recreational area; it could never introduce skiing, as the country never has snowfall. Even skating is still not part of their culture the way it is in countries that experience extreme cold. 4 Gupta, p. 11. 5 Escobar. 6 For detailed discussion on this topic see Wiarda, Non-Western Theories of Development, Harcourt Brace & Company, USA, 1999. 7 Escobar. 8 Stiglitz. 9 Escobar. 10 Nietzsche, as cited in D Milovanovic (ed), Chaos, Criminology, and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)order, 1997. 11 Ibid., 1997. 12 Daily Times, ‘Death penalty and increasing crime in Pakistan.’


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