ISAS Briefs

For half a week in January 2013, many eyes in South Asia, and in much of the world, were focused on a maverick Mullah in Pakistan by the name of Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri. Many saw him, and still do, as a harbinger of change. A Pakistani combination of India’s Anna Hazare and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, he appeared suddenly like a comet on that nation’s political horizon, summoning up the largest crowd ever gathered in that challenged country’s capital, Islamabad, and nearly toppled the government. Just as suddenly, he melted away as did those myriads of followers who braved the rain and cold at his bidding. Pakistan’s version of Xenophon’s ‘March of the Ten Thousand’ was over for now. But not without having left an indelible imprint on its political fabric, demonstrating that people’s power still mattered in a system that, through most of its history, has been dominated by the proverbial uniformed ‘man on horseback’ or the military. Qadri appeared for a time to render the streets of Islamabad chaotic. But those gathered around him saw his actions as reflecting a cause: not just for restoring honesty in governance but seeking to do that by using as the tool the tolerant, syncretistic, and Sufistic face of Islam which represents Pakistan’s values, urgings and ethos much more than that fierce, fundamentalist, and Salafist version that has been relentlessly battering the Pakistani nation, exhausting it, and sharpening the public’s yearning for a positive change.