A Discussion with Husnul Amin, Student, Institute of Social Studies, Social Transformation in Pakistan

With: Husnul Amin Berkley Center Profile

June 23, 2008

Background: This discussion between Husnul Amin and Brady Walkinshaw took place on June 23, 2008 as part of preparatory work for a June 24-25, 2008 consultation in the Hague on roles of faith-inspired organizations in development. In the interview, Mr. Amin shares how he came to research the links between poverty, social development, and religious education in the Islamic world. He also relates how his own experiences in Pakistan have shaped his view on the relationship between Islam and development.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you came to your current position?

I am from Pakistan and I worked in Islamabad for quite a long time as a lecturer in economics, so my background derives totally from economics. However, when I was student, I was a religious political activist, actively engaged, so I was constantly thinking about issues of faith while I was studying. What confused me was to understand why secular NGOs and development actors were ignoring this whole area of religious movements, madrassas, and religious institutions. These actors are actively participating in development activities. This puzzle was my motivation to study religion in the context of development in Pakistan.
As a student in class, I joined an Islamist student movement, Islami Jamiat Talab Pakistan (IJT)—a student wing of Jamat-eIslami Pakistan. I joined it in class 10 and was part of it for five to six years. Later, I had something of an ideological evolution in my understandings of certain parts of the movement. I was inspired by another modernist intellectual Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, a staunch critic of the contemporary Islamic movements' thought and practice. The advantage I now have gained is that I can deeply understand the insights and discourses going on within these religious movements, because I have been trained in study circles, in discussions, and in protests, and I can now see these issues as an insider. I left the movement in 1995 when I was a bachelor student in economics. I was inspired by a different set of issues, not to deal with active politics but rather with a pro-development outlook through a process of social change—a social rather than a political revolution. I am also writing columns that address how the religious sector in Pakistan can be channeled and mobilized toward social change and progress.

Recently, I coined the idea of an “Ulama Movement” on the pattern of “Lawyers Movement” (for the restoration and reform of the judiciary in Pakistan). I proposed how non-violent Ulama can organize themselves through a peaceful movement for the conflict resolution in Pakistan. To mention, the majority of the Ulema are against the idea of suicide bombing. They issued their verdict, but they don't mobilize themselves and other Ulema to contribute to support the resolution of conflict.

How can these religious leaders and Ulema, by mobilizing their social energies through peaceful means, through madrasas and mosques, contribute to the resolution of conflict? I set out for them a proposal of factors that are on their side: one thing is the media, free local independent media, the second is the global media which is now considering religious people in new ways. They will pay attention to how a segment of the Ulema can contribute to resolving the root cause of conflict. This can change their worldwide image, and offers many opportunities and benefits. In Islam, whatever the capacity and competence of the religious scholars, in the case of religious measures they can always go consult their religious scholar. People have adapted and they will not go to another religious scholar if they have become the center of religious education, and this is the thing that will give you the advantage, as peaceful social actors and with appeal to the wider sectors of society, that some forms of fundamentalism are prohibited in Islam. My view, which I express to them, is that such an approach will guarantee that people will mobilize around them.

With your interests in religious scholars and the role of religious education in Pakistan, what has been your research focus?

What I propose to do in my dissertation (and I have just completed my fieldwork) is to study three levels of religious engagement in development. One is the individual Islamic Ulemas, asking the central questions of how they define development, what are their conceptions of material development and progress? What are the strategies and solutions that they propose for poverty alleviation? I conducted a survey of 340 Ulema throughout Pakistan. It covered different religious sects, demographic characteristics, rural and urban areas, and provincial and ethnic backgrounds.

Second, I have collected data on Islamic political parties that are engaged in active politics, that take part in elections, and that sometimes come into power and sometime do not. I consulted the news content of Daily Jang (an Urud newspaper widely published in Pakistan) from 1988 to 2006 in national newspapers to show what issues they have raised in the last 20 years. I am curious as to where poverty and development can be located in the oral interface of religious politics. I also codified the manifestos of each of the parties, to look at the issues that arise during election time. To what extent do they discuss poverty and development in their political discourses?

The third level of analysis are the madrasas, as town-level institutions. With the religious schools, I conducted my survey through questionnaires to build up a database. I looked at questions about the concepts of poverty and development, and what are the causes of underdevelopment and poverty. What solutions and strategies do they propose? I asked, how can Islamic institutions such as mosques and madrasas contribute to poverty alleviation? There are a number of sub-discussions, in terms of how these institutions are useful for different development activities, like health care, etc. I also wonder about charitable institutions, and what is the concept for how money can be better channeled to contribute to poverty alleviation and a better society.

In your work, how do you see these different scholars, political parties, and madrasas viewing the issues of material gain?

I did not impose my own conception of poverty and development on these issues. Poverty is, very clearly, multidimensional, whereas in economics, poverty and development are defined as the lack of material resources. If you take the example of the Ulema, they like material things but they have a social network of relationships, which contribute not only to their material progress but also to their social progress.

I have seen through my studies that there is an anti-neoliberal approach to development that comes through in my fieldwork. Again, there is a problem, and I will use this as an entry point, on how the World Bank and other actors came into this discourse of religion. Islamic political parties contested the World Bank and IMF, as enemies to all societies and to Muslim society, but when they came into power in 2002, they signed agreements with the World Bank and IMF and took loans. As I studied their discourse, I found that this counter-discourse against family planning, against vaccination programs, gradually disappears and the political parties make compromises with the liberal discourse. My hope is that the study of these discourses and trends, will give us new entry points for development policy.

Do you find that these religious movements are able to articulate alternative visions of development?

I am analyzing my data now, and at this stage, I can see different things. You can find alternatives like Islamic finance or Islamic insurance, but I see these as the rearticulation of old ideas, in a new light. They will articulate and debate old issues as though they represent some new findings. One thing that I find really interesting in Pakistan, unlike Egypt or with the Palestinians, is that the Islamic movements in Pakistan pay less attention to material and social progress. They have a more systemic approach toward things, like reforming the state and the structures, rather than the social sectors. They do less in social development than other Islamic movements.

How have you seen poverty, social development, and religious education?

Majority of the students enrolled in madrasas, are poor. They don't have access to other education or to other forms of social or economic status. The second thing is that they are part of the context. Madrasas also offer a solution to resolution of conflict in Pakistan. Most teach and believe in one Pakistan with a central state, and are less driven by ethnic concerns, so they may contribute to the minimization and intensity of conflict in the country. Of course, the madrasas also play a role for social mobility; when a person graduates from a madrasa you can see him move upward, and you can see that this contributes to the education of his children.

For parents, madrasas are the lowest option for their children's education. Anthropologically, what I have seen is that if they have some income they will go to English schools and then the government schools. Nearly all parents will prefer a government school to a madrasa, and only in the worst situation will he send his children to a madrasa. There is today another trend, as madrasas begin to compete, so that nearly all the larger madrasas have opened an English medium school side by side with the madrasas. Again, this is a response to the market.

Have the trends that you've observed and commented on, both in the discourse and practice, shifted much over the past decade?

I can safely say that the focus of the religiopolitical discourse has been narrowed down from very abstract, general and abstract towards local and regional socioeconomics issues of distribution of wealth, to more concrete issues of health and education. Second, the focus has also shifted from more indirect issues to more direct issues among the Islamic political parties. Before, they might have said that there is poverty because of debt, and that we are enslaved to the United States. Now, they say that we don't have resources, that there is a budget deficit, and that the distribution of opportunities is not fair and just. I think that political factors are behind this, since they are in constant engagement with the society, through mosques, through politics. This constant consternation between the Ulemas and the political parties is very interesting. They have learned to become rational actors who learn from the process of interacting as they gain political influence.

Could you speculate some on whether you see this as a positive shift for areas of human development like education?

It is a very positive shift, and what I have told you is that I can only identify entry points. My own experience has been that any aid that can work needs to be driven by market forces. Very often it is only the market that can bring madrasas to offer skills and technical know-how in their curriculum, and you can now see that, in a number of madrasas, they have computer education and they have a more institutionalized system to teach English and mathematics. The demand, for example, for imams in Europe, means that they must speak English. For instance, in the UK if a mosque requires an imam to speak English, you can see how this will create market compulsions for these madrasas to adapt.

Frankly, what I see, after having surveyed some 400 madrasas, in a project with DFID support, is that I noticed how they looked at us, coming from a aid organization. The main thing I observed, was that there are many secular NGOs that have been to these madrasas and have lied to them, saying they would bring water coolers, fans, and they have all failed and have never been back. There have been many empty promises made. I find a basic flaw in the training of the secular people who are approaching the madrasas and the religious institutions. The development actors giving the training frankly are not even aware of the real dynamics and issues within madrasas. They often have a journalistic vision, and they seldom know even the most basic issues that can be addressed through the institutions.

Are there other issues you would like to comment on, perhaps on the discourses you'd discussed earlier, with their ties to development?

There is one global discourse which is always there among Islamist parties. But, the good thing is that the contextual discourse, the local discourse, which has not always been there, is emerging. In Pakistan, they share the global discourse with other Islamic organizations, but they also have a very contextualized discourse that will address local concerns of poverty and development. The important thing when comparing Islamic movements in Pakistan to sister movements in other countries, mostly in the Middle East, is what I consider a serious lack of concern toward social development. Pakistan is the same, and while of course intellectuals are aware of this, the development actors pay much less attention.

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