By Brig® Mehboob Qadir
Email: clay.potter@hotmail.com

          Faith is essentially a person’s medium of communication with God Almighty the Creator and thus has to be a matter of personal equation and passion.However this soft and affectionate sentiment has eversince been exploited by clergies of invariably all the religions in the world more so in relatively backward countries including Pakistan.WE know that not only here but in most other countries religion is used for sectarian and political causes,retention of power and self perpetuation.In Pakistan  packs of sectarian hounds roam the countryside ripping apart our delicate social fabric, while our mullahs and muftis use it to line their pockets and retain grip over their followers.They have also found it profitable to purify bank investments and issue controversial political edicts from time to time to malign political opponents of the sitting government.In brief we had a country wide circus of sectarian, political, ethnic and tribal jugglers keeping the crowd at each other’s throats.

    Of all these tools , religion has had the widest and most powerful impact in our country, the very basis of its creation as the intelligentsia and politicians would have us believe.However it was the evil genius of late General Zia who used religion as an instrument for self perpetuation and nearly succeeded.One remembers his infamous Nizame Salat when even ordnary little mullahs of the tiny mosques began to ride in the middle of the road and tick off people on infringements religious or so they thought.This was the illicit birth of the religious policing in our country which one way or the other has survived in our society.There after observing religious teachings have become no more a matter of voluntary intimacy but a mullah induced coercion.The orders were to arrange prayer mats, straw caps and lotas in offices for collective prayers which was eagerly lapped up by many looking for a stamp of piety but eventually to eat into hours of office work.One could not come around to such official but spurious enthusiasm, was pulled up strongly but mercifully let off.There still were seniors of substance then.

     These and other similar missteps were very divisive and directly militated  against established practices in the army.A wave of quiet revulsion was building up in the army which had the unfortunate effect of creating an us-and- them syndrome against our absolutely essential  cohesion  and  regrettably a class of known fakes who even went to the extent of not letting fellow officers sit in their staff car without proper ablution. This and so many other irksome grafts  eventually threw up a liberal like General Pervez Musharraf to the top.He was an expression of our military culture’s rejection of made up piety or rather religious sycophancy and refocus on professionalism to begin with.True to his open nature he never hounded out these fellows which how dearly one wishes today  he should have.Even if he may have  wanted to get rid of them but Nawaz Sharif’s utterly arrogant and  imprudent decision not to let his aircraft land back in Pakistan precipitated a military take over from which he could never really recover to give enough time to the army affairs.

      Applying religious yeast to the power batter had worked for Late Zia. Our civilian hopefuls found Gen Zia’s model of a rich mix of religion and politics quite useful though they could not fully recreate its enabling environment.However the army kept distancing itself from this toxic brew.Yet the ‘piety’ seed had found roots and was creeping up and around ,mostly to conceal gaps in character and  professional competence.A  disgusting culture of fake piety and showcase devotion was practiced by a kind of unbranded brotherhood of laundered men and women in which Dars and Tableeghis were quite a team of stitchers.These preachers had slid into the system fairly effortlessly under overt patronage by late General Zia and his proteges.A time came when arranging Dars gatherings became vogue in higher military families and their motivational speakers an in-thing in our training institutions,higher headquarters and even at wedding dinners.Sadly but logically most of their preachings  lacked commitment and conviction.Moral coefficient continued to remain mundane and tainted.

     There was one more powerful reason for the appeal of this brotherhood.It  was a pseudo equality that it tended to set up amongst men and officers much against the strongly structured army chain of command which had quite unusual but disturbing consequences. I was commanding an artillery brigade in DI Khan in 1994.It was around noon time when through my big office window I saw a Suzuki FX car stop in the porch, out came a major general in uniform, an Aviation Lt col and a middle aged civilian with a short white beard and decent clothes. That was a complete surprise.Those familiar with our military protocol know that general officers never visit other headquarters without prior intimation and do not travel in uniform in ramshackle Suzuki cars.I rushed to receive them and respectfully complained about no information regarding the GOC’s arrival.It transpired that the civilian guest was the next in Soofi chain of a saintly person in DIKhan( whom blissfully I did not know).The general had flown in an Army Aviation plane to see him, that the Lt col was higher in the Soofy order than the GOC himself.Soon they left, leaving one perplexed at this strange  unmilitary site. Many years later that very Army Aviation officer was implicated in Major General Abbasi/Brigadier Billa’s aborted  conspiracy.

     Coincidently I was part of the Army Haj contingent (fully self financed) in which General Abbasi and Brigadier Billa were also there.The night we reached Madina Sharif the next morning I woke up to busy hum in the room.It were both these officers getting ready,General Abbasi asked me to wash quickly.’Where to Sir?’ I asked.He said ‘let me take you to a saintly man’.Out of utter laziness I replied ‘ Sir the saint of the saints , the Holy Prophet that I had come to see have paid my respects already’ and went to sleep again.That saved me from being court martialled later.By then no body knew what was cooking in their minds but that Pakistani‘saint’ in Madina Sharif too was found an accomplice in their conspiracy as the chief doctrinaire or something closer.

      There was also a rumor of a senior commander of a deployed army formation seeking his pir sahib’s spiritual and actual help to identify where the enemy attack might come?Eastern border was hot those days.One can go on narrating numerous other such deviations, but the point to understand is that this flood of unsolicited spirituality fouled the simple and uncomplicated flavor of our soldiering and spoiled our discipline.Instead of standing up and owning our mistakes or inefficiency , many of us began to attribute the failure to divine will which at times became difficult to challenge.This trend has persisted in its various hues and levels.There were other angles of this pseudo piety and one of them was, perhaps still is,the practice of  sending people for Haj on government or institution’s expense and hope one’s Islamic generosity be rewarded. That is so preposterous. There is no such thing as Haj on government expense, it has to be paid out of philanthropist’s own pocket. That was the reason why as unit commander and then as brigade commander I did not allow this malpractice to take place. 

   Reverting to the central discussion. This covert but insidious brotherhood of the khaki pious and their fellow missionaries weaved their way up the command ladder with remarkable dexterity and method. They have been supportive of each other in ways of which much was not as permitted and pure as they might like us to believe. One of their techniques was to spot bright and potential senior officers early in their career and patronize them professionally and even monetarily. Those who saw the trap and refused to walk into faced difficulties.They have managed to climb to the higher command wrung and are having a field day, as they say

       Long and short of this discussion is it was time to pause and reflect upon a fundamental question. What was apparently started as an attempt to fumigate the Service from remnants of Gen Yahya ’s whisky soaked ilk albeit with an eye over self perpetuation  mainly by late General Zia, has it benefitted our military professionalism and discipline or not? From one’s half a century in service one can say with reasonable certainty that it has not.To the contrary it has created a class of men and women who invoke religion almost every step of the way instead of buckling up and addressing the difficulties that arise in the course of discharge of duties.What began as a drive to revert to simpler soldiering through the faith route opened the gates to sectarian controversies to seep in which were raging outside as also tended to alienate non Muslim soldiers and officers.A change in outward appearance became visible which led to reconfiguration of mental approach not exactly of service pattern in many cases.

      One thing is certain that no mufti, mullah ,pundit or Pope has ever made a successful  combat commander in any army.Even early Islamic period’s greatest general, Khalid bin Walid had his nuptials the very night of a hard fought battle while thousands of his troops still lay in the battle field killed and wounded.That is how soldiering has always been.It is a profession of valor,trapping and annihilation of the enemy, of savagery, blood and gore where preaching has only a limited scope in the preparatory stage not when it is mortal combat.One experienced first hand during 71 War in East Pakistan that men and officers fought ,all said and done, for their personal guts and the man in the trench with him.Nothing else.We need to shun bloated religiousness, needless digressions into non-military ventures , ostentatiousness and re-establish our culture of professional soldiering and proper military discipline.