he collusion of the corporate and military-industrial complex with liberalism has resulted in death and destruction on a planetary scale. Unfortunately, sections of Pakistan’s liberal class have internalised the discourse of terrorism and peace peddled by the liberal war machine. Instead of applying a critical lens to understand the order of things in the neo-liberal framework, the liberal intelligentsia in Pakistan tends to view everything through the binary of friend and foe of liberalism. As a result, they have produced more ranting on social media than interdisciplinary and intellectually nuanced literature on secularism or liberalism.

Gone are the days when secular and liberal scholars such as Dr Eqbal Ahmed, Hamza Alavi, Sibte Hassan, Ali Abbas Jalalpuri, Niyaz Fatehpuri, Syed Muhammad Taqi and Dr Akhtar Ahsan shaped perspectives on politics, religion and society. There is no gainsaying the fact that there is a dire need to produce a critique of current Muslim religiosity and religion in Pakistan. However, such a critique remains incomplete if the Pakistani version of liberalism is exempted from scrutiny. For a comprehensive critique of the Pakistani mindset, it is indispensable to examine Pakistani liberalism alongside Islam and society. This essay seeks to illustrate the self-ignorance of Pakistani liberalism by citing examples from Pakistani politics and the global neo-liberal order.

It is a peculiar feature of Pakistani politics that Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the chairman of what is considered the most “liberal” party in Pakistan, was educated at one of the world’s oldest and leading institutions of liberal education, the University of Oxford. His mother, the late Benazir Bhutto, was also a graduate of the same university. Yet no election has ever been held within the Pakistan People Party since its establishment in 1967. Drawing on their substantial financial resources, Shahbaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz likewise enabled their children to acquire academic credentials from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Despite this exposure to liberal education, the largest political parties in Pakistan remain undemocratic. Is this a consequence of religion, or are other socio-cultural forces at work behind the scenes, sustaining dynastic politics and preventing internal democracy?

In the particular political and social setting of Pakistan, the state appropriates not only religion but also ostensibly liberating ideas to serve its vested interests. Take the example of the idea of enlightenment in Pakistan. We are well aware of the manipulation and distortion of religion by General Zia-ul-Haq to perpetuate his power. The concept of enlightenment met a similar fate under General Pervez Musharraf. Tragically, sections of Pakistan’s liberal class threw their weight behind Musharraf’s version of enlightenment. Some went so far as to justify the contradiction of upholding the ideals of enlightenment while living under a dictatorship at the same time.

The irony is striking. The enlightenment movement in Europe was shaped by intellectual giants such as Immanuel Kant, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and Montesquieu. In Pakistan, by contrast, the so-called rays of enlightenment were expected to emanate from an omnipotent and omniscient military general and his acolytes. As a result, the country remains trapped in a vicious cycle of ignorance, which repeatedly reappears in different guises and disguises.

Oblivious to the inhuman side of liberalism and to its critique in modern philosophy, Pakistani liberals tend to judge everything religious through the lens of Twentieth-Century liberal ideas. The liberal class in Pakistan believes that it is striving to bring greater freedoms to a closed religious society but often fails to recognise that the neo-liberal version of freedom has turned other societies into new forms of confinement. Unlike earlier modes of discipline, understood through Foucauldian bio-politics in which societies were managed by controlling bodies, neo-liberalism today seeks a more pervasive form of control through technology.

According to Byung-Chul Han, the age of “bio-politics” has passed; we are now living in the age of “psycho-politics.” His work offers pioneering insights into the conditions of the Twenty-first Century, dominated by social media and information technology. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han criticises neo-liberalism for transforming freedom into a new form of un-freedom. The marriage of capital and technology in the neo-liberal era has harnessed the energies of the mind to produce self-regulation, ultimately draining modern homo sapiens of critical thought, sentience and a coherent sense of self.

In modernity, the state system developed institutions such as the prison, mental asylum, factory, barracks, hospital and police to discipline and control its citizens. From this emerged the concept and practice of the panopticon, a circular building with a central observation tower, enabling prison guards to watch all prisoners at all times. The prisoners cannot see the guards. No one can escape the searching gaze of the guard stationed in the panopticon. It is worth recalling that the design of the panopticon was conceived by the English liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a key figure in modern liberalism. Drawing on its design, function and purpose and extrapolating it to society at large, it can be argued that mechanisms of control and discipline in modernity were largely horizontal.

However, the means of control in the Twenty-first Century have changed drastically. Control has become vertical, with the prying eyes of cameras, drones and satellites surveilling us everywhere. Religious notions of omnipresence and omniscience have taken on a sinister turn: satellites and drones now watch over us. Anything that violates the creed of the new order is met with swift retribution from above. Wars in the Twenty-first Century, too, are increasingly fought vertically.

The marriage between the military-industrial complex and capital has given rise to new technologies of surveillance, enabling both the state and capital to destroy from above. The technologies employed in vertical warfare were tested and refined in Iraq, Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. The establishment of a no-fly zone over Iraq and the control of airspace over Lebanon, Syria, Libya and Iran, are clear examples of this vertical hegemonic apparatus. Israel receives extensive vertical support and intelligence on Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria from its allies in the West. Viewed in this way, Gaza resembles a concentration camp created through the nexus of technology and the psycho-politics of neo-liberalism. Through this apparatus, Israel has geo-fenced the territory and carried out killings from above with impunity.

At the same time, this system allows Israel to place itself beyond the reach of international law, as laws rooted in ground realities melt into thin air under aerial bombardment. There is a reason why Elon Musk distributes free Starlink access to protesters in Iran, yet does not extend the same concern to dropping food packages for starving children in Gaza.

Today we live under what may be described as a reign of the terror of sameness. Although encountering others can be painful, it has the capacity to emancipate us from the tyranny of the ego, thereby bringing about transformation of the self. Sameness, by contrast, extinguishes the élan that makes us human. Liberalism, in this sense, ends up eliminating otherness. Those who resist the tyranny of the same are either expelled or eliminated. Unfortunately, liberals in Pakistan often become illiberal when it comes to accepting the “other.”

Today, reactionary and one-dimensional liberals in Pakistan have chosen the path associated with Tarek Fatah. Despite living in a predominantly religious society, Pakistani liberals and secularists have expelled their own “other.” This is why few are persuaded by their claim that secularism or liberalism is not opposed to religion. Owing to a lack of academic nuance and reflective engagement, many wavering liberals in Pakistan label everything religious as terrorism. Instead of analysing diverse Islamist groups and ideologies on their own merits, they treat them as a monolithic entity.

The conflation of disparate actors and movements — such as al-Qaeda, Jundallah, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Daesh, the Taliban, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Fatima Mernissi, Hizbullah, Dr Ghamidi, Abdul Karim Soroush, Hamas, Boko Haram and Ansar Allah — into a single category generates deep misunderstandings of emerging phenomena, ideas and personalities. This, in turn, explains the failure of much local scholarship to recognise the social, economic, psychological and political factors that fuel terrorism. In fact, rather than reflecting a primitive mindset, the armed struggles of Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis lay bare the violent foundations and contradictions of modernity itself.

Dr Faisal Devji, in his book The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, critiques the self-deceptions of the contemporary international order, arguing that liberal states often behave in illiberal ways in the global arena. He contends that “liberalism has no presence outside the nation-state, which is why the international order these states operate in has never been liberal.” Devji highlights the inability of the liberal order to account for diverse militant movements: while it claims universality at the level of discourse, it routinely suspends those principles in practice.

Religious militancy, in this sense, is not a religious act in the strict sense, but politics pursued by other means in response to political conditions. For example, with the decline of secular militant movements in Palestine, and the weakness of the secular class in the face of foreign aggression in Lebanon, religious groups stepped in to fill the vacuum and resist occupation. If the ground of resistance is left empty, it will inevitably be occupied by others.

In today’s world, the so-called Islamic threat has become a bogeyman used to perpetuate exclusion and justify violence against the “other.” Owing to the irrational suspicion of Muslims, generated by fears of terrorism in the West, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, urges Western societies to turn a critical eye inward rather than painting everything outside their borders in the colours of evil. More recently, Dr Naazir Mehmood, in his article How terror became a convenient alibi, explains the processes through which terrorism has been constructed as a convenient alibi. While Nussbaum asks the West to look inward, Dr Naazir emphasises the need to reverse the lens. He writes: “A more honest politics would reverse the lens. Instead of asking how to fight terror endlessly, it would ask why despair finds such fertile ground. Instead of militarising policy, it would democratise opportunity. Instead of invoking civilisation, it would invest in education. Instead of managing fear, it would confront inequality.”

To understand the politics and policy of terrorism, we must raise inconvenient questions. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, instead of looking inward and reversing the lens, we feed our minds with received knowledge produced by power, the opinions of television anchors and conspiracy theories circulating on social media. We are so absorbed in current affairs that we fail to take into account the longue durée of the phenomenon. As a result, we are unable to discern the shape of things to come. The world cannot extricate itself from the present moral and political morass until it challenges and transforms the dominant epistemic, political and military paradigms that govern it. Only by dismantling prevailing discourses of power and politics can humanity avert annihilation driven by military might and moral exceptionalism.

The writer is the author of Nomadic Meditations: Wandering in the History of Ideas. He may be reached at [email protected]