Maulana Fazlur Rehman is the quintessential opportunist of Pakistani politics. His opportunism fits ideally with the pragmatism of Pakistan’s part modernist, part-Islamist state machinery, which changes colors like a chameleon according to the situation. Fazl is trained in the politics of Deobandi tradition, which in its original form was deeply pragmatic as it took birth during the British colonial era and the colonial regime in British India was known for its liberal attitude towards allowing every religious denomination to flourish without much restrictions.
So undoubtedly influenced by British liberal traditions in the matters of religions and politics, the forefathers of Deobandi political traditions joined hands with the secular Congress party in the anti-colonial struggle. Fazl followed the footsteps of his predecessors and was a partner of Benazir Bhutto in 1990s, when more traditionalist elements of Pakistan clergy were shouting slogans on the top of their lungs against female political leadership as “haram.”
But the Maulana has particular advantage in dealing with Taliban and other militant elements in Pakistan and Afghanistan—he is presiding over a large network of Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan society where most of Afghan Taliban leaders studied as part of their educational careers in Dars-e-Nizami, a common medium of education in Pakistani conservative madrassas.
In the academic literature, it still remains a mystery how the Deobandi revivalist tradition—which was born in the Uttar Pradesh province of British India, a land far away from Afghanistan and Pak-Afghan border areas - spread and merged with the Pashtun culture in the north west of Pakistan. What is more clearly known is the fact that the US backed military government of General Zia-ul-Haq used the Deobandi religious tradition as a greenhouse for constructing a Jihadi network in their struggle against Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fazl, although, leads the political trend in Deobandi tradition, but nevertheless the organizational structure he presides over is at the heart of the militancy problem in Pakistani society.
Maulana’s Failed Mission To Afghanistan?At the grassroot level, there exists no clearly demarcated line between the members of Fazl’s Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan in the Pak-Afghan border........