X-post of AjayKKs article in the sports thread. :
A month old article detailing Pakistani cricket team's links with Tableeghi Jamaat.
Posting here for archival as URL will not be saved.
Quote:
Pakistani cricket and the influence of Tableeghi Jamaat.
Is Pakistan winning this year’s Twenty20 a symptom of the receding influence of the Tableeghi Jammat in the team, asks Nadeem F. Paracha.
In 1996 when the underdog Sri Lankan cricket team created one upset after another to finally win that year’s prestigious Cricket World Cup, the then decade long Civil War on the island between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamil Tigers took a subtle but definitive turn. [1]
Not that this major cricketing triumph ended the strife in the war-torn island. It is, however, believed that the decisive process towards the victory of the Sri Lankan Army against the Tamil Tigers this year [2] began when the Sri Lankan people saw themselves galvanizing towards forming a firm and united consensus against terrorism and internal warfare after their cricket team brought home the cherished cricket trophy. [3]
Many Pakistanis are now looking at the Pakistan cricket team’s magnificent success in the finals of the recently concluded Twenty-Twenty Cricket World Cup in England to work as some kind of a psychological catalyst that will trigger unity between the people and politics to once and for all overcome the violent challenges Pakistan has been facing for the last many years. [4]
Of course, this is easier wished than done - especially in a country in which, even when large sections of political parties and the people are finally approaching a workable consensus on the issue of supporting armed confrontation against the barbaric contingents of Islamists in the mountains of Swat and Waziristan [5] - there are still certain influential politicians and media personalities who are stubbornly frozen in the chaotic and highly emotional narratives of the immediate post-9/11 period that saw a bulk of Pakistanis actually believing that extremists like Osama Bin Laden and Mulla Omar were expressions of anti-American imperialism and ‘true Islam.’ [6]; [7]
The recent victory of the Pakistan cricket team in a major event can do wonders for a state and government who are now trying to unite a people who seem to be divided on the issue of the Taliban and the Army operation on the basis of sects and ethnicity.
Starting in the late 1970s, an anti-pluralistic process was initiated by the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship that soon spiralled beyond mere posturing and sloganeering.
With the ‘Afghan jihad’ raging against the former Soviet Union, Zia, his intelligence agencies, and parties like Jamat-i-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam started embracing a narrow and highly political version of Islam.
This was done to radicalise large sections of the Pakistani Muslims who had historically been part of a more apolitical and lenient strains of the faith —the kind that over the centuries had evolved within the highly pluralistic milieu of the subcontinent.
Most Pakistanis were historically related to the mazaar and sufi traditions of the subcontinent, and thus, were least suitable to fight a ‘jihad’ that Zia was planning to peddle in Afghanistan.
Their beliefs were not compatible at all with Zia or for that matter, with late Abul Ala Maududi and Syed Qutb’s versions of Political Islam. [8]
To compensate this ideological ‘deficiency’, the Zia regime sprang up indoctrination centres in the shape of thousands of madrassas.
Almost all of them were handed over to radical puritans. These were preachers and ‘scholars’ who had become critical of the strains of faith most Pakistanis adhered to. Accusing these strains of being ‘adulterated’, they fell instead for the assertive charms of the Political Islam.
When doves cried
On the social front, and especially after the anti-Soviet ‘Afghan jihad’ came to a sudden halt in 1989-90, the tensed up Islamisation process and related indoctrination that had largely remained within the four walls of madressas during the awkward Zia era, suddenly burst its banks and started to rapidly flow back inwards from the Afghan border.
This not only saw the Salafiyya groups (patronized by Zia) becoming more active than ever within the country [9], but a more evangelical side of this trend too appeared to cater to the fall-out of Zia’s Islamisation process that now entered the drawing rooms of middle-class and the petty-bourgeois Pakistanis.
Starting with the charismatic South African Muslim speaker, Ahmed Deedat, in the mid and late 1980s, his video cassettes became prized possessions in lavish middle-class drawing rooms, setting off a trend that then saw the likes of Ferhat Hashmi, Babar Chawdry and Dr. Israr Ahmed becoming household names.
Their biggest prize were well to do middle and upper middle-class Pakistanis who ever since the 1980s had been gradually moving away from their largely Berelvi heritage.
Following on the footsteps of the above-mentioned Islamic evangelists, arrived the likes of Zakir Naik and the hyperbolic conspiracy theorist, Zaid Hamid. These too gathered their share of urban middle-class followers.
However, the trend in this respect really kicked off when after the mid-1990s, organisations boasting such evangelists started to bag sporting and show-biz celebrities as ardent followers. [10]; [11]
Uneasy of remaining apolitical and statement-less in the rapidly unfolding post-Cold-War and post-Afghan-War era in Pakistan, and stung by episodes of chaotic and cut-throat democracy manhandled by the Pakistani state in the 1990s, sections of the urban middle-classes and many of their celebrities decided to lend a receptive ear to the non-militant version of modern conservative Islam being peddled by the neo-Islamic-evangelists.
Having little or no intellectual linkage with the political left - and growing up as part of a generation under the Zia regime that through Orwellian doctoring of the secular aspects of Pakistan’s political and cultural history [12] attempted to wipe out any memories of a more secular and liberal Pakistan - these celebrities became easy prey for the more ‘educated’ trend of Islamic obscurantism and myopia that started to cut through the urban middle-classes in the 1990s.
That said, it was however, a somewhat more populist organisation in this respect that rose the most in prominence in this period of urban Pakistani middle-class reflection and its eventual submission to modern Islamic evangelicalism.
This organization was the Tableeghi Jamaat.
Selective bashing
Formed in 1926 as a pacifist Islamic movement, the Tableeghi Jamaat had always been an important part of Pakistan’s myriad Islamic milieu, largely catering to a more conservative clientele among the country’s rural and working classes. [13]
During the 1980s when many sections of the Pakistani middle-classes started to shift away from their ancestral Berelvi heritage and bypassed most secular-progressive trends of the time to arrive at a non-militant strain of modern Islamic conservatism, it was in this period that many among this class started to show an interest in the ways of the (highly ritualistic) Tableeghi Jamaat.
Starting with members of the petty-bourgeois trader classes who were the first major urbanites to join the Tableeghi Jamaat in large numbers, these were soon followed by experimental middle-class folks who’d been dangling uneasily between Salafiyya militancy and Muslim secularism in the 1980s.
At the eruption of an unsettling period of political uncertainty after the violent demise of Ziaul Haq and his dictatorship, the Pakistani middle-classes found themselves in the midst of a raging political and cultural conflict between the prominent remnants of Zia’s ‘Islamic state,’ and the renewed forces of populist democracy. [14]; [15]
In this turmoil, large sections of the Pakistani bourgeois and petty-bourgeois continued to nostalgically hark upon the memories of the superficial ‘stability’ of the Zia years, becoming an applauding part of the post-Ziaist state’s various smear campaigns against populist democrats like Benazir Bhutto (and later Nawaz Sharif).
The state too was hanging on to the ways and memories of Zia. [16]
As the bulk of urban middle-class Pakistan slipped between Salafiyya militancy of the Zia years and the populist democracy of the 1990s, the Tableeghi Jamaat suddenly shot to prominence like never before when a photograph (in 2000) appeared in an English daily showing some retired and playing Pakistani cricketers and a former pop star visiting the Jamaat’s annual gathering in Raiwind near Lahore.
Pakistani cricketers (until 1999), always came out seeming liberal and cosmopolitan.
Many of them stayed for long periods of time in England where they played county and league cricket and were also known for leading modern city lives.
Teams under Mushtaq Muhammad (1976-79) and Imran Khan (1982-92), were packed with both veteran and young individuals who were well versed in the ways of western lifestyles, a reality that only became an issue whenever the team would not do well.
If one goes through former Pakistan cricket captain, Mushataq Muhammad’s autobiography, ‘Inside Out,’ one can clearly deduce that celebrating victories with champagne was not uncommon in the dressing room until about 1979; and (also) even until the late 1990s, many players would go clubbing or to a bar after the game. [17]
After Zia’s Islamisation process started to kick in by 1979, the champagne vanished from the dressing room but the post-match night-life and drinking on tours continued.
But as mentioned before, this only became an issue when the team would lose - as was apparent after the 1979 Pakistan team’s tour of India under Asif Iqbal.
The team lost the six test series, 2-0, and soon the country’s Urdu press was full of reports on the cricketers’ sexual and drunken escapades in the night clubs of Bombay and Delhi.
Those attacked the most in this context were Imran Khan, Asif Iqbal, Zaheer Abbas and the flamboyant Wasim Raja (brother of Rameez Raja and a ‘Shahid Afridi’ of his time).
It was conveniently forgotten that the same team with the same ‘playboys’ and ‘drunkards’ had comprehensively defeated India and New Zealand only a year before and pulled off a miraculous test victory against the Australians the same year. [18]
In a comedy of errors, soon after the 1978 Test match in Melbourne that the Pakistan cricket team won thanks to an extraordinary spell of seam bowling by Sarfraz Nawaz, the tall bowler while talking to an Australian TV interviewer announced that the team will be celebrating the victory by having drinks.
However, after realizing that his country was now under an Islamist Military dictatorship, and that the interview was being beamed live on Pakistan Television, Nawaz at once added: ‘I mean, soft drinks!’
But since Pakistan had pulled off an incredible victory, the conservative press either ignored the statement, or only dealt with it in a light-hearted manner.
This remained to be the trend throughout the 1980s and much of 1990s. The cricketers were able to keep their non-cricketing exploits on tours out of the press as long as they performed well, and stories of clubbing, drinking and ‘womanising’ only appeared when the team was in the doldrums.
For example, Imran Khan was lucky to have his team and himself perform exceptionally well between 1987 and 1992, because these were also the years in which two disgruntled Pakistani players, Qasim Omar and Yunus Ahmed, accused the Pakistani captain and his team of indulging in heavy drinking and smoking hashish in the dressing room. Omar claimed that the team was also involved with call girls. [19]
The attitude of most Pakistani cricketers up until the late 1990s was that as long as they were playing good cricket, nobody had any right to question what they did with their private time.
This arrangement between the players, the press and the public worked well, but started to break down when initial reports and rumours of match-fixing started to appear sometime in 1989.
The rumours grew so strong that when alluded to (by a cricketer), some of the Pakistan team players had fallen prey to the charms of certain Indian and Sharjah based bookmakers during a 1990 tournament in Sharjah, skipper Imran Khan and vice-captain Javed Miandad had to get all the players to swear on the Qu’ran that they had not been involved in match fixing. [20]
Though said to be a parasite born and bred in the cash-rich and amoral atmosphere of the cricket tournaments of Sharjah, the match-fixing aspect of the game truly went international after the 1992.
In spite the fact that the players (of all countries) kept denying its existence and the ICC only superficially looked into the matter, rumours of players (especially from Pakistan, Australia, India and South Africa), kept appearing.
Already under the creeping shadows of these rumours, the Pakistan cricket team touring the West Indies in 1993 got itself entangled in an embarrassing drug scandal.
The team had been performing well ever since the late 1980s, keeping the conservative press at bay about their extra-circular activities on tours, when some Pakistani players were caught by the Granada police for smoking cannabis on a public beach during a tour of the West Indies. [21]
Incredibly, since the Pakistan team had done well in the One day series, the same Urdu press that had been haunting the players ever since the Zia regime for indulging in drinking, clubbing and call girls, now turned around and accused the West Indians for ‘masterminding the operation’ and ‘trapping’ the Pakistani players, who were now set to win the Test series!
The team continued to perform in stunning spurts of brilliance foiled by inexplicable downfalls till the 1999 World Cup in England, when the cricket boards around the world and the ICC finally decided to investigate the stubborn match-fixing allegations against a number of players from various teams.
Pakistan under Wasim Akram performed remarkably well in the 1999 World Cup, reaching the finals only to lose badly to a rampaging Australian team.
This happened almost on the eve of an unprecedented series of verdicts handed down by Pakistani, Indian, Australian and South African boards on the match-fixing issue.
By 2000, Pakistani players, Salim Malik and Attaur Rheman, South Africans Hershel Gibbs (for two years), and skipper Hanse Cronje, and Indian stars Azharuddin, Menoj Parbhakar and Ajit Jadeja were all banned for life for indulging in gambling and match-fixing. [22]; [23]
Heavy fines for not co-operating with the boards and ignoring to report match-fixing incidents were levied against Australians, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne, and Pakistani players such as Wasim Akram, Waqar Yunus, Mushataq Ahmed, Saeed Anwar and Inzimamul Haq.
The bans, the fines and the consequent embarrassment that the team faced, seemed to have plunged many senior players into a discomforting existential crisis.
Wasim quit as captain and was replaced by his fast bowling colleague, Waqar Yunus. The Pakistan cricket team was now on the edge of becoming something nobody could have even vaguely predicted.
Islam’s Poster Boys
The so-called (and unprecedented) ‘Islamisation of the Pakistan cricket team’ that peaked during stylish batsman, Inzimamul Haq’s captainship, was not a sudden happening.
With the accusations, bans and fines, also came stories of heavy drinking, drug intake and womanising that had been sidelined due to a spat of good performances by the team under Wasim Akram.
The Pakistani players now found themselves feeling exposed and excuseless. Wasim’s fast bowling partner, Waqar Yunus, seemed determined to stamp his own style as a captain, and if need be, change the nature of the Pakistan cricket team’s culture.
Following the movement of the team was former Pakistani batsman, Saeed Ahmed.
Though known for his cricketing exploits in the early 1970s and a penchant for London’s night-life, he hadn’t been heard or seen in cricketing circles ever since the 1980s.
Then suddenly, during a Pakistan team’s tour of Sharjah in 2000, Saeed Ahmed was seen in the players’ dressing room. He had changed. He was no more the stylish, flamboyant party animal of the 1970s, but now had a long beard, a skull cap and was clad in shalwar-kameez.
Noting his presence, Saeed’s former county cricket colleague, friend and commentator, Tony Greg, approached him for an interview, not believing it was the same Saeed Ahmed he had played with many years ago.
In the interview Saeed explained how he had joined the Tableeghi Jamaat and was on the ground to help the Pakistan cricket team get through the crisis it was in after the match-fixing scandal exploded.
Both Waqar and the tour management did not mind Saeed’s presence in the dressing room. Waqar explained this by saying Saeed was only there to give the boys some pep talk.
According to a 2006 televised interview that former Pakistani leg-spinner, Mushtaq Ahmed, gave to Wasim Akram on the ESPN-Star Sports Channel, Saeed Ahmed handed Pakistani players a few audio cassettes of recorded lectures of some of the Tableeghi Jamaat’s leading speakers.
Mushtaq explained that throughout that season, many of the players listened to these recordings (mostly in their car stereos).
First to be ‘won over’ in this respect was brilliant left-handed opener, Saeed Anwar, who was also suffering the death of his new-born child. He at once joined the Tableeghi Jamaat and agreed to follow the strict dress code and rituals that the Jamaat prescribes to its members.
Anwar was first seen with a long beard and pensive expression, quietly reading the Qu’ran in the dressing room during Pakistan’s matches against South Africa in Morocco in 2001.
According to an article by well-known Pakistani journalist, Khalid Ahmed, it was Anwar who then started to regularly invite various Tableeghi Jamaat members in the dressing room, and since all Jamaat members are also supposed to preach and ‘invite’ as many people as possible to join the Jamaat [30], Anwar started delivering lectures to his team mates.
All the while Waqar allowed this, believing that a turn towards religion by the players might as well help him find the unity that had been alluding Pakistani cricket teams ever since (ironically), he (along with Wasim Akram) led a revolt against Javed Miandad’s captaincy in 1993. [24]
When Pakistan was bludgeoned out of the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, a number of senior players retired, including Waqar and Wasim. The captainship briefly went to wicketkeeper Rashid Latif and was then handed over to Inzimamul Haq.
Though Saeed Anwar was retired too, by now he had managed to convince Mushtaq Ahmed and innovative off-spinner, Saqlain Mushtaq to join the Tableeghi Jamaat.
In turn both began their own recruiting regime in the team, and helped by Anwar and former-pop-star-turned-tableeghi, Junaid Jamshed, they managed to induct Yasser Hamid and Shoaib Malik into the fold as well.
The Jamaat’s biggest catch however, was the new skipper himself, Inzimamul Haq. [25]
Even though Pakistan had experienced a humiliating exit from the 2003 World Cup under Waqar, Inizimam seemed to have been impressed by how Waqar had tried to pacify the volatile Pakistan cricket team’s culture by allowing Tableeghi Jamaat members a free reign in the dressing room.
According to a former Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) official, like Inzimam, the PCB too saw the ‘Islamisation of the cricket team’ as an effective way to remould the culture of the dressing room.
The culture that was to be remoulded was the one built during the captaincies of Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Wasim Akram. That was a culture of flamboyance and combativeness, and of volatile personalities but which, by the late ’90s, had spiralled out of control, getting tainted by greed, political intrigues and groupings.
A PCB media adviser agrees with the theory that Inzimam actually used religion to control the explosive tendencies of the culture prevailing in the team.
Apparently, the late coach Bob Woolmer had little or no problem with the team’s re-born-Muslim status as well and his reasons were attached to what Inzimam was gaining from his Tableeghi regime, i.e. discipline and submission from the cricketers.
However, this discipline was not exactly based on a wilful belief in the importance of professional order, but rather a grudgingly submitted fear gained from the players by dangling the ever-useful Islamic card and a strict code of conduct and ethics based squarely on the Tableeghi Jammat ideals of Islam. [26]
Just before the 2007 World Cup, during a talk show hosted by former Pakistani cricket captain Rameez Raja, Inzimamul Haq, when asked what his message would be for the youth, insistently suggested that along with worldly knowledge, they should also get religious education.
This said two things. First of all, it suggested that ever since Inzimam’s stint as captain, more and more Pakistani cricketers had started using the formulaic language used by Tableeghi Jamaat members.
Secondly, and as some PCB officials and cricketers later claimed, most Pakistani cricketers, if they had to be in the good books of the captain, had to tamely submit to his Tableeghi regime in the dressing room. [27]
Like Mushtaq Ahmed, Saeed Anwar and Saqlain Mushtaq before him, (and celebrities like Junaid Jamshed), Inzimam had willingly let himself be turned into a poster-boy for the Jamaat, which in the last many years has also been accused by some quarters of preying on the insecurities of known personalities in the showbiz and cricketing circles. [28]
During the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy in India, Inzimam was taken to task by the former Pakistan Cricket Board chairman, Naseem Ashraf, for insisting on holding joint prayers with his team on the ground where they were having a training session. [29]
Critics asked whether the Indian team could ever be allowed to pray to Ganesh or Hanuman on a Pakistani ground, or an English team hold a mass at the Gaddafi Stadium?
No was the obvious answer. But veteran sports journalist, Waheed Khan summed it up by suggesting that this is an irrelevant question because these teams were far too professional to ever use a cricket field to exhibit their religious beliefs.
It is no secret that players like Shoaib Akhtar were an awkward anomaly in Inzimam’s team.
The reason behind Shoaib’s falling out with Inzimam had certainly to do with things more than just pulled hamstrings and tantrums.
Shoaib was said to be appalled by the nature of Inzimam’s supposedly ‘manipulative,’ religion-driven ways of gaining loyalty from his players, and it was natural that a personality like Shoaib was bound to feel isolated and persecuted in the new-found religious make-up and psyche of the Inzimam-led Pakistani cricket team.
After much of Inzimam’s team had been ‘converted,’ the only ones deciding not to toe the line in this respect were Shoaib Akhtar, Shahid Afridi, Yunus Khan, Kamran Akmal, Abdul Razzaq and, of course, Danish Kaneria (who is Hindu).
Even Yusuf Yuhanna, a Christian, converted to Islam (and became Mohammad Yusuf). Even though he insisted that there was no pressure from Inzimam for him to change his faith, insiders and press reports suggested that much of Yusuf’s own family members thought otherwise. [29]
However, by early 2006, Shahid Afridi too finally became a member of Inzimam’s religious clique and a Tableeghi Jamaat member, leaving only Shoaib Akhtar, Abdul Razzaq and Yunus Khan to face the music.
Though non-Tableeghi members like Razzaq, Yunus, Akmal and Salman Butt decided to remain diplomatic, Akhtar continued to challenge the Jamaat’s presence in the team. He was a throw-back of the volatile and fiery Pakistani cricketers of the ‘70s, 80s and much of the ‘90s.
Inzimam’s Raiwind regime may have turned the Pakistan cricket team into a (seemingly) well-knit unit, but its many critics accused the captain of operating at the expense of ostracising talent that refused to bend to the religious dictates of his regime. [30]
Many also believe that Inzi’s religious zeal actually softened the team’s innovative and competitive nature, a nature that was rigorously nourished and encouraged by the likes of former captains like Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Wasim Akram.
The new attitude had left them looking and behaving more like cricketing ambassadors of the Tableeghi Jammat, with an on-field outlook that smacked of a lacklustre approach towards competitive cricket.
Inzimam’s team made an embarrassing exit from the 2007 World Cup, an event that also saw the sudden and unfortunate death of coach Bob Woolmer.
Pakistan’s media manager on that tour, P J. Mir, was highly critical of the way the team behaved, saying that Inzimam and his boys were more interested in preaching, than in playing cricket.
On the same tour, while travelling between cities on the plane, Inzimam ordered all the players to stand up and say their prayers in the aisle of the jet, even when asked by the stewardesses to remain sitting. [31]
But what now?
A PCB official told this writer after new captain Shaoib Malik replaced Inzimam as captain(in 2007), that silently but surely, the culture of the team is being remoulded again, making it ‘more competitive and secular.’
He said the board had absolutely no problem in how any player wanted to conduct his religious business, but the sort of religious fanfare exhibited during Inzimam’s reign as captain is being discouraged.
One can understand that it will take some time for the new board to rectify the Tableeghi culture that was so systematically invested in the psyche of the team.
This became apparent when after losing the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup final to India, Shoaib Malik apologized to ‘all Muslims of the world’.
Some observers considered it to be a somewhat racist comment, since there are Christians and Hindu Pakistanis as well who were supporting the team, and, of course, most Indian Muslims were rather happy that Pakistan lost!
‘It will take time,’ says a PCB official. ‘The cricketers were encouraged to wear their religious beliefs on there sleeves, and they got used to it. But this will change, once the cricketers realise that one doesn’t have to exhibit one’s religious commitment to prove one’s patriotism,’ he added.
Now that the team is under Younus Khan, who never did join the Tableeghi Jamaat, it is reported that the Jamaat’s influence is by and large a receding reality in the team.
In fact, only the dynamic Shahid Khan Afridi seems to have retained strong links with the Jamaat.
But that was never the problem, as such. The issue was psychological. What was used as a tool to discipline a volatile batch of cricketers became a heavy stone around the team’s neck.
It pulled the team’s natural and bashful instincts too close to the ground, consequently leaving it seeming slow and sluggish in attitude, and more interested in using the cricketing platform to advertise the credentials of the Tableeghi Jamaat.
Pakistan had reached four World Cup semi-finals and two World Cup finals between 1979 and 1999; whereas it was chucked out from the very first round of the two World Cups it competed in between 2000 and 2007.
So perhaps Pakistan reaching the finals of the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup, and winning this year’s tournament is a symptom of the receding influence of the Tableeghi Jammat in the team?
Whatever the case, it is important that if Pakistan’s recent triumph is to be used in any way to tackle the polluted air of religious fundamentalism choking the culture and politics of Pakistan, then it is vital that the cricket team presents itself as thoroughly professional lot of Pakistanis who do not hold sympathy for any particular brand of Islam. The culture of unprovoked religious exhibitionism in this respect must come to an intelligent halt.
