THE so-called war on terror has confused the real fundamentalist challenge. It faces secularists and democrats at every step in daily life and not merely in the remote fastness of Waziristan or the border regions of Afghanistan or indeed even in the shape of the MMA. It is a challenge that most of us have failed to recognise or counter.

A kind of hypocritical piety has come to dominate our lives that goes unnoticed and may have a far more invidious effect than the activity of the militants and radicals, who are at least identifiable. The religious parties are using Islam for political purposes. That is straightforward enough: they too are identifiable. But there is also a lot of not-so-obvious false religiosity that is reflected in all ministers and political leaders referring to religion at some point or the other in their speeches to justify their policies or actions or sanctimoniously invoking God’s name before starting on another peroration that is full of what they know to be false declarations and assertions. Every TV channel now seems to be in a race to outdo the other in presenting what are considered to be Islamic programmes.

Even the minister of state for finance in his budget speech this week could not resist the temptation to declare that Pakistan would serve as a model for other Islamic countries. Ziaul Haq, amidst his flurry of measures designed to make the country Islamic, had claimed that the eyes of the entire Muslim world were on Pakistan to see how it implemented religious injunctions as state policy. The eyes of the world were then, as now, turned on Pakistani illegal immigrants and, currently, on those suspected of militant tendencies — we continue to live in a world of delusion.

There is also the practice that has lately become popular of saying “Allah Hafiz” instead of “Khuda Hafiz” — a practice that has been unthinkingly adopted by so many of us. That is why “invidious” is such a good word to employ to describe what is happening around us. There is obviously nothing wrong with “Allah Hafiz”, but why play with words and change something that has long been accepted? (The Arabs, incidentally, either simply say “Salam” or “Fi-amanAllah”).

Or there is this obsession with repeated umras by the well-to-do, with the lead provided by the nation’s leaders, or the “dars” sessions held by ladies who otherwise think nothing of splurging money on imported cosmetics, and both seem to have become a fashion with the well-to-do middle classes.

When huge gatherings are organised by religious and proselytising parties and groups and innocent and gullible people persuaded to attend, there is no concern for public safety in these volatile times. No one dares ask why busy roads are closed for prayers or religious gatherings. Our entire value system is in peril of falling a prey to unmitigated hypocrisy, to religion for show. If Islam has ever been in danger, it is from this ‘munafiqat’, hypocrisy, and the ‘munafiqs’ it has produced. They have made religion sound like a burden rather than as something that makes life fulfilling.

This threat is being met neither by our political parties nor by those who are described as “liberals”. Even Muslim jurists have declared the Hudood laws to be non-Islamic and oppressive. Yet no political party seriously campaigns against them. Asked on Tuesday to comment on the demand for the laws’ repeal, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz could only feebly say that it was a “sensitive issue” and would be discussed in parliament. Most liberals confuse liberalism with a free-wheeling lifestyle. They don’t bother as long as they can continue to enjoy their comforts and their evening social rounds.

Liberalism is not freedom to eat or drink what you like or the freedom to live as you want to: it is a state of mind which should feel agitated at any retreat before fundamentalism. Many liberals are unabashedly pro-establishment and utterly conservative in their political attitudes, conservatism in our context means “compromise” as long as our vested interests are not jeopardised. So you have this phenomenon of this absolutely liberated head of a multinational company nursing a drink in his hand and rubbishing politicians and declaring that at least in a military dispensation, he doesn’t get so many “sifarishaat”, recommendations, for jobs (although even that has been proven wrong).

Otherwise perfectly secular businessmen and business executives feel quite comfortable with both mullahs and military regimes as long as their businesses continue to flourish through budgets described as “people friendly” but which actually entrench the elite further.

If at this point a mixing up is detected between democracy and resisting fundamentalism or adhering to secularism, it is only because one cannot be separated from the other. Secularism is inherent in, and an essential component of, democracy. No serious debate has ever taken place on separating religion from governance. Much damage had been inflicted on the communal fabric when the Quaid-i-Azam rose to speak in the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947. Yet, as a confirmed secularist, he had the courage to declare that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state. Do we have a secularist leader like this in our midst?

The Indian diplomat and politician, Mani Shankar Aiyer, in his excellent book Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist quotes from Professor Rasheeduddin Khan’s work Bewildered India. The professor says that Pakistan’s decision to emphasise religion as the determinant operative principle of its nation-building led not only to the alienation of the non-Muslim population, but “even in the life of the majority it projected a conflict of loyalties of identity, between demands of modernised social change and adherence to a given dogma”. This conflict continues to cloud our thinking.

It is important, however, to make a distinction with regard to some recent, post-9/11 developments that are also sometimes taken to indicate a retreat into fundamentalism. Many Muslim women in the West and in Pakistan have taken to wearing the veil or scarf and many Muslim men have begun to look more like practising Muslims. For many of them this is not a going back to fundamentalism, but an assertion of their cultural, religious and political identity that they believe to be under threat. This is particularly true of young Muslim youth in the West who otherwise live in a secular environment and are secular in their thinking.

If this is a mark of political revolt against the persecution and profiling of Muslims by western governments, most notably by the Bush administration, then it has to be looked at with some respect. It should be remembered that many Palestinian women wear the veil but have been totally a part of the secular, anti-imperialist Palestinian movement. They are far more liberated than so many of our ‘begums’ and even NGO activists who sigh and exclaim, “Oh, these mullahs”.

So this retreat into a more traditional mode of dress or conduct on the part of those who do so politically ought to be considered separately from the other manifestations of fundamentalism that appear to be ritualistic and without substance. The latter should be guarded against and all those who care for a rational, democratic and pluralistic Pakistan ought to refuse to fall into easy acquiescence of the agenda being set for us by misguided zealots.

Our ostensibly secular parties like the People’s Party and the PML-N (though its leader had once nursed ambitions of becoming an Amirul Momineen) should be specially forthcoming on this account in this election year, with the religious parties in full cry and the militarists looking for ways to hang on.