LAL MASJID boys wearing the Palestinian kaffiyeh are a sight that is laughable. Do those who indoctrinate these raw minds bother to tell their followers that the Palestinians with those bandannas are not having fun but are involved in the deadly business of fighting the Israeli wehrmacht?

In fact, since the second intifada began, over 4,000 Palestinian boys have sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom but not before they had killed nearly 1,100 Israelis in retaliation. For the Lal Masjid boys, however, the polka-dotted kaffiyeh is a fashion, and like all fashions, it is transient, has no moral basis and is designed merely to catch attention.

Whatever has been going on in the Lal Masjid environs and elsewhere in Pakistan smacks of the pre-Islamic Jaheliyah, an Arabic word that defies an exact one-word translation in English. The word stands for the following ideas rolled into one – bigotry, anarchic barbarism, misconceived notions of honour, a tendency to seek instant revenge for a perceived hurt, indifference to human suffering, and a total absence of compassion. In other words, the state of nature as portrayed by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan.

Dr Jamil Jalibi, whom some people were fortunate to know as a school teacher in Bahadur Yar Jang School and who later rose to become Vice-Chancellor of the Karachi University and head of the National Language Authority, says there are two kinds of Jehalat: One is jehl-i-murakkab – widespread jehalat in society; the other is jehl-i-baseet, an all-encompassing and overpowering jehalat. Pakistan, says Dr Jalibi, is in the grip of jehl-i-baseet.

In today’s Pakistan the target of one’s vengeance often has no relationship with the cause that prompted it. In February last year, mobs roamed the streets of Pakistani cities paralysing life and burning and vandalising public and private property. Feb13 saw the worst riot in Peshawar’s history, and on Feb 14 in Lahore two people were killed as mobs torched 250 vehicles and damaged 100 buildings, including the Punjab Assembly.

All this not because the dead or any of their relatives or the institutions they belonged to had committed any crime, but because a newspaper in a distant country had published a blasphemous cartoon.

In what way the death of those innocent people and the loss of property serve the cause of Islam or deterred a future European blasphemer is not clear.

Moreover, it would be wrong to assume that a given political party or madressah aroused the crowds to religious frenzy. That those who gave the call for the strike were responsible for the conduct of their acolytes goes without saying. But, those who burnt and vandalised and caused deaths were largely on their own, and this is a greater cause for concern that must make the nation’s thinkers sit up. The poison of instant violence has gone deep and spread in the body politic, and anyone can make use of it – depending on what emotive cause he chooses to exploit.

In Karachi, the murder of Maulanas Yusuf Ludhianvi, Saleem Qadri and Shamzai and the blast in Nishtar Park in April last year on the day of Eid-e-Miladdun-Nabi saw this phenomenon at its peak. Following Maulana Ludhianvi’s assassination, mobs roamed the streets, attacking public and private property, and at least two people were suffocated to death when the offices of Business Recorder were attacked.

Originally, Dawn’s page-one story had intended to inform the readers of the obvious news – that Maulana Ludhianvi had been assassinated. By late in the evening, the picture had completely changed as mobs went about pillaging and burning, with the murder story appearing as a single-column news item.

The main three-column heading was “Mob paralyses Karachi”. The strap line said: “Newspaper offices sacked, bank looted”. The next day, there was a complete strike punishing for no fault of theirs over 10 million men, women and children, while medical services were paralysed.Ambulances being attacked are not a new phenomenon in Pakistan, because a mass insanity seems to descend on mobs when they take to the streets.

On April 11 last year, the bomb blast at Karachi’s Nishtar Park killed over 50 people. The nation was shocked. However, angry crowds blocked the movement of ambulances carrying those very people who were injured in the blast. The behaviour must shame us especially when we realise that, during clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli army, ambulances are allowed to operate in war zones.

So far, it is men who have been violent. A new and more perverse side to the new, national psyche came to the fore when burqa-clad women took to violence in Islamabad last month.

The raid on a home, the dishonouring of a family and the abduction of three women were more than three acts of crime; they underlined the entrenchment in some Pakistani minds of some false values masquerading as a religious obligation.

Holding a press conference a couple of days later, a spokeswoman for the Hafsa girls said there were 22 brothels in

G-Sector in Islamabad alone. Then what was the point in dishonouring and abducting one family? Did that raid and abduction lead to an abolition of prostitution throughout the country? In the first place, an act of crime cannot be justified on the plea that it was meant to end another crime.

But if, for argument’s sake, it is conceded that the abduction and the beating and disgrace to which that woman and her daughters were subjected had led to an elimination of brothels throughout the country, perhaps one could have fewer reservations about it. But, without the benefit of that press conference, we know that Pakistan, like every country in the world, has thousands of women involved in that business.

The phenomena represented by the attack on that Islamabad apartment and its approval by some sections of the clerics represent social diseases beyond the corrective powers of legislation and the law enforcement agencies. Asking the government to see to it that its writ prevails is to be naive. The state cannot take action that will be counterproductive and help exactly those forces against which force is meant to be used.

There are many causes for the rise of forces of bigotry and obscurantism, but one that is often ignored is the profusion of writers on Islam in newspapers catering to popular tastes but without the intellectual and academic calibre needed for the task. In this category also fall some clerics appearing on popular TV talk shows. The other causes include the unabashed use of violence or threat of violence for political purposes projected as religious aims, and the carte blanche which everyone has arrogated to himself or herself to “spread good and suppress evil”.

The tragedy is that the idiom and jargon developed by learned scholars have been pirated and vulgarised by those who lack a world vision, and have interpreted Islam in a way that is devoid of compassion and focuses solely on the use of force and coersion.

What kind of Islam are we then chasing? According to the late Eqbal Ahmad, one of Pakistan’s greatest intellectuals, we are chasing an Islamic order “stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests and spiritual devotion … concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilisation of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations”.