Zia Islamic Quotes

General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s.

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, “No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.” But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime.

I passed by General Zia's tomb and knew that I never would have become Muslim if I was raised in this country [Pakistan]. As a rebellious American adolescent, I had chosen Islam because it was the religion of Malcolm X, a language of resistance against unjust power. But in Pakistan, Islam was the unjust power, or at least part of what kept the machine running. Pakistan's Islam was guilty of everything for which I had rebelled against Reagen-Falwaell Christianity of America.

In Pakistan both branches [of the Ahmadis] fell to persecutions, sanction by the state in 1984 with General Zia Ul-Haq's Ordinance XX, which forbade Ahmadis of either branch from calling themselves Muslims, their religion Islam, or their temples mosques. Under penalty of law, they could not perform the call to pryaer, pray in the manner of Muslims, quote the Qur'an or hadith, greet each other with "as-salamu alaikum," or receite the shahadah... In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it was illegal for some people to say, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger.

Again historical antecedents played a part. There was dissent from the beginning. Jinnah’s claim to be the ‘sole spokesman’ for Muslims had vied with Maulana Mawdudi’s authoritarian reading of a ‘holy community of Islam’. In turn, General Ayub Khan (1958-68), in collaboration with various pirs (Muslim holy men), competed with the revivalist Jamaat-i-Islami to gain a monopoly over the discourse of ‘modernist’ Islam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Awami League’s espousal of ‘Bengali Islam’ stood (again mainly versus the Jamaat-i-Islami) in opposition to the authority of ‘Pakistani Islam’. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (1972-77), championed ‘folk Islam’, again in collaboration with an assortment of mainly Sindhi pirs, to challenge the dominance of ‘scripturalist Islam’, advocated both by the Jamaat-i-Islami as well as by sections of the country’s modernizing elite. Later, General Zia ul Haq (1977-88), who initially worked with but then against the Jamaat, favoured a ‘legalist’ interpretation of Islam with a strong punitive bias that aimed to stem both its popular as well as its modernist expressions. In time it strengthened the hold of an ulama-inspired, ‘shariatized Islam’ which, by the 1990s, openly challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state and further aggravated Pakistan’s consensus problem.

We also grew up during the time of the Afghan war, when the Mujahideen, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden were heroes. Jihad was honourable, and Islamic Hudood Ordinance was imposed. The effects of the Islamisation introduced during the Zia years were to persist beyond his mysterious death. The fabric of society had changed, perhaps irreversibly.

Kalau dalam bidang keagamaan sendiri terdapat keragaman dalam kesatuan, maka dalam kebudayaan Islam sudah semestinya pula terdapat keragaman - Zia 'Gokalp (1875-1924)

Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982 and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea. President Zia aimed to cement Islamic unity, turn Pakistan into the leader of the Muslim world and foster an Islamic opposition in Central Asia. Washington wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world was fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghans and their American benefactors.

The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.

Beginning with Liaquat, moving forward with Ayub Khan and culminating with Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s leaders proceeded to delineate a ‘noble and eternal’ ideology that would give Pakistan ‘a tremendous power of cohesion and resistance’, insisting that it was on the basis of Islam ‘that we fought for and got Pakistan’. Islam, hostility to India, and the Urdu language were identified as the cornerstones of this new national ideology.

In France, officials promoted Islam as a weapon against left-wing radicalism in enclaves teeming with Algerian immigrants. Still in shock over the murders of several members of its team at the Munich Olympiad of 1972—i.e., in the years before the emergence of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas—Israel, too, deluded itself into nurturing a Palestinian religious turn. The government naively imagined this development would be a boon for Israel: a burr in the saddle of the Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was robustly backed by the Soviets. Like Nasser, however, Arafat was a shrewd Leftist who appreciated the necessity of accommodating Islam. Though Arafat was a domineering Marxist, the PLO was, and is, an amalgam of entities that always incorporated Islamist elements as well as socialists, secularists, and Arab nationalists. Transparently, the American Left’s motive for pinning the purely “secular” label on the PLO and, particularly, on Fatah (Arafat’s base within it), is to promote the fiction that Fatah (now the ruling party in the “Palestinian Authority”) is “moderate” and worthy of U.S. support. The idea is to draw a flattering contrast to the incorrigible Islamist terrorists of Hamas. As we’ve seen, though, Fatah is not strictly secular—the claim that it is relies on the savage zealotry of Hamas to overwhelm the facts. Fatah was propelled by jihadist rhetoric and theory, its charter regards the duty to “liberate” Jerusalem as a religious obligation, and it has a decades-long history of rationalizing terror on Islamic scriptural grounds—these are “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Similarly astute were Pakistan’s Leftists. Zulkifar Ali Bhutto’s legacy, the Pakistan People’s Party, has always couched its secular-socialist ambitions in Islamic rhetoric. With echoes of the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan, the PPP’s motto remains, “Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people.” And for all her pretensions to Western liberalism, Benazir Bhutto, who followed her father’s footsteps to become Prime Minister, was midwife to the Taliban in Afghanistan and stoked jihadist terror in Kashmir—all part of her geopolitical maneuvering against India. Sadat and both Bhuttos were ultimately killed by Islamists: Sadat slain by the Muslim Brotherhood; Bhutto père executed in the Zia coup d’état, after which Pakistani society underwent a thoroughgoing Islamicization; and daughter Benazir murdered by the Taliban when she reincarnated herself as a crusader for democracy. Fatah, similarly, is holding on for dear life: ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, it is hunkered down in the West Bank—hoping that the democracy it purports to champion isn’t taken too seriously (notoriously corrupt, Fatah would be likely to lose a true popular election) and praying that Hamas decides jointly annihilating the Zionist entity is a higher priority than crushing an intramural competitor. There is a moral to these stories. Revolutionaries of Islam and the Left make fast friends when there is a common enemy to besiege. Leftists, however, are essentially nihilists whose hazy vision prioritizes power over what is to be done with power. They are biddable. Islamists, who have very settled convictions about what is to be done with power, are much less so. Even their compromises keep their long-term goals in their sights. Thus do Leftists consistently overrate their ability to control Islamists. Factoring the common denominator, power, out of the equation, something always beats nothing.