Pan-Islamic Movements Collide With Secular Policies in Broad Region of Asia

The young hotel owner softened his voice as he related the latest rumor in the villages of southeastern Bangladesh: Moujahedeen rebels from Afghanistan had slipped into a local compound owned by a Saudi Arabian relief group, where they trained fundamentalist Bangladeshi and Burmese Muslims in the use of machine guns.

Hundreds of miles to the north, in the war-torn Himalayan city of Srinagar, such rumors have become fact: Kashmiri rebels who once fought alongside the Afghan moujahedeen in their struggle against Soviet Communist invaders now are waging a “holy war” for secession from India, in part with the backing of Muslim fundamentalist forces in neighboring Pakistan.

And in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, which has emerged as both the barometer and vanguard for South Asia’s hundreds of millions of Muslims, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is battling with the nation’s small but well-organized fundamentalist clergy--a pan-Islamic lobbying group that seeks to form an “Islamic belt” stretching from North Africa eastward to Myanmar and including the strategic, newly independent republics of former Soviet Central Asia.

Such is the view here in one of Asia’s most populous Muslim nations at a time when global analysts in East and West are speculating with increasing concern about the post-Cold War world. Many of those analysts fear that divisions between Islam and the West will ultimately replace the now-ended struggle between capitalism and communism.

These images of change, gathered during several weeks of traveling through this part of the Muslim world, appear on the surface to confirm what one prominent South Asian analyst called “the Western world’s worst nightmare--the Muslims all getting together.”

“There is, in fact, a strong pan-Islamic feeling all over South Asia,” said Mushahid Hussein, a Pakistani political commentator in Islamabad who has traveled throughout the Islamic world since he graduated from Georgetown University. “If anyone in Algeria sneezes, someone in Islamabad catches a cold.”

Indeed, for nearly a decade, Pakistan was the logistic and ideological conduit for the CIA’s proxy war with the Kremlin in Afghanistan, in which the Islamabad government funneled billions of dollars in weaponry and cash to the anti-Soviet moujahedeen , the Muslim guerrillas of Afghanistan. Throughout the Afghan civil war, which still rages even though Moscow withdrew its occupation troops in February, 1989, Pakistan favored the most fundamentalist of the Afghan rebel groups. Its goal: to establish an Islamic regime in its western neighbor, forming a regional belt of Islam stretching from Iran to Pakistan.

What is more, U.S. and Indian intelligence sources say the Pakistanis have diverted some of the arms meant for the moujahedeen to the more fundamentalist groups waging a war of independence in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state where such support is transforming what began as a Kashmir nationalist rebellion into a jihad, or holy war.

Similarly, there are abundant rumors of Saudi-backed Pakistani involvement as far afield as the remote Bangladeshi cities of Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar. It is there that moderate Muslims such as the hotel owner speak darkly of the region’s youth being converted to a more militant form of Islam.

There is even a growing movement among the youth in southern Bangladesh to support and intensify an armed struggle to create a separate Islamic nation in the bordering Myanmar state of Arakan, where a brutal crackdown by the predominantly Buddhist military has driven tens of thousands of starving and angry Muslim refugees into Bangladeshi border camps.

The deepest concern lies to the northwest of Pakistan, in the newly emerged Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. All four have large Muslim majorities, and in the months since the collapse of the Soviet Union, their Islamic clergy have launched a sweeping campaign to reassert the region’s Muslim identity after 70 years of often-bloody Communist repression.

Secular regimes have managed to endure in all four states, where some advocates of democracy now say they fear the forces of Islam as much as they do the remnants of communism. In fact, one such pro-democracy leader in Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashkhabad, just 20 miles from the Iranian border, said soon after his republic declared independence last year that the worst threat came not from Moscow but from Islamabad.

And it was those shared fears that brought U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III to the Central Asian republics last month.

“We think that Islam will never gain political power in Turkmenistan, for example, and there will never be very close relations with Iran,” said Turkmenistan’s pro-democracy leader Turdymurat Khodja Mukhammedov, “but it is Pakistan that we fear will try to introduce more Islam in all of Central Asia. And the reason why I am afraid of Pakistan’s influence is because they haven’t had any taste of democracy--real democracy.”

But there are emerging signs that Pakistan is radically rethinking its role in a future Islamic belt. Motivated largely by those fears in Central Asia, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Sharif has quietly embarked in recent weeks on a bold campaign to change his nation’s fundamentalist, pan-Islamic image.

In its most striking recent policy shift, Pakistan announced Jan. 25 that it was supporting U.N. efforts to create a broad-based, secular interim government in Afghanistan, a move that virtually abandoned the fundamentalist moujahedeen groups still favoring a military solution that would install an Islamic regime in Kabul. Already, Islamabad has cut all arms supplies to the rebels.

Sharif’s point man in his country’s new assertion of moderation conceded recently that the campaign already has incurred the wrath of Pakistan’s fundamentalists. But he said it is vital for Pakistan to quickly change its regional image, lest it make more new enemies than friends.

For Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali, Sharif’s minister of state for economic affairs and chief advocate of the new moderation drive, there is little attraction for Pakistan to serve as the vortex of an Islamic belt that might some day be powerful enough to challenge the West. In the emerging new world order, with its rapidly shifting global markets, he said, economics is more important than theology.

Sardar Aseff bases his view on a three-week state tour of all four Central Asian republics as Sharif’s personal emissary last December.

“Everywhere we went, they said, ‘For God’s sake, we have won our rights at great expense--great costs to ourselves,’ ” he said. “And they are not prepared to surrender any of those rights. . . . The great shift is from atheism to secularism--not to fundamentalism.”

The greatest fear Sardar Aseff said he encountered during his tour was the same as that of Ashkhabad’s Turdymurat--that Pakistan would keep supporting the Afghan rebels until an Islamic government takes power there, forcing a tidal wave of more moderate Afghan refugees into the border states of Central Asia, and ultimately that Pakistan would attempt to export its own brand of fundamentalism to the newly independent republics themselves.

In projecting arguments that contributed heavily to Pakistan’s recent policy shift on Afghanistan, Sardar Aseff said he told Sharif and the nation’s powerful military leaders, “These are the fears of Central Asia, and if we make mistakes now, instead of having five potential allies and economic partners, we’re going to get five potential enemies.”

A senior Western diplomat in Islamabad agreed that geography has defined Pakistan’s new regional imperatives. To reach the new markets of Central Asia, all of which are desperate for the goods that Pakistan needs to sell, Islamabad must have land routes through an Afghanistan free from war.

Sardar Aseff acknowledges that Sharif’s shift in Afghan policy has angered Pakistan’s own vocal fundamentalists, but he says they are a fanatic fringe whose influence has long been overrated in his country, which was created as a refuge for the subcontinent’s Muslim minority when Britain granted independence to both India and the new nation of Pakistan in 1947.

Stressing that Pakistan’s fundamentalist Jamat-e-Islami party holds just 10 seats in the National Assembly, he added: “Ninety percent of this country are moderates. They’re not fanatics. . . . It’s a total myth. I don’t think anyone has called their bluff yet.”

And rather than auguring a Pakistan with a vital role in an Islamic region, Sardar Aseff said, the fundamentalists are instead the last gasp of a medieval movement.

“I believe this side of pan-Islamism is a dead duck in Pakistan,” he said. “No sensible person is for this. . . . I think the vast majority of the country are fed up with these people.”

But Sardar Aseff conceded that “there remains a very strong pan-Islamic feeling in Pakistan.” And other analysts such as Mushahid Hussein suggested that Pakistan’s progressive new economic approach to the new Central Asian republics, as well as to its old Muslim neighbors such as Bangladesh, ultimately will be the vehicle to a more fundamental pan-Islam.

In describing the evolution of Pakistan’s policy toward newly liberated Central Asia, for example, Hussein placed it in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was for decades the closest ally of Pakistan’s traditional enemy, predominantly Hindu India.

“And then what happens? Suddenly we discover, ‘My goodness, they’re Muslims too,’ ” he said. “It’s like a dream come true. . . . Now, how do you cash in on this? You start with the economics first . . . and the political and military relationship will flow from that.”

Hussein, who labels himself not a fundamentalist but “an Islamic nationalist,” agreed that Pakistan must distance itself from the image of its western neighbor, Iran, which ranks as one of Pakistan’s most formidable regional competitors for the moderate new Muslim markets of Central Asia. But he insisted that his nation will never lose sight of its basic Islamic moorings.

“The only difference between Iran and Pakistan is that Iran has a clerical regime,” he said. “But Islam is what makes Pakistan click, and that’s the basis of the whole future relationship, whether in Central Asia or in the region as a whole.”

Still, moderates such as Sardar Aseff concluded that the future of the Asian fringe of Islam depends in large part on how the West reacts to winds of change now blowing here.

When asked about Western perceptions of the emerging new Islamic belt, Sardar Aseff said: “So does Europe look like a Christian belt to us. These are, I think, very, very stupid fears.”