Saudi-style free market is at its best in media industry where, according to a media expert, ‘Mickey Mouse, the Spice Girls and Koran collide’ literally. There was a televisual revolution in terms of channels available in the wake of First Gulf War when the Gulf War (1990) brought 24-hour CNN coverage. Not the pioneers, but Saudi royals were among the first to launch private TV channels. Ever since Saudi royals have become big media players.

Ironically, it was television that cost Shah Feisal his life. Shah Feisal introduced television to Saudi Arabia. His nephew Khaled bin Musad was indeed angry at the arrival of obscene box. He organized a mutiny and raided the television station in Riyadh. The police quelled the mutiny Saudi-style. His Highness Prince Khaled bin Musad was martyred for his anti-tv cause. To settle the scores, his brother Feisal bin Musad murdered Shah Feisal in 1975.

By the time, Shah Feisal launched television in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s General Ayub had also launched his television project. The Pakistani mullahs also bitterly opposed the obscene idiot box. Of all the mullahs, Maulana Mowdodi did not oppose the television. Now a days, there is hardly a mullah not visible on tv screens. Even Taliban who organized public executions of tv sets in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have begun to produce jihadi videos.

Back in 2006, the Musharraf regime took 156 FM radio stations off the air ‘to stop the spread of religious extremism and anti-state sentiments notably among Pashtun tribes near the Afghan border.’ In the post-9/11 period, the southern districts in Khyber-Paktoonkhwa and Tribal Areas experienced an upsurge of FM stations. Most of these FM stations were/are run either from the compound of a mosque or a madrassah (seminary).

It was two FM stations that invoked Brelvi-Deobandi riots, in Khyber Agency, in March 2006. This is what happened: Pir Rehman (a Brelvi) and Mufti Munir Shakir (a Deobandi) got hold of broadcasting equipment and set up FM stations in the compounds of their respective seminaries. Both the FM stations began to engage in a Brelvi-Deobandi munazra (religious debate). Soon the whole village was tense and polarised along sectarian lines. Eventually, a gun battle on March 27, 2006, between the followers of both these mullahs left 25 dead and scores of others maimed.

Ridiculously, the radio was bitterly opposed by mullahs when it reached the Muslim world. They thought it was damned Satan speaking out of this magic box. Likewise, no mullah, at least in Pakistan, is ready to observe the ban on loudspeaker’s misuse. Let alone observance of a ban, no mullah is ready to say Call for Prayers (Azan) or Friday sermon unless a mosque is fitted with half-a-dozen loudspeakers. Needless to say that the loudspeaker was bitterly opposed too. A number of fatwas (religious edicts) declared recitation of Azan on loudspeaker as un-Islamic.

The camera was indignantly opposed too. A camera-picture is still haram (forbidden) according to hardliners. However, a number of mullahs opposed to camera-pictures, are seen round-the-clock on host of tv channels. A funny scene was to watch, a few years back, the late Dr Israr Ahmad declaring on television camera-pictures as haram. He was definitely ignorant that a video camera was taking his picture dozens of times by every passing second in order to broadcast his lofty ideas.

When Dr Israr’s former mentor Maulana Mowdodi died, Noble laureate V. S. Naipul was in Pakistan. Naipul writes: ‘But he did not die in Pakistan. The news of his death came from Boston. At the end of his long and cantankerous life the Maulana had gone against all his principles. He had gone to a Boston hospital to look for health; he had at the very end entrusted himself to the skill and science of the civilization he had tried to shield his followers from. He had sought, as someone said to me (not all Pakistanis are fundamentalists) to reap where he had not wanted his people to sow. Of the Maulana it might be said that he had gone to his well-deserved place in heaven by way of Boston; and that he went at least part of the way by Boeing’. One may cite dozens of other such examples. Mullahs, for instance, are opposed to Western-democracy but faithfully contests elections. As an intellectual cover, they resort to a cliché being popularised of late: ‘modernisation is not necessarily westernisation’. This play of words is a façade the political mullah uses to shield against the inconsistencies in his thinking regarding the nexus between modernity and technology. In mullahs view, modernity is technological advancement while westernisation is ‘fahashi’/ ‘madar pidar azadi’( obscenity/absolute vulgarity).

At face value, it appears correct that modernity and westernisation are not necessarily the same things. However, there is a historical relation between modernity and ‘westernisation’. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, writers of highly canonized ‘Empire’, “The origins of European modernity are often characterized as springing from a secularizing process that denied divine and transcendent authority over worldly affairs...What is revolutionary in this whole series of philosophical developments stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries is that the powers of creation that had previously been consigned exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth...Just as in philosophy and science, in politics, too, humanity reappropriated in this early period of modernity what medieval transcendence had taken away from it.”

In other words, as long as a society remains in the grip of a certain ‘received wisdom’, it believes it monopolises the ultimate truth. Modernity is a challenge to received wisdom and ultimate truth. It is an impetus to seek the truth logically as well as scientifically. It is, in turn, the search for truth that lays the basis for scientific and technical advancement as it opens the doors to debate and research. The received wisdom remains an obstacle for the Muslim world in achieving scientific advancement.

Farooq Sulehria