Can Pakistan lead the Muslim world out of its Dark Age?

They were unable to unite in halting the advance of the Ottomans who reached the gates of Vienna – and were halted there more by Sultan Suleiman’s demise than any credible Christian resistance.
Today, the roles are reversed. It is the Muslim world that is unable to unite to fend off the domination of the West. The crisis between Qatar and its Gulf partners is reminiscent of the squabbling of weak rulers in Renaissance-era Europe.
Today’s vulnerable Muslim world is wide open to the influence and domination of external powers.
First, many Muslim countries face a crisis of political legitimacy. Governance structures, mostly bequeathed by departing Western colonists, have corroded. The authoritarian regimes in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Iran survived the Arab Spring, but most are now vulnerable domestically to both democratic and ideological challenges.
Egypt has reverted to military rule. Turkey’s populist leader battles internal and external opposition. External intervention in Libya has yielded a civil war and the emergence of the militant Islamic State group and other terrorist outfits. Similarly, Syria has been destroyed by external intervention and a brutal sectarian civil war. The fiction of Iraq’s unity is preserved by the presence of Iranian militias, US military support and the war against IS. The US-installed Afghan regime is weak, corrupt, divided and militarily beleaguered. Ironically, Pakistan is one of the few countries in the Islamic world which, despite corruption scandals, retains at least some democratic legitimacy.
Second, violence is spreading across the Muslim world. Global terrorist groups – IS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabab et al – are now active participants in civil and cross-border conflicts and pose a threat to global stability.
Muslim nations are not the main sponsors of global terrorism – they are its principal victims. Major global powers have fought terrorists selectively and at times used them for partisan purposes. No effort has been made to stop state terrorism or to differentiate between terrorists and insurgencies which – like the Afghan Taleban – have local, negotiable goals. Most important, no concerted effort has been made to address terrorism’s root causes: persistent injustices against Muslim peoples in Palestine, Kashmir and elsewhere, or poverty, ignorance and social alienation which forges a recruiting ground for terrorists everywhere, including on the Internet.
Third, the crises within the Islamic world have been exacerbated by ideological and doctrinal differences. The most vital schism is between Sunni and Shia power. This schism was dormant until Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It rose to the fore in the Iraq-Iran war. It was manifest in the Afghan civil war between the Afghan Taleban and the Northern Alliance. It was, however, the US invasion of Iraq, its dismantling of the Sunni-dominated Baath party and army and the organisation of one-man one-vote elections that enabled the Iran-sponsored Shia parties to gain power in Iraq and extend Iranian influence across the Levant and beyond.
Iran’s rise is anathema to its Sunni rivals: Saudi Arabia, the GCC and Egypt. Turkey has also been uncomfortable; although it has been obliged recently to moderate its rivalry and secure Tehran’s cooperation to forestall Kurdish separatism. 
But the sectarian divide is not the sole ideological rift within the Muslim world today. The Muslim Brotherhood and its populist ideology have become abhorrent to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE. Hamas, the Palestinian affiliate of the Brotherhood, has suffered collateral damage. On the other hand, Qatar and Turkey have espoused the Brotherhood and Hamas, offered refuge to their adherents and support to them in the Libyan civil war. Such Qatari divergence was evidently the main reason for the Saudi-UAE break with Doha.
Last, but not least, today’s weak, vulnerable Islamic world is wide open to the influence and domination of major external powers. The recent Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh illustrated the susceptibility of most of the assembled Muslim nations to US domination. Russia also enjoys critical influence with several Muslim countries, including Iran and Turkey, due to its military power and growing role in Syria and the region. So far, China has remained aloof from inter-Islamic differences. Its desire seems to be to use its economic and financial power as a force for greater cohesion with Muslim countries.
What seems most dangerous in the immediate future is the hardline positions being adopted by the Trump administration on most international disputes and crises, including North Korea, South China Sea, Syria and Iran. If implemented, these positions, particularly the formation of an alliance against Iran, are likely to lead to intensification of conflicts affecting the Muslim world.
Pakistan, as the Muslim world’s second-largest nation, its largest military power and its only nuclear-armed state, cannot play possum on issues involving the global Islamic community. Pakistan has consistently concluded that its national and security interests can be best advanced by promoting unity and cooperation among Muslim countries. Today, more than ever, Pakistan is obliged to play an active role to develop viable avenues for conflict resolution and cooperation among the Islamic nations and, hopefully, lead the way to a new age of enlightenment in the Muslim world. – Dawn/ANN

Munir Akram is a former Pakistan ambassador to the UN.