Pakistan: Religious groups have a growing influence on social media

From: The Friday Times, January 11-17, 2013 - Vol. XXIV, No. 48

Religious groups have a growing influence on social media


Retweeting religion

by Saba Imtiaz

On a wintry afternoon last February, amid a sea of men clutching flags of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamaatud Dawa and the banned Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat at a Difa-e-Pakistan Council rally in Karachi, two men monitored the developments from their station atop a container, along with a small army of journalists.

But while the cameramen looked for the best view, and the reporters wrote down the afternoon-long proceedings, the men were working in real time, armed with a laptop, smart phones and a Wi-Fi router.

Together, they posted a play-by-play of the rally online, and responded rapidly to the dozens of tweets being sent their way.

The two men were part of the Jamaatud Dawa social media wing. The group is banned by the United Nations and the United States, and India has been demanding action against its chief Hafiz Saeed, particularly after the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai, credited to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, but that hasn't stopped them from tweeting.

Jamaatud Dawa's tweets on Hurricane Sandy stirred up a storm online

And they're not the only ones. Every major religious-political party in Pakistan - from the Jamaat-e-Islami to the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazlur Rehman) and the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat - has an extensive social media presence, from multiple Twitter accounts to Facebook pages. The Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat also uses an online messenger client to stream speeches and have chats. Tune in to the party's channel and one is inundated for hours with messages of 'kafir kafir Shia kafir'.

Rallies organised by the parties are live-tweeted and streamed online. Other banned groups, such as the Masood Azhar-led Jaish-e-Mohammad, also have an online presence, but these are restricted to uploaded versions of their newspapers, books and magazines.

According to Abdul Rehman at Jamaatud Dawa's IT and Social Media department, "The concept of social media was not new for us because we were already maintaining our online lectures, Quran and Hadith courses, chat rooms, and forum discussions for a decade or more."

"Banned groups are sending threatening messages to people on Twitter"

Rehman says the group looks at its online presence as a way to dispel what it says is 'propaganda', including clarifying that the group is not banned in Pakistan and putting forth its stance on humanitarian causes. And it was the group's tweets on Hurricane Sandy that stirred up a storm online as well. After Hurricane Sandy hit parts of the US last year, Hafiz Saeed offered his "help and support" to the victims on Twitter. The US Embassy in Islamabad tweeted back: "We respect the Islamic tradition of help to the needy, but we can't take Hafiz Saeed's offer seriously."

It would be hard for anyone to take Jamaatud Dawa's offers seriously: the group has been implicated in the November 26, 2011 attacks in Mumbai, leaders at its rallies routinely call for death and destruction to rain on India and the US, and it has a long history of being involved in the insurgency in Kashmir.

Talat Aslam, the senior editor of The News in Karachi, highlights that there are "two types" of religious groups on Twitter - legitimate political parties and banned organizations. "It's more disturbing that banned, very extreme groups are spreading hate speech on Twitter, sending threatening messages directly to people for the world to see. That is the more disturbing phenomena."

"If you have a look at people's Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, a large majority of people have a bit of sympathy with these groups. Look at the kind of disinformation on subjects like Malala - huge waves of pictures claiming that the whole thing was fake," Aslam says. "It's very effective in a sense. One interesting thing is that religious parties have a very strong urban, youth presence, unlike what people traditionally believe that 'it's out there in the wilderness'. A good group of educated people have been attracted to these kinds of messages. And the views of more mainstream political parties seem to blend in and overlap with some of the campaigns, such as against drone strikes or Malala, and they often share each other's material. If I was a religious party, I would be quite happy to see what kind of influence I've had."

Sarfaraz Ahmed, the director for public relations for the Jamaat-e-Islami in Karachi, says that social media has considerably impacted the party's communication strategy. "The people we have are so energetic," he says. "They really want to improve and change things."

The Jamaat-e-Islami has a formal 10-member team working on social media just in Karachi, who are given an overall party strategy. On Twitter, they frequently 'clash' online with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement's social media team, mirroring the parties' real-life opposition to each other. According to Ahmed, "There are an additional 60 to 70 people in Karachi who supplement the team." Ahmed is unable to calculate how many people work on social media for the party nationally. The party's policy is not just imparted to social media volunteers, but many of the volunteers are able to communicate on different news issues. While the current Jamaat-e-Islami Amir Syed Munawar Hasan does not directly deal with social media, Ahmed says that there is a man designated in Lahore who stays in touch with Hasan for nearly 70% of the day. "He informs him of ongoing issues and then takes his views on these," Ahmed says. Among those working on social media is the late former Jamaat-e-Islami head Qazi Hussain Ahmed's grandson Ibrahim Qazi.

Even though Jamaat-e-Islami is already well established throughout Pakistan, Ahmed chalks down the party embracing social media to a number of reasons - the success the Muslim Brotherhood had in Egypt using social media, the 'bias' against them in Pakistan's electronic media, and the fact that the party has been unable to "counter negative things said about us on the grassroots level." It counts highlighting the attacks on Rohingya Muslims in Burma as one of its successes, as well as pointing out alleged crimes committed by activists of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement.

But while the flame wars and the controversial tweets can make headlines - or cause a great deal of amusement to social media users - the number of followers these parties have online raises new questions about the influence of religious parties in Pakistan. Aslam agrees with the assessment. "I personally feel something very paradoxical has happened in Pakistan. Twenty years ago, one could safely say that 'people are religious but religious parties have no popular support or vote'. In a way it was true. In Zia's period, it was the normal view of liberals that religion was being forced on a public who was not very religious. What seems to have happened in the ensuing decades is that it seems something has changed, in terms of what young people are thinking."

Aslam says there's a combination of reasons and events - such as the educational syllabus, events in Afghanistan and Iraq etc - that has "created this alarming new development in which you can see grassroots support. So the old things we used to say may no longer be true. This doesn't mean this will translate into votes."

But as nearly every political party in Pakistan is negotiating with religious groups for their support in the upcoming elections, the power of the right wing - both online and on the ground - shows no sign of waning.

Saba Imtiaz is a freelance journalist based in Karachi and reports on politics, culture, militancy, human rights and religious movements. She can be contacted at saba.imtiaz[at]gmail.com. A list of her recent work is available on her website http://sabaimtiaz.com