ISLAMICA : What hope does any new leadership in Pakistan have of wresting power from institutions as heavily entrenched as the military and the feudals?

IMRAN KHAN : The problem we have is that the elite people, the well-to-do, who have more money than the rest, who have better educations, are totally depoliticized. Including the youth. They are totally depoliticized. And the common man is just fighting for his survival. Normally it is the educated youth in a country, the students, they are the ones who are at the forefront of change. Like in Indonesia, the change was brought about by the youth. In the United States, the strongest antigovernment protests during the Vietnam War were on campuses. Here you have a youth that is totally depoliticized, especially the westernized elites. The youth on whom you spend the greatest amount of money, all the values that are indoctrinated in them are material values. All they are interested in is their material wellbeing, the jobs, going to the land of milk and honey, going abroad, there is no sense of nation-building, or fighting for your country, or changing it. That kind of vitality does not exist. The youth and the westernized elite need grounding in their religion.

ISLAMICA : You mention grounding in our religion, what do you think is the best forum for such grounding?

IMRAN KHAN : The education system needs to be reformed as a whole and religion is a very important part of education. Do not listen to these secular people who say that religion should have nothing to do with education. Absolute nonsense. Muslims produced the greatest scientists for seven hundred years. And in those education systems everyone was also taught their religion. Everyone understood it. In fact, it is the only protection against the negative side of the clergy, or what you call “mullah-ism”. You can only protect yourself if you understand the religion. So how can it be bad to learn religion, because it teaches you of ethics, of values, of being a better human being … being selfless, being charitable, all the great values in a human being are imparted by religion, not just Islam, but other religions also. People who say we should remove religion completely from education are talking nonsense. You need morality in society, whatever you do.

ISLAMICA : What can we build on in terms of improving the way that our religion is perceived by people outside Pakistan and how important do you think it is for Muslims to even “manage” these perceptions?

IMRAN KHAN : The problem we are facing is that they keep telling us that democracy and Islam do not go together only because there is no democracy in the Muslim world. Yet we all know that the first citystate of Islam, Medina, had very strong democratic institutions. Elections alone do not mean democracy. Democracy means democratic institutions which means a strong independent judiciary. That is the key. Apart from that you have elections. But that independent judicial system is the key institution that ensures democracy. The first Islamic state had an excellent judicial system. For a long time in the Muslim world the judiciary was independent of the executive branch. We suffered because instead of developing on that state we ended up back in monarchy with no checks on the executive. And when the West was changing and constitutions were developing in the United States, during the French Revolution, when Oliver Cromwell asserted the parliamental control over the executive, we here were still having absolute monarchs who invariably degenerated that system. It is meant to self-destruct. So this is our biggest problem: a problem of perception … because the impression is that Islam is an outdated religion. Look at the Muslim world, there are no democracies. The second challenge we face is that, because we do not have, like the Catholic Church, a spokesmen speaking for all Catholics … We have a book in Islam. And every Muslim can make up his own mind and decide which scholar to follow. We have no single voice to speak from. So the result is that instead of the best voices speaking for Islam we have those voices speaking that the Western media decides should speak, and the media can pick anyone. And they prefer the fanatics to come forward, who make no sense at all, who reinforce the stereotypes of Islam in the West. We need people like Hamza Yusuf, enlightened people who can speak with the same expression and language of the West. We need scholars.