We help this nation to look into the mirror every day..That is most important a task..any nation able to do that is on the mend, we are definitely on the mend..
The wages of ‘using’ Islam —Khaled Ahmed’s Urdu Press Review
The model of civilian democracy was there nextdoor in India, but Bangladesh reverted to our pattern and had 20 years of military dictatorship with generals applying their own 8th amendment to Islamise the state
After having created Pakistan, we have done two things. We have assumed that what was before 1947 was bad, and that whatever we have done after 1947 is good or had to be good. The facts on ground tell us that both these assumptions were wrong. Not all that was before 1947 was bad and not all that we did after 1947 to organise things to our satisfaction was good. Behind all this hidden is a Muslim’s idea of the state. What kind of a state do the Muslims want? A short answer is a welfare state with shariah. A welfare state after the collapse of socialism is a dangerously deficit state unless it has oil. And when it comes to shariah we insist it should be literalist. This is a prescription for depression.
Senior columnist Irshad Haqqani wrote in ‘Jang’ (25 March 2004) that Islam had been used in Pakistan for selfish and unworthy objectives and the true values of Islam like equality and brotherhood had been corrupted. The old British system which had exploited the enslaved people was still intact in its infrastructure. The elements of the status quo (army, civil services, feudalism, capitalist, etc) were fully entrenched and were not allowing Pakistan to fulfil its real promise.
The British Raj worked; what we have doesn’t work. It may probably be more profitable to discuss why the Muslims of the world everywhere can’t create a state without being vague and discontented about it. Bangladesh separated from us because we had military dictators. The model of civilian democracy was there nextdoor in India, but Bangladesh reverted to our pattern and had 20 years of military dictatorship with generals applying their own 8th amendment to Islamise the state. Hindu India remains a democracy despite poverty.
Daily ‘Jang’ (24 March 2004) reported from a seminar in Lahore that most speakers agreed that the people had stopped reposing confidence in the institutions of the state. Mr Fakhr Imam said that the real problem was that no policies adopted by the government were ever discussed in parliament. Imran Khan said that the four evils of extremism mentioned by President Musharraf in parliament were created by the establishment itself. Ghulam Ahmad Bilour said that America used Pakistan earlier and wanted to use it again. Makhdoom Khaliquzzaman said that the clergy had brought the Americans in the region. Syeda Abida Hussain said that politicians had made their share of mistakes but the state institutions had made more mistakes than they.
In democracy if you have the numbers you can push through your policies with a simple majority, but you can’t amend the Constitution unless you have a two-thirds majority. That’s how governments function. In Pakistan, the ‘other’ method of proclaiming ordinances also exists; that too is a democratic device. The plaint about being a slave of America is naïve. In the regional context India too was keen in 2001; Pakistan just beat it to the punch. Fifty years have passed like this. Had we joined the Soviet bloc, things would have been much worse.
Daily ‘Nawa-e-Waqt’ (24 March 2004) quoted Justice (Retd) Javid Iqbal as saying that a report on curriculum and textbooks prepared in 2003 by SDPI’s Dr Nayyar was against the ideology of Pakistan because it opposed the concept of umma as unrealistic and rejected the ideology of Pakistan, in particular the two-nation doctrine. He criticised the government for not reacting against the report as it deprived Pakistan of its grounds for existence. He also said that jihad was the strength of the state and this should be known to children.
Dr Javid Iqbal’s stance doesn’t gibe with the more convincing modernist worldview in his books. This is a moment of obfuscation in the life of an honest and forthright man. If the foundations of Pakistan’s existence are in third-rate hate-mongering textbooks then they are flimsy indeed.
According to daily ‘Insaf’ (25 March 2004) a spokesman of Functional Muslim League in Lahore criticised chairman Pakistan Cricket Board Mr Shahryar Muhammad Khan for inviting Jinnah’s daughter Dina Wadia and her son Nusli Wadia to watch the Indo-Pakistan cricket match in Lahore. Spokesman Azad said that Jinnah had broken all contact with his daughter and it was wrong on the part of the PCB to revive it because in the Quran Prophet Noah was rebuked for seeking contact with his disobedient son. Dina had not received anything from her father’s patrimony as everything was divided between Shirinbai and Fatima Jinnah.
This bit of tragic disinformation is a part of the textbook indoctrination. Not knowing about how Jinnah disposed of his property is like not knowing about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in America. Prejudice and hatred spring from an informational blackout.
A column written by Shaukat Janjua in ‘Khabrain’ (25 March 2004) narrated that at a SAARC-related meeting in India, he heard Indian trade minister Sikandar Bakht saying that Indians and Pakistanis had been divided by an artificial line and that this line should be undone to make the people one again. On this a member of the Faisalabad chamber of commerce Mian Shafiq, who had immigrated from East Punjab, raised the slogan of Allah Akbar so loud that the Hindus at the meeting were dumb-struck and Sikandar Bakht forgot his speech. The writer went on to say that Pakistanis were unhappy in Pakistan but when they went to India and experienced freedom and a bit of wine they forgot that Hindus and Muslims had never been friends down the centuries.
This is a perfect example of mercantilism. It simply proves that we have not been able to develop a truly business class. We have warriors masquerading as businessmen. But there is increasingly available evidence that a section of the industrialists are no longer warriors in disguise but do understand economics.
According to daily ‘Insaf’ (26 March 2004), Multan Intermediate Board exam was disrupted when the examinees discovered that one question in Urdu ‘B’ paper said: ‘write the blessings of love (mohabbat ki barkatain)’. The students said that they were not trained to write on the subject and considered it obscene. After the exam was over, some boys had attempted the question while others had not, leaving the page blank. It was later discovered that the question actually was about blessings of work (mehnat ki barkatain) and was changed to ‘love’ through the misprint of a wrongly placed dot. The people of Multan appealed that no marks be deducted against students not attempting the question or writing the answer wrongly under love.
One misplaced dot turned a platitude into an interesting topic. (We don’t have written vowels in letters and we have dots that can wander around in a script that we have refused to reform. Some reforms in orthography proposed by Maulvi Abdul Haq and Sir Syed were not really accepted. The easier way of writing ‘zakat’ and ‘riba’ by our ancestors was also rejected as Pakistan went Islamic.) The fact that the examinees could not write about love is also a rebuke to us for an educational system that is strong on indoctrination but zero in autonomous thinking.
Writer Zubair Ahmad Gondal in Jang criticised the SDPI report on the matter of injecting Islamic content in textbooks and said that no foreigner had the right to force Pakistan to remove Arabic verses on jihad from school textbooks. He said the scandal of SDPI report came in the wake of another scandal, that of the Government’s removal of Quranic verses about water from the biology book of classes 9 and 10. The writer praised Dr Shirin Mazari for defending the Islamic content. He praised the editorial written on 16 March 2004 in Jang against the SDPI report, but said it was wrong on the part of the government to form a committee to scrutinise the SDPI report while some members of the committee were the very same people who had helped write the report. He quoted a publication ‘afkar-e-muallam’ and praised it for saying that ‘our textbooks have been attacked by the West’ (yalghar). He quoted an ‘expert’ of Punjab University as saying that a certain lobby was targeting our textbooks for foreign elements.
The writer is a senior office-bearer of a wing of Jama’at-e Islami and the newspaper carrying the article for that reason should have given his designation. The country saw a consensus between the secular intellectual and the fundamentalist religious elements plus a religious state. The debate should have been purely intellectual but it was not. It was angry and threatening which is quite common in Muslim societies. The secular intellectual of course knows that he would be eliminated when the state falls into the hands of the fundamentalists, but his own infighting is more lethal than his unexpressed contradiction with the fundamentalist. * |
