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To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46340)	5/27/2004 7:13:28 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

US praises Karachi police for acting promptly Washington: The Karachi police has been praised by the State Department for responding quickly to the Karachi bomb attacks and preventing a greater loss of life. Spokesman Richard Boucher in answer to a question about the two car bombs that exploded about 50 metres from the residence of the US Consul-General said, “US Consulate personnel tell us that the Pakistani police responded quickly to the scene, that their actions prevented a greater loss of life. We appreciate the professionalism and the care that Pakistani authorities have taken to protect US government facilities in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan. We expect the Pakistani authorities will conduct a thorough investigation of this incident and take swift action to identify those responsible and bring them to justice.” At that point, the spokesman was not sure if the cultural centre on the same street had any link with the US or was in receipt of any funding from it. Later, it turned out that the centre was a privately-run institutions. khalid hasan

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46340)	5/27/2004 7:15:27 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

A struggle that we do every day;;Christians and Islamisation of crime —Khaled Ahmed’s Urdu Press Review dailytimes.com.pk The process of Islamisation has resulted in the Islamisation of crime. Many dacoits have been ‘raised’ from ignominy through their devotion to Islam. This process has been depicted in Punjabi films. What actually happened was criminalisation of Islam. This process was accelerated by jihad which was joined by many erstwhile criminals. Earlier, ethnic politics in Karachi had ‘reclaimed’ many outlaws. Today the minorities have become sensitive to the social implications of this criminalisation When Jinnah created Pakistan, he received the largest number of letters of support from the Christians. This is what ‘Jinnah Papers’ says, the archives of his office. The Christians thought that they had a better deal in Pakistan than in India where they thought Hindus would observe the caste system. But after 1949, the community has felt its space being narrowed down more and more. From being a secular population, they have now become sensitive about religion. Many of them have migrated, the rest feel harassed. They are badly hit by the blasphemy law, a law enforced to target the minorities. According to ‘Jang’ (22 March 2004), the Christian Councillors Alliance protested outside the office of the film censor board in Lahore for passing a gangland movie in which a dacoit Mullan Muzaffar is depicted as a bad man with a heart filled with Islamic devotion. They were upset over the fact that the film showed that his partner-in-crime, one called Saja Masih, was converted by Mullan Muzaffar to Islam. They said it was wrong because Saja Masih never embraced Islam and was buried in a Christian graveyard after his death. They demanded that the extremely moving scenes with loud dialogue depicting the conversion through recitation of ‘kalima’ be cut from the film. The process of Islamisation has resulted in the Islamisation of crime. Many dacoits have been ‘raised’ from ignominy through their devotion to Islam. This process has been depicted in Punjabi films. What actually happened was criminalisation of Islam. This process was accelerated by jihad which was joined by many erstwhile criminals. Earlier, ethnic politics in Karachi had ‘reclaimed’ many outlaws. Today the minorities have become sensitive to the social implications of this criminalisation. The case of Mullan Muzaffar is well known. After he started showing signs of religiosity he was ‘adopted’ by a powerful cleric of Lahore on the plea that he was repentant. But the truth is that his gang was quite secular; that’s why a Christian criminal was operating in it. The Christian protest today ignores the fact that Saja Masih was a violent criminal, it is more concerned about his religious identity. If the Muslims are reclaiming their criminals why shouldn’t the Christians? Religion has thus become a cover and no one including the state is safe from it. Writing in ‘Khabrain’ (23 March 2004), Brigadier (Retd) Saulat Raza stated that Pakistan’s great opening batsman Saeed Anwar had gone religious and was nursing a big beard which was all right but he should stop his efforts to convert the only Christian cricketer in Pakistan’s national tram, Yusuf Yuhanna. Yusuf looked good crossing himself every time he scored well and that gave Pakistan a good image. Cricketers sporting flowing beards give Pakistan a bad image as a country of wild fanatics. This is of course the doing of foreign hostile media because terrorists who kill in Pakistan were also bearded. There was something wrong in the way the hostile Western media publicised the religious trend among such Pakistani cricketers as Saqlain Mushtaq (big beard) and Inzimamul Haq (beard), the last-named also shown leading a namaz of the cricket team. What is more worrisome is that every time Saeed Anwar claims that Yuhanna has converted the latter is shown crossing himself in the field of cricket. This is a dangerous thing. Saeed Anwar should be careful. Anyone who embraces Islam and then reverts is an apostate. In the eyes of the people at least he deserves death. By making his claims Saeed Anwar is endangering the life of Yusuf Yuhanna. Brigadier Saulat Raza should not accuse the Western media on this score; thus is entirely our own problem. It is so strange and so full of hypocrisy that media from Mars too would take notice of it. Why should a Christian convert to Islam if everything here is tilted against him? All Christians are under threat from the blasphemy law. They will convert only under duress and that is against Islam. According to ‘Nawa-e-Waqt’, (19 March 2004) General Zia’s daughter based in America said that her father was killed by General Aslam Beg, General Asad Durrani, air force officers and America. She said General Zia asked Aslam Beg to accompany him in the fateful plane but he insisted that he would go in his own plane. The American ambassador too liked to go in his own plane but General Zia persuaded him to go with him. Americans have the practice of getting their own man killed when they want a targeted person removed. She said she was not allowed to meet the American ambassador’s widow. General Zia’s daughter has not watched her brother’s change of stance vis-à-vis General Beg. He first accused the general, till it became embarrassing for prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He set up the Justice Shafiqur Rehman Commission in 1992 to inquire into the 1988 death of General Zia. The Commission exonerated the United States but accused the Pakistan army of obstructing its investigations. Ijazul Haq began by accusing General Beg but slowly learned that it was politically more useful to accuse the US. According to this mindset, Suhrawardi, Liaquat Ali Khan, Khan Sahib, General Ayub, Bhutto, etc, were all killed by America. According to daily ‘Insaf’ (20 March 2004), the mosques of Peshawar protested loudly in Friday sermons when the third one-day cricket match was being played in the city between India and Pakistan. The imams of the mosques stated that the mosques were empty because most people were sitting at home watching the match on TV. The rest were at the stadium watching cricket and neglecting their duty to Allah. The imams also castigated the NWP government for violating the ‘juma’ prayer. Cricket matches in the past were not castigated by the mullah, but the same clergy now thinks it is the duty of the MMA government to uphold the tokenism of Islamic rituals. This is the Taliban legacy. It is also called orthopraxy which religious governments resort to instead of addressing serious public issues. In India one BJP-ruled state banned cow-slaughter, but the BJP was defeated there. It is obvious that banning of cow-slaughter did not solve the problems of the poor. Writing in ‘Jang’ (20 March 2004) Ataul Haq Qasimi stated that in Qonia the tomb of Maulana Rum contained a symbolic grave of Allama Iqbal too to celebrate the close spiritual relationship between the great poets. He recalled that at one time the grave of Allama Iqbal was overgrown with grass which he cleaned up. In Ankara, the second biggest road was named Jinnah Road and the Indian embassy was located on it! Turkey is the only Islamic country that accepts Allama Iqbal completely. Two states in whose national language he wrote his most serious work never gave him the respect he deserved. When Ali Shariati read his famous lecture in Tehran’s Husseinyeh Irshad, the clergy protested. According to a volume (Iqbal and Afghanistan) recently prepared by Pakistan’s great scholar, Ikram Chughtai, when Allama Iqbal sent his ‘Payam-e-Mashriq’ long poem to Amir Amanullah in Kabul, the king’s education committee was offended and recommended the works of Abul Kalam instead! Before her death, Annemarie Schimmel noted that Iqbal’s Lectures were banned in Saudi Arabia. Only in Egypt did Umm-e-Kulsum sing his ‘Shikwa’ in Arabic. *

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46340)	5/29/2004 3:28:36 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50167

Dr Aafia was handed over to US last year: govt By Our Staff Reporter ISLAMABAD, May 28: An interior ministry spokesman on Friday confirmed that Dr Aafia Siddiqui, allegedly involved in terrorist activities, had been arrested in 2003 from Karachi and handed over to the US authorities. Dr Aafia, having dual Pakistani-American nationalities, holds a doctorate in neurological sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The spokesman told this correspondent that Dr Aafia had been handed over to the US because she had "kept her US nationality". Otherwise, the spokesman said, no Pakistani involved in any activity had so far been handed over to the US by the present government. An FBI report showed Dr Aafia, 32, to be one of the seven dangerous terrorists who planned a new attack on the US. The interior ministry spokesman said Dr Aafia was also wanted in Pakistan because of the country being one of the major coalition partners of the US in the war against terrorism. The FBI report claimed Dr Aafia to be still in Pakistan but the interior ministry spokesman said that she was in the US custody. Another interior ministry official said Pakistani intelligence agencies had interrogated her but her links with Al Qaeda could not be established. He said in the US, Dr Aafia was accused of delivering anti-US speeches and "preaching jihad". Later, she was declared a "dangerous terrorist" by the FBI. The same official confirmed that Dr Aafia had visited Pakistan in 2003 and had spent a few days in Islamabad. She is stated to be an award winning student of the MIT. A statement issued by Dr Aafia's father, published in the press during March 2004, said she had studied in the MIT for 10 years and obtained her PhD and returned to Pakistan in 2002. He said that she had again gone to the US and returned to the country in February 2003 after renting a post office box in her name in Maryland. He alleged that Dr Aafia had been kidnapped in Karachi along with her three children aged between three-and-a-half months to seven years from March 25 to March 31, 2003. Dr Aafia's father had ridiculed the FBI's allegations, saying that the agency had all of a sudden declared her to be an Al Qaeda leader besides accusing her of supporting other "operatives of this group" entering the US. The FBI claimed that she had hired the post office box for one Majid Khan, an alleged member of Al Qaeda, residing in Baltimore. In 2003, Dr Fawzia, Dr Aafia's elder sister along with the minister for religious affairs Ijazul Haq had called on interior minister Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat in Islamabad to know the whereabouts of her sister. On this occasion, the interior minister was quoted by her father as saying: "According to my information, Dr Aafia has already been released and Dr Fawzia should wait for her sister's call at home."