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  #31  
Old Wednesday, July 24, 2013
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Not quite sane


One of the most notorious and infamous criminals in recent US history is a man called Charles Manson. Manson was a failed musician who in the late 1960s somehow managed to form a small cult around him of confused young middle-class drifters (mostly women) in San Francisco.

Taking bits from the Bible and pseudo-religions like Scientology and inspiration from the rising socio-political tensions in the US at the time, Manson concocted a theory suggesting that the song, Helter Skelter, by the famous British pop/psychedelic band, the Beatles, predicted a coming racial war between the blacks and Caucasian Americans.

Manson’s ramblings in this respect were largely the result of the high dosages of the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD, that his small group and he were constantly taking. He told his followers that they would have to ‘create Helter Skelter’ by committing murder and (thus) trigger the predicted racial war.

In August 1969 the cult went on a killing spree, stabbing and shooting to death nine people, including actress Sharon Tate who was pregnant at the time. She was stabbed 16 times.

The gruesome murders shocked the country. Manson and his circle of followers were finally apprehended by the police in December 1969. But what disturbed Middle America even more was the sight of some young men and women who turned up outside the court building where Manson’s trial was being held and began to demonstrate and demand his release.

In March 1971, the court handed Manson and three other members of the group death sentences for their direct involvement in the murders. In 1972 another member of the group was also given the death sentence. But the sentences were automatically reduced to life imprisonment when California abolished death penalty in the state.

Various noted American sociologists and psychologists have tried to investigate what made a group of young middle-class Americans follow Manson into slaughtering nine innocent people for the sake of an irrational and delusional cause.

More curious are certain studies probing the mindset of those men and women who actually exhibited sympathy and support for Manson and his group of killers — even after the gruesome and graphic details of the murders became common knowledge.

One popular theory emerging from these psychological probes suggests that most probably Manson fans and apologists saw the murders as reflections (and release) of their own repressed social and sexual frustrations and anger in the event of their inability to discharge these frustrations by committing murder and acts of violence themselves.

In other words, if the murderers were criminally insane, then those rationalising or glorifying their crime were not quite sane as well.

Thus, in Pakistan’s context, I wonder if the same can be said about those who were captured by TV cameras showering rose petals on Mumtaz Qadri — the man who gunned down former Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, because he thought Taseer had committed blasphemy.

And what about young, educated, middle-class men and women who went off the tangent abusing and battering (on social media) a young 16-year-old girl from Swat who last year was shot in the forehead by religious extremists?

Malala Yousufzai narrowly survived the attack and had to be treated by military doctors in Pakistan and surgeons in the UAE and the UK before recovering.

She then went on to deliver a remarkable speech at the UN, pleading universal peace and women’s education, sounding decades more mature, coherent and inspirational than her detractors.

On the evening of her speech, I undertook a quick study of Twitter and Facebook, chasing the profiles of that section of Pakistanis who erupted after Malala completed her address at the UN.

Though many Pakistanis exhibited profound praise and applause for the brave girl, I did come across numerous Tweets and Facebook ramblings of many perfectly ‘normal’ looking men and women who accused her of being a US/Western agent, a hoax, a fraud, etc.

The detractors all seemed to be educated young urbanites with an interest in pop music, Bollywood/Hollywood films and other fun stuff. At the same time, most of them seemed to also be Imran Khan fans.

A PTI Karachi member confessed to me that Khan, who had not Tweeted anything about the speech on the day that it took place, finally tweeted about it (in praise of Malala) after it became apparent that most of the people badmouthing Malala on Twitter and Facebook had Khan’s picture as their DP (display picture), or claimed to be from the ‘PTI family’.

Nevertheless, not all were PTI or Khan fans. I know some very decent, intelligent and empathetic ones as well. But the question remains: How can anyone with a young sister, daughter or even a fellow female classmate, ever get him or herself to abuse an innocent young teenaged schoolgirl who was shot by a man full of unadulterated hatered and who thought everyone but him was an infidel and worthy of death?

Going back to the theory that attempted to psycho-profile Manson’s fans, can it be said that if those in Pakistan who slaughter men, women and children in the name of faith are criminally insane, then are those who do not pull the trigger or explode themselves in a mosque, shrine or market, but are ever ready to defend, rationalise or even glorify acts of sheer brutality, are not quite sane either?

I’m not a psychologist, and maybe in anger I’d like to label them as being equally insane. But as a citizen of Pakistan, even in my most calm moments, I can’t help but to lament that if these people are not as insane, then mentally they are certainly not all there and can be in need of some urgent psychiatric help.

Heck, the way things are in this country,perhaps we all are.

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  #32  
Old Wednesday, August 14, 2013
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Default My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab

My name is Pakistan and I’m not an Arab


In 1973, my paternal grandparents visited Makkah to perform the first of their two Hajj pilgrimages.

With them were two of my grandmother’s sisters and their respective husbands.

Upon reaching Jeddah, they hailed a taxi from the airport and headed for their designated hotel.

The driver of the taxi was a Sudanese man. As my grandparents and one of my grandmother’s sisters settled themselves in the taxi, the driver leisurely began driving towards the hotel and on the way inserted a cassette of Arabic songs into the car’s Japanese cassette-player.

My grandfather who was seated in the front seat beside the driver noticed that the man kept glancing at the rear view mirror, and every time he did that, one of his eyebrows would rise.

Curious, my grandfather turned his head to see exactly what was it about the women seated in the back seat that the taxi driver found so amusing.

This was what he discovered: As my grandmother was trying to take a quick nap, her sister too had her eyes closed, but her head was gently swinging from left to right to the beat of the music and she kept whispering (as if in quiet spiritual ecstasy) the Arabic expression Subhanallah, subhanallah …’

My grandfather knew enough Arabic to realise that the song to which my grandmother’s sister was swinging and praising the Almighty for was about an (Egyptian) Romeo who was lamenting his past as a heart-breaking flirt.

After giving a sideways glance to the driver to make sure he didn’t understand Punjabi, my grandfather politely asked my grandmother’s sister: ‘I didn’t know you were so much into music.’

‘Allah be praised, brother,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

The chatter woke my grandmother up: ‘What is so wonderful?’ She asked. ‘This,’ said her sister, pointing at one of the stereo speakers behind her. ‘So peaceful and spiritual …’

My grandfather let off a sudden burst of an albeit shy and muffled laughter. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘the singer is not singing holy verses. He is singing about his romantic past.’

My grandmother started to laugh as well. Her sister’s spiritual smile was at once replaced by an utterly confused look: ‘What …?’

‘Sister,’ my grandfather explained, ‘Arabs don’t go around chanting spiritual and holy verses. Do you think they quote a verse from the holy book when, for example, they go to a fruit shop to buy fruit or want toothpaste?’

I’m sure my grandmother’s sister got the point. Not everything Arabic is holy.

Even though I was only a small child then I clearly remember my grandfather relating the episode with great relish. Though he was an extremely conservative and religious man and twice performed the Hajj, he refused to sport a beard, and wasn’t much of a fan of the Arabs (especially the monarchical kind).

He was proud of the fact that he was born in a small town in north Punjab that before 1947 was part of India.

In the early 1980s when Saudi money and influence truly began to take hold on the culture and politics of Pakistan, there were many families (especially from the Punjab) that actually began to rewrite their histories.

For example, families and clans that had emerged from within the South Asian region began to claim that their ancestors actually came from Arabia.

Something like this happened within the Paracha clan as well. In 1982 a book (authored by one of my grandfather’s many cousins) claimed that the Paracha clan originally appeared in Yemen and was converted to Islam during the time of the Holy Prophet (Pbuh).

The truth, however, was that like a majority of Pakistanis, Parachas too were once either Hindus or Buddhists who were converted to Islam by Sufi saints between the 11th and 15th centuries.

When the cousin gifted his book to my grandfather, he rubbished the claim and told him that he might attract Saudi Riyals with the book but zero historical credibility.

But historical accuracy and credibility does not pan well in an insecure country like Pakistan whose state and people, even after six decades of existence, are yet to clearly define exactly what constitutes their nationalistic and cultural identity.

After the complete fall of the Mughal Empire in the 19th century till about the late 1960s, Pakistanis (post-1947), attempted to separate themselves from other religious communities of the region by identifying with those Persian cultural aspects that had reigned supreme in Muslim royal courts in India, especially during the Mughal era.

However, after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle, the state with the help of conservative historians and ulema made a conscious effort to divorce Pakistan’s history from its Hindu and Persian past and enact a project to bond this history with a largely mythical and superficial link with Arabia.

The project began to evolve at a much more rapid pace from the 1980s onwards. The streaming in of the ‘Petro Dollars’ from oil-rich monarchies and the Pakistanis’ increasing interaction with their Arab employers in these countries, turned Pakistan’s historical identity on its head.

In other words, instead of investing intellectual resources to develop a nationalism that was grounded and rooted in the more historically accurate sociology and politics of the Muslims of the region, a reactive attempt was made to dislodge one form of ‘cultural imperialism’ and import by adopting another.

For example, attempts were made to dislodge ‘Hindu and Western cultural influences’ in the Pakistani society by adopting Arabic cultural hegemony that came as a pre-requisite and condition with the Arabian Petro Dollar.

The point is, instead of assimilating the finer points of the diverse religious and ethnic cultures that our history is made of and synthesise them to form a more convincing and grounded nationalism and cultural identity, we have decided to reject our diverse and pluralistic past and instead adopt cultural dimensions of a people who, ironically, still consider non-Arabs like Pakistanis as second-class Muslims.

http://dawn.com/news/1032519/my-name...im-not-an-arab
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  #33  
Old Tuesday, August 20, 2013
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A fine anomaly


Recently the Bangladesh Supreme Court banned the right-wing Islamic party, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). Apart from accusing it of being involved in the atrocities committed by the party members against Bengali nationalists in league with the former West Pakistan forces in 1971, the court also maintained that the party’s existence went against the constitution of Bangladesh.

Few remember that even before the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, a similar move was attempted in Pakistan in which the government contemplated banning religious parties because they ‘soiled the image of Islam by mixing it with amoral politics’.

It is also bemusing to note that in a country that has increasingly become obsessed with religion and the role it plays in its politics and society, very few remember one of the finest and most refined Islamic scholars produced by Pakistan. He was also the man directly associated with the attempt to dislodge religious parties from politics in Pakistan.

Maybe this is because for years the image of an Islamic scholar that has been peddled by the state and accepted by society in Pakistan is that of a man with a long beard, speaking Urdu in an Arabic accent (!), or a woman fully draped in a jet black burqa, mumbling moralistic little nothings on TV.

The man in question was Professor Fazalur Rehman Malik. Clean-shaven, well-spoken, always looking sharp in his suits and ties, and more importantly, extremely well-informed and well-versed in Islamic literature, philosophy and history, he was on the verge of almost completely undermining the role of religious parties in Pakistan when he was forced to flee the country.

After studying Arabic at the Punjab University in Lahore, Rehman went to Oxford in the UK for further studies.

He was teaching Islamic philosophy at McGill University in Canada when in 1961 he recieved an invitation from Pakistan’s head of state, Field Martial Ayub Khan, to come to Pakistan and help him set up the Central Institute of Islamic Research (CIIR).

Ayub had come to power on the back of a military coup in 1958. Though a practicing Muslim who seldom missed saying his daily prayers, he was not only allergic to civilian politicians (whom he described as being selfish and corrupt), but he also had a great disliking for religious parties and the clergy.

With the ambition to create a Pakistan driven by his ‘benevolent’ military dictatorship, and based on state-facilitated capitalism, and a constitution culled from what he described to be the ‘progressive and modernist Islam of Jinnah,’ Ayub wanted the CIIR to help him achieve this through legislation and necessary laws.

It was the CIIR under Professor Rehman who advised Ayub to constitutionally curb the religious parties and their interpretation of Islam.

Rehman then drew a social and political framework for making Pakistan a ‘progressive, modern Muslim majority state.’

Though Ayub did not act upon each and every aspect of Rehman’s framework, the workings of the CIIR certainly made the Ayub regime ban the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1964. The decision, however, was overturned by the Supreme Court.

But Rehman was not a secularist, as such. Instead he saw himself and his work to be a modern extension of the ‘Islamic rationalism’ of figures like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, Maulana Shibli Naumani, Niaz Fatehpuri and the 8th and 9th century Muslim rationalists, the Mu’tazilites.

Instead of attempting to become a militaristic bastion of international Islam, Rehman suggested that Pakistan take the lead in engineering an Islamic polity that through science and scholarship, could successfully compete with the economic and technological prowess of the two superpowers of the time, the United States and the communist Soviet Union.

The detailed research papers that the CIIR produced under his guidance emphasised the application of reason in the interpretation of the Qu’ran, and the absorption of western science, philosophy and economics to help Islam (in Pakistan) survive as a progressive and flexible religion with the ability to supplement economic, scientific and cultural progress instead of hindering or retarding it.

However, when in one such paper he suggested that laws and society in Pakistan should be based on a rationalist and modernist interpretation of the Qu’ran, and that the hadith (Islamic traditions based on hearsay), should only play a minimal role in this respect, he was vehemently challenged by his more conservative counterparts.

The counterparts were also well aware of his advice to Ayub to ban religious political parties.

Leading the attack on Rehman was the prolific Islamic scholar and founder of the Jamaat, Abul Ala Mauddudi, who demanded that Rehman be expelled from Pakistan. and from the fold of Islam.

Then, in 1967, during a lecture that he was delivering on Pakistan’s then nascent state-owned TV channel, PTV, Rehman suggested that drinking alcohol was not a major sin in Islam.

Even though alcohol was legal in Pakistan till 1977, the religious parties went berserk and held a number of rallies against Rehman.

Rehman, more or less, was basically repeating what early scholars of the Hanafi School of Islamic jurisprudence had already suggested.

And ironically, some 40 years after Rehman’s musings, and 30 years after the sale of alcohol (to Muslims) was banned in Pakistan, the highly conservative Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan finally decreed that consuming alcohol indeed was a minor sin.

On May 28, 2009, the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) declared whipping for the offence of drinking as un-Islamic and directed the government to amend the law to make the offence bailable — even though the last person to be whipped for consuming alcohol was in 1981.

In 1969 as Pakistan entered a turbulent period in which a far-reaching political movement led by leftist parties and student organisations forced Ayub to resign, Rehman continued being perused and harassed by the Islamic parties until he was left with no other choice but to leave the country.

He went to the US and distinguished himself as a highly regarded Professor of Islamic Thought and researcher at the University of Chicago.

The 1970s and 1980s were also his most prolific years as an author in which he wrote some of the most influential books on modern Islamic thought — especially Islam (1979) and Islam & Modernity (1982).

He never returned to Pakistan and died in Chicago in 1988.

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  #34  
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The broken bow


So often one hears a fellow Pakistani bemoaning how polarised a nation we are.

But sometimes I feel that what they mean by polarisation in this context is the presence of the rich ethnic, religious and sectarian diversity that this country is actually blessed with.

This diversity on most occasions has simply refused to come under the all-encompassing umbrella of ideological unity that the country’s establishment, its religious allies and the urban bourgeoisie have been shoving down our throats for the last six decades. They refuse to realise that organic diversity (and not synthetic homogeneity) is what drives democracy and best utilises the inherent economic, cultural and sporting genius of a nation.

But no doubt there is also polarisation of a more disturbing kind in the Pakistani society.

On occasions it’s been like a black comedy that can generate sheer bafflement.

Every Friday at my office during the second half of the morning session, I notice guys who regularly go for Friday prayers at the mosque break up into little groups. One day I decided to figure out why this happens or why they are all not going to the same mosque (or to the one nearest to the office).

It is easy to understand that the Shia among them would visit the Shia mosques.

But one Friday I was rather amused when I overheard a group of Sunni colleagues discussing why they would not go to a particular (Sunni) mosque because the mullah’s sermons there offended them.

It turned out that the lads were Deobandi Sunnis, who, due to lack of time, had had to visit a nearby mosque whose mullah belonged to another Sunni sub-sect, the Barelvi — which, nevertheless, is the majority Sunni sub-sect in Pakistan. So the discussion was to locate a Deobandi mosque nearest to the office.

A senior colleague, who’d seen me talking to these guys, approached me in the evening, smiling: “Did you see how they were whining?” I smiled back: “I’m not very good at understanding these things.”

He shook his head and then said something that took me by surprise. He said: “I was the one who introduced them to the mosque they are now whining about. I’m sure in their hearts they now believe I am a heretic.”

This colleague is a very religious man, with a beard and all, so his claim did baffle me but not for long.

I soon realised what he was suggesting. He belonged to the Barelvi sect. It was a strange experience because on various occasions I’ve seen him agreeing with his Deobandi counterparts on so many issues, especially on things like the blasphemy law, the need to enforce the Sharia, etc. But here they were all, refusing to go to each other’s preferred mosques.

This actually shouldn’t come as a surprise in a country where the state has for long been active in defining what or who a ‘Muslim’ is in a society brimming with various Islamic sects and sub-sects. This has left the sects judging one another, sometimes overtly and sometimes discreetly.

The state did not learn anything from the findings of the famous Justice Munir Report in which — after the 1953 anti-Ahmadi riots instigated by the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Majlis-i-Ahrar Party — Justice Munir noted that according to his interviews with a number of ulema on the matter, he found that no two ulema agreed on a uniformed definition of a good Muslim.

Later on history recorded another rather amusing episode. During the movement against the Z A. Bhutto government in 1977, led by an alliance of various anti-PPP parties (the PNA), the alliance leaders met at the Karachi Press Club to brief the press about their plan of action.

Demanding the imposition of Sharia laws and the ouster of the ‘secular- socialist’ Bhutto regime, the alliance’s top three parties were representing the country’s main Sunni sub-sects.

The Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) followed the Deobandi school while the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP) was Barelvi in orientation. PNA’s third main party, Jamaat-i-Islami, had a following among middle-class urban Sunni conservatives and pro-Saudi elements.

Newspapers reported that after outlining their plan of action and professing their unity of purpose (i.e. the downfall of Bhutto and the imposition of Sharia), the PNA leaders broke for the evening prayers.

In those days there were no prayer rooms or mosques at places of work, and certainly none at the Karachi Press Club (though there is one now).

So some journalists cleared a room for the PNA leaders to say their prayers in.

Urdu dailies, Imroze, Jang and Musawat, then went on to report how a commotion of sorts broke out amongst the PNA leaders when they couldn’t agree on who would lead the prayers as all three followed their own respective schools of Islam.

The issue was not political but sub-sectarian. Some newspapers reported that JUI’s Maulana Mufti Mehmood refused to offer prayers behind JUP’s Shah Ahmed Noorani (and vice versa).

Syed A. Peerzada in his book Politics of JUI quotes a JUI leader who alleged that the reporting of this discord was the doing of the PPP’s Kausar Niazi whose job it was to exploit the sectarian differences between the PNA’s religious parties.

This might be true, but then this was perhaps the easiest thing to do: i.e. to disturb the make-up of what Bhutto might have (correctly) thought was, at best, a cosmetic face of unity among the political-religious figures of Pakistan.

The fact still holds true, and like it or not, perhaps it always will.

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Sudden awakenings



Imagine this: A country ravaged by religious extremism and violence. Its people elect a government that for five years (while in opposition) wagged its finger at the previous government for failing to curb and control this violence.

Then, after winning a handsome majority in the election, the new government’s prime minister appears on TV to deliver his first address to the nation.

This is what he says: ‘It is only now that we (the new government) realised how grave and complicated the situation (regarding terrorism) really is’.

You hear him say this and you wonder: What on earth were these guys wagging their fingers for? Were they not in the country for the past five years?

Quite the contrary. Not only were they running things in the Punjab Assembly, they had also faced a spate of extremist violence in the province that they had managed to win in the 2008 election.

That is, before the Punjab chief minister (who is once again the province’s CM), almost pleaded to the extremists to spare Punjab because ‘they (the Punjab government) believed in the same things as the extremists did.

This submissive plea did manage to make the extremists stop their attacks in the Punjab. However, elsewhere, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh and Balochistan, the bloodshed and the madness unleashed by the supposedly banned extremist and sectarian outfits continued unabated.

Nevertheless, what was once just a provincial government in the Punjab has mostly become the new national government. The Punjab CM can continue to ward off extremist attacks by suggesting that his government stands for the same things as the faithful brutes do, but the rest of Pakistan is not willing to go down the same apologetic and submissive road.

The last government in Islamabad and its allies in the KP, Sindh and Balochistan had suffered an unprecedented volley of deaths and violence at the hands of the extremists.

And yet its (albeit chaotic) response to the violence was carelessly and cruelly criticised by opposition parties, especially the PML-N, the PTI and Jamaat-i-Islami.

The previous government’s chaotic conduct was milked to the hilt by the opposition and its overt sympathisers in the private electronic media, enough for the nation to vote for the PML-N (in the centre and Punjab) and PTI (in KP) in the May 11, 2013 election.

Both PML-N and PTI insisted that they had the right understanding and answers to all the ills being faced by Pakistan, especially regarding extremist violence, the energy crises and the struggling economy.

But as far as the overbearing spectre and experience of extremist and sectarian violence is concerned it now seems that both these parties were chasing illusions created by empty theories and concoctions built upon a stunningly half-baked and superficial understanding of the issue of religious extremism and terrorism in Pakistan.

A respected English weekly recently reported how PTI chief Imran Khan was perturbed when a string of officials in KP gave him a detailed presentation on the make-up of extremist organisations operating from the province.

He was told that there were more than 40 outfits that were functioning under the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella. This seemed to have surprised him.

But all that has been baffling men like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan recently in this regard was not only being reiterated by the previous government, but also by a string of well-grounded newspaper reporters, columnists and even some TV anchors for quite some time now.

Were the Sharifs and Khan reading Naseem Hijazi novels when they should have been taking notes from what a number of Pakistani as well as some foreign journalists had been informing the public regarding the make-up, agenda and operational modus operandi of the extremist and sectarian organisations in Pakistan?

In their ignorance, not only did PML-N and PTI lead the country astray and confused it on the issue of extremist violence, it now seems they ended up believing in their own delusions.

And today here we are, with new governments in Islamabad, Balochistan and the KP demonstrating a shocked and almost numb look after suffering over 50 terrorist attacks within a matter of two months.

This is cause for concern. We now have in power governments at the centre, Punjab and KP whose elaborate theories — about how things like drone attacks and military presence in Waziristan are the main cause for extremist violence — are being blowing to pieces and sounding more naïve than ever.

We are seeing men in top governmental positions wringing their hands after realising the true nature of what this country is really up against.

I am convinced that an experienced man like Nawaz Sharif is more than likely to finally come to terms with what he seems to have been suddenly made to realise.

His government should wipe away that dropped-jaw look, roll up its sleeves and get down to first fully understand the complexities of extremist violence in this country and then actually do something about it — instead of continuing to air the flowery baloney (both PML-N and PTI) have been feeding an unsuspecting but terror-struck populace.

And about time Khan too allows his ego to shift and make room for the kind of vital information that may actually humble his otherwise haughty demeanour. He is still an important player, considering that his party runs the government in war-torn KP.

If he refuses to accept the fact that his theories regarding extremist violence have now started to sound ill-informed and based on woolly assumptions, then he is bound to end up on the wrong side of history. Not a very glorious side to be on for a very glory-loving man.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1039825/sudden-awakenings
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Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?


Last Monday, the parents of university student Shahzeb Khan, whose death sparked an outrage against the abuse of power by the wealthy and the landed in Pakistan, decided to pardon the culprits responsible for the murder of their son.

The family filed an affidavit with the court several days ago pardoning the men accused of killing their only son.

But as the young (and now pardoned) culprits came out of the courtroom smiling triumphantly and waving victory signs as if they were some mutant versions of the great Nelson Mandela, local TV channels and social media sites erupted with outrage and condemnation.

This anger was entirely understandable because a concerted campaign against the alleged culprits had been passionately initiated in the electronic media and on social websites. So when the mother of the unfortunate young victim was reported to have pardoned the culprits, the news arrived as a rude shock to a lot of Pakistanis.

But it was equally disconcerting to witness the way the electronic media responded to the news.

Since myopia in most matters relating to ideology and morality remains the prevailing mindset among the now more-vocal-than-ever urban classes in this country, TV anchors and reporters came down hard on the victim’s mother.

But since she was not a CIA agent, ‘liberal fascist’, someone from a minority sect or religion, or any other such socio-political parasite, the outraged media began hammering her for being a ‘bad mother’, a ‘dishonest woman’, and an insult to motherhood.

So-called religious scholars and the ulema were invited by the TV channels to lash out at her, and legal experts gazed intensely into their navels while questioning the court’s role in accepting the pardon.

Alas, as one saw the mother being reduced to becoming a vicious, heartless vamp, one wondered. I mean, if she was (reportedly) forced by influential elements to pardon the killer of her own son and thus became a villain in the story, how is she any different from a mother (Aafia Siddiqui) who (reportedly) dumped her husband, abandoned her kids, escaped to fight a jihad in Afghanistan and ended up in an American jail?

Yet, to the media Shahzeb’s mother is a cold-blooded woman and another mother, Aafia Siddiqui, is a petite soul who became a victim of US imperialism, bigotry and conspiracy. How so?

On the day the heartless vamp pardoned her only son’s vicious killers, members of the armed forces, the government and the opposition parties were drafting a resolution that called for immediate ‘peace talks’ with armed extremist groups.

Now, God willing, this (albeit wishy-washy) idea of talks with rabid militants actually manages to bring peace, this would automatically mean that the state, government and people of Pakistan have decided to forgive the deaths of over 50,000 Pakistani civilians, politicians, soldiers and policemen slaughtered in the country’s war against armed extremists.

Well, as the experts and purveyors of peace talks in this context will tell you, the ceasefire and the forgiving bit will at least ensure that no more Pakistanis are killed in their mosques, shrines and markets by the overtly and trigger-happy faithful.

Let’s hope that’s exactly what the resolution achieves and that’s what the electronic media was applauding and euphorically hoping for. Fair enough.

But, then, if peace with the extremists would mean the collective forgiveness of the tens of thousands of parents who lost their loved ones at the hands of the extremists and of the hundreds killed (as collateral damage) in US drone attacks, how on earth is the act of forgiveness in this regard of one mother any worse?

Rest assured I too was deeply disappointed at the way the Shahzeb case finally panned out. But call it a weakness, I just cannot hail one act of forgetting and forgiving and denounce the other. I cannot call one mother a greedy, heartless vamp and the other ‘qaum ki beti’ (daughter of the nation).

Either we should be willing and honest enough to condemn acts of violence (and bad motherhood) and of forgiveness and compromise across the board or simply keep mum, unless we want to go on proving that not only are we entirely confused, but also as a nation and state we have actually turned moral hypocrisy into a glorified, knee-jerk art.

Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
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Ever been approached by a member of the Tableeghi Jamat (TJ)? How soft-spoken and friendly they sound. So much so that even if you disagree with their overly ritualistic interpretation of the faith, you can’t help but listen to them before (politely) excusing yourself.

However, recently when a TV anchor did a show on the leader of this Islamic evangelical movement, Tariq Jamil, and criticised some of his ways, the anchor was bombarded with the kind of unhinged comments (on social media) that are usually associated with the notorious ‘PTI trolls’.

Crude, crass, abusive and entirely reactionary. One was surprised at how easily the veneer of gentility that usually defines the personalities of TJ members and of their supporters rubs off at the first sign of criticism.

The attacks on the (liberal) anchor were so rapid and abusive that it even made the anchor’s (more conservative) companion on the show Tweet that ‘Tariq Jamil is no prophet that he cannot be criticised’.

Late last year, the former Interior Minister Rehman Malik had also come down hard on the TJ, claiming that the evangelical movement had become a breeding ground for extremists. His statement understandably ruffled quite a few feathers, especially from within parties like the moderate-right PML-N and the Islamic JUI-F.

PML-N’s Sharif brothers have had close links with the TJ, and the JUI-F follows the Sunni Deobandi school of thought that the TJ too adheres to.

Also, quite a large number of TJ members are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the province from where the JUI-F draws the bulk of its electoral support.

For long the TJ has been viewed as a benign movement that distances itself from mainstream politics and militancy, focusing instead on propagating ‘correct’ Islamic rites and attire, and ritualistic paraphernalia in tune with the Deobandi line of thinking.

The TJ was formed in the late 1920s to supposedly ‘cleanse Islam from Hindu and Sikh influences’ in the subcontinent.

However, after Pakistan’s creation in 1947 the TJ was more successful in attracting positive attention from Pakistanis living abroad than from those living in the country.

Based in Raiwind in the Punjab, the TJ membership and appeal, however, got a two-fold boost after the arrival of the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in 1977.

This was the time when Zia used a part of CIA and Arab funds (dished out for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan) on constructing a number of indoctrination centres in the shape of seminaries. The rise in the TJ’s fortunes was thus a product of the proliferation of the more puritanical strands of Islam during the Zia regime.

By the late 1980s, the TJ became successful in also attracting membership from the country’s trader classes, especially in the Punjab and KP. In the 1990s it began attracting the interest of certain prominent sections of Pakistan’s affluent middle-classes, including certain pop musicians, TV actors and eventually cricketers.

Throughout the (Sunni-Shia) sectarian turmoil that the country faced in the 1980s and 1990s, the TJ however, remained free to preach and recruit. It was always believed to be a harmless movement that had no political, sectarian or militant motives.

However, since the country’s Sunni majority remains 'Barelvi', a parallel evangelical movement emerged in the 1980s. ‘Barelvi Islam’ emerged in the 19th century India as a Sunni Muslim infusion concocted from elements of Sufism and ‘folk-Islam’. It is opposed to the Deobandi branch of South Asian Islam and both the Sunni sub-sects have been embroiled in vicious polemical battles for over 150 years.

Called the Dawat-i-Islami, the new evangelical movement claims to represent the Barelvi majority’s spiritual interests. Also seen as non-political, the Dawat, however, has been accused of containing members that have graduated to becoming members of some Barelvi militant organisations.

The guard who shot dead Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer (for ‘blasphemy’) in 2011 was also a former member of the Dawat.

On the other end, when Rehman Malik spoke about the TJ it was the first time a member of a sitting government in Pakistan had accused the outfit of breeding possible recruits for various hard-core Islamist organisations.

Alarms in this respect were first raised by some western observers when in the mid and late 1990s, the former chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, Lt Gen Javed Nasir, became a staunch member of the TJ. This was also the time the TJ was making in-roads into the Pakistan army.

Though known for his staunch Islamist views, Lt Gen Nasir’s entry into TJ’s fold was seen as being only incidental and the TJ continued to recruit and preach freely.

But the accusations (though suppressed in Pakistan) kept coming. The TJ’s name came up in connection with terrorism plots, such as in October 2002 in the US (the Portland Seven case) and the September 2002 Lackawanna Six case (also in the US).The TJ was mentioned again in the August 2006 in a plot to bomb airliners en route from London to the United States, and in the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.

However, TJ as an organisation was not directly accused in any of the cases because most of the accused men were said to be members of various violent Islamist organisations. TJ's name only came up when the accused were also said to have been a part of the TJ at some point before their final radicalisation and entry into more militant and radical outfits.

In 2008, the Spanish police arrested 14 Asian Muslims for allegedly planning to attack various places in Spain. Twelve were Pakistanis. A Spanish Muslim leader claimed that all of these men had once been members of the TJ. Though counter-terrorism experts have understandably focused their studies more on the militant groups, in the last five years or so, many of them have now begun to also study the dynamics of evangelical groups like the TJ.

They believe that in spite of the fact that TJ’s primary function remains to be non-political and almost entirely evangelical, its rather secretive organisational structure and the goodwill that it enjoys among most Pakistanis allows elements from extremist organisations to use TJ as a recruiting ground for more violent purposes. They say that most young men joining the TJ are more vulnerable to the Islamists’ propaganda due to the TJ’s conservative social orientation.

Rehman Malik was not shooting in the air. He was merely pointing out yet another area of concern in a country being torn apart by men committing violence in the name of faith. His statement only became controversial because very few Pakistanis are aware of the potential of the TJ unwittingly allowing the polluting of its pond with rotten fish.

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Nadeem Paracha in his usual satirical style writes about the drones attacks and their apparent reaction in the form of suicide bombings. (A popular disposition of the Pakistani social/political classes).

Drones are unmanned aircrafts. They are called unmanned because they are actually manned by women. So one can say drones are women-manned aircrafts. This is done to insult the conservative sensibilities of our brothers in the tribal areas where, of course, there are no women.

The first drone attack to take place in Pakistan was actually in 1024AD. It was fired by a Rajput stooge of the Jews on the army of Mahmud Ghaznavi who was liberating the Somnath temple from idols. He took away some gold as well which he duly distributed among the poor in what today is Dubai.

The first Pakistani to be hit by a drone was actually an innocent camel in North Waziristan. This made him very angry and as a result, he began to behave like a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Drones were invented by the famous Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein when his equation, E=mc2, was successfully challenged and debunked by the famous Muslim physicist, Oreo Maqbool Biscuit in his equally famous book, ‘War and Peace’, co-written with nuclear scientist, alchemist and judo expert, Zaid Hamid in 1941.

When asked how a drone attack was possible in 1024AD, Oreo said it was a case of time travel. This, he said, was achieved when the reptilian Elders of Zion discovered a wormhole near Jerusalem that distorted the space-time continuum in the region and made the camels of that area very angry and militant. Thus, the invention of drones. He insists that he be given a Nobel Prize for this discovery.

Ever since 1024AD, drones have killed over three billion Pakistanis. It is strange how not a single non-Muslim Pakistani has ever been killed by a drone. So, to balance things out, the angry camels began to kill Christians. It was only fair.

Compared to the 3bn Pakistani Muslims killed by the drones, only 14 Pakistanis have been killed in suicide attacks by the angry camels. Such attacks are not at all common in Pakistan. In fact, the first ever suicide attack in the country took place only last Sunday and that too only because Pakistan is a country full of sinners and bad Muslims.

It is wrong to say that the Pakistan military is allowing the Americans to use drones in the country. The truth is that it is actually against the drones that the army is fighting and not against the so-called militants, who are simply innocent herdsmen. The truth is that it is the civilian government which is allowing the Americans to use drones — especially former President Zardari who is believed to own a number of drone factories in Switzerland.

On the other hand some liberal fascists are planning to set up drone factories on the moon on a large area that they illegally occupied by evicting poverty-stricken Uzbek and Chechen liberation fighters who wanted to liberate the moon from the tyranny of the descendants of Jewish astronaut, Neil Armstrong, who by the way, had converted to Islam.

But he turned out to be a bad Muslim, unlike Michael Jackson who turned out to be a good one, before he died in a drone attack. In Dubai.

The Government of Pakistan does not allow its greatest scientist — in fact, the world’s greatest scientist — Dr. A.Q. Skywalker, to develop the drone technology so Pakistan can make its own drones and kill innocent shepherds itself. In fact, the so-called militants are on record saying that they would rather be struck by a Pakistani drone than by an American one. Very patriotic people, they are.

The Pakistani drones will make sure that no innocent Pakistani (i.e. Muslim, of course) is killed. Only bad militants would be targeted which, till last count, were just two and they too were willing to repent after the inevitable success of the peace talks. Reports suggest that they had become bad militants because they’d been listening to John Lennon’s song, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ backwards.

If one listens to that song backwards one could clearly hear a cleverly masked message that says: ‘Garrble, garrble, woonok wonk bing donk.’ Very evil.

According to famous intellectual, revolutionary and very angry old man, Imran Khan, only one out of a million people living in Waziristan is a bad militant. That is a fact. And the blast that you just heard was actually caused by a gas cylinder explosion.

It is not true that Americans use drones to attack those militants that are out of our reach. This is an American lie. And that gas cylinder explosion you just heard is actually innocent civilians being struck by a drone missile.

It is a sad fact that some Pakistanis use more time protesting about trivial issues such as the misuse of the blasphemy law, rape cases and the 14 people who were killed in the only suicide attack that has ever taken place in this country, instead of protesting against the drones that have killed billions of Pakistanis.

But then, such misguided people are all alcoholics, drug addicts and believers of free sex, so one cannot expect them to speak out against the drones. They will all burn in hell.

The Americans are bribing the Chinese to make toy drones so they can be exported to Pakistan and given to Muslim children to play with. We should retaliate by asking the Chinese to make toy models of Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif that say ‘stop drones, stop drones, stop drones’ every time a gas cylinder explosion kill civilians and soldiers.

Orders should also be placed for the making of revolutionary looking dolls (male, of course) whose features are a cross between Che Guevara, OBL and Lady Gaga. Comrade Tariq Ali can be used to market these dolls.

But Pakistan should make manned drones i.e. un-womaned drones manned by hunks, called hunk-manned drones.

Trained pilots should not be necessary for such drones. One’s ghairat, patriotism and control over his daily flatulence cycle should be enough. We suggest handsome, ingenious and muscular hunks like Sangsar Abbasi to be given the honour of using these hunk-manned drones against the sissy women-manned American drones.

Last but not the least, the drones are also said to be the main cause of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan and this year’s horrifying earthquake in Balochistan.

There is ample evidence to prove this. Some brilliant scholars at the Punjab University are close to proving the long-term effects of drone attacks. Apart from floods and earthquakes (in Muslim countries), the effects also include the spread of homosexuality, energy shortage, corruption, dengue fever, hair-loss and worst of all, Turkish soaps on local TV channels.

So beware, friends. It’s all ‘garrble, garrble, woonok wonk bing donk.’

The truth about drones
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It was called the ‘New Left’. Emerging in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the (old) left’s disparaging response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and attempted to bring them more in line with concepts like liberal democracy.

The New Left criticised both Western capitalism and Soviet communism and attempted to put forward a more non-dogmatic and democracy-friendly version of Marxism. By the 1960s, it was ideologically informing the evolution of the various neo-Marxist movements that began taking shape around the world.

The New Left thinking also contributed to the various contemporary socialist experiments taking place in the Muslim world at the time, where certain leaders and political organs attempted to cut through Marxist dogma and capitalism by fusing nationalism and the more egalitarian notions of Islam with socialist economics. By the early 1970s, the New Left had begun to influence conventional social-democracy in Europe as well, where leftist parties emerged without any ideological strings attached to the Soviet Union.

However, the international oil crisis, brought on by Egypt and Syria’s war against Israel in 1973, triggered a serious economic downturn in the West. It also began generating a gradual reaction against the New Left politics and economics. Consequently a number of economists emerged who severely critiqued social-democracy, socialism and the concept of the welfare state.

By the early 1980s, this tendency was referred to as the ‘New Right’ and its early political and economic manifestations were defined by the Ronald Reagan presidency in the US and Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the UK. The New Right forwarded an aggressive mixing of free market economy, patriotism and a militarist foreign policy, a tendency which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, peaked in the shape of ‘neo-conservatism’ during George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2008).

In Pakistan, the New Left’s frontline expressions were the students’ movement against Ayub Khan in the 1960s, and the populist emergence of social-democratic parties such as the PPP. However, interestingly, just as the New Left was being wiped out in the West by the New Right in the 1980s, in Pakistan it was the old right (i.e. conventional religious parties in cahoots with a politicised military) that did the trick.

But, alas, the New Right in Pakistan seems to finally be coming of age. Because if the collapse of the country’s last military dictatorship and the constant drubbing the conventional religious parties have faced in various elections can be seen as the withering away of the old right in Pakistan, then the active emergence of a revamped PML-N supplemented by an alarmist new electronic media can be detected as a more vocal arrival of the New Right in Pakistan.

Couple these happenings with the ‘judicial activism’ exhibited by the current strand of top judges and lawyers, and the impulsive support it got from PML-N, the electronic media and right-wing parties like the Jamaat-i-Islami and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, one can then suggest that a somewhat instinctive move is afoot to challenge the large remnants of both the old and new Left in Pakistan.

Boiling within the mix of the New Right politics and sociology in Pakistan are also characters operating as televangelists, ‘security analysts’ and TV journalists. In appearance and content they consciously avoid looking like the greying guard of the old right, and instead attempting to sound and look a lot more contemporary.

They have gone on to use an intriguing combination of the economic and aesthetic dynamics of consumerism, free-market enterprise and various forms of media to forward a fusion of social piety, political Islam, a plethora of conspiracy theories and demagogic (left-meets-right) oratory.

However, it is almost entirely ambiguous about its stand on matters such as terrorism and extremism. It claims to condemn it, but is more likely to put the blame on American foreign policy and then return to its ambiguous disposition when questioned about the long involvement of Pakistan’s own past policies in the matter.

Whereas the top tier of the Pakistani New Right (PML-N and certain senior TV anchors) are merging lofty political notions such as constitutionalism and accountability with ‘judicial activism,’ the second tier, mainly made up of political parties like the PTI, and a new breed of TV preachers and personalities, are (for want of a better word) glamourising certain updated notions of the ‘Islamic state’.

More dangerously though, undaunted by the obvious failure of political Islam in the Muslim world, the country’s New Right is trying to rekindle it and that too at a time when various Islamic reformist movements across most Muslim countries are consciously trying to detach Islam from the political moorings it was convolutedly given in the 20th century by men like Abul Ala Maududi and Syed Qutb. It is those very moorings that may have played a major role in plunging many Muslim countries in the state of cultural stagnation and political turmoil that they are in today.

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Conflicting views and feelings become the order of the day whenever former military dictator, Gen Musharraf is put in the dock for his regime’s action against militants holed up in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque).

Though the action took place more than five years ago, it still creates (at least in the mainstream and social media) heated debates and extreme stances.

One Abdul Rashid Ghazi had become the centrepiece of the event; a radical cleric who was said to have been leading a group of armed militants from the mosque and its seminary.

Ghazi today is remembered as a militant who had asked his followers to burn down CD shops and kidnap ‘obscene women’ in Islamabad because he wanted to force the government to impose Sharia Law across Pakistan.

After refusing to give in to the orders of the government of Gen Musharraf, the mosque and its seminary were stormed by the army and Ghazi was shot dead.

If one monitors what has been said about Ghazi in the media, two distinct views come to the surface: The first one describes him as a terrorist who wanted to impose his version of the Sharia by force, while the other hails him as a ‘mujahid’’ who stood up to the might of an ‘infidel state.’

But often we picture our heroes and villains as caricatures drawn from conflicting perceptions that are wildly aired in the media. I’ve always wondered why isn’t there any serious attempt to study them as we would any of our immediate contemporaries.

Last year, while on a visit to Islamabad, a journalist colleague of mine introduced me to an old college friend of Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Without any hesitation I got down to probe him about the less talked about (or even unknown) aspects of Ghazi’s life.

Who was he and what made him so desperately angry? I’m sure he wasn’t born this way.

Ghazi’s friend told me that he (Ghazi) was a militant for a very brief period of his life. Otherwise he was an extremely bright man with normal career ambitions.

“He could have been a diplomat in the foreign office or an educationist,” his friend told me.

The friend added that Ghazi’s greatest ambition was to become a diplomat at the United Nations. This is what Ghazi was planning to become when he joined college in 1982.

Ghazi was born into in a religious family. His father was a cleric who had founded the Red Mosque in the late 1960s.

He enrolled his two sons into an Islamic seminary. But Ghazi rebelled and dropped out, demanding that he be put in a ‘normal school’. This was in 1976 when he was about to enter his teens.

His father reluctantly got him admitted into an all-boys school from where Ghazi did his matriculation in 1979.

Ghazi’s friend fondly remembers him as an enthusiastic fan of music, films and political history. Ghazi had already begun dreaming of becoming a diplomat.

Nevertheless, Ghazi once again got into an altercation with his father. According to his friend, his father wanted him to grow a beard and join the seminary that he was running.

Not only did Ghazi refuse to grow a beard and join his father’s seminary, he went on to join a co-ed college. Here he got involved with various student groups opposed to the reactionary dictatorship of Gen Zia.

All communication between his father and him had broken down. They were not on talking terms when in 1984 Ghazi joined the Quaid-i-Azam University that was then a hotbed of anti-Zia activities.

He enrolled as an MSc student of International Relations. His friends remember him to be a bright student and an active member of a progressive student organisation.

This created a problem for his father, who was being facilitated by the Zia dictatorship to help produce jihadis for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency that Pakistan was backing.

“He hardly ever went to a mosque, let alone visited his father’s mosque,” his friend claimed. “He was reading writings by Marx, Max Weber and Henry Kissinger. He was a lively fellow but always focused on becoming an international figure in world diplomacy,” the friend added.

But Ghazi’s brother, who had followed his father into becoming a cleric, would never miss the opportunity to admonish Ghazi for going against family traditions and bringing a bad name to their father due to his ‘westernised’ ideas and lifestyle.

So what happened?

According to Ghazi’s friend, after getting his Master’s degree in International Relations, he ended up getting a job at the Ministry of Education.

The friend suggested that Ghazi was not happy with his job and was impatient to realise his dream of becoming a diplomat.

Estranged from his family and not achieving his goal quickly enough, Ghazi became agitated. Then in 1998 his father died. He was assassinated (allegedly) on the orders of an opposing militant outfit.

“All that guilt that had been instilled into him by his brother came to the forefront,” his friend explained. “His brother told him how he had hurt his father’s feelings …”

Ghazi went into depression and began attending the gatherings of a variety of Islamic evangelical groups.

Then, in 1999, he joined his brother at the Red Mosque where both became leaders.

After Pakistan entered the ‘War on Terror’ as a US ally, the brothers are said to have established links with militant Islamist organisations.

Ghazi was now a changed man. He’d grown a beard, renounced his ‘secular’ past and had become a vehement militant insisting that the state of Pakistan impose strict Sharia laws.

But, as his friend interestingly noted: “He wasn’t built to fight. He was too intelligent to become a jihadi. His philosophy might have become aggressive, but I don’t think he was willing to die for it.”

This statement makes sense. During the military operation against the Red Mosque militants, some TV channels began to report that Ghazi was willing to surrender, but was held hostage (through ‘emotional blackmail’) by some frontline militants in his entourage until the military finally barged in and shot dead each one of them.

Ironically, this man who had dreamt and studied to be an international diplomat died for an idea and cause he had actually rejected most of his life.

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