Islam in the mess in Pakistan...
Uncover the wisdom in your wounds, the blessings in your misfortunes, and the believer’s gifts that are waiting to be claimed where you may least expect them... in the dark! -- Debbi Ford
The NATION of Pakistan was born with the birth of ‘the other’ status, which helps to identify ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences that were accepted at the time of partition. “Until I came back to Karachi somewhere in 1984 on a permanent basis, I thought everybody was a Pakistani,” said a bemused me…!
This problem is not with the discovery of one’s collective identity... it is just inherited from that time! A Muslim state was formed with untold deaths, destructions, and massacres of innocent people, and uprooting of them, who had been settled for ages in this land… The predicament begins with the transformation of ‘the other’ into a real ‘threat’; or when ‘the other’ is relegated to a subhuman entity as reflected in sectarian killings, or the carnage wreaked presently by the Taliban!!!
Relationships with ‘the other’ are not always sour, but demonization results in bitterness; therefore, bloodshed is the solution that cannot be ignored??? As Pakistan today has been constructed into a nation, the Talibans have slaughtered their ‘rivals’, destroyed property and educational institutions; the nationalists are killing non-locals in Balochistan; while Sindh has also witnessed some nationalists flex their muscles against the migrants. Meanwhile, MQM in Karachi—a political party representing the interest of immigrants from India—is blamed for much worse intolerance inflicted by them on their other caste neighbors…
These Killers are possessed by their own gods of hatred! They may blame their actions on a history of exploitation, or current deprivation of their resources, but they forget that no historical analysis can justify Islamic violence, period!
Criminal behaviors, after all, are inherited as our human constitution. But things get worse, when young minds from birth are filled with hatred, with revenge and killings in the name of God, with contempt of others’ religious and philosophical beliefs, and promises of eternal paradise and lusts of sex as reward for religious bigotry!!! So those, who are born to believe in revenge and fight for the ways of their gods, will forever preach it in very extreme senses…
Similarly, the state accentuates violence by its support for Islamic Sharia law, which grants immunity, in the name of religion, to such as killings, marauding self-esteem and kidnappings of believers of other faiths… The cover of this safety and protection, provided to these felons by the state with laws that are favorable, perpetuates such crimes against humanity…
The license issued by this Islamic god of hatred, to kill the innocents—a vendor, a teacher, an office worker, students, party workers—is a grave crime against humanity. Whether a Pakistani is a Taliban wanting to kill his ‘other’, or a Baloch determined to shoot an outsider on sight, or a Sindhi becoming violent towards non-Sindhis, or the Urdu-speaking MQM, targeting the Pashtuns in Karachi, they all share a common element which is religious bigotry—each has a god of hatred embedded in them. These gods are worshiped with blind intents of belief…! There is no lost ways to it??? If you deviate, you will be proclaimed as a kafir and killed!!!
But despite these flaunting of extreme brutalities, these Muslim perpetrators don’t face state resistance. Take, for example, the Sindh High Court ruling that the Jirgas are illegal, yet newspapers are replete with news of karo kari incidents, whereby little girls are given away to resolve feuds and conflicts between families, and of families being threatened by powerful landlords and cannot reach courts for justice and self-esteems!
There are laws against murder, but non-locals are gunned down with impunity in Quetta and other state cities. Similarly, a militant group in Karachi chooses to kill and maim at will. Indifference, a common state response to such violence, strengthens the power of parallel systems of religious animosities…
The leaderships in Pakistan, whether military or civilian, always lack a sense of public good or the human rights of living in free wills... Their sense of self-aggrandizement is high and their constant interference in the independent functioning of official services and systems is rampant with corruptions and blind eyes of religious intolerance... Well-functioning bureaucracies and various other government services, especially the police and the courts; it would not be in their interests to partake justice to all, who knock at their doors!
What the rulers perhaps overlooked is the consolidation of parallel powers to the point that it came to challenge the writ of the state—the Tehrik-e-Taliban being the best example and the Baloch nationalists a close second…
The state empowers parallel forces by ignoring their injustices and weakening its own systems through interference and nepotism of religious bigotry. The government also lacks moral authority in Pakistan as its leadership, whether in uniform or in civilian garb, and consistently fails to establish a relationship with the people of ‘the other’ status.
The people of Pakistan are exceptional, when it comes to forgiving their leadership; but sadly, leaders see them as distant beings, who are not worthy of any attention. And hence, it is from the same populace that these gods and their followers of hatred arise…
A disturbing indicator of a collective sense of resignation is the absence of public protests in areas of violence and human rights degradations of religious worships and above all their rights for free worships!
Civil society may comprise of groups guided by principles of equality, who demand state protection and promotion of human rights, and tries to mediate between the state and its citizens who are in oppressions. Its forte is to protest against all forces of oppressions, for example by women and human rights groups on various issues of brutalities, such as the protests that burst forth against the murders of women in Jafarabad, or the public flogging of a 17-year-old girl in Swat...
The moderates in Pakistan have demonstrated a remarkable ability to take a principled stand on a national level, in the form of the lawyers’ movement to partake justice to the needy. There are also a large number of religious groups that are unequivocally against rampant injustices, but are silent when the gods of hatred become active. These are just a clear sense of camouflage to its religious bigotries. They fool the westernized worlds into believing that what they are doing is for the good of mankind?
In reality, this is just perusal of beliefs and the real taqqiyas that Islam preaches to its followers… There is a dearth of goodwill in Pakistan: we can recall the responses to the earthquake victims; they are still now not being compensated or even given what they deserved in such strokes of calamity… Yet when bloodbaths begin, protests are rare??? It is like the ‘boy who cried wolf, wolf’!
There are three primary forces in Pakistan: the state, the armies of the gods of hatred and the civil society... Today, even the latter must act firmly, promptly and persistently against all kinds of beliefs that adorn the crown of hatred. It is imperative that it is visible at the scene of the crime and not only in distant cities. Society must reinforce that, collectively, the Pakhtuns will, ardently, become Talibans; that the Baloch are supporters of the killings of non-locals in Balochistan; that Sindhis are anti-IDPs, etc…
The Civil society goes beyond lip-services to its ethnic and religious divides that are there from the days of Pakistan’s becoming; as it shows its acts of mauling sands in the eyes of all humanity...
Comments powered by CComment