The Frankenstein of blasphemy & intolerance devouring our society... slowly and gradually....
Couldn't agree with you more. It is not only the illiterate and the uneducated but the people who rule the Urdu media that are guilty. Since these are the opinion makers such bigots are in reality responsible for propagating intolerance in the society. Ayaz Amir has written a very apt column on this. He is referring to Hamid Mir & Ansar Abbasi articles published in Jang of Nov.1, 2012.
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Hurricane Sandy: Americans getting it wrong....Islamabad diary
Ayaz Amir
Friday, November 02, 2012
From Print Edition
147 49 87 3
I clicked on Google and got this article from The New York Times which wondered…”Did the enormous scale and damage from Hurricane Sandy have anything to do with climate change?”
It went on to quote several distinguished climate scientists who agreed that the human race had messed up the environment, leading to climate change, but that it would take years before anyone had all the answers about how the winds rose over the ocean and wrought such destruction.
“My profession hasn’t done its homework,” says a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kerry Emanuel, cited in the article. “I think there’s going to be a ton of papers coming out of this, but it’s going to take a couple of years.”
Clearly, American scientists are worrying themselves unnecessarily. If only they could take time out to read some Pakistani newspapers they would save themselves a lot of trouble and have their doubts removed in an instant.
A journalist with whom I often find myself in talk-shows, to my great joy I need hardly add, has expressed the definitive opinion that Hurricane Sandy is God’s punishment visited upon the American people for the Californian film blaspheming the Holy Prophet.
Excerpts from his column: “How could the Lord of the Worlds remain silent over (this blasphemy)? Of what account a superpower against the might of my Lord? ...Only a few weeks after (the blasphemous film) powerful America has been hit by such a calamity that until yesterday intoxicated by pharaonic power it today presents a picture of the utmost helplessness.”
In between he says that Muslims across the world were expecting nothing from their rulers, all American toadies, or from the Organisation of Islamic Countries. And they were dismayed. But how could my Lord remain silent? He doesn’t say it but the implication is clear that the US deserves every bit of what it has got, although what connection there might be between the benighted film-maker and the millions hit by the hurricane comes out less clearly.
We can therefore rest easy. The Almighty took notice of a film that any ordinary filmgoer would have found unworthy of notice and, moved to uncontrollable wrath, sent down the thunderbolts of His vengeance on the modern-day Philistines, the American people. This in a widely-read newspaper, on the living page. And there would be any number of Pakistanis, rest assured, who would say how very true…and be in raptures over the notion of divine retribution.
The same day another article shed light on the reaction among Indian Muslims to the hanging of Ghazi Ilm Din in 1929, convicted of the killing of Ram Gopal, a Hindu who had published a book disrespectful of the Holy Prophet. It said the event had a profound impact on the Muslim mind and may have been responsible for moving Iqbal to sound the demand for a separate Muslim homeland in India. There would be few more singular takes on the Pakistan movement, this explanation opening up a whole new field of historiography.
None of this should be surprising. History has not been among our strong points. We are more at home with fantasising and mythology, the history taught in our schools a tribute to this world of make-believe. And I suspect that because as a nation we tend to live in the clouds it is so much harder for us to come down to earth and deal with the problems of this world, as opposed to those of the hereafter.
The years pile up and as they do my morbidity grows that our mental state is fast reaching the point of no return, if that fatal milestone has not been crossed already. Substances deeply embedded become one with the soil. Some shibboleths take such a hold of the mind that the mind becomes one with those shibboleths. This is close to being our condition.
What holds Pakistan back? Not so much the energy crisis, balance of payments or the Taliban, symptoms of our distress, as this mental condition, in full display in our reactions to different happenings. Let me not be too specific, issuing fatwas having become a national pastime. Those who should stand up make a virtue of expediency, swaying to the winds howling across the landscape, instead of giving some kind of lead to the masses.
Does anyone from amongst our armies of the devout think that a hurricane, however calamitous, will break America? How many people have died in Hurricane Sandy? A few dozen. And if such a thing had happened here, would we have coped as well? We have a hard time handling our floods even though knowing they will come we should be better prepared.
And talking of divine vengeance, for what accumulation of sins was the 2005 earthquake a punishment? If for corruption and related failings then it is decidedly odd that the corrupt amongst us are flourishing like never before. If we still persist with the divine theme then it also becomes necessary to ask why the poor, the lowest of the low, suffer the most whenever a natural calamity occurs. The meek shall inherit the earth but one has to look real hard for evidence to support this divine assurance.
Theology is part of our lives, part of the baggage of the human species as it emerged out of the African forest and spread across the globe. Our theologies are inherited, passed down from one generation to the next, a circumstance which should teach us humility and inculcate in us a sense of tolerance for the beliefs of others, but one we choose to forget in the din and heat of theological rancour.
Then there is the history of modern Muslim countries which makes for such depressing reading, lands so easily conquered and colonised, and when seemingly liberated so imperfectly liberated. So little to be proud of, yet look at our cockiness…a visitor from Mars would think we had created the modern world. Across the dull, uninspiring ferment of the world of Islam’s recent past only one figure stands out, only one, who had the will and the strong arm to break the shackles of the past and show a new path for his people, Kemal Ataturk.
You’ll find poets here, poets of love and despair, of unfulfilled longing – Faiz’s poetry is one long lament, one paean to unrequited love – but what strange luck of the draw that all the inventors, scientists, warrior-statesmen, revolutionaries, even great poets, titans in their field, who adorn and, in so many instances, darken the pages of modern history are from other climes. As far as talent and genius go, the lands holding aloft the banner of the faith present the aspect of an extended desert – not of the imagination, because we are fertile in imagination, but a desert of achievement.
The status quo is broken always by radicalism, of thought and action. Consider the curse we carry. The only radicalism we have is of the Taliban and the blaring loudspeakers of the far right. Even a Mustafa Kemal would have a hard time putting this right.
Tailpiece: Lord Shiva’s teardrop, shed at the death of his beloved Sati, is to be seen again at Katas Raj, the pond having been cleaned up and the natural springs flowing again freely. But could the Punjab archaeology department do a better job of preservation and could my friend the chief secretary please ensure that there is no more lime washing of the old walls? Enough in the name of preservation has already been done to destroy the brooding magic of the ancient temples.
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Hurricane Sandy: Americans getting it wrong....Islamabad diary - Ayaz Amir
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