Islam & modern sensibility

‘COMPATIBLE’ means something that is capable of existing or performing in a harmonious, agreeable and congenial combination with something else. Muslims today are confused about the compatibility of their religion with modern values and trends.

The confusion has been further aided by the intolerant and stubborn attitude and behaviour of some Muslims that has cast a shadow on the essence of their religion. The situation has encouraged anti-Islamic forces to point their guns at Islam and tell the world that it is an outdated and impractical way of life.

The state of Muslims, good, bad or indifferent, is one thing and success or failure of Islam quite another. The truths represented by Islam are as old as creation itself. These truthful values began forging their way gradually on their onward march. Different people in different periods of history owned them and reaped a happy and hefty harvest.

Islam as an ideology and way of life (deen) is an ongoing organic process that will keep on germinating with fresh fruits, but for a new crop, properly guided efforts based on modern knowledge and in line with Quranic values are necessary. This paradigm is missing in the Muslims of today.

Lack of knowledge and years of indoctrination have led to religious intolerance and bigotry, something that Islam vehemently opposes. Islam is definitely compatible with the ongoing process of time if its core values of justice, tolerance, morality, honesty and accountability are promoted and practised. Islam in the modern perspective should not be judged by institutions
that encourage fanaticism but by its insistence on the higher ideals of human dignity and equality.

If Muslims shun internecine antagonism and devote their energies to the system laid down in the Quran, no new laws are needed. According to Sarojini Naidu (address to Young Men Muslims Association, Madras, 1917), “Islam is the first religion that preached and practised democracy, for in the mosque the democracy of Islam is practised five times every day.”

The new world order which no one understands has pitched the West and non-Muslim powers against the so-called barbarian Muslims. The underdeveloped Muslim countries with a large population are confused about the new concepts of the modern age like progress, freedom, democracy, development and gender equality. They have started feeling that perhaps Islam is not compatible with these new thinking tools.

The Islamic values are definitely not aligned to support the corporate culture whose motto is maximisation of wealth at all cost. The Quran points out that its teachings are for all times and that God has created man and has set up the balance in order that we may not transgress this balance. It asks us to establish weight with justice and not fall short in balance (55:1-9).

Plundering the resources of the world and depriving others lead to an imbalance that is being perpetrated by the developed countries on the poor and underdeveloped countries of the world in the name of peace and prosperity.

The Quran is against such practices as they disturb man’s happy relationship with nature. Here too we see Islam’s prescription
for a happy world order. This problem and confusion lie in defining modern values and their utility. They may be beneficial to those who have canonised these values and trends. At the same time, they are confusing and illogical to those who have
suffered as passive recipients of western economic colonialism now reigning supreme.

Islam negates the annihilation of the weak. Even the West’s reliance on pure reason is now termed waywardness by many scholars, and has been a complete mess. Scientific knowledge has increased the quality and span of life, but to what use? There are more suicides now than ever before. It is not a matter of Islam being compatible with modern trends, but going a step further, modern trends have to prove their compatibility with their own values and only then a true realisation of Islamic values will come to the fore.

The West itself is so confused with its own new age metaphysics that many there are talking of the impending end of the world.

How can they question or blame Islam for ills of the modern times when they themselves are locked between free will and determinism and have slipped into a moral dark age?

Can Islam be modernised? This is the question that confuses people all over the world. The answer to this needs a valid re-interpretation of Islam as a potential force to harmonise society. The traditional practices of cultural Islam and the true teachings of the divine message have to be treated differently. The embargo on freedom of thought and control on violent suppression of free thinking must go.

The following dictates of the Quran are conducive to a better future for all times: Muslims will conduct their affairs through mutual consultation (42:38) and equal human dignity (17:70). They will establish justice in the land (5:8). They will stop mischief on earth because God does not like mischief (2:205). They will work for the unity of mankind (2:213). Their main objective is to work for the welfare of mankind (3:110), gender equality (4:32), superiority by character only (49:13), rule of
law and not of individuals (3:79), and freedom of religion (22:40) and expression (2:42).

The western powers are adamant in propagating every un-Islamic act of ignorant Muslims as Islamic and are not willing to let Muslim intellectuals and scholars present the true Quranic Islam lest their own followers change loyalties and follow these universal values.

Read More

A dangerous request

THE Libyan rebel leader who wants foreign forces on his soil perhaps doesn’t realise the implications of what he is asking for. Talking to journalists on Tuesday, the Misrata-based leader pleaded for British and French forces to help the rebels in their fight against Col Qadhafi. Obviously, the Misrata leadership is desperate, because the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council is fighting its own battle and is unable to help the beleaguered Misrata pocket against the well-armed Qadhafi loyalists, who are using rockets and air power against the enemy. This is causing heavy civilian casualties, too, with the overall death toll from the civil war being 10,000 killed and over 55,000 injured. It is bad for him but good in the long run for his country that European powers do not seem willing to send their troops to Libya. While Paris has rejected the very idea of French soldiers taking part in the fighting, London has offered to send military ‘advisers’, who will be helping neither in arming and training the rebels nor in planning. That makes one wonder what the advisers will be there for. Meanwhile, Nato has continued its bombing runs.

Nuri Abdullah Abdullati, the Misrata rebel, said he was appealing for foreign troops on “humanitarian and Islamic principles” so that the slaughter could stop. He should know that the Arab League has already developed reservations about Nato strikes because of heavy civilian casualties, and the Organisation of Islamic Conference has not stirred itself while a massacre goes on in a member-country. A foreign military presence in an oil-rich country in the midst of a civil war will further complicate the Libyan situation, and Mr Qadhafi and his dynasty could well be the gainer. And even if the rebels win, the new regime will always have the stigma of being installed by foreign powers.

Read More

A few good men

THOSE who believe on either side of the India-Pakistan equation that Kashmir is a Muslim entity are sadly missing out on the contribution of Kashmiri Pandits to the limitless enrichment of the subcontinent’s secular culture, chiefly of the Urdu language and the aadaab-imajaalis, social etiquette, that came with it.
Recent interventions by the Indian Supreme Court’s Justice Markandey Katju in a spate of landmark cases have triggered happy memories of some of his legendary Kashmiri compatriots. Recently, Justice Katju used a couplet by Faiz Ahmed Faiz to successfully encourage the Pakistan government to free an Indian prisoner who was languishing there for years. I believe he has been urged by fellow Indians to help secure the release of an aging Pakistani virologist lodged in Ajmer jail.
This week, Justice Katju played the historian. “Hum Babar ki aulad nahin, hum log baahar ki auladein hain,” he declared in an address at Delhi’s India Islamic Cultural Centre. He was discussing the scurrilous rewriting of Indian history by right-wing nationalists.
Simply translated, he was urging religious revivalists to acknowledge that far from being progenies of this or that Muslim ruler, as right-wingers allege, Indian Muslims, together with most other Indians are in fact offspring of waves of migrants. This claim is unlikely to go down well with India’s revanchist ideologues.
Justice Katju said mythmaking against Muslim rulers was a post-1857 British project. It had been internalised in India over the years. Mahmud of Ghazni’s destruction of the Somnath temple was stressed but not the fact that Tipu Sultan gave an annual grant to 156 Hindu temples.
He buttressed his arguments with examples quoted from D.N. Pande’s History in the Service of Imperialism and said Indians were held together by a common SanskritUrdu culture, which guaranteed that India would always remain secular.
Dr Pande discovered the truth about Tipu Sultan in 1928 while verifying a contention — made in a history textbook authored by Dr Har Prashad Shastri, the then head of the Sanskrit Department in Calcutta University — that during Tipu’s rule 3,000 Brahmins had committed suicide to escape conversion to Islam. The only authentication Dr Shastri could provide was that the reference was contained in the Mysore Gazetteer. But the Gazetteer contained no such reference.
I should not be surprised if for his reasoned views Hindutva cohorts will hate the judge. Even less popular will be his verdict of Tuesday in which he ordered the government to be brutal if that was the only way to deal with the centuries-old tradition of honour killing of young boys and girls. Kangaroo courts across the country threaten their young ones against marrying outside their communities.
Justice Katju easily kindles memories of another Kashmiri legend of the 1960s from the Allahabad High Court. Justice Anand Narain Mullah was a major Urdu poet of Lucknow and, like many of his fellow Brahmins from Kashmir, a witty raconteur.
In one of his humorous couplets, Justice Mullah threw a well-aimed barb at fellow leftist poets whom he found too drunk to be able to trudge the revolutionary march they canvassed support for. If I err in recalling the exact verse, readers may please correct me.
Hangama-i-surkh inquilab humney suna to tha magar Jaam-o-suboo ke paas paas daar-o-rasan se door door (I had heard of the revolutionary ferment of the Left/With a cup of cheer, far from the noose, they did rest) One of Justice Mullah’s verses caused a menacing controversy when he became a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council. Self-proclaimed nationalists bayed for his blood for alleged perfidy. It seems they mistakenly or perhaps zealously regarded a verse as insulting to Indian martyrs. It goes thus:
Khoon-i-shaheed se bhi hai qeemat mein kuchh siwa Fankaar ke qalam ki siyahi ki ek boond. (A drop of ink is dearer on the poet’s quill/Than all the blood that martyrs are made to spill) Few Kashmiris of any hue have moved me as spontaneously as the late Hriday Nath Wanchoo. I met the genial communist turned human rights activist in Srinagar at the height of brutal violence in Kashmir in early 1990s. A bronze bust of Lenin, the only one I have seen in Kashmir, glistened under a dim lamp in his cluttered study. There he shared with me his thoughts for a Kashmir free of Indian military occupation.
To make the point, he had unsuccessfully filed a petition in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court to assert his right as a Kashmiri to travel freely across the Line of Control. A couple of months after the meeting, the soft-spoken Wanchoo was murdered. The finger of suspicion was pointed at Muslim extremists though some of his sympathis ers fear the government had a role. Wanchoo’s grandson, Amit, is a much-liked doctor. Popular also as a musician, he lives in Kashmir to keep his grandfather’s spirit alive.
How can votaries of a Muslim Kashmir overlook the contribution of Ratan Nath Sarshar or Braj Narain Chakbast to the romance of the Urdu novel and poetry respectively? However, the train of thought triggered by Justice Markandey Katju’s far-reaching fulminations would be incomplete without reference to Jawaharlal Nehru. He is controversial no doubt and largely responsible for alienating Mohammad Ali Jinnah from the mainstream of the Congress-led national movement. However, it would be preposterous to call Nehru communal.
Who else but he could quote the acerbic Alberuni so faithfully as Nehru did in Discovery of India? The 11thcentury chronicler was never at ease with the Muslim plunder of Hindu temples. But he also wrote of Indians: “They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-contained and stolid. They believe there is no country like theirs, no nation like theirs, no science like theirs, no religion like theirs.” How did Nehru respond to the criticism? He described Alberuni’s views as “probably a correct enough description of the temper of the people”.

If the Kashmiris manage to keep their secular Kashmiriyat despite the enormous pressure by Hindu and Muslim extremists to cave in, it would be in no small measure due to the periodic interventions of a few good men who refused to relent under duress. ¦ Dawn’s The writer is correspondent in Delhi.

Read More

Afraid of devolution?

WONDERS never cease. In the second decade of the 21st centu ry, the transfer of power to the units of a federation has been made controversial! Efforts are being made to help the centre retain the privileges that right fully belong to the provinces.

No student of politics will deny that Pakistan broke up in 1971 largely as a result of the policies designed to make the centre strong at the expense of provincial rights and aspirations. Nor can anyone forget that the failure to restore to the provinces what has always been due to them poses the greatest threat to the state’s integrity today.

We are also familiar with the argu ments employed while calling for mak ing the hands of one ruler or another strong. It was said the country faced so many threats that a centrally organised security edifice alone could preserve its integrity. The centre alone had the mental and physical wherewithal to achieve economic progress. In an Islamic state there could be only one centre of power and Pakistan had a special reason to crush centrifugal forces and fissi parous tendencies which were being fanned by the enemies of the state — democrats, secularists, advocates of the nationalities’ rights, separatists, et al.

For six decades, the politics of Pakistan revolved around the federal question. Any stratagem that could prevent the state from becoming a federation was in order — the fiction of parity, the abolition of provinces in the western part of the original state, the imposition of martial law and the state’s declaration of war against the majority nationality and the smallest nationality both. No wonder almost all democratic movements in the country have had their origins in the federating units’ struggle for self-government.The central demand was that the centre should keep only three or four subjects such as foreign affairs, external security, currency and communications. All other subjects — internal security, local government, planning, education and social welfare — were to be restored to the provinces.

It is in this context that one should examine the national consensus on redesigning the polity by meeting some of the main demands of the federating units. The endorsement of the 18th Amendment by all shades of opinion in parliament is nothing short of a miracle. It not only marks a giant stride towards realising the promise of the 1973 consti tution, in several respects it surpasses the 1973 consensus.

The 18th Amendment act may not be a perfect piece of constitutional legislation but the transfer of subjects from the centre to the provinces is not one of its blemishes. Indeed, that is the point of the highest merit in the whole scheme. Unfortunately, the amendment has not received from the people, especially civil society organisations that bear the heavy responsibility of guiding them, the attention it deserves, and the factors contributing to this situation need to be considered.

First, the process of demonising the politicians begun by the praetorian rulers in 1958 continues to this day. Although the politicians’ contribution to their fall from grace has not been insignificant they have been sinned against more than they have sinned. Some of the mud flung at them has rubbed off on parliament, and the people have developed a bias against it and against anything it does. Additionally, the professional critics of the government believe they must run down the 18th Amendment as part of a strategy to demolish it.

Secondly, the debate on a single article included in the amendment has overshadowed the nearly 100 other points of the reform. At the same time, the point on which the amendment could be criticised has been ignored — that it has bypassed the provinces’ right to judicial autonomy and ignored the plea for making the high courts the final courts in a large number of matters.

Thirdly, all those who claim to speak for the people have not adequately explained to them the link between a democratic constitution and their rights — to life, liberty, security, employment, development and peace. Most of them are wallowing in the belief that they have nothing to do with constitutional amendments because they are up to their nose in the battle to keep hunger and disease away from their doorsteps.

Fourthly, the provinces are considered tenants of the central rentier state and not its co-equal coordinates by Dicey’s definition.

These factors lend the voices of the denigrators of the scheme of devolution acceptability in the public they do not deserve on merit.

The most important argument against the devolution plan is that the provincial authorities do not have the capacity to discharge their added responsibilities. There is an element of truth in this contention just as it was there in the British argument for denying the South Asian people independence. The argument is as invalid today as it was 70 or 100 years ago. Besides, the provinces cannot acquire the capacity for administering their affairs unless they are assigned this task. To say that devolution may wait till the provinces acquire the required capacity amounts to blocking their rights for ever.

Those who rely on this argument also miss the fact that fair governance is impossible until power is devolved from the provinces to local government institutions. The latter too are hit by the same argument. Any delay in the transfer of power to the provinces will also delay the empowerment of local bodies and communities.

Another argument is that there are matters of rights, equality and uniformity in development that can only be dealt with at the central level. This plea is valid only to the extent that citizens in all parts of a federation should have equal rights but the argument that the federating units cannot guarantee this is a presumption not backed by evidence and it also amounts to condemning the provincial communities unheard.

Besides, within the framework of an equality paradigm, different provinces have a right to address their social development with reference to their cultures and social sensibility. Those opposing devolution can invite the charge of ignoring Pakistan’s cultural and social diversity and the demands of a pluralist outlook.Nobody is mentioning the fact that those who have lorded over the people because of their grip over the levers of power at the centre and their beneficiaries have a vested interest in declaring that the heavens will fall if the provincial kamdars get a share of power. No surprise there. After all, the Raj and the regimes of Ayub and Ziaul Haq still have their defenders.

This is not to deny that like any major initiative devolution poses some teething problems but these problems do not cancel out the principle of democratic self-rule, which is the best form of governance known to humankind. These problems can be, and should be, solved through a sober dialogue. Nobody should be afraid of devolution; what we should be afraid of is the intrigue of vested interests to preserve a centralised state whose failure is choking the whole nation. ¦

Read More

Arms licences

THERE was a time when newspapers would map the journey of a gun to the individual holding it. This type of rudimentary reporting has since gone out of demand. In fact, today the occasional police references to the origins of a grenade thrown here and a bullet fired there are dismissed as remnants of an investigation routine that lags behind the dangerous times we live in. Arms are now a part as well as a way of life.

In this context, the government`s apparent need to use arms licences as an instrument to please its insecure friends is appalling. A Dawn report says that, despite a ban since January 2010, arms licences continue to be issued, providing the proud weapon-holders with a power symbol they cannot do without. Some 7,000 applications for licences sent by the interior ministry are pending with Nadra, and a senior Nadra official has confirmed the receipt of additional individual applications that are recommended by the prime minister, who has already allowed the issuance of 300 arms licences during the period the ban has been in place. The beneficiaries of his favour include retired, senior servicemen and prominent politicians and bureaucrats.

The government is estimated to have issued some 10,000 arms licences since 2008 in a country where legal arms are but a small fraction of a large heap of weapons. The news item in Dawn is bound by formalities to make a distinction between licences issued for non-prohibited and prohibited bores, whereas theoretically the ban is for all licences issued since the beginning of 2010 to be placed in the category of the prohibited. If this were not enough, the report shows the spokesman of a party which had in January filed a (now withdrawn) deweaponisation bill in the Senate defending his right to have a legal weapon — to combat the holders of illegal gadgets of destruction. His party had backed the bill in the Senate with figures of thousands of deaths caused by `illegal weapons` between 2006 and 2009. The government had found the bill rather unnecessary given there were already so many laws to deal with the issue of the spread of weapons in the country. Those who had thought that this official recognition would perhaps lead to an effective invoking of the relevant legal provisions for a fight against weaponisation must be disappointed. The government appears too obsessed with old power symbols and the security of a privileged few to be bothered about the dangers that brandished guns, both legal and illegal, pose to the people at large.

Read More