Category Archives: Islamisation

Prospect

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

WHETHER it was intended to be such or not, would its citizens wish the establishment of Pakistan be a receptacle for any variant of Islamic/Muslim fundamentalism pervading politics and determining social behavior?

Citing words and conduct, most would say history shows that this was not the motivation or goal of the Quaid-i-Azam and his lieutenants. Indeed, some of the leading Ulema were critical of the concept of a separate state for the Subcontinent’s Muslims.

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Security

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

          IS PAKISTAN secure? Yes we have a nuclear deterrent; but we would have to be pushed to the very edge to employ it. This means outsiders seeking to push and control Pakistan’s direction for diverse purposes, can, to a sufficiently large extent, afford to ignore it: Except that Pakistan’s nuclear actualities make it a factor in the global power calculus. So how vulnerable is Pakistan to sundry pushes in any ‘preferred’ political direction?

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The people’s man

BY Zubeida Mustafa

HOW the Single National Curriculum is being formulated betrays a gross ignorance of the principles of public policymaking. As I wait for the final document I often think of my friend Javed Hasan Aly who passed away last month of Covid-19, leaving his family and his many friends bereft.

I can imagine him shaking his head sadly and declaring that policymakers in Islamabad were violating public interest blatantly.

Javed was in the government himself (1965-2005), engaged in policymaking. He rose to the influential post of secretary Establishment Division. But he could make no impact. Why? He was so unlike the crowd in Islamabad vying for the boss’s favour. Whenever I teasingly referred to him as a bureaucrat, he would feign annoyance to remind me that he was a ‘civil servant’. “I have always striven to serve the people and that is why my priority has been to learn about the interests of the public”.

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Teaching religion

By Zubeida Mustafa

M.H. ASKARI, my colleague in Dawn and an Urdu short-story writer of eminence in his youth, wrote about his experience of joining the Anglo-Arabic School in Daryaganj in the late 1920s. On the first day, his principal asked him, “Will you study Sunni Deeniat or Shia Deeniat?”

Not being aware of the sects, Askari went home and asked his father Mirza Mohammad Said, an outstanding scholar who was widely acknowledged and had been Patras Bukhari’s teacher at Government College Lahore. Prof Said promptly replied, “My son will not study any Deeniat at school.”

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An opportunity?

By Zubeida Mustafa

IN tandem with Islamabad, the Sindh government has announced that the students who were scheduled to sit for their Grades IX to XII Board examinations this summer will be promoted to the next class without being tested.

In the absence of an alternative, this can be deemed to have been a sensible step. Moreover, the fact is that the exams we have been holding for the last several decades are no less than an ‘immaculate deception’. They are rife with corruption, and candidates resort to unfair means while massive sums change hands to manipulate results.

As a consequence, the real learning outcome of the students is appalling. Education in Pakistan is exam-oriented and these exams are a farce, leaving no incentive for the students to study. For them, it is a paper chase for the certificate/degree.

Now is also the time for the government to come clean on its failure to educate the children of this country as it is required to do under Article 25-A of the Constitution. The pandemic lockdown and the disruption it has caused are a blessing in disguise. The government should now rise to the occasion to bring about radical changes in our education system.

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Time to act

By Zubeida Mustafa

THE state of religious minorities in Pakistan today is most deplorable. They are vulnerable to violence, terrorism and physical abuse and many of them have lost their lives as a result in the last few decades. Their places of worship have come under attack on numerous occasions. This is in blatant violation of the Constitution which guarantees the right to life and religious freedom to all citizens of Pakistan.

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Religious politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

 Of course Muslims feel that Islam is one as conveyed by its Holy Prophet (PBUH) in Quranic revelation, and concretized by his exemplary life. But apart from podium oratory, reality demands the qualification that, as apparent in contemporary practice, this singleness emerges in the fact of variously distinct manifold ‘ones’: individual understanding and schools of interpretation are separate and differ.

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Food paradoxes

By Zubeida Mustafa

HAS the sight of a child scavenging for food from an overflowing garbage bin made your heart bleed? This is common in Karachi, where kitchen waste containing a lot of cooked food is thrown away. This child is one of the 31.5 per cent of under-fives in Pakistan who were found to be underweight by the 2011 National Nutrition Survey. Nearly 43.7pc were categorised as ‘stunted’. The figures are expected to rise in the NNS currently under way. Continue reading Food paradoxes

Playing with hellfire

TLYRA dharna

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

MUCH significance is being attached to the rise of the TLYRA (Tehreek-e- Labaik Ya Rasool Allah) and its political face TLP (Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan) ; and the MWM (Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen). There must be finer points of differentiation in party postures but the new bodies seem a Maulana TQ’s PAT derivative in terms of political leverage (intent is a matter of speculative personal opinion). But the future may be fraught with menacing linkages.

In 2012 Maulana TQ baulked from venturing to show how his national electoral vote-bank matched the heft of his staunch foot soldiers in road-camps. Awesomely righteous he remains; but a comparatively familiar game changer does not occasion the anxiety the undefined goals of these fresh but by-electorally promising moral stalwarts do – or, perhaps even more pertinently, could be projected as embodying. They are not waving the Daesh flag (anyone can chalk walls or paste posters of any sort) but they have made their debut  customized to the current international perception of militant Muslim obscurantism. Their apparent success and the government’s apparently craven surrender enables international global-jihadism terrorist-risk-perception tanked up thinkers to move Pakistan a notch higher on the flashpoint watch-list of alarmingly unstable, no matter how wistfully democratic, extremism prone Muslim countries. Continue reading Playing with hellfire

Misuse of faith

By Zubeida Mustafa

A RECENTLY launched collection of Hamza Alavi’s papers and speeches should be a timely reminder to us about the role that faith has come to play in Pakistan’s politics. Translated into Urdu by Dr Riaz Ahmad Shaikh (dean of Social Sciences, Szabist), Tashkeel-i-Pakistan: Mazhab aur Secularism leaves no one in doubt about the misuse of religion by our leaders to gain advantages in public life at the expense of the people’s well-being and the national interest.

Hamza Alavi, who was a Marxist scholar recognised in world academia, firmly believed that the founder of this country never sought to set up a theocratic state. Yet that is the direction in which Pakistan appears to be heading. Continue reading Misuse of faith