THE Quran guides us in several ways in respect of various aspects of life. One of these is the direct admonitions and injunctions, in the form of dos and don’ts, which, besides promoting excellent moral values, can also be of great help in practical life and in building human relations on sound and healthy lines.

It is not uncommon that some people, instead of relying on their own efforts, start eagerly desiring what belongs to others, which, among other things, adversely impacts on the state of mutual relations. Another factor that can have the same unhealthy effect on mutual relationship relates to the question as to who should get what and how much whether it be in the course of partnership or employment or any other relationship. The relationship is disturbed when one usurps that which belongs to others or violates or does not respect the due rights of others.

The Quran provides excellent guidance in this connection when it says “And do not covet what Allah has given some of you more than others: the men shall have their due share according to what they have earned and the women shall get according to what they have earned” (4:32). The verse, in fact, tells us about four things. One is that any one who earns a thing or gets it in a proper or legal way is entitled to him.

The second thing that the verse tells us is that a person should depend on his own efforts instead of eagerly desiring or usurping what belongs to others. The third is that every person, whether a man or woman, shall have an equal opportunity to contribute and get the reward accordingly. The fourth is that a person shall get only according to what he has earned or in proportion to what he has contributed. In this way through a single verse the Quran provides guidance in respect of four important aspects of life.

Likewise, we are often faced with the problem of how to repel or ward off a wrong or an evil in a proper and effective way. In this connection also the Quran provides appropriate guidance when it says “repel evil with that which is better” (23:96). The verse conveys a message of far-reaching effect consistent with human nature. A wrong or evil can be normally repelled in two ways. One is to punish the wrong doer each time he commits wrong. The other is to motivate or impel him to avoid doing wrong. The former is the negative way while the latter is the positive way.

The negative way can, at the most, make a person avoid doing wrong so long he has the fear that he may be punished for it. But the moment he finds an opportunity of doing that thing without being noticed or caught, he will certainly do it. So the negative way merely treats the symptoms not the disease.

A person can be persuaded to refrain from committing wrong deeds for good only when he is convinced that what he had been doing was wrong and that now he sincerely desires to give it up. That desire can be created only by positive measures like appropriate guidance or by finding out the actual cause that led him to commit such wrong acts and then removing that cause.

People are impatient by nature as the Quran tells us (70:19-21). They get discouraged in adverse and unfavourable conditions and give up all hopes and efforts or take actions with undue haste which invariably result in failure, discouragement or disappointment. These are the obvious outcome of impatience and lack of steadfastness. In this respect also the Quran provides excellent guidance when it says “bear with patient constancy whatever betide thee” (3:17) and “those who endure with patience will be rewarded without measure” (39:10).

Edison carried out three thousand experiments before he finally succeeded in inventing the light bulb. He virtually failed three thousand times but he claimed that he had three thousand successes because each failure brought him nearer to success. If we have to list the causes of the success of great men in their mission, steadfastness could be among the first few in the order of importance. They endure all kinds of pressures and the hurdles created in their way. They steadfast with the same spirit. By promising unlimited rewards for patience and steadfastness the Quran impels us to endure with fortitude all adverse conditions in the way of achieving our objectives.

The Quran also emphasises the importance of consultation. While enumerating some of the attributes of true believers it says “and those who do their work through mutual consultation” (42:31). The Prophet was also specifically advised to consult his companions in the conduct of affairs (3:159). Consultation can not only enable one to manage things or conduct his affairs in the most effective way but can also help improve mutual relations when people frequently meet to consult each other.

We frequently make promises in our dealings, whether social, commercial or otherwise. Without promises or pledges most of the activities of life will either cease or become too cumbersome to be carried out. We accept the promises of each other because we trust that they will be fulfilled. Fulfilment of promises not only strengthens confidence in one another but also helps improve the state of mutual relations. The Quran treats the fulfilment of promises as an act of righteousness (2:177) and enjoins us to keep our pledges (17:34).

The Quran says “Allah loves not any self-centred boastful person” (31:18) and “keep to forgiveness and enjoin kindness” (7:199). Most of the problems facing human society these days will automatically end if people shun self-centred pride and learn to forgive and be kind to others. In this way the Quran provides the most appropriate guidance with respect to various aspects of life.

A SECTION of Pakistanis living in Washington have articulated strong scepticism about the understanding President Musharraf has reached with Washington. An American news agency has quoted them as expressing the “fear” that Pakistan might be “ditched” once the threat posed by South Asia-based extremists has passed.

The conjecture is that the US might one day reject Pakistan in favour of its bitter rival — India — which is “a democracy with far more obvious claim to Washington’s attention.” The report points out that Pakistan, under President Pervez Musharraf, may have provided valuable support to the US in hunting down Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants, but then it perhaps had little choice since refusal to cooperate would surely have earned Pakistan US hostility under policies being pursued since 9/11.

However, the agency concedes that some American observers believe that Pakistan is key to US interests in terms of counter-terrorism. But Dr Dennis Kux, the celebrated author who was once the State Department’s South Asia specialist, has his reservations. “I fear the future will be much like the past, once the problems with Al Qaeda wind down,” he says.

Pakistan has maintained a close relationship with the US for over 50 years, even though it has not always followed a steady and consistent pattern. Ties have followed an undulating course, dotted with heights of mutual trust and cooperation of cold war years and depths of distrust and mutual indifference, with 9/11 marking a new phase of cooperation and understanding.

President Bush’s invitation to President Musharraf for a meeting in his holiday resort at Camp David, was a special gesture. It can even be seen as a tilt towards Pakistan as no other South Asian leader has ever been invited to Camp David. In concrete terms, the talks resulted in a three billion dollar package of economic and security-related assistance for Pakistan.

While not all the details of the talks between the two sides may ever be fully be known, since this is the custom, US officials in their briefing after the talks stressed that the two presidents made a long-term commitment “to build a relationship very different from what we have seen in the past.” They also said that the talks had focused mainly on economic and security issues.

In presenting the outcome of the talks at camp David mainly in terms of the impact of the economic assistance offered by the US, Pakistan has also emphasized America’s commitment to a long-term multifaceted relationship. It is obvious that the trust expressed by the US president in Pakistan as a friend and ally is due to the close support it has been receiving from Islamabad in the conduct of its operations in Afghanistan and in its hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

It appears that Pakistan has also expressed its willingness to make its troops available for peace-keeping in Iraq, preferably under the umbrella of the UN, OIC or some other international organization. There are strong indications that this would not be a very popular move and President Pervez Musharraf may have to reconsider his offer in view of its internal political implications.

For security reasons, Pakistani leadership has been inclined towards establishing close relations with the US from the very outset. Except for the first few months following independence in 1947 when Pakistan explored the possibility of securing military and financial assistance from Britain, it has looked to Washington for aid and assistance. As early as in May 1948, the American military attache based in Karachi reported to his government that he had found “a very strong feeling of friendship and admiration for all things American” among Pakistanis.

When in June 1949 Moscow’s invitation to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan became known, British and American diplomats worked overtime to have it superseded by an invitation for a visit to Washington. Ultimately when, for reasons which to date are not quite clear, the soviet invitation fizzled out, the Americans actually invited Mr Liaquat Ali Khan to visit the US and the invitation was promptly accepted. Although this did not lead to any immediate offer of economic or military assistance to Pakistan, American policy-makers became aware of Pakistan’s economic and security concerns. Some years later Pakistan and the US entered into a close security and strategic relationship and for several years Pakistan was the recipient of a steady flow of arms and economic aid.

Almost every other head of state or government who came to power in Pakistan after Mr Liaquat Ali Khan tried to maintain or strengthen the alliance relationship with Washington. In retrospect, the outcome of the contact between the late

Gen. Ziaul Haq’s top aides (Foreign Minister Agha Shahi and army chief of staff Gen K.M. Arif) was uncannily similar to the results of President Musharraf’s talks in Camp David. What Pakistan then received was also a 3.2 billion “multiyear commitment, equally divided between economic and military assistance.”

In addition, the then US under-secretary of state, Buckley, also indicated that the US administration hoped to “address the underlying sources of insecurity that prompt a nation like Pakistan to seek a nuclear capability...” In return, the US expected Pakistan to support its covert action in Afghanistan to bring an end to the Soviet occupation. To this Gen Ziaul Haq readily responded.

At the joint press briefing after the Camp David talks, President Bush spoke about President Pervez Musharraf’s efforts to “build a modern Pakistan that is tolerant and prosperous...” The US president has also been quoted as having said that “the friendship between the US and Pakistan is vital to the security and stability of South Asia.”

The official US news release on the subject devoted more space to President Bush’s expectation of Pakistan’s cooperation in fighting terrorism and in removing tensions between Pakistan and India. That Kashmir was discussed between President Bush and Pervez Musharraf was also confirmed at the White House news briefing.

Pakistan is faced with a number of challenges arising out of President Musharraf’s talks with the American leaders. There is the question of curbing religious extremism, especially the alleged cross-border infiltration into the Indian occupied Kashmir. In an article published in Los Angeles Times, the well-known South Asian specialist Selig Harrison disclosed that India had recently provided the US with detailed maps showing 174 locations where Pakistani camps to train infiltrators operated. The State Department and Defence Intelligence Agency sources say that US reconnaissance satellite findings broadly corroborated the Indian information.

Known for his pro-Indian leaning, Selig Harrison also sounded critical about the upturn in the US-Pakistan relations, when he said: “The Bush administration has engaged in a delicate balancing act in South Asia; it has embraced Pakistan’s military ruler as an ally against Al Qaeda (and) at the same it has worked to prevent its Islamabad connection from damaging continuing efforts to improve a potentially more important relationship with India... An unconditional commitment to Musharraf would give hardline anti-US Hindu nationalists a new lease of life in India (and) conflict with the (US) administration’s view that India is a growing world power with which we have common strategic interests.”

There is no space wider than that of grief, there is no universe like that which bleeds.

By Pablo Neruda

WE are winding our way cautiously through the narrow road which leads to the canyon of what was once the hidden valley of the Yosemite tribe of native Californians. It is early, there are few others here, in this silent land, at this hour, and the solitude is like a mist which binds us like another skin.

Shortly we shall pass through the canyon and stand before the sheer granite cliffs rising thousands of feet into the air, piercing the sky like massive sentry’s guarding the night. Before us will loom the fifth tallest waterfall in the world, tons of pristine snow-melt cascading down from a height of nearly two and half thousand feet. We shall stand in what was once the last refuge of Chief Tenaya of the Yosemites, before his capture by white settlers who laid claim to the land which lay before them like a divine promise, the manifest destiny of American progress.

In 1848, at the advent of the gold rush, there were roughly 100,000 Indians in California. By 1870, this figure had been cut in half — primarily by disease and predatory violence. These are conservative figures; some casualty estimates run even higher.

In assessing this particular period in the history of American expansion across the mid-west to the Pacific coast, it must be remembered that the generation rushing for California’s gold had been brought up on Indian tales. Fighting “savages” was a way of life and had been since the ‘pilgrims’ landed on the Atlantic coast in what became New England. Indians were barbarians who killed, scalped and tortured their victims. To kill an Indian was a civilized act and there are many accounts of easterners crossing the plains who actually shot the first Indians they came across. This type of thinking was deeply inculcated in large segments of American society.

The United States was a young nation in the 1850s, restless, eager, and flushed with the recent victory over Mexico which wrested most of southern California from Spanish control. It was American destiny to have acquired the vast, new lands of the great Southwest. The title to the west was ordained and no “inferior races” could halt the inexorable American march.

This was also the era of slavery in America. Even northerners accepted this “peculiar institution” within the culture. Southerners, in the forefront of the Gold Rush immigrants, helped assure that the California natives would become a new class of slaves in the new states through the economic necessity of a labouring class. Indenture laws and other “civilized” means legitimized the new society.

Hordes of men in Gold Rush California found themselves not only thousands of miles from home, but in a rough, frontier country with little law, facing the huge unknown. It is in these circumstances that hundreds of Indians were ruthlessly destroyed in California. This was accomplished not only directly by the most brutal of the settlers, but through the acquiescence of all the others who did not care enough to be outraged by what was taking place.

The late historian Mari Sandoz once noted that “Properly conditioned, any people will produce a good per cent of men (including women) who look upon the extermination of those who differ from them (and have something they want) as the proper destruction of a predatory animal. It is not only the Nazis who do these things, or the wool hat boys of the South. We can all be led down this path if the approach is insidious enough.”

Californians of the 1850s had been conditioned, by governors who spoke of inevitable wars of extermination; conditioned by officials who referred to degraded and filthy red men; conditioned by a press making constant remarks about the degraded “root digger”, a pejorative term referring to native Indians.

Strangely enough, the American army tried desperately to avoid conflicts with the Indians in frontier California. With no political axe to grind and a minimum of social pressures to shape their thinking, army officers often had the perspective to see clearly what was happening to the Indians. It seems obvious that the Indians had historically always occupied the best land — land the whites coveted for their mines, farms, towns.

The army was in no position to benefit from the land-hungry yearnings of the settlers, and California became one of the few areas in the West where the military protected the Indians from the settlers, instead of the other way round. One army officer describes his encounter with an Indian fighter, as American men who hunted natives were called:

“He is dignified as well as good-hearted — in fact there is nothing in his appearance and manner different from those of any other well-meaning citizen. And yet, he has just been telling me, with a slight, satisfied smile playing over his lips as he spoke, how he once hanged an Indian and again how he cut the throat of another... Am I disgusted when he tells me he once cut a steak with his bowie knife out of an old Indian?”

Sometimes the killers themselves recognized the tragedy in which they were taking part. William Perkins, a merchant, felt compelled to join a volunteer group seeking some marauding natives. After the group attacked and burned a village, Perkins had second thoughts about his actions: “To say the truth, I was not entirely satisfied with myself...we invade a land that is not our own, we arrogate a right through pretence of superior intelligence and the wants of civilization, and if the aborigines dispute our title, we destroy them.”

The most persistent enemy of the native Californians was the firmly rooted white philosophy which preached that, one way or another, the Indian was doomed. Beyond the callous references to “root diggers” the single most important catchword of the period was “extermination”. It was used early and often and picked by the newspapers and journals of the time. It was a word that set the stage for slaughter: “It is now that the cry of extermination is raised... men, women and children... of the Indian race... shot down.” (Sacramento “Placer Times”, April 1849)

Exterminate, not annihilate or destroy. The term suggests the killing of rodents or vermin rather than people, and further emphasizes the prevalent white contempt for the California natives. The word was repeated endlessly to a public that easily accepted its premise. It was a predestined notion and inevitable. Extermination suddenly assumed the stature of some monstrous, natural law.

Derided and scorned as “root diggers” by the early Anglo visitors to their lands, the California natives nonetheless had a rich and varied culture. Living close to the earth as did most primitive peoples, they developed a proximity and awareness to nature which pervaded every aspect of their lives. They had a mystical reverence for their surroundings — for the game they killed or worshipped, for the seeds they ate, and for the rich land in which they lived.

Religion was integral to their way of life. It encompassed morality and was expressed through the initiation rites and the cults and shamanism on which they depended for healing. They lived in a shadow world of friendly and evil spirits who were pacified by ritualistic ceremonies and dances.

Indian mythology was deeply rooted in nature and the animal life with which it abounded. Although differing widely, all California Indian groups had creation myths which related directly to the area in which a particular group lived. The creator took many shapes. This Great Spirit, or creator, was often tied closely to animals in their world, taking on the shape of an eagle or a coyote, always revered, never feared.

In the winter of 1851, volunteers from amongst the white settlers in the central valley of California gathered to hear the words of J. Neely Johnson who was expected to rally the men towards making war with those Indians who had refused to succumb to pressure to sign treaties relinquishing their control over the land they had lived on for generations: “While I do not hesitate to denounce the Indians for the murders and robberies committed by them, we should not forget that there may perhaps be circumstances which might, to some extent, excuse their hostility to the whites. They probably feel that they themselves are the aggrieved party, looking upon us as trespassers upon their territory, invaders of their country.”

Despite some doubts about the rightness of the manifest destiny white settlers believed they were pursuing, the Indian wars were imposed on the tribes who resisted increasing occupation of their lands and the massacre of their people, women and children killed or sometimes taken prisoner. According to John Boling who was one of the party of men to pursue the Indians into the Yosemite area, “It was often pitiful to see the suffering of the papoose. Little children as naked as when born would crowd around the campfire and fight like dogs over scraps of bacon and bread thrown to them.”

Unfortunately, for the California Indians as well as all colonized people through history, this rare sympathy for a weaker enemy, less equipped to cope with deviousness, deception, and the devastation of fire power, was dwarfed within the larger context of the need to conquer and vanquish the conquered. In April 1851, when John Savage, a prominent white settler who led the campaign to displace native Californians from their lands, found himself faced with the resistance of the Dumna tribe, he addressed their chief, Tomquit, with these words: “I’m a big medicine man for the big father in Washington. You have to do as I say. I can hurt you and make your people die. I can make all the fish leave the rivers, and the antelope and the elk go away.”

Following a campaign of killing, looting, and the burning of villages and supplies of winter food, Savage managed to gather 1,200 Indian men and ordered them to give up the title to their lands and to settle on a piece of land designated by the treaty which began the corralling of native tribes into reservations. The Great Father in Washington was to take care of the Indians now — feed, clothe, and help them to adapt to white man’s ways. When the chief of the Yosemite, Tenaya, was finally captured (after his son was killed and his parents left to starve in a cave), these are the words he spoke:

“My people do not want anything from the “Great Father” you tell me about. The Great Spirit is our father, and he has always supplied us with all we need. We do not want anything from white men. Go, let us remain in the mountains where we were born; where the ashes of our fathers have been given to the winds. I have said enough.”

America’s evolution as a nation was different from and less organic than that of the European nations; it lacks even a national name, having derived it from the name of the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. Its people were first colonists, then rebels, then a mixture of all the peoples of Europe and later, the rest of the world. Such a country could not take itself for granted, but had need of ideas, convictions, speculations to grow around. Its aspirations were never confined within its own elastic frontiers, but embraced all human destinies. In 1850 one of their great writers, Herman Melville, wrote: “God has predestined, mankind expects great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” In 1893, a German American, Carl Schurz, criticized this conviction as “youthful optimism...the idea that this Republic... could transform any country, inhabited by any kind of population, into something like itself simply by extending over the magic charm of its political Institution...”

The magic charm of the American Institution was to treat the rest of humanity as clay to be moulded by the potter’s hand. This assumption of superiority may be called a legacy of British insularity, magnified by America’s size and wealth. It leads to the habit of viewing the rest of the world with a condescending or disdainful indifference. In the last decade, and in the last two years, this indifference has transformed itself into the lethal pursuit of the annihilation of any opposition, whether it is political power, economic strength, or cultural diversity. The magic charm of the American Dream has begun to unravel and stands bare for what it is composed of: obeisance to capitalism’s Rock of the Ages, the stock exchange and corporate interests.

We are driving back now. As we turn the corner, a rainbow strings itself between two peaks, like the hour between day and night. It is dark, all around us are vast empty spaces which speak of the grief of lost and ravaged cultures and obliterated names. All around us, tonight, there is only silence and the dying sigh of a universe which bleeds.