October 22, 2003	Wednesday	Sha’aban 25, 1424

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

ISLAMABAD, Oct 21: The conference of Pakistan-India writers concluded on Tuesday with its delegates asking the governments of India and Pakistan to sign a peace treaty and abjure the use of nuclear weapons.

The three-day conference, organized by Hawwa Foundation and ActionAid, demanded of the two government to commit themselves to a bilateral, phased reduction of expenditures on conventional forces and armaments and desist from “the glorification of nuclear might.”

The final declaration included a whole range of steps, including liberalization of visa regime, curbing of hate propaganda against each other, increased opportunities for cultural exchanges and visits of writers, poets, scholars, journalists and academics and demands to facilitate travel by rail, road, air and sea.

But it was the theme of ‘fundamentalism’ that dominated its proceedings. Fundamentalism not just in narrow interpretation of the term but in its broader scope. There was a whole range of notions on fundamentalists. There were dreamers, realists, moderates and even some ‘fundamentalists’ talking about fundamentalism.

Prof Ashfaq Saleem Mirza was definitely a realist: “Fundamentalism is all over and what we are discussing here is based on dreams and hopes,” he opened the discussion with a pessimistic finality. “I don’t see any enlightenment anywhere.”

Dr Saeeda Hameed, an Indian with strong family roots in Pakistan, was an optimist. This was despite her brushes with naked communalism, first as a child when she was afraid to disclose her Muslim name and then her encounter with the carnage in Indian Gujarat. “Let’s just join hands and go cracking at fundamentalists,” she said passionately.

Manohar Shyam Joshi, who, among other things, produced the famous Bunyad serial, believed creativity has a basic contradiction with fundamentalism. He was more concerned about secular and progressive fundamentalism. “There are literary fundamentalists who cannot tolerate each other,” he said. “The progressives tend to be equally fundamentalists when confronted with the ‘others.”

Ajeet Kaur and Dr Tariq Rehman too shed light on their own version of fundamentalists. But what exactly is fundamentalism? It was obvious that the question needed to be defined before the answers. Here came Dr Inayatullah to everybody’s rescue. A fundamentalist, he said, is a close-minded person who is not open to new ideas; inflexible to change; sure of his or her version of truth; disabled to question his or her own beliefs; devoid of self-awareness; projects his or her own weaknesses on others; exclusionary to others and, most important, a revivalist who is stuck somewhere in time or history.

Now this made everybody looked like a fundamentalist. There was hardly any person who could claim that he did not possess any one of these qualities. This also made Communists and even liberals seem like fundamentalists. It was more of an attitude than concrete. It seemed like a constant process where one had to check perpetually against such tendencies. So it was generally agreed that some fundamentalists were better than others. The worst kinds are those, as Munnoo Bhai said, who are selectively fundamentalist. They tend to become like one in the morning but change by the evening. But the fundamentalists involved in physical violence are the worse types.

There was a general consensus that Pakistan was fairly ‘livable’ place until 1970s. The menace of religious extremism, everybody agreed, is becoming dangerous. Writer Intezaar Hussain, who opposed progressives, not the idea of progressivism but its activists in Pakistan, was forced to confess on the sidelines that “those progressives look like angels before these fundos.”

An earlier session also discussed gender issues but was focused more on that radical brand of feminism that is exclusionary to men, a trend that remains peripheral and not mainstream in the feminist movements across the world.

Hiroshima’s Mayor Dr Tadatoshi Akiba also made a presentation during the day. The gathering paid tributes to Khishwar Naheed and her team for their untiring efforts to make the event a success. The conference concluded in the same melodious way that it started on. Music prodigy Afsheen, a Nayyara Noor in the making, enthralled the audience by singing two poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz.