A home-made science scholar

In the late sixties (wasn't it 1968?) man first set foot on the moon. We sat up the whole night listening to the radio and experienced the thrill of a lifetime when the beliefs and legends of thousands of years about space were smashed to nothingness. The moon - poor moon! - suffered poetically too and its romance was all but extinguished.

However, our little daughter's amma whom we had brought with us from Peshawar, refused to believe that any such thing had happened, and heaped all the maledictions that her Pushto could conjure up on the heads of the kafirs who were spreading this blasphemy. I wonder how old Mr R.M. Abbasi was at that time. But more of him later.

The other day I read a most revealing article in Al-Maarif, the journal of the Institute of Islamic Culture, Lahore, on the "mythology" that some hyper-active Muslim brains have pinned on Islam. I use the word in inverted commas because Islam is not supposed to have a mythology.

And yet some so-called scholars of old, a few of them reputed as saints and highly regarded in any case, have left behind fairy tales about, say, structures like the Koh-e-Qaaf and institutions like the Angel of Death which are as full of marvels and magic as any that Hindu or Greek mythology can present. And, horror of horrors, these writers of old, with their super-charged imaginations, have not refrained from ascribing some of these legends and fairy tales to the Prophet himself (may peace be upon him) to make them sound credible.

There was a time when the Christian Church was as backward, ignorant and intolerant as these people. For instance, Galileo (1564-1642) was threatened with excommunication because he openly subscribed to the theory of Copernicus (1473-1543) that the planets, including the earth, revolve on their axes and move in orbit around the sun.

One would have thought that with modern education and elementary acquaintance with basic science we would no longer be reposing faith in antediluvian ideas and shibboleths. But it is not so. Our young maulvis can be excused since they are deprived by their religious teachers (or keep themselves deprived) of modern knowledge, but anyone else, who has read, say, up to B.A. and watched television, is not expected nowadays to assert that the earth is flat.And this is where Mr R.M. Abbasi (mentioned above), a lawyer and obviously B.A.LL.B., comes in, after publishing an advertisement in a national Urdu daily some time ago. Unfortunately he has not given any other information about himself, like his age, his other academic attainments, his scholarship and the sources from where he derived his revolutionary beliefs.

Actually I should not use the word "revolutionary" because in this ad he has publicly contradicted the fact that the earth revolves around itself and that it also revolves around the sun. He appears to be against revolutions of the planets.

His beliefs can be called radical since, in today's enlightened world, he is perhaps the first educated person in hundreds of years to go against Galileo and Copernicus.

The text of Mr Abbasi's advertisement does not refer to the stationary character of the earth, but to make sure that no doubt is left about his extraordinary views it is captioned by the words. "The earth is not round, it does not revolve either on its own axis or in orbit of the sun." On its part the text also presents a startling offer to mankind which it would be foolish indeed to ignore or reject.

The offer relates to an invention of Mr Abbasi's aimed at countering and overcoming "the poisonous snake of darkness and human destruction which, with the onset of the 21st century, will manifest itself by its physical control (over mankind)." But the offer to make the invention public is conditional. Let me give it to you in his own words.

"I will announce my invention when all the religious parties in Pakistan, especially the large ones, get united on the fundamentals of the Deen and convene a representative gathering."

The call to unite for the sake of knowing Mr Abbasi's invention is necessary because he feels that the world of Islam is specially targeted by the poisonous snake of darkness and human destruction.

Maybe I should not have been in a hurry to write on this topic but waited a few weeks at least to see which of the religious parties will heed Mr Abbasi's warning and express their readiness to take part in the united gathering without which we shall be deprived of knowledge about the invention. But, then, it may be easier to change Mr Abbasi's views than prevail upon these parties to come to a common theological platform.

For instance, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Amir of the Jamaat-i-Islami, may not entertain Mr Abbasi's offer at all since the latter prefaces it with the assertion that the earth is flat and stationary. An engineer by education, Qazi Sahib will merely laugh at the offer, but Mr Abbasi may find some adherents among the heads of some other religious parties who are not bothered about science.

Anyway, whether they credit him with any sense or not, they must give him an opportunity to unfold his invention before them. Not even a charlatan or a mountebank should go unheard, provided he believes passionately in his invention or discovery. Let us not forget that Mr Abbasi is a double graduate.

I recall that a conference of the country's religious parties, with the late Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani in the chair, was held some years ago at Bhurban, Murree, to hammer out a united front on some contentious theological issues, but the weather was not too salutary and the locale was too enjoyable to permit serious discussion. It would have been opportune for Mr Abbasi to address the gathering, but unfortunately the advertisement appeared long after the conference was held.

Maybe another is convened after some time now that everyone has read the ad. In any case, if Pakistan is now devoured by that poisonous snake of darkness and destruction it will be the ulema's fault and not Mr Abbasi's.

Mr Abbasi says in his ad: "God has opened a door through a humble member of the ummah which shows avenues clearly depicting to humanity at large and to Muslims in particular the solution of all their problems, from pain to rain." Please don't laugh at this.

In their time, Galileo and Copernicus were also laughed at. Who knows, some religio-scientific society in Pakistan may give credence to Mr Abbasi's beliefs and anyone deriding them may be branded an ignorant heretic.

Decreasing space for manoeuvre

Pakistan's politics has evolved its own law - the law of diminishing U-turns. Each U-turn leaves less space to manoeuvre, and we may soon be boxed in for all the readiness to dance. Our first U-turn was on Afghanistan; the second on handling core issues with India; and the third is on our nuclear scientists. Yesterday's heroes may be today's rogues.

Each of these U-turns has had its effects - overt, external ones relating to acceptability and commendation from the international community and the sole superpower that required them; and other effects that are experienced internally within the country.

For it is not what citizens think and feel that moulds the state's policies and alignments. These are set in reference to an 'objective' national interest, determined by a military dictatorship that has been there long enough to have gestated a civil regime as proxy spokesman.

Few Pakistanis seriously believe they are travelling down the road to democracy, but it is a fiction real powers find convenient to proclaim to real public opinion outside the proxy state. By definition, public opinion does not matter in a proxy state - unless it erupts.

If public opinion were to erupt in Pakistan, what would it proclaim? And how would any upheaval in Pakistan affect the 'global alliance' waging its war on terror? The questions originate in the unknown and are fraught with uncertainty. That is the disconcerting atmosphere in which Pakistanis live. Projections of stability and economic regeneration are mere transparencies that blur outside corporate boardrooms and official circles.

The U-turn on the Taliban had strong political endorsement from parties that had always wanted a reorientation of Pakistan's policy in that context. Yet, it is undeniable that generally there was a sense of guilt and self-dislike at being party to the infliction of a horrible and extensive punishment on the Afghan people, ineffectually sanitized through the term 'collateral damage'.

Afghanistan is no stranger to fratricidal conflict, and to ethnically and religiously-linked onlookers on either side of the Durand line, the distinction between intrusive Soviet troops and invasive coalition forces playing a role in regime change or regime support was media-made.

Pakistanis accepted General Musharraf's argument that the government had no choice. An elected civil government would have been approached less offhandedly, and its popular anchors better respected. American martial intent in Afghanistan was once again a bonanza for a Pakistani dictator.

Pakistan's freedom-respecting citizens (neither Anglophobe nor anglophile) are still questioning the contradictions and dualism in the Bush-Blair applications of humanitarian and democratic values and perspectives on terrorism.

As regards the U-turn vis-a-vis India, it is of course true that the COAS is best fitted to re-orientate army bellicosity. Hitherto the armed forces (which derived much of their political stature and budgetary chunks through public perception of the Indian threat) consistently inhibited and aborted civil attempts at an India-Pakistan rapprochement.

Benazir Bhutto was branded a security threat, and Vajpayee's bus-ride to Nawaz Sharif in Lahore ran into Kargil. But, lying somewhere between the civil and military hawks is the mass of the common people. They do not hate India, but they do not trust it.

If policy re-orientation is to filter through the ranks and masses of the Pakistani people, it has to have a genuine civil political plank. The undoubtedly genuine civil political plank provided by the PML-Q and the PPP Patriots is to the COAS as president and nothing else. Yet, the former mainstream parties with their federally popular leadership are encouraged to atrophy. The roles of the clerically-led MMA and the tangential MQM in reworking an India-Pakistan equation are turbid for varied reasons to external and internal observers alike.

Internationally, Pakistan's being a proxy military dictatorship means that the rules of engagement favour the other side. Whereas Mr Vajpayee's government is understood as being answerable to the Indian electorate, Pakistan's people are quite rightly answerable to the government. They do not know what is affected in Kashmir, and why or how.

Indians know that the APHC has spoken with their government and still needs its permission to come and go from its home in Kashmir. Indians know that cross- border terrorism as defined by them has been shown the red light. Pakistanis know that at any time their country can be falsely accused of having violated this stop sign. India and President Bush are judge and jury. Pakistan remains on trial. What more may its government have to do to retain its credentials?

In a third U-turn, the cream of Pakistan's nuclear- scientist cadre has come under the investigative pressure of its own government. Whether Dr A.Q. Khan and his team ever deserved near deification is not the issue. The point is, who will buy the argument that they enjoyed the freedom of action imputed to them and misused it unbeknownst, all this while? All along they have been under the wing of the continuum of Pakistan's ruling military establishment. If naughty scientists were able to pull the wool over watchful eyes, one questions the watch.

Institutionally, the army has never publicly questioned the wisdom of having taken its nuclear potential out of the closet. This nuclear parity with India has always been extremely popular, and public adulation of the men who made it possible has been more than official policy. It is a national reality. Can officialdom, comfortably reconstituted within the National Security Council, dissociate itself from the suddenly-detected reprehensible actions of nuclear heroes without simply seeming to be renouncing its former commitments?

No one seeks to ask the obvious question: why should a Pakistan fundamentalist even wish to surrender a monopoly? There are rogues aplenty outside the KRL and Pakistan, but Pakistan first? What could be coming next under the rubric of national interest?