| 09 April 2004 | Friday | 18 Safar 1425 |
Wrong answer in Sri Lanka
What happened to Quaid's dream?
Poverty alleviation has, of late, become a matter of increasing concern both at the international and national level. Islam can be rightly described as a religion of and for the poor, meeting their essential requirements with dignity and self- respect so that they may make full use of God-given faculties.
The Holy Prophet (PBUH) said, "If you want my pleasure, look after the poor. You will deserve Allah's help and His provision, if you look after the poor." "Look for me among the weak, for you are helped and provided for because of the weak among you" (Abu Daud).
"These people of ours are helped because of their weakness, their callings, their prayers, and their sincerity" (Muslim). "Certainly Allah will not bless a people who do not give the rights of their weak." "Those people will not be purified whose weak cannot get their right without much difficulty" (Ibn Maja).
Islam is perhaps the first religion which gives the poor a right of share in the wealth of the rich and establishes an institutional mechanism to make financial assistance available to them to cater to their basic needs. The Quran says: "And in their wealth was a share for the one who asked for help and for one who could not." (51:20).
The share of the poor is, however, not to be asserted by their own fancy or that of their leaders through collective bargaining via militant trade unions, which can create discord and class conflict.
It must be determined in accordance with the guidance provided by Allah in the most even-handed manner, every one being equally dear to Him as His creation. Islam makes the rights of the poor the obligation of the rich for which they are made answerable to Allah.
For this, a complete and very effective institutional framework has been provided which combines both compulsory and voluntary action on the part of the individual.
According to the Quran, the ideal society is the one in which, "it is provided for thee that thou wilt not hunger therein, nor wilt thou be naked. And thou wilt not thirst therein, nor wilt thou be exposed to the sun" (20:119-20).
The Holy Prophet said, "a son of Adam is entitled only to three things; dwelling to live in, a garment to cover his nakedness and a piece of bread and water." The scope of the Islamic concept of basic needs is wider than the current western one which is restricted to roti (food) kapra (clothes) and makan (house).
Allah has also included water, which is so vital for life and whose neglect is causing serious health and environment problems, particularly in developing countries.
A very important feature of the Islamic system is that, unlike the western concept of the modern welfare state providing the social safety net, it makes this the joint responsibility of the state and the individual.
While the state is bound by the elaborate system of zakat, the individuals are urged to supplement it with voluntary charity the scope of which is practically unlimited - the constraint being the means available and the desire to do good seeking Allah's pleasure. Allah has promised a corresponding reward for this supererogatory act of virtue.
It is in the Quran: "As to the men that give alms and the women that give alms, and those who lend to Allah a goodly loan it will increase manifold for them and there will also be an honourable reward" (57:19).
"Never shall you attain to righteousness unless you spend out of that which you love; and whatever you spend Allah surely knows it well" (3:93). "And they ask thee what they should spend. Say, 'What you can spare.' Thus Allah makes His commandments clear to you that you may reflect upon this world and the next" (2:220).
According to a hadith in Muslim, the Holy Prophet pointed out so many specific things to spare for charity that the companions felt that they had no right over anything they had in surplus.
Muslims are urged in the Quran to "eat ye thereof and feed the distressed, the needy" (22:29), "and feed him who is needy but contented and him who supplicates" (22:37). Muslims are expected not only to help the poor themselves, but also urge others to do so.
"He is not a believer who eats to the fill when his neighbour is hungry" (Mishkat). "A town in which a person spends a night on an empty stomach forfeits Allah's protection."
It is for the Muslims to devise a system in which compulsory levy for the poor and voluntary charity are dovetailed to form an integrated system avoiding duplication, ensuring that nothing is amiss and that there is no room to pass the buck. This presupposes understanding, harmony and trust between the government and public.
According to the Quran, "Surely all believers are brothers" (49:11). The Holy Prophet said, "On the Day of Judgment, Allah, the Exalted, will call: Where are those who loved each other to My glory? Today I shall give them shelter in the shade of My mercy.
Today there is no shade besides My shade." "By Him in Whose hand is my life, you will not enter Paradise unless you believe, and you will not truly believe unless you love one another" (Muslim).
It is unfortunate, rather tragic, that the prevailing culture in Muslim countries is not of mutual trust between the government and the public but alienation to the point of active confrontation. This is characterized by the government not hesitating to play tricks with the public and the public, in return, doing its best to cheat the government.
The government and the public in Muslim societies ignore Islamic teachings in their mutual relationship. The Holy Prophet said, "Each one of you is a shepherd and is responsible for his flock. The man who rules over the people is a shepherd and is responsible for his flock."
"Any man whom Allah has given the authority of ruling some people and he does not look after them in an honest manner, will not have even the smell of Paradise." "There is no governor who rules Muslims and dies, having played false with them, but Allah will forbid him Paradise." (Bukhari).
Wrong answer in Sri Lanka
"I have a strong belief that our nation will have peace but I am under no illusion that it will be easy," said Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe two years ago, as his government signed a ceasefire in the civil war that had ravaged the island nation for eighteen years. Now he is out of power, and the ceasefire itself is at risk.
The election that has driven his United National Party from power came three years early. It wasn't his choice; President Chandrika Kumaratunga dismissed parliament last November because she feared that Wickremesinghe was making too many concessions to the rebels.
She was within her legal rights, but her intent was to force an early election and abort the deal for a federal Sri Lanka that Wickremeshinghe was discussing with the rebels.
She has succeeded. The results of the election on April 2 didn't quite produce a majority for her Freedom Party and its new ally, the former Marxist terrorists of the People's Liberation Front (JVP - Janata Vimukthi Peramuna).
But since they can easily make an alliance with the new Buddhist party founded by extremist monks only months ago, which flatly rejects the idea of a federal Sri Lanka, they will form the next government. That means that the peace talks are off, and after a while maybe the ceasefire too.
Of course, nobody ever says they are against peace talks; President Kumaratunga says she wants peace too. She does, without a doubt, but it has to be a peace that makes few concessions to the Tamil minority - and since the Tamils already have military control over most of the territory they claim, that kind of deal is not going to happen.
Sri Lanka's Buddhist heritage should make it a gentle and civilised country, and in some ways it is. "It's not like Palestine," said Prof. P. Balasundarampillai, vice-chancellor of Jaffna University. "Tamils and Sinhalese are on friendly terms." But Sri Lankans do kill one another over politics rather a lot.
Even within the Sinhalese majority, the killing has been impressive. The JVP, now a legal political party, killed between seventy and eighty thousand of its fellow Sinhalese in its days as a Marxist revolutionary movement in the 70s and 80s.
Then came the rebellion of the Tamil minority in 1983 under the leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and another 65,000 violent deaths in a war marked by suicide bombings in the cities and big battles in the jungle.
The latter tragedy, at least, is the old story of the dual minority, and it does have echoes of Israel and Palestine. Sinhalese are the overwhelming majority in Sri Lanka (fifteen out of nineteen million), just as Jews are the overwhelming majority in Israel (five out of six million).
The Tamil minority, a mainly Hindu community that migrated from India about a thousand years ago, is only three million strong and no threat to the majority, any more than the Arabs of Israel are.
Just across the water in southern India, however, are another 80 million Tamil-speakers - or if you want to do it on religion rather than language and count all of India, another 900 million Hindus.
So just as the Arabs within Israel are treated as the advance guard of the 300 million Arabs beyond Israel/ Palestine, the Tamils of Sri Lanka are seen a dangerous fifth column by many among the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.
The paranoia is strengthened by the fact that Buddhism was once the dominant religion in India, only to be pushed out by a revived Hinduism until only Sri Lanka still had a Buddhist majority.
The Tamil people of Sri Lanka never posed a threat to the majority, but the first thing the Sinhalese Buddhist majority did after getting independence from Britain was to pass laws restricting Tamil civil rights. There was no 'Tamil problem' but that created one, as Tamils protested against their limited access to higher education and government jobs.
Gradually the situation slid downhill from there, via terrorist attacks and anti-Tamil pogroms, to full-scale civil war in 1983. Soon the Tamil Tigers controlled most of the Tamil-majority territory in the north and east, functioning as a de facto government that collects taxes, provides services and runs courts. -Copyright
What happened to Quaid's dream?
Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's daughter, Ms Dina Wadia, on her first visit to Pakistan since her father's death, recorded a somewhat intriguing observation in the visitors book at his mausoleum: "This has been very sad and wonderful for me. May his dream for Pakistan come true."
What her son, the successful Indian industrialist, Nusli Wadia, had to say made her observation sound even more poignant. He wrote in the visitors' book: "My dream to come here has been fulfilled; I will come back to see his dream come true."
Both used the future tense in the context of the Quaid's dream. Their observations had a touch of scepticism, almost as if the Quaid's dream of Pakistan had yet to materialize. Of course, both also expressed the hope that there will be a day when the Quaid's dream would actually come true.
Could it be that like the American scholar and academician, Professor Robert Laporte, writing on the occasion of Pakistan's 50th anniversary, they too felt that Pakistan after five decades "is still in the making, still striving to find a stable and effective form of government"?
Most western observers are deeply impressed by India's ancient civilization and by the mystique of the Hindu religion, but they tend to look upon Pakistan as something of an upstart state, with an identity not easy to define.
In any case, it is also only realistic to assume that an extremely short visit amid all the excitement of the resumption of cricketing ties between India and Pakistan could hardly be an occasion for a visitor to properly comprehend Pakistan's identity and ethos.
The sad fact that Ms Dina Wadia had little personal exposure to her father's hopes and aspirations and may not have been able to form a realistic perception of his vision can also not be altogether ruled out.
However, there is also the fact that Pakistan over the past 56 years has moved farther and farther away from the Quaid-i-Azam's dreams. With the feudals dominating the affairs of Pakistan and an elite class arrogating to itself the right to be the rulers, what Mr Jinnah said at the Delhi session of the All-India Muslim League in April 1943 seems to have been forgotten, even though this contained one of his earliest enunciations of the raison d'etre of Pakistan.
The Quaid in his presidential address had said: "Here I should like to give a warning to the landlords and capitalists who have flourished at our expense by a system which is so vicious that it is difficult to reason with them; the exploitation of the masses has gone into their blood.
They have forgotten the lessons of Islam. Greed and selfishness have made these people subordinate to the interests of others to fatten themselves. Do you realize that millions have been exploited and cannot get one meal a day? If that is the idea of Pakistan I would not have it..."
In the course of a talk to Muslim League workers in Calcutta in March 1946, he again expressed the same sentiments, and said: "I am an old man and God has given me enough to live comfortably at this age. Why should I run about and take so much trouble... Not for the capitalists surely... In 1936 (during the Bengal famine) I saw the abject poverty of the people.... In Pakistan, we will do all in our power to see that everybody can get a decent living..."
Unfortunately, when Pakistan came into being it had no economic programme, mainly because in the years preceding it the Quaid was too busy fighting a political battle and obviously had no time to draw up a blueprint for the future economic system of Pakistan. The situation has become only progressively worse since then.
There has also been a similar apathy towards the need to provide Pakistan with a democratic system. To this day, the prerogative to rule over the destiny of the people continues to be exercised by an exclusive elite class, comprising mainly of the landlords and capitalists whom the Quaid, years before Pakistan came into existence, had totally rejected. Landlords and capitalists are well entrenched at the helm and the situation does not seem likely to change in the foreseeable future.
Even though the intelligentsia, particularly those among them who are influenced by western ideas, tend to be critical of the "narrow religious base" on which Pakistan was founded, there is amongst them a consensus that the Quaid himself had a broad, deeply secular, and liberal outlook.
He expected that Pakistan would not develop into a parochial, chauvinistic state. He even hoped that with the achievement of Pakistan, Muslims would cease to be Muslims and Hindus would cease to be Hindus, not in the matter of their religious faith but in their role as citizens of the same state, and that "religion would have nothing to do with the business of the state." However, in Pakistan society has evolved in exactly the reverse direction.
It is not altogether improbable that even during the short time that she spent in Pakistan, Ms Dina Wadia might have noticed the conspicuous place that religion has come to occupy in the day-to-day life of the people and its dominating part in the running of the people's life and the affairs of the state.
Mr Jinnah's "pluralistic view of Pakistani society" virtually no more features in the people's thinking. General Ziaul Haq provided a constitutional basis for this change. In the words of Professor Anita M. Weiss of the Oregon State University, "the pluralistic perspective was definitely discarded in 1979 when President Mohammad Ziaul Haq's administration left no question that some interpretations of Islam were to wield unprecedented influence in the state."
Ms Dina Wadia could not but have noticed the innumerable banners and profuse wall-chalkings as evidence of this phenomenon even when she made her brief journey from the airport to the Quaid's mausoleum and that perhaps may have prompted the thought in her mind which was expressed in her observations at the Quaid's tomb.
She may also have noticed the media debate over the inclusion or deletion of some verses of the Holy Quran in or from school textbooks even for subjects like biology.
Tribal traditions too have been a strong influence in the conduct of the daily life of the people. For quite a large section of the people living under the tribal system, even abominable and criminal traditions such as karo kari have come to be sanctified.
The only redeeming factor is that quite a substantial section of the younger people in many parts of Pakistan is beginning to question all this. It has been pointed out that the question of declaration of one's religious beliefs, for instance, should have nothing to do with the issuance of national identity cards.
What is extremely deplorable and totally contrary to the Quaid's thoughts on the ethos of Pakistan are the painfully sharp ethnic and cultural differences that which one encounters almost at every step.
It has been said that ethnic crises and regional divisions have perpetually threatened the unity and security of Pakistan. The breaking away of East Pakistan in 1971 may have been an extreme phenomenon but there are deep feelings of deprivation and of being exploited in provinces such as Sindh and Balochistan.
The North-West Frontier has always had an "uneasy relationship" with the centre. In parts of the Frontier, Islamist parties have managed to virtually sideline the law of the land. The Baloch have fought regular wars with the security forces of the centre.
If Ms Wadia felt like a stranger in Pakistan as she found it, in contrast to what may have been her impressions of how her father visualized the state of Pakistan, her prayer that her father's dream may ultimately come true may have been a genuine and spontaneous reaction.
What she saw, even if she did not stay here long enough to see a great deal, could not have been anything like the Muslim homeland of her father's dreams. Even if she grew up in a broken home, she could not have been a stranger to her father's liberal, secular, progressive and broadminded view of life and society.