| 18 June 2004 | Friday | 29 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
Need for law to ban strikes
Iraq: how history's lessons were ignored
Islam is not simply confined to prayers, rituals or some other religious practices. It is spread over a wide spectrum of life. It would be no exaggeration to claim that the concept of Ibadat in Islam includes every act or deed that we perform according to the Quranic code and Sunnah.
We will be either rewarded or punished on the Day of Reckoning for every act that we do in our lifetime. Therefore, every good deed that is carried out for the sake of Allah in accordance with the Shariat is, in fact, an act of Ibadat.
The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) says: "The whole of earth is declared a place of worship for me." (Sahih Muslim) It gives a clear conception of Ibadat in Islam. The whole earth is declared a mosque, a sacred place where our activities are closely watched by our Creator.
Every good deed that we perform comes under the heading of Ibadat. At one time the Prophet remarked that the one who removes the sadness of his brother and entertains him with a pleasant smile is the noblest of men.
He also says that person who earns his livelihood by lawful means to feed his children is a greater abid (worshipper) than his brother who is simply absorbed in ritual worship.
Before the advent of Islam all the worship and prayers were meant to please God. Offerings were made at the gods' altars to please them. Islam has revolutionized the very concept of Ibadat.
In Islam the objective of Ibadat is to reform and build up one is character. In Islam, too, the purpose of Ibadat is to seek the pleasure of Allah. But it is sought through following and obeying His commands and injunctions. It aims at the moral and spiritual development of the believer. Ibadat has direct bearing and impact on one's character and behaviour.
Our worship and prayers must change our thinking and behaviour. If no change and improvement takes place, it means that acts of Ibadat have lost all their effectiveness for us. We are no more receptive to them.
It doesn't mean that Ibadat have lost their inherent effectiveness. It is just like the fire that doesn't burn the wet wood. But you can't say that the fire has lost its capability. The fire does burn but the wood has lost its receptivity. Just take the example of salah.
The Quran says: "O believers! seek help in patience and salah." (2:153) Two things are necessary in order to build strength to bear the heavy responsibility of living life in accord with the orders of Allah: developing patience, perseverance and steadfastness from within; and invoking our minds, hearts and souls to reinforce and strengthen patience with the physical act of salah. At another place in the Quran Allah says: "Indeed salah forbids all indecent deeds and evil." (45:29)
If a person offers his five prescribed prayers regularly but along with it he does not stop from doing wrong things, it clearly indicates that his salah has no more moral and spiritual impact on his behaviour and conduct.
All our worship and prayers do not add in the least to his kingdom. God does not depend upon his creatures to be praised. He is free from all want and praise. Whatever a man does, he does it for his own benefit. Allah is 'al-Ghani' and 'al-Hameed.' He says: "He who strives does so for himself. Verily God is independent of the creatures of the world." (29:5).
We are always after the quantity and are least concerned with the quality whereas God Almighty demands from us the quality. Even the smallest act that is done with Ikhlas (sincerity of purpose) and in accord with Shariah is highly valued and weighs heavier in the sight of Allah than the greatest act of Ibadat that is performed without Ikhlas/ we miss the quality and essence of Ibadat.
It is the quality and essence of Ibadat that changes the thought and behaviour of a person who enters the fold of Islam. It, in fact, builds up a strong character in him. A perceptible change takes place in his attitude and behaviour.
He undergoes a continuous process of moral and spiritual improvement. This world, according to Islam is a place of trial for us. We have been given a fixed period of life during which we are being judged.
All our activities are closely watched by our Creater who will reward or punish us for our good or bad deeds on the Day of Reckoning. And during this period of life whatever God Almighty has bestowed upon us in the form of offspring, wealth, property and whatever sufferings, pains, miseries and tribulations we undergo are, in fact, all trials and tests.
If in this world, Allah has blessed some people with affluence and some with little riches or has deprived others altogether, this does not mean that He has done it on merit. But He has rather planned it purposely in order to try and test humankind.
This distribution of material goods as well as power opportunities etc. is in accord with the Divine plan and purpose. But ignorant people cannot understand this. The Quran has explicitly mentioned it in Surah al-An'am. "It is He who made you trustees on the earth and exalted some in rank over others in order to try you by what He has given you." (6:165).
In case of blessings and favours that are lavished upon us, we are being evaluated by Allah to see how much we are grateful to Him and in case of sufferings and loss of life and property we are being tested that how much we show patience and perseverance. According to an Hadith: "Iman (Faith) is made up of two halves: one half is sabr another half is shukr."
This tradition sums up Iman in a few words. In other words Islam can be easily defined and explained in terms of 'sabr' and 'shukr.' Hazrat Ali says that Iman is like a bird that has two wings one is that of sabr and the other is that of shukr.
Man's gratitude to Allah is not a thing that benefits Allah, for Allah is high above all needs. It does not add to God's glory and honour in the least. If a man adopts an attitude and behaviour of thankfulness and gratitude, it is for his own benefit. It, in fact, improves his own soul and gives him a higher rank in the life to come.
We express our gratitude to Allah for his favours and bounties. Shukr is the very basis of faith (iman), religion (din) and obedience to Allah. WE thank Allah for the guidance He sent us through His messengers and prophets. To give thanks is to show by our conduct and behaviour that we appreciate the gifts of Allah and use them in His service.
The Quranic meaning of having sabr includes having patience, forbearance and endurance. It is to exercise self-control and restraint in all circumstances. It is to be constant and steadfast.
It denotes will power, firm resolve and control over one's animal desires. A believer can overcome the internal temptations and all of the external obstacles he/she faces on a daily basis.
It is specially important for a believer to have this steadfastness, this endurance in difficult times, for it is in these times that one's faith is truly tested.
The objective of all Ibadat is to inculcate in the believer the qualities of sabr and shukr. Islam has changed and revolutionized the very concept of Ibadat that has been accepted and practised for centuries.
Before Islam the concept and objectives of Ibadat were confined and limited to mere worship and to please Got. It was not concerned with character-building. Moral and spiritual development of the individual were not among his objectives.
In Islam, the Ibadat has direct bearing on one's mind and character. If it does not bring about any substantial change in our attitude, behaviour and conduct, it is quite clear that it has lost all its effectiveness for us. When Allah has explicitly declared in his Book that the Ibadat has a deep impact on the mind and conduct of a believer, it becomes all the more necessary to review our modes of Ibadat.
Need for law to ban strikes
According to a study carried out by the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a day's strike in one city alone - Karachi - costs the nation a loss of Rs 1.18 billion.
The government's losses in terms of taxes are Rs 154 million. If we calculate the losses accruing from the countless "wheel jam" strikes we have had since the mid-eighties, the losses should reach astronomical proportions.
These losses have stemmed not from natural calamities - over which man has no control - or from wars, over which men do have the capacity to exercise some kind of control; these staggering losses in revenue and production stem from our decision to treat as of little consequence such a destructive weapon as a countrywide strike.
Few people know that these strikes not only bring the nation to a halt, they create intense psychological disorder among individuals and groups. As observed for nearly two decades, the Pakistani "wheel jam" strikes have certain features of their own:
• Those who give the strike call try to enforce it by force or threat of force. This emotional manipulation denies the individual his democratic right to observe or ignore the strike, and constitutes a violation of human rights - like a citizen's right to ply his trade, attend school, go on a pleasure drive, or hold a wedding.
• The use of force ranges from asking shopkeepers not to open shops to burning shops and other business houses, interfering with public and private transport, pelting vehicles with stones and sometimes burning them.
• As a prelude to the strike, the burning of buses, cars, gas stations and shops begins the evening before. These histrionics take people by surprise, and even those sympathetic to a given strike suffer.
• The strikes often give an impression as if those giving a call for them see little difference between the state and the government and between a sovereign state and a country under foreign occupation, for the strikes have the same venom as a strike called against a colonial power by a people fighting for freedom.
• Organizers of the strikes often fail to control their workers, or mobs, which go on the rampage, leaderless. Their fury, then, turns them into psychopaths. They cease to behave normally.
Often, these mobs have interfered with train movements and stopped or burnt down ambulances. (In one strike, the Chenab Express was burnt down at a Karachi Circular Railway station; once, a hospital opposite the Quaid-i-Azam's mazar was attacked and ransacked.)
• The story of human misery arising from a lack of empathy is familiar - heart patients and women in labour are unable to reach hospitals; passengers are stranded at airports and railway stations; intending passengers are unable to move out. The worst sufferers are daily wage earners.
Repeated strikes of the kind taking place in Pakistan generally precede revolutions. This is ironic, because in Pakistan there is no revolutionary party. In fact, parties which have specialized in "wheel jam" strikes marked by obsessive and compulsive acts of arson and destruction are wedded to the socio-economic status quo and have an extremely parochial religious and political philosophy.
The economic effects of a strike have been mentioned earlier in terms of production and state revenue losses. The statistics were compiled in the eighties. Today, those figures must at least be doubled.
But the most adverse impact on the economy is in the realm of investment. Pakistani investors, much less foreign ones, have no reason to invest in a country where production - if not factories themselves - are hostage to mob action.
The consequences of a lack of investment in meaningful terms are obvious: the economy grows far below its potential; unemployment rises, exports remain stagnant, brain drain increases, and poverty rises. This gives rise to regional and provincial rivalries and leads to political tensions.
An equally pernicious effect concerns Pakistan's image abroad. Images seen by millions over CNN and BBC have served to present Pakistan and Pakistanis in the mould of a very unflattering stereotype - crowds in shalwar and qameez throwing stones and burning buses.
This has led some inimical to the country to remark that Pakistanis are not a nation but a mob. This image is one of the factors that have destroyed tourism.
The effects of these strikes go beyond the realm of economy, for they have given to the people of Pakistan a mob mentality to which nothing is sacred - public or private property, hospitals and ambulances.
Now every Pakistani crowd is never far from turning into a furious mob on the slightest pretext. Students waiting for mark sheets, passengers jostling and pushing to secure a seat on the train on the eve of Eid, cricket fans denied entry into a stadium, people hit by a power failure and waiting for repair gangs to arrive - every Pakistani crowd is edging to go berserk.
However, none can beat a Pakistani crowd if there is a religious tinge to a tragedy. Crowds attending funerals, or those legitimately angered by a bomb blast in a place of worship or the murder of some religious divine take leave of their senses and suffer from temporary insanity.
What happened in Karachi in May after the murder of Mufti Shamzai or the blast at Imambargah Ali Raza were not isolated instances; even worst cases of mob fury occurred when Maulana Yusuf Ludhianvi and Maulana Habibullah Mukhtar were assassinated in 2000 and 1998, respectively.
Angry crowds held a city of over 10 million hostage, and there were widespread acts of arson and destruction of property when the institution they belonged to gave a call for "wheel jam" strikes.
Regrettably, the leaders of public opinion - ulema, especially - have done nothing to discourage this trend that is eating into the vitals of this nation, or to enlighten the people on the harm this mob mentality is doing to Pakistan.
Before we discuss how to put an end to this phenomenon and the subsequent conditioning of the national psyche, let us be clear that we are not talking about trade union strikes.
The trade unions reserve the right to go on strike according to the laws of the land, for this right is something that cannot be taken away from them; what we are discussing here are "wheel jam" strikes called by parties and groups for political and "religious" reasons.
First, there is a need for all political parties to renounce the "wheel jam" strike as a political weapon for pressuring the government on a given issue. As experience shows, governments are not at all pressured by these strikes; it is the economy which suffers and it is the people who are tormented.
Second, the government must move a law in the National Assembly to ban "wheel jam" strikes. As observed and enforced in Pakistan, these strikes are incompatible with the norms of democracy and civilized conduct. They are an unusual phenomenon not witnessed in normal times.
They may be resorted to by movements fighting for their country's liberation. But they are a stupefying phenomenon in an independent country and reflect adversely on the quality of the Pakistani leadership.
Let there be open debate in the print and electronic media, and let intellectuals and leaders of public opinion discuss it freely. There is no doubt some people will defend these strikes, pointing to the absence of democratic traditions in Pakistan and the harm done to the very concept of the rule of law by military interventions.
But believer in this line of argument must prove that these strikes contribute to a consolidation of democracy and lead to the creation of a responsible civil society.
The National Assembly must discuss the law threadbare and ban such strikes because they have done incalculable harm to Pakistan's economy and to the psyche of the Pakistani people.
Iraq: how history's lessons were ignored
They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population.
A planned hand-over of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...
On the eve of the "hand-over" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005. Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq. That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.
Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople.
He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lt-Gen Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.
That same 11in by 18in poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp - "foxed", as booksellers say - which may have been Private Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917.
It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.In a letter to me, she called this "his precious document", and I can see why.
It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. It reads now like a funeral dirge.
"Proclamation... Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators... Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers... and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage.
"Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile... But you, people of Baghdad... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions.
"It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realized once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals... It is the hope and desire of the British people... that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth... Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain... so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realizing the aspirations of your Race.
(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq." Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army - which included Iraqi soldiers - in Mesopotamia.
He spoke "often and admirably," his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.
But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: "My father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his 'nephew'.
I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years." In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign. The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra.
More than 80 years later, Shameem Bhatia, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan, would send me an amused letter, along with a series of 12 very old postcards, which were printed by The Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA.
One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms; another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him; others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river, and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, one of its buildings shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender.
The ruins then looked, of course, identical to the Iraqi ruins of today. There are only so many ways in which a shell can smash through a home. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by "local [Arab] notables" that "we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition".
But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara.
His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters, ending in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle.
The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of United Nations sanctions that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when spare parts for the pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq.
Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague Patrick Cockburn found "tombstones... still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed... A quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage."
Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived in 1917. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets "gaped emptily. The shops were mostly closed... In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia, coffins and half-mouldering skeletons were floating.
On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town [300 people were dying of it every day] the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves... There was no longer any life in the town."
The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. There was, of course, no "cordial" reception of British troops in Baghdad. Indeed, Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army but who "always entertained friendly ideas towards the English" were jailed - not in Abu Ghraib, but in India - and found that while in prison there they were "insulted and humiliated in every way".
These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand Iraq over to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz - to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of "independence" for the Arab world if he fought alongside the Allies against the Turks - on the grounds that "some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia".
British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia (the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that) and that "clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end" - which was not how Lt-Gen Maude expressed Britain's ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917.
Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that "taking Mesopotamia...means spending millions in irrigation and development". Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in 2003.
Those who want to wallow in even more ghastly historical parallels should turn to the magnificent research of the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah, whose volume on the British occupation was published in Beirut long before Saddam's regime took over Iraq, at a time when Iraqi as well as British archives of the period were still available.
Attiyah's Iraq, 1902-1921: A Socio-Political Study, written 30 years before the Anglo-American invasion, should be read by all western "statesmen" planning to occupy Arab countries. - (c) The Independent
To be concluded.