| 01 October 2004 | Friday | 15 Shaban 1425 |
Why limit the debates?
Can we privatize facts?
Adam was the first man, and Eve the first woman created by God. Thus, from the beginning of time, man and woman were a pair and companions for each other: "O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female..." (49:13)
It is a general belief of the western society that women are considered inferior to men in Islam. This belief is so maintained because of their ignorance of what the Quran and the Traditions state on this matter. As a matter of fact, Islam is the only system that ensures equality between the two genders.
The most authentic expression of equality in Islam is seen, when unlike other faiths, Islam blames Adam along with Eve for the first sin. They both gave in to temptation and committed a sin:
"We said: 'O Adam! dwell thou and thy wife in the garden; and eat of the bountiful things therein as (where and when) ye will, but approach not this tree, or ye run into harm and transgression.
Then did Satan make them slip from the (Garden), and get them out of the state (of felicity) in which they had been. We said: Get ye down, all (ye people), with enmity between yourselves. On earth will be your dwelling-place and your means of livelihood for a time.'." (2:35,36)
Men and women are regarded equal keeping in view their different nature and particular disposition. A woman's rights and responsibilities are equal to those of a man yet not alike. Their roles are different yet this does not imply that one is inferior to the other.
In Islam, both men and women can rise in spiritual eminence. The greatest honour bestowed on man by God is Divine Revelation. Along with men, women have also received the gift of Divine Revelation.
"Behold! The angels said: 'O Mary! Allah hath chosen three and purified the, chosen the above the women of all nations'." (3:42) "Behold! We sent to thy mother, by inspiration, the message:" (20:38) "So We sent this inspiration to the mother of Moses..." (28:7)
In Islam, both men and women will be equally rewarded for their good and righteous deeds in the present world as well as in the hereafter: "Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has faith, verily, to him will We give a new life, a life that is good and pure, and we will bestow on such their reward according to the best of their actions." (16:97)
"For Muslim men and women, for believing men and women, for devout men and women, for true men and women, for men and women who are patient and constant, for men and women who humble themselves, for men and women who give in charity, for men and women who fast (and deny themselves), for men and women who guard their chastity, and for men and women who engage much in Allah's praise for them has Allah prepared forgiveness and great reward." (33:35)
A woman being equal to man has along with food, clothing, and shelter, the right to be educated. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) declared that it is incumbent on every Muslim male and female to pursue knowledge.
It being the touchstone of civilized society, Islam allows no discrimination in its attainment. The following is a well known Tradition of the Prophet that describes the significance of education for both men and women:
"Anas reported that the Messenger of Allah said, 'Search for knowledge is compulsory upon every Muslim man and woman'." Both men and women have a right to inherit from their parents and near relatives: "From what is left by parents and those nearest related there is a share for men and a share for women, whether the property be small or large, a determinate share." (4:7)
A woman's right of inheritance is protected under the law. If the deceased wishes to deprive a female heir by giving her share to another relative, he will be prohibited to do so under Islamic law.
Her right though protected, her share is half of that of a man. This is because of the quantum of financial responsibilities that rest on a man as breadwinner of the family. Apart from one or two exceptions, a man has to provide for his family and needy relatives and has also to make charitable contributions in accordance with his wealth for the benefit of society at large.
A woman is, on the other hand, provided for and is financially secure. As a daughter, the father provides her for; as a wife the husband provides her for; and as a mother her son is responsible for her financial security. Due to this security, and absence of any financial responsibilities, a woman's share in inheritance is half of that of a man.
A woman has every right to enter contractual agreements, and participate in affairs of commerce. She has the right to earn and derive benefit from her earnings: "...To men is allotted what they earn, and to women what they earn..." (4:32)
History reveals that women were active participants in public life along with early Muslims. They were especially active in times of emergency and war, nursing the sick and wounded, preparing supplies, etc.
A woman's life, property and honour are sacred in Islam: "And those who launch a charge against chaste women, and produce not four witnesses, (to support their allegation), flog them with eighty stripes; and reject their evidence ever after: for such men are wicked transgressors..." (24:4)
The penalty imposed on her for an offence committed is equal to that of a man. Similarly, her right to compensation in case of suffering harm is equal to that of a man.
Woman are held equally liable as men regarding offences of both civil and criminal nature. An example is that of theft liable to hadd. The charge proved, be it man or woman, the following punishment is inflicted:
"As to the thief, male or female - cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of Allah, for their crime: and Allah is exalted in power." (5:38) Same is the case in inflicting punishment for adultery:
"The women and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with a hundred stripes; let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the last day: and let a party of the believers witness this punishment." (24:2)
Women are also entitled to certain privileges, which have not been granted to the opposite gender. She is exempted form performing some religious duties, like praying and keeping fast during menstruation and in times of confinement. She is under no obligation to offer Friday prayers in a congregation.
As a mother she is granted more honour: "And We have enjoined on man (to be good) to his parents: in travail upon travail did his mother bear him, and in years twain was his weaning...."
Women of western society had to fight for their rights, and due recognition was given to them after a long period of perseverance and active tussle with the opposite gender. They acquired their rights by force, unlike Muslim women who acquired their rights by Divine law.
Muslim women were not subject to the hardships their counterparts in the West had to face and overcome. Protection, education, respect, and freedom of speech made women prominent members of Muslim society at a time when women of the West were captives of ignorance and exploitation. Islam has preserved their separate identity and distinct qualities that make them equal but not identical to men.
Why limit the debates?
Almost unbeknownst to the citizens of this great republic, the US election process is being bent in opposite directions by legal and institutional forces oblivious to each other - and to the damage they are doing to the workings of American democracy.
One set of players - Congress, the courts and regulatory agencies - has opened the presidential campaign to massive and hugely expensive intervention by groups outside the two-party system.
The airwaves are filled with ads and the battleground states are crawling with workers financed by independent groups at least nominally uncontrolled by the Republican or Democratic parties or the George Bush and John Kerry campaigns.
At the same time, the presidential debates that are probably the single most important part of the contest have been negotiated privately by the two major candidates' personal representatives and are being presented by an organization representing the two major parties - and only those parties. It is not difficult to make a case for either of these arrangements. But the juxtaposition defies logic and can distort the overall campaign process.
Much has been said - here and in other commentary - about the enlarged role in this election being played by non-party groups, the so-called 527 and 501c organizations that were created as vehicles for unlimited large donations of "soft money," which the McCain-Feingold law said the two major parties could no longer accept. Millions of dollars have flowed into these new channels, and the impact of their ads and voter mobilization efforts is significant.
Some regard this as a dangerous loophole in the law and argue for restricting these outside players. But in a free society, there is a principled argument for protecting individuals' right to express their views on candidates and issues at the time the nation is choosing its leaders - rather than requiring that all spending be controlled by the office seekers or parties themselves.
When it comes to the debates, recent practice (since 1988) has given the sponsorship to the private, non profit Commission on Presidential Debates, formed by the two major parties and headed by former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic national committees.
The commission has been successful in institutionalizing the debates, which were only intermittently scheduled and too often allowed to lapse when they were in the hands of the television networks or the League of Women Voters.
For that the country can be grateful. But controversy has grown over the commission's ground rules, which tend to restrict participation to the Republican and Democratic nominees. The exclusion of Ross Perot in 1996 and of Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in 2000 was the subject of protest and litigation, but the commission stuck to its guns.
This year, once again, it is only Bush and Kerry who received the coveted invitations for 4 1/2 hours of prime-time discourse on all the TV networks. It is perfectly sensible to assert, as the commission does, that voters are most interested in seeing direct interaction between the two candidates who actually have a realistic prospect of winning the election, rather than cluttering the screen with a bunch of also-rans.
But if the law allows (and in some ways encourages) both donors and grass-roots activists to go outside the two-party system to participate in the campaign, then what is the logic of restricting the debates to those who have passed through the major-party primaries and conventions?
It would be better to recognize the special and valuable role of the major parties - as we do by subsidizing their general election campaigns with taxpayer funds and by ensuring that their nominees get to debate - but at the same time to leave the door open for outsider participation, both in debates and in independent campaign spending and activity.
The way to do this is to nudge the TV networks to carry one more presidential debate - open to all those candidates who have qualified for ballot position in a majority of states.
Scheduled early in the autumn, such a debate could provide valuable exposure this year for Nader, Green Party candidate David Cobb, Libertarian Michael Badnarik and Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka. Major-party nominees could be invited to join them if they wished.
Should any of the minor-party candidates strike a chord - as Perot did when allowed into the 1992 debate or as Jesse Ventura did in Minnesota in 1998 - the public reaction, as measured by polls, would be enough to qualify him for the later debates with the major-party nominees. It is possible to preserve the advantages of the two-party system and still have an open democracy. It ought to happen in 2008. -Dawn/ Washington Post Service
Can we privatize facts?
The point is not the venue, except to stress that it was the last place where I would have expected the "concern" to be raised. We were at a gathering of publishers, and publishers were engaged in what they love best, jockeying for power within an institution.
That was understandable, acceptable and even welcome, for any institution is worth only as much as the hunger of its members. Suddenly a member from a town in North India got up and urged everyone's attention on the census figures. We had a wise man in the chair, who used the first opportunity to interrupt and change the subject.
The implication is obvious. Population statistics, and particularly the alleged "leap" in the Muslim population of India, have entered the public discourse. There have been some tart responses to the tardy sequence of claim, correction, denial and distortion that has been inflicted on us by the census bureau. But this confusion is not, anymore, a cloak that hides facts.
It is instead a backdrop on which a single message is being advertised by certain politicians and social activists: that the population of Indian Muslims is rising at an "alarming" rate. This "alarm bell" is a "wake-up call" to Hindus to rise and meet the "challenge".
Every marketer knows that an advertisement persuades only if it fits complementary perceptions. This one finds an audience because of a long and continuous demonization of Muslim men as sex-hungry predators with four wives apiece, and Muslim women as subservient cattle hidden inside tent-veils.
Such rubbish gets sustenance, paradoxically, from the more luridly conservative Muslim clergy, who periodically hit the headlines with nonsensical claims, the most silly being the one that Islam forbids family planning.
Dr Rafiq Zakaria, whose "Indian Muslims: Where Have They Gone Wrong?" should be on every sensible reading list, was categorical and vehement when I asked him whether family planning was un Islamic.
There was absolutely no justification for such a claim in either the Holy Quran, he said, or in the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet). He pointed out that every single Muslim country, including Saudi Arabia, had signed the United Nations charter on population control. Dr Zakaria quotes Iqbal on this kind of mullah: Qaum kya hai? Qaumon ki imaamat kya hai
Isko kya jaanein yeh do rakat ke imaam! (What is a community? What is its leadership? What do they know of this who only know how to pray two raka of namaaz!)
The dialectic of alarm raises its own dictionary of questions. How do you deal with this "problem"? By competition or elimination? By encouraging Hindus to have more children or by forcible contraception of Muslims.
Those in parties like the BJP or Shiv Sena who raise such questions take care never to provide answers. It is far more convenient to leave answers to the fertility of thought or imagination. The politics of confrontation is played out in the mind, for that is the true battlefield of opinion.
Such politics is not the exclusive privilege of Hindu hard liners; all through the 20th century a section of Indian Muslim leaders continually upped the ante in their search for "Hindu" enemy. In a sense their need helped create the enemy.
At the forefront of such politics were conservative clergy, seeking to convert their influence into control of the community, and salivating politicians, who were sure this was the easiest route to votes.
Victimization, thereby, was raised to the status of a political virtue. Indian Muslims were encouraged to see themselves as constant victims of one conspiracy or the other.
Before partition, an imagined future was constructed in which the Muslim "minority" became an enslaved underclass to the Hindu "majority". The rhetoric revolved around the single dimension of numbers, as if either Hindus or Muslims were a monolithic entity shaped by a single fear or passion.
After partition, when it became obvious that much of that imagination had been, at the very least, heated, the politics of victimization-confrontation sought fresh monsters, and, of course, found them. There was never any shortage of Hindu fundamentalists willing to oblige, nor of governments and parties who fished for votes in pools of blood.
Everyone got hurt, but who got hurt the most? Such ideas could only produce the mentality of a ghetto, into which their own leaders drove Muslims. The law and the courts, arguably Indian democracy's finest estate, were demonized.
The process reached its nadir in the Shah Bano case where every major player, including the government and parliament of India, behaved with callous irresponsibility in pandering to anti-woman barbarism that sullied the reputation of a faith that has also been one of the great reformist movements in world history.
Pakistan's judges described the Shah Bano episode accurately: it was stupid. The Muslim politician-clergy elite at the apex had a vested interest in keeping the base insecure, and therefore ignorant; exploitation becomes more difficult with education and economic progress. Consciously or unconsciously they shared this objective with Hindu fundamentalists.
It may have been a coincidence, but two crises visited India simultaneously. The economic collapse in 1991, symbolized by the transfer of Indian gold reserves to London, forced economic reform.
We were fortunate to find an excellent leader in the then finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh. The social collapse was symbolized by the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992, and the vicious riots that followed.
This collapse needed drastic social reform and a doctor and determination of equal ability. It was a role fit for Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who could have - should have - done for social reform what Dr Manmohan Singh did for economic reform.
This social reform was needed as much among Hindus as Muslims; the mobs who hunt during riots are hardly the paradigm of civilization. Prime Minister Rao had credibility and cachet among Hindus, just as Mr Arjun Singh had the confidence of Muslims.
Perhaps it was a moment that called for cooperation between the two. But Mr Rao's horizon generally never crossed self-preservation, and Mr Singh lost the plot. But when leadership fails, people seek their own answers.
Indian Muslims learnt the best possible lesson from December 1992. Their trust in politicians withered, and they, at long last, took to education with the kind of missionary zeal that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan induced in the 1880s.
This is why at least one census figure has surprised those with conventional ideas about Indian Muslims. They are virtually on par with other communities in literacy and education.
Just as economic reform needed a heavy injection of privatization, social reform also needs privatization. I do not mean privatization of mere schools; and certainly not the privatization of the school syllabus. But I do offer an idea. The time has come to privatize facts.
Today the government of India is the sole owner, and therefore the sole dispenser of facts. The census is a case in point. Every ten years we are presented with statistics that are vital to our understanding of our nation, essential to policy-making, and determinants of political behaviour which in turn creates or destroys government. These statistics are delivered unto us from a bureaucratic Mount Sinai, with all the certainty of the Ten Commandments. How accurate are they? No one knows.
Experience in other matters indicates that while you can accuse a government of many things, you can never accuse it of efficiency. How many errors and prejudices are hidden in those statistics? How much laziness and indifference clogs truth? The simple answer is that we do not know.
The government will not close down its census bureau or its statistical departments, nor should it. (This is analogous, in fact, to the government's continued participation in some parts of the economy, irrespective of liberalization.) But the government's monopoly over facts has become counter-productive.
That is a necessary prelude to rescuing communities from the numbers game. We need to redefine terms that have become ritual in political discourse, the worse instances being "minority" and "majority". They certainly do not mean what they claim to mean.
The Hindu in Kerala does not vote in the same manner as the Hindu in Karnataka. Reading in a straight line from south to north, Hindus have voted totally differently in different states in the parliament elections: for Marxists in Kerala; for BJP and Deve Gowda in Karnataka; overwhelmingly for the BJP in MP, and substantially for Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP.
There may be more commonality among Muslims because of their antagonism towards the BJP, but it is absurd to treat them as a monolith. What are the facts? We will never really know until we have privatized them.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asia Age, New Delhi.