| 14 November 2004 | Sunday | 01 Shawwal 1425 |
Reviving the spirit of 1974
Nightmare in Fallujah
This auspicious day of Eidul Fitr, coming after the sacred month of Ramazan, is mainly greeted as a day of festival while its significant message in terms of individual and collective conduct is not fully realized.
Observance of prayers by large congregations and payment of 'fitra' - a fixed amount - in charity are obligatory. After these essential religious requirements are fulfilled, the festive colour and character of the day finds expression in various ways.
Often, in the rejoicing, the underlaying spirit of the occasion is overlooked. Feasting within reasonable limits after a month of fasting is understandable. But an extravagant display of merry-making with so much misery around us should prick our conscience. It exposes the fact that the hold of discipline during a few weeks of fasting was tenuous and ephemeral, and easily gives way to intemperance and excess.
The month of Ramazan has a particular relevance to the Book of Allah, the Quran. It was during one of the most blessed nights of Ramazan, the Night of Power (or Honour), that this "Guide for the entire humanity, the embodiment of clear Signs and Arguments for Guidance and the Criterion of judgment between right and wrong" was provided to mankind.
Fasting should inculcate a deep sense of self-accountability, restraint, patience, fellow feeling and social responsibility. It is instrumental in effecting changes in the behavioural pattern of the faithful.
As the month ends everyone of us must look into ourselves and scrutinize the quantum of change and improvement we have absorbed. The exchange of Eid greetings on this day gives expression to the need for unity and higher purposes to weld our scattered fraternity into a single community. But unless its common aspirations are better appreciated and articulated we cannot qualify as an Ummah unless the whole body feels the pinch and pain when one limb aches.
Unfortunately, despite individual assertions and institutional arrangements as well as inter-Islamic platforms such as the OIC, an adequate response to the challenges facing the Muslim world is found wanting.
This is particularly so in the context of Palestine, the US-led occupation of Iraq, the persecution of the Iraqis, the world-wide war on terrorism and a campaign to malign the Muslims and Islam on that score.
Muslim countries have yet to fashion a collective response to these challenges. Such a response must include a just settlement of the Palestine problem, an early end to occupation of Iraq, resolving the causes of terrorism and a dialogue between the Islamic fraternity and the West on terrorism. Unless this is done, Muslim countries will remain dangerously exposed to all sorts of maligning the world over.
Reviving the spirit of 1974
For many the picture of Yasser Arafat at the 1974 Islamic summit in Lahore published in our international section yesterday would have revived memories of that historic event that had appeared to mark the stirrings of a political renaissance in the Muslim world.
The objective was never achieved; neither economic nor political cooperation among Muslim countries has materialized in any significant or substantial sense. The hope of a progressive new thrust, as so eloquently outlined then by the late president of Algeria, Houari Boumedienne - striking in his trademark cape - has remained unfulfilled.
Boumedienne had said: "Religious links alone, whether Islamic or Christian, do not prove strong enough under the blows dealt by poverty and ignorance." The passage of the years has only underlined the truth of Boumedienne's message.
Most of us live in a cocoon of nostalgia for a vanished glory and our attitude reflects what Z. A. Bhutto, the host of the 1974 summit, had described as "incomprehension of the movements of history".
Individual countries have made great progress in their own way, but the vision of the Islamic world as part of a vigorous non-aligned Third World struggling for a just dispensation free from manipulation by the exploitative industrialized nations remains blurred.
The OIC has turned out to be an effete organization, lacking both will and imagination to face the challenges of today. Its inability to take a collective stand on just one issue, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, bears testimony to its ineffectiveness, an issue brought sharply into relief again by the death of Yasser Arafat.
What a momentous occasion the February 1974 summit was. It had come in the wake of the embargo imposed by the oil-producing countries against the West and the invocation of the oil weapon by the Arab states for a resolution of the Palestine question.
It had also come in the wake of the traumatic division of Pakistan and become the occasion for a reconciliation between the erstwhile two parts, with Shaikh Mujibur Rahman flying into Lahore and being embraced by Mr Bhutto, watched by thousands with tears in their eyes.
There were also King Feisal and Hafez Al Assad and Qadhafi and a youthful and dynamic looking Arafat. There was a sense of movement and liberation in the air. The frontiers of obscurantism and fanaticism appeared to have been pushed back for a while. They are advancing again. Where has that old fervour gone? - or in the words of the incomparable Faiz:
Where have the travellers who had kept company during the night's journey disappeared, O Faiz?
Where did we leave the morning breeze behind, where did the morning stray?
Nightmare in Fallujah
Reports emanating from the besieged Iraqi city give harrowing details of the carnage the American-led attack has wrought on the city's remaining 50,000 residents trapped inside the war zone.
A week into the battle, the streets of Fallujah are said to be littered with corpses, among them women and children, and the stench unbearable. Aid workers and rights groups have said that supplies of water, electricity and fuel have been cut off, while food is becoming scarcer.
Requests for getting emergency relief supplies into the city, providing succour to the wounded civilians, and for removing bodies had not been accepted by the Americans and the Iraqi government till yesterday.
Some 7,000 families seeking refuge in emergency camps set up on the outskirts of the city by volunteer groups are not faring any better. This is not a scene from some far-off desert outpost in Africa where factional fighting and bad governance can create human misery of this proportion but from the very heartland of Iraq under occupation.
The occupation forces and the Iraqi government had ample time to plan the military action now under way in Fallujah. While they took all necessary measures to keep tabs on their own military casualties, not enough was done to evacuate the civilian population before the assault on Fallujah began.
The city was put under curfew several days in advance of the military action, which leaves no reasonable excuse for the authorities' failure to evacuate the civilian population ahead of the attack.
An estimated 100,000-plus civilians have been killed in Iraq since the occupation began - which is a measure of neglect and disregard for human life on the part of those who masterminded and have been executing this unwarranted and illegal war. Calling it a war for the liberation of the people of Iraq has been a bad joke from the word go.