No terrorism in Islam

TODAY the greatest problem which Islam is facing is its presumed linkage with terrorism. It is very disturbing to note that an impression is there among western nations and countries that Islam is a militant religion and it was spread by sword and still its religious theory is based on fundamentalism and on so-called terrorism.

Islam is misrepresented by western media in this regard. It is very ironical that western pundits linked the most peaceful religion of the world with terrorism and violence. They always projected Muslims as aggressors, tyrants and despots who trampled the human rights under their feet.

As far as Islam is concerned, it’s a religion which promotes peace and condemns terrorism. It is a tolerant religion and there is no room for terrorism and violence. Islam is a religion that has held terrorism as inadmissible from the outset. Islam has been an upholder of peace, not terrorism, from day one. Islam desires peace to prevail in the world. The Quran calls the ways of Islam as the paths of Peace (5:16).

It is mere ignorance of Islamic teachings that leads the West to promote propaganda against Islam and against its stand on peace. Islam has always projected universal peace for humanity, peace which is to be observed and respected in all circumstances, irrespective of whether a person lives in or outside the territory of the Islamic state and whether he is at peace or war with the state. Human blood is sacred and may not be spilled without justification; it is not permissible to oppress women, children, old people, the sick or the wounded; a woman’s honour and chastity must be respected in all circumstances, the naked clothes, the wounded or diseased treated medically, and the hungry must be fed.

Islam is a religion which teaches non-violence. According to the Qur’an, God does not love ‘fasad’ and violence. What is meant here by ‘fasad’ is clearly expressed in Quran. Basically, fasad is that action which results in disruption of the social system, causing huge losses in terms of lives and property. We can say with certainty that God abhors violent activity being indulged in human society, as a result of which people have to pay the price with their possessions and lives. This is supported by other statements in the Qur’an. For instance, we are told in the Qur’an that peace is one of God’s names (59:23).

At no place Islam promotes the killing of the innocent and allow the destruction of public and private property. At no point Islam preaches to disturb the social order of the society by promoting violence and terrorism. In fact contrary to this, Islam is a religion of peace and protection of life, property and social order is one of the rights of individual, Islam wants to establish at all costs. To start with let’s take a look on Islamic teachings regarding right to life. The right to life in Islam is so much protected and emphasises that no one has the right to violate any one’s right to life in this regard. The Holy Quran says, “Do not kill a soul, which Allah had made sacred except through the due process of law.” (6:151).

In another verse Allah Says, “Nor take life which Allah had made sacred except for just cause.” (17:33). The Holy Quran says, “If anyone slew a person unless it is for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as he had slewed the whole humanity.”(5:32)

Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) is reported to have said, “One who kills a man under covenant (a non-Muslim citizen of an Islamic state) will not even smell the fragrance of paradise.” (Sahi Bukhari)

Even in a state of war, Muslims are not allowed to kill the opponent in a barbaric manner. Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) said on ghazwa that “if you want to kill, kill by a fair way.” Islam not only secures the life of its people but also guarantees the protection of their property. Such a guarantee of protection of life is laid on the lawful property gained through reliable sources. Prophet Mohammad in his farewell address, said, “Your lives and property are forbidden to one another and to you until you meet your Lord on the Day of Judgment.”(Sahi Muslim).

During the caliphate of Hazrat Umar “a Syrian cultivator complained that the army had trampled down his crops, and the caliph at once ordered for the payment of the ten thousand dirhams to him as compensation out of the Baitul Mal.”

The Holy Quran places great emphasis on just dealings so that every one gets his due rights related to property and honour. It says: “O ye who believe stand out firmly for Allah as witness, to fair dealing and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve, to do wrong and depart from Justice. Be just, that is next to piety, and fear Allah. “For Allah is well acquainted with all that you do.” (5:8)

Islam promotes social harmony and justice. Violent and terrorist activities breed hatred in society, while non-violent activities elicit love. Terrorism is the way of destruction while peace is the way of construction. In an atmosphere of violence, it is enmity which flourishes, while in an atmosphere of peace, it is friendship which flourishes. The method of violence gives way to negative values while the method of non-violence is marked by positive values. According to the teachings of Islam human beings are to be respected, despite their differences.

Even where antagonism is displayed, we have to adopt the way of avoiding conflict and continue to show peaceful behaviour. The Quran and other divine scriptures testify that peace is the core message of Islam. Let us all strive then to establish peace in the world, for that is the bedrock on which all human progress rests. In order to preserve the peace, established by nature, from disruption, importance should be given to the injunctions which have been laid down by the Quran and Sunnah.

Peru’s bad boy

Ollanta Humala is plotting “a coup d’etat with a democratic face,” warned the president of Peru’s Congress, Marcial Ayaipoma.

“Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections,” declared Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s most famous writer and a former presidential candidate. “[Humala] is going to govern with the military, close Congress, have a confrontation with Washington, permit free cultivation of coca, and he won’t sign the free trade pact. He’ll persecute the press....It’ll be a dictatorship, there’s no doubt about it,” predicted former Foreign Minister Fernando Rospigliosi.

How fortunate, then, that Ollanta Humala is not going to win the run-off vote for the Peruvian presidency on June 4. Humala came in ahead of everybody else in the first round of voting in April, but the most recent large opinion poll, conducted on 24-26 May by Apoyo, showed former president Alan Garcia leading Humala by 55 per cent of decided voters to 45 per cent. So that’s all right, then. Only....

Only the voters may be lying to the opinion pollsters. When Apoyo let the people it interviewed fill in their voting preferences on a secret ballot, the numbers changed, and Garcia led Humala by only 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Then there’s the one-fifth of all voters who say they’re “undecided”: are they all truly undecided, or are a lot of them just embarrassed to say that they’re going to vote for Humala? This race is not over yet.

But why would anybody in their right mind vote for Ollanta Humala? He is a 42-year-old ex-army officer, suspected of human rights abuses when he commanded counter-insurgency forces in the highlands in the 1990s, whose only claim to fame is that he and his brother led a failed military coup in 2000. At least that coup attempt was against former president Alberto Fujimori, not a man noted for his love of democracy, but Humala’s younger brother Antauro is now in jail for having led a bloody uprising against the democratically elected government of President Alejandro Toledo last year.

The whole Humala family is noted mainly for its extremism. Although the family is both white and very well off, Humala’s father Isaac founded an ultra-nationalist, authoritarian movement called “etnocacerismo” that proclaimed the ethnic superiority of Peru’s Indian and mixed-race majority over the white descendants of Spanish immigrants who still dominate both business and politics.

Ollanta Humala’s pitch is basically the same, appealing to the economic and ethnic resentments of Peru’s mostly Indian and mixed-race poor.

Peru’s economy has grown at a strong 4.5 per cent during the past five years under President Toledo’s administration, and last year it reached 7 per cent. So why is Toledo the least popular leader in the Americas, with less than 10 per cent popular support, and why is an untried, unstable, eccentric dark horse like Ollanta Humala within a few percentage points of winning the Peruvian presidency?

Because “trickle-down” doesn’t work in Peru: all that economic growth raises the living standards of the rich and middle-class minority, and almost none of it gets to the half of the population who live on less than $1.25 a day.—Copyright

Human face of privatisation

TIME and again, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises has triggered criticism. The latest disinvestment of 75 per cent of public shares in the Pakistan Steel Mills has led to a barrage of complaints relating to the lack of transparency and the indecent haste with which the transaction was conducted. The Supreme Court has been approached on the matter.

This article takes up a more fundamental aspect of privatisation — the issue of social policy and how it contributes to the rising crescendo of complaints whenever a public enterprise is privatised.

Although it was not originally intended to be so, the privatisation process in Pakistan has been reduced to an accounting exercise in which assets are sold to pay off the huge debts incurred through various acts of omission and commission in our style of governance.

But that is too narrow an outlook with which to approach such a fundamentally important issue. Enough empirical data has now emerged to show that even such a narrow objective is not being achieved as debts and deficits keep mounting.

Despite selling off over 150 state-owned enterprises and collecting about Rs. 400 billion (over 75 per cent of these funds were raised during the last four years), the country’s external debt that stood at $37.8 billion by end June 2001 has now gone up to over $39 billion.

From an accounting perspective, this is happening because we are not working towards balancing the two sides of the money equation. While it is easy to raise funds by selling off assets, it has been difficult for the government to control its extravagant and unproductive expenditure. Thus while we sell our assets to raise foreign currency resources to pay off national debts and deficits, we also incur new ones — in the areas of trade, current accounts and budget — as a result of poor economic management.

Neither the income-generating capacity of our economy nor our manner of expenditure control is helping to balance the books. If the winds of change start blowing across the world, we could soon find ourselves up the creek. The rate at which we are going, we would soon have sold off most of our remaining state-owned assets, but still be carrying a huge debt and deficit burden. How do we then intend to finance our deficits and service the debts? Other things apart, where would the Pakistani rupee be in such a situation?

This should be extremely worrying for the nation, despite the rosy picture painted by government representatives. But privatisation is more than an exercise in accounting. Reducing it to an accounting exercise aggravates the problem. Some of the complaints about the operational aspects of privatisation appearing frequently in the national press arise from the inherent flaws in our ‘auction-house’ style of sale of assets.

Privatisation, despite the deceptive term, is every inch a public issue. The most important thing about privatisation from the public perspective is the ownership issue along with its psychological and political aspects. Reducing privatisation to an accounting exercise effectively excludes from consideration related economic, political and psychological aspects that constitute important public concerns. It should be no surprise then to hear public suspicions and resentment about the conduct of various transactions.

Former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, is acknowledged the world over as privatisation’s successful initiator. She used privatisation not only to revive the sluggish British economy, but also to create widespread ownership of corporate assets by the people through what she called ‘popular capitalism’. In the bargain, she injected efficiency into newly privatised enterprises and also got her privatisation programme accepted by a large body of the British public.

Privatisation through ‘popular capitalism’ in Pakistan was originally intended to address these psychological aspects of public ownership by selling 25 per cent of the stock of privatising companies to the people at ‘discounted and non-commercial rates’. So that the benefits of this approach reached all citizens the sale was to be made through post office branches available in every nook and corner of the country, besides the banks. The 26 per cent shares along with its management were to be sold to a ‘strategic’ investor, while the remaining 49 per cent government shares were to be sold off over time depending upon market conditions.

It would seem that in the privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills, the government has severely curtailed its own potential for future benefits and also foreclosed the citizens’ prospects for benefiting from any post-privatisation improvements.

The current ‘ auction-house’ practice with token sales of stock to people at commercial rates and through restricted banks is a far cry — quantitatively and qualitatively — from the social policy objectives to be achieved through ‘popular capitalism’.

There are also strong economic arguments in support of the ‘popular capitalism’ approach over the ‘auction-house’ approach to privatisation. Several studies of corporate performance all over the world show that the widespread stock ownership of enterprise contributes positively to improved efficiency of operations. One of the reasons for higher efficiency and the aggressive pursuit of opportunities by American companies, as compared to Canadian, European and Japanese companies, lies in the wider dispersal of stock ownership of American companies. There is no economic merit in replacing one kind of monopoly with another through privatisation.

Therefore, it is important to ask what the purposes of privatisation are and what policy objectives should guide this exercise. Should social policy objectives also be reached through privatisation or should the latter be restricted to an accounting exercise?

Should all or some activities falling in the category of manufacturing, infrastructure, transportation, water supply, health, education, municipal functions, dispute settlement, security services, etc., currently performed by the government, be privatised? What about profitable and non-profitable, strategic and non-strategic enterprises? What criteria should determine the eligibility of a public enterprise for privatisation and for the ‘strategic’ investor to make a bid?

Again, should privatisation serve to widen the base of corporate ownership among the people? Finally, should the proceeds of privatisation go towards helping the poor segments of society through improved education and skill development, besides being applied to servicing debts, financing trade deficits and buying bullet-proof cars?

Our answers to these fundamental questions of privatisation depends on our view of the role and responsibilities of the state in the provision of social and economic services to the people. It is here that a review is called for. Not against privatisation per se, but in laying a clear framework of multiple objectives that must be served by it. The performance of the programme must be independently evaluated according to this criterion.

This is important for an additional reason as well. The few remaining state-owned enterprises now comprise the energy assets of the country. With an energy crunch looming on the horizon, Pakistan will need to have important instruments at its disposal in this strategic region to enhance its energy security.

We often talk about the need for globalisation to acquire a human face. Let our privatisation also have a human face within the country. That is why it is important to pause and review the entire philosophy of privatisation in Pakistan. Future privatisation efforts must be geared towards this revised mandate.

The writer is a former federal secretary.

Email: smshah@alum.mit.edu