Learning in the plural

WENT searching for Karachi’s soul the other day but found it was on sick leave. So I abandoned the quest, made a beeline for the bland and shortly fetched up in Zamzama. Making quick work of some pending business, I had time on my hands and a gasper or two with which to while it away.

By and by the local fauna hove into view. Particularly arresting was this man behind the wheel of a huge SUV, fingering one end of his moustache, then the other in an inbred sort of way and occasionally jerking his chin upward to inspect the results in the rear-view mirror. He looked well pleased with life, possibly on account of his facial hair but it probably went deeper than that.

Watching a grown man preen himself in public is diverting only up to a point. Fortunately his vehicle’s number plate was equally fascinating. Fond no doubt of the minimalist touch, he seemed to think that the number 140 in small black lettering on a simple white background ought to suffice.

And I’m sure it did. If people with cars like mine tried something like that they would be pulled over at every second traffic light. But this man drove not so much a car but a tank and had a pointy moustache to boot. Can’t go wrong with that combination. May not be pretty but it works.

Other diversions lay in wait. Presently the wandering gaze fell on the wonderfully incongruous sight of hijabi women in jeans and T-shirts that, to borrow shamelessly from B. Wooster, rather accentuated than hid the female form.

Kindly explain this one to me. What’s wrong with this picture? Sure everyone has the right to dress any way they want so long as it’s easy on the eye. But the hijab and full-bore sensuality — together, in one convenient package? One or the other I would have thought.

Particularly priceless were those decked out in knee-length skirts rounding off the mandatory hijab and figure-hugging shirt, looking more like milkmaids from 19th-century Holland than modern-day soldierettes of the true faith.

Must be the fashion or it could be that some women have particularly provocative heads that must be kept under wraps at all times. Who knows. Some things are never fully explained.

Business at the bank beckoned and I motored off accordingly. There I found to my dismay that my balance did not reflect my true worth, such as it is, and cornered a customer service ‘executive’ to enquire after a transfer which should have been credited to my account.

Was it a hexagon, he asked? No, I don’t think my employers would be paying me in geometric shapes, I replied, beaming freely to indicate levity. It fell flat like most of my jokes and I hurriedly took my leave, averting my gaze from his polyester tie.

What is this obsession with jargon, the crutch of the mediocre and intellectually feeble for whom the sumptuousness of discourse must be reduced to bite-size morsels? These androids actually think they sound impressive, more informed, when they utter bilge like ‘evidence-based practices’ (are they any other kind?). Or ‘thinking outside the box’ which, as Robert Fisk pointed out recently, is surely nothing more profound than being imaginative or innovative.

What really gets my goat is ‘learnings’, as in “my learnings from this workshop”. I suppose if you learn something and then happen to learn some more, in the plural so to speak, then it stands to reason to tack on an ‘s’ at the end of it. Just like how the input of more than one person becomes ‘inputs’ and a frenzy of conjecture is presented as ‘speculations’.

Why not, anything goes in this lax age. But where I draw the line, and quite firmly at that, is ‘equipments’.

Enough said, for now.
imalik@dawn.com

COMMENT: Lal Masjid: civil society’s baffling quiet

THERE is one baffling and disappointing aspect of the Lal Masjid affair — civil society is quiet, notwithstanding some murmur here and there. Preoccupied with the CJ affair and the Karachi killings, the academia, lawyers, intellectuals, teachers’ unions, NGOs and the HR bodies seem indifferent to the long-term consequences of whatever is going on inside the mosque and its environs.

The Lal Masjid clerics are obviously an unbalanced lot who seem to confirm V.S. Naipaul’s theory that converts — especially Iranians, South Asians and the Malay stock — suffer from neurosis. To them, says Naipaul, nothing is sacred “except the sands of Arabia”. As we can clearly see, to the Lal Masjid warriors, even the mosque is not sacred because it stands on a non-Arabian soil. The threat to carry out suicide attacks in which innocent human beings will be atomised seems to certify the correctness of Naipaul’s theory that to converts nothing is sacred.

If not to China’s Falun Gong gang, then Lal Masjid brothers can be safely likened to David Koresh, the crackpot ‘saviour’ who shut himself up in his compound in Waco, Texas. After a 51-day stand-off, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a crackdown, tanks opened holes in the walls, helicopters opened up with machine guns and the compound was burnt down, with flames shooting 75 feet into the sky. There were nearly 80 dead, including Koresh, his followers, in trance or under his spell, 22 children and two pregnant women.

Renot’s excessive use of force was criticised, but by and large the entire American nation heaved a sigh of relief because Koresh and his evil cult had no followers, and no one went about burning buses in L.A. and D.C. This is not the case here, for the Aziz-Rasheed brothers — and Zille Huma’s killer -- are not without admirers, and even those who have reservations about the Lal Masjid duo’s modus operandi are hoping for a crackdown so as to make propaganda capital out of it.

The question, however, is: is this abnormal way of enforcing Sharia something that only the government should tackle? If the authorities fail to sweep off the lot, is the government alone the loser and not society itself? The problem with this kind of reasoning is that it can be misunderstood and interpreted as an attempt to justify governmental inaction.

The law enforcement agencies’ options are limited. They cannot open up with artillery or fire teargas shells, for this exactly is what the Lal Masjid, the Taliban and their supporters are hoping and praying for. The mosque can be stormed, with some casualties on both sides, but the ultimate triumph will be that of the Taliban supporters, to whom a crackdown on the sacred precincts of the mosque will give a resounding propaganda victory — proof that it is only the Taliban and their types who can protect mosques. In such a scenario, the stand-off at Lal Masjid may come to an end, but the crackdown will translate itself into more power and more votes for the “neurotic” religious right. Worse still, such a crackdown could create fissures in the establishment and in the army, both of which are not without Taliban sympathisers, with consequences that are too frightful to visualise.

A crackdown on the Lal Masjid cultists will be possible only if there is a national consensus behind it. However, given the fractious nature of our politics, with political differences turning into animosities, such a consensus is out of the question. There is no doubt many NGOs, including women’s rights groups, have demonstrated against the Lal Masjid-Hafsa politburo, and it goes without saying that Aziz-Rasheed brothers’ criminal acts — abductions, attacks on shops and threats of suicide bombings — have not exactly been commended by many religious groups and parties. The MMA’s component parties belong to Deobandi, Barelvi, Ahl-i-Hadees and Jafria schools, and none of them has approved the Lal Masjid gang’s actions. But the criticism lacks depth and sincerity, for one obvious reason: all opposition parties are thoroughly enjoying the government’s predicament.

The government’s dilemma is: if it does not act, it stands accused of failing to enforce its writ even in the federal capital; if it comes down hard on the two brother maulanas and their acolytes, the repercussions will shake the government, as if it is not already shaking. More important, the media, which today is chiding the government for failing to enforce its writ, will be the first to condemn the crackdown. (Just visualise TV images showing cops running berserk in the mosque and chasing and beating up nice “Islamic” boys). That is how the media the world over is.

What the political parties and civil society in general fail to realise is that if the Lal Masjid clerics succeed in appearing as victims of a governmental crackdown the problem will not go away, because it is the next government — and civil society — which will be faced with a similar, and perhaps greater and wide-ranging fitna.

The entire strategy of the two brothers is focussed on one point — dare the government into rash action. The more they provoke the authorities, the more diffident the government becomes the more disappointed the Lal Masjid brigade feels. What they want is a military crackdown. There is no doubt they will lose the first round, and the authorities will evict the brainwashed lot from the mosque, but in the long run it is they and not the government or civil society that will be victorious.

If there is to be a crackdown it must have the nation’s support. This can be obtained through parliament, provided the government and the opposition adopt a united stance. However, in the present circumstances neither the government nor the opposition nor society’s liberal sections — angry with the government over the CJ affair and the May 12 killings — would be willing to unite to crush a menace that one day could engulf the entire country.