Fanaticism has grown in the country to the extent that settled areas in the NWFP and even in Sindh are facing a threat of take-over by obscurantist forces.

When we call these forces “religious extremists” or “religious fundamentalists” we tend to confer a kind of legitimacy on them by associating these trends with some form of religion when the reality is to the contrary.

Islam does not allow indiscriminate killing of innocent people no matter what the reason. Means are important and ends do not justify the means. God allows us to fight against only those who fight us and does not expect us to commit excesses as Allah loves not the ones who commit excesses. Killing one innocent person is like killing entire humanity. God also says that there is no compulsion in religion. And, God allows a great deal of freedom of expression and individual action.

He could have decreed and all would have fallen in line. But, this is not the route He adopted. God Himself appealed to human reason, and sent His message through thousands of messengers for the people to understand, own, believe, and then follow His creed. The fact that a whole lot of sinners thrive on earth shows that God gives people ample time, space and opportunity to rectify their behaviour before they are judged by Him. And, no one is allowed to take one’s own life no matter what. Life is a gift from God to whom the soul is destined to return only at a time of His choosing. No freedom of choice is allowed to human beings in this respect by the Creator.

These are some of the religious guidelines regarding human life and respect for it. Religious teachings must be followed, and we must be tolerant and wise instead of attempting to enforce our own worldview through brute force at the expense of innocent lives. According to the fundamentals of the faith, no physical offence should be done, no one should be harmed indiscriminately, and certainly no suicides.

An Islamic society is based on honesty, integrity, justice, equity, fair play and equal opportunity for all. Thus applied, Islam calls for an earnest effort made in the way of God to establish a benevolent society for His people to benefit from. Emphasis is required on good, polite behaviour, codes of public conduct and community, and national decision-making that would steer society in the desirable direction instead of expanding one’s own zone of influence through sheer terror.

Islam places great emphasis on knowledge acquisition and its valuable dissemination for a favourable impact on society. The first word of the first revelation sent to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) was Iqra, that is, ‘read’. Nowhere did God ever enjoin only the men to read and not the women. Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in his famous saying, “Acquire knowledge even if you have to travel to China,” does not discriminate between men and women. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge would then be the pursuit of the religious.

Burning down girls’ schools and depriving half the population of the opportunity to gain knowledge is not only extremism but irreligious conduct. It is fanaticism of the kind of shab-khoon, called terror in modern parlance.

In olden days, shab-khoon was a way to get people unawares while they slept at night, and shed their blood. The practice was considered highly reprehensible even in times when the world had not developed much scientifically and technologically, because it was unjust terror unleashed on a people who could not defend themselves.

Like all monopolies, any effort to establish a monopoly of a certain shade of religion over the people is equally bad. It generates negative spillovers. There is a need to dissociate oneself from practices based on brute force so that there is a clearer understanding of the tenets of Islam. This is necessary to deny any implicit sympathy that some, who call themselves religious-minded, may have for terror. The erroneous worldview must lose support amongst pockets of the population, poorest of the poor, as we see today.

Due emphasis should be laid on the economic prosperity of the community and on poverty alleviation that Islam so stresses. This can be done through better understanding of the principles of economic justice and equity enshrined in the faith which aim at ensuring a life of dignity for all. The uplifting principles of Islam need wider dissemination through the education system so that we attain the twin goals of ridding society of violence as well as poverty.

Income poverty stems from a poverty of knowledge, poverty of a mistaken belief system, poverty of values and poverty of intellect. All this requires a holistic knowledge-based view of what life is, what its purpose is, and how it should be lived.

COUNTRIES across the world will have to dramatically increase investment in dams, pipes and other water infrastructure to avoid widespread flooding, drought and disease even before climate change accelerates these problems, experts have warned.

Investment needs to be at least doubled from the current level of $80bn a year, an international congress was told this week, and one leading authority said spending needed to rise to 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product just “to be able to cope with the current climate” — one thousand times the current level.

The warnings follow a summer of dramatic events, from hurricane flooding in the Caribbean and the east coast of America to desperate measures in drought-stricken Mediterranean countries, including importing water by ship.

Rich nations suffer huge under-investment, but the threat of poor infrastructure to populations in developing countries is even greater, said Dr Olcay Unver, director of the United Nations’ Global Water Assessment Unit.

So serious is the problem that next year the UN’s World Water Assessment Report will make one of its main messages the need for investment to “accelerate substantially”, said Unver.

“You can’t justify the deaths of so many children because of lack of infrastructure or lost productive time of people [who are] intellectually or physically incapacitated because of simple lack of access to safe water or sanitation,” he added. Dr Glen Daigger, senior vice-president of the International Water Association, said there was growing evidence that spending on clean water and sanitation was the single greatest contribution to reducing disease and death.

The UN has identified dams for hydropower and irrigation as leading drivers of sustainable economic growth in developing countries. “Water and sanitation is clearly a better investment than medical intervention, but it’s not sexy,” added Daigger.

Last year the World Bank called for investment in water infrastructure to more than double from $80bn to $180bn over the next 20-25 years to cope with population growth and climate change, which are expected to leave about four billion people living in “water stress” areas —deemed to have insufficient water to meet daily needs. Conditions would be particularly severe in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, said the bank. Water pollution and the threat to coastal areas of erosion, sea level rise and storm surges are also growing concerns.

However, experts meeting at the IWA conference of 2,700 water professionals in Vienna suggested the true scale of the problem could be much higher.

Prof Pavel Kabat, one of the lead authors of the water chapter in last year’s report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said investment needed to rise to 1.5 per cent of GDP for 20 years, just to cope with existing population demand and climate variability. Africa, the region with the greatest lack of infrastructure, would have to spend its entire forecast GDP growth for more than half a century even to reach relatively modest levels of water storage and supply; and even Europe would have to triple spending.

Failure to invest would mean “we’d have more recurrent floods and droughts because our systems are not able to take the magnitude and frequency of water we’re witnessing,” he said. It would also undermine other development spending in poorer nations, said Kabat, citing the example of Kenya, where he said two extreme years of wet and dry in the 1990s destroyed 40 per cent of the country’s wealth.

“If these things are not in place we can keep on building schools but we’re not doing the right thing,” he added.

Earlier this year the American Society of Civil Engineers said the US needed to spend $1.6tn over five years to repair all its crumbling infrastructure, and gave the worst assessment of all to the water sector.

—The Guardian, London