Somebody once said: “Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the major one was that they escaped teething.” We, too, have escaped teething but at the cost of having no teeth at all.
The result is that whatever we say carries no bite. Day in and day out, we hear tall claims about the virtues of being a Muslim. Yet, we all know the society we have produced. See the killings, for instance, which continue with complete impunity in mosques, imambargahs, churches and even graveyards. Let alone anything else, we cannot be classified even as ‘human beings’. How could one qualify for doctorate without even completing primary kindergarten education?
Pakistan is somewhat more fortunate than the rest of the Muslim world in the sense that the common man in the subcontinent recognizes the need for improvement in life. Whenever given a chance, he has chosen secular, progressive and forward-looking leaders and parties. In 1946, all religious parties such as Jamaat-i-Islami, Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind, etc, faced total rejection and the common man choose Mohammed Ali Jinnah who, by all standards, was secular and progressive.
In 1970 again, all religious parties were routed in favour of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan and Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan, both of whom were secularists. And yet again, in the last decade, the PPP and PML have been brought to power by the common masses who have rejected orthodoxy. What more proof do we need that the masses in Pakistan want to keep politics and religion entirely separate from each other. The fact that Jinnah was not given enough time by destiny, and the rest of the so-called secular bunch never fulfilled even an iota of the people’s aspirations is, however, another matter.
As for the rest of the Muslim world, the scenario is such that out of the 49 or so Muslim countries with a full or near-Muslim majority, none has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact, most, if not all, Muslim countries are ruled by self-serving elites who advance their personal interests by stealing resources from their people. They are busy in sucking lifeblood from the jugular vein until their nations are bled white. Western greed has fully exploited this situation. The imperial interests of Britain and, later, the United States, have always feared independent nationalism.
These ruling Muslim elite have always served foreign imperial interests. May it be the ultra-conservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Indonesia’s Suharto or Jordan’s Shah Hussein — the list is a never-ending one. Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, such secular Muslim governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social justice that is so pivotal to any successful dispensation. Democracy was frustrated by them to preserve their positions of pelf, power and privilege. These failures in the past and present have left a vacuum that Islamic religious movements grew to fill in countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, to name a few. In Afghanistan, for instance, a war that started in the name of Islam now continues for over a decade, with thousands and thousands of Muslims killed by their own kind. The clash that started in the name of faith, sooner than expected, took ethnic roots and now nobody talks of being a Muslim anymore. What really matters is whether you are a Pustun, Tajik or Hazara.
Our clergy reminds me of a fable. A hunter, not very bold, was searching for lion tracks. He asked a man cutting oaks in the forest if he had seen any marks or knew where he could find a lion. “I will,” said the man, “at once show you the lion itself.” The hunter turned very pale and his teeth chattering with fear, replied, “ No, thank you. It is only the tracks that I search, and not the lion itself.” The moral: A hero is brave in deeds as well as words.
How many of our religious leaders have even bothered to raise even a finger against gang rapes, honour killings, private jails, the unremitting slaughter of Shiites, Christians and Ahmadis in their places of worship, and so on and so forth. They will always be concerned with peripheral issues, rather than confront real issues.
However, Islam, as insistently pointed out, among others, by the noted Palestinian writer Edward Said, holds very different meanings for different people. Fortunately, we have among us people such as Maulana Abdus Sattar Edhi who runs the world’s largest free ambulance service, and is overdue for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Here again Aesop’s Fables, that have remained timeless and ageless, provide an excellent insight into our natural psyche. A man who had travelled to foreign lands boasted on returning to his own country of the many wonderful and heroic feats he had performed in the different places he had visited. Once, at Rhodes, the man said that he had leapt such a distance that no man of his day could do so. There were in Rhodes, continued the man, many persons who saw him do it and whom he could call as witnesses. One of the bystanders interrupted him, saying, “If this be all true, there is no need for witnesses. Suppose this to be Rhodes and leap for us.”
Has anybody ever heard Maulana Edhi praise any of his achievements, giving long sermons or passing fatwa for “he who does a thing well does not need to boast.” The time has come for Muslims to stop wallowing in self-pity. We are not helpless victims of malicious conspiracies hatched by the West. Muslims sit over 70 per cent of the world’s energy resources, yet the combined exports of the entire Arab world, minus oil revenues, are less than tiny Finland. The creative output of scientific papers written in the entire Muslim world each year is a small fraction of Israel’s, though there are over one billion Muslims as compared to over two million Jews. We are mostly authors of our own misfortune. Maybe what is happening with us was best described by Martin Luther King — “The day we see the truth and cease to speak it is the day we begin to die.”
We are on the lookout for quick villains and even in our failures, we refuse to be inventive. The number of Muslims killed in inter-Muslim wars for power and pelf far outnumber the number of Muslims killed by infidels. In Algeria, more Muslims have died in the last decade than those killed in the revolutionary war against France. In 1982, over 10,000 Sunni Muslims were killed in Syria. How many Palestinians were killed by King Hussain?Then there is Reza Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ of 1952, and Khomeni’s ‘Islamic Revolution’ of 1979.
The world is now a global village. Our collective survival lies in recognizing the path of secular-humanism based on the principles of logic and reason. This alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe the right of a better tomorrow. Renaissance and reformation has to come. And, for that we need ready hands and not ready tongues. Just save our breath. The day we produce something worthwhile is the day the world will come to us. Remember “None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.” (Franklin)
Somebody once said: “Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the major one was that they escaped teething.” We, too, have escaped teething but at the cost of having no teeth at all.
