Adieu! Dear friend

ABDULLAH Malik has closed his diary and put aside the pen that had little rest for six decades or more. With his departure, we have lost another member of the post-first-war generation that played a decisive role in shaping the political destiny not only of South Asia but the entire humankind and taught the voiceless million the values of freedom, social justice, culture and literature.

That was the generation of such great people as Pablo Neruda, Lorca, Hemingway, and Nazim Hikmet, Iqbal, Premchand, Sajjad Zaheer, Josh and Faiz. That was the generation that fought fascism in Spain, Nazism across the globe, and apartheid in South Africa. And that was the generation that defined the meaning of the South Asian peoples’ struggle for independence. The world witnessed a great wave of awakening during the period between the two great world wars and it inspired a galaxy of intrepid warriors of truth. Whatever place history may assign Abdullah Malik among the legendary figures of this generation, his identification with it cannot be denied.

Abdullah Malik was never shy of writing about himself and sometimes he put down on paper what many would have preferred to leave unsaid. Whether this was due to an exaggerated view of one’s own self or to an exceptionally strong commitment to transparency, one good result is that his entire life is on record. The readers of his writings know all about his childhood in a deeply religious family, the affection of an indulgent grandfather, his adolescent fancies, and his eventual graduation into the ranks of socialist campaigners. Ahrariat was in his blood, but he accepted the discipline of the Communist Party and also joined the Muslim League’s fight for Pakistan.

After independence, party labels lost their attraction for him and he devoted himself to a struggle for a life of reason, justice and egalitarianism without being bounded to a particular group. He enjoyed eminence as a journalist for decades and became an elder politician to politicians.

He came into journalism via the Progressive Writers Movement, and the conviction bred by the latter significantly influenced, both positively and negatively, his work as a journalist. Professionalism could not suppress his partisanship for the cause he believed in. Trade unionism was the means of change and for long years Abdullah Malik was a pillar of strength to the journalists’ trade union. He was not a great professional reporter but a good one, and his main contribution to the brood of reporters was the dignity he earned for his calling.

He was a compulsive writer. He maintained a daily diary for nearly the whole of his adult life, and authored scores of books. Sometimes in his impatience to communicate what he had to say he ignored the arrows the purists shot at him, regarding the liberties with language, expression and style he took or the long quotes with which he laced his narrative. But as Faiz once remarked, those who do not write must salute all those who do, and Abdullah Malik wrote and wrote and was keen to dictate a column even when death was knocking at the door. The books he has left us are a treasure of knowledge about Pakistani people’s past and their present. Even the long extracts he used offer us access to chapters of history that have been consigned to oblivion.

He was an equally compulsive reader and was quite capable of snatching from your hands the book you had just bought and reading it before you had a chance to open it. This enabled him to keep abreast of not only time but also ideas. He was distinguished among his peers by his robust scepticism. Each theory, each viewpoint was liable to be challenged and scrutinized. He enjoyed the role of a cat among the pigeons and of an iconoclast among conformists. His motto was: “Never withhold your rejoinders.” The same was his attitude in whatever association he formed. The closer the fight (“ghurmas”), the better he relished it.

He gave his youth to the promotion of socialist ideals. The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore affected him grievously, perhaps dangerously too. He shed copious tears — none of his friends had a comparable command over the lachrymal glands — on what to him was the loss of many years of his own life. He was deeply affected in the sense that lack of clarity about the future pushed him deeper into the past, his own as well as of his people.

Like most people, Abdullah Malik had his weaknesses, especially a weakness for friends that gave him the title of a dharaband (factionalist). The dhara he chose to join was of the people who made difficult pledges to themselves to struggle for fellow beings and had the strength to remain true to their salt.

No tears need be shed for Abdullah Malik for he lived by his conviction, the way he wanted. The real cause of grief is the realization that the breed to which he belonged is threatened with extinction.

Iraqi expatriate recalls Saddam’s days of terror

THE dilemma of Iraqi expatriates is not easy to understand, especially of someone like Dr Juman Kubba, an Iraqi-born American academic and a writer who is still carrying nightmarish memories of her childhood in Baghdad. The current war has been a new terrifying experience for her.

“I can’t sleep at night, I just watch news on TV and pray,” Dr Juman complained. I met her the other day to talk about her book, ‘The First Evidence’: a memoir of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which was recently marketed by an American publisher.

Dr Juman comes from an elitist Iraqi family.The Ba’ath Party jailed her father, one of the top professionals of his time, after it came into power in Iraq. The family quietly left the country soon after, first to the UK and then to America. She now lives in South California and is currently teaching at a university in the UAE.

“I owed it to my dead parents. I had promised them to tell their story to the world that how a highly educated family suffered in their own homeland by the Ba’ath regime. I wrote these memoirs before 9/11, but the publisher thought the time was now when information on the lives of Iraqis is fewer.”

Before and during the war against Iraq I couldn’t register a single vote given by an Arab or any other expatriate in favour of so called operation freedom by the American-British coalition. I was hoping to get the other side of the story from Dr Juman.

“The people of Iraq will like to get rid of Saddam Hussein, no matter who does it for them, but they will never like to live under any foreign force, no matter who, no, never,” her voice was soft and low, but the tone of confusion was evidently high. The TV was on and CNN was showing US briefing on war.

“Lies, lies, and lies,” her anger surprised me. Perhaps, for once, she had forgotten the 30-year old plight of her parents. “They have bombarded a maternity home, a hospital, residential buildings, its terrible to watch innocent people dying every day,” she took her eyes away from the TV screen that was now showing the allied forces knocking the Baghdad city.

THE Abu Dhabi TV, which has gained a lot of respectability in the Arab world for its balanced coverage of the war, is mourning the death of the family of its reporter Shakir Hamid, who was covering the fighting in Baghdad and had become a familiar face for millions of viewers in the UAE.

The US forces killed Shakir’s older brother, Jawad, and his two children when they were trying to escape the fierce bombing over Nassiriya.

Mr Jawad, almost a cripple from an earlier accident, was with his wife and seven children and was part of a caravan of cars that was trying to flee to Souk Al Shuyoukh when it was hit by the American fire.

Jawad and his two children died while his wife was seriously injured.

Imad, Shakir’s younger brother and also a TV journalist, who had come to Dubai from Baghdad a day before the war, tearfully narrated the story on the TV. Shakir, unaware of the tragedy, as he couldn’t be contacted in Baghdad, came to know about the death of his elder brother “by watching the story being told by another brother on television.”

Shakir is still the member of the Abu Dhabi TV team that is besieged in Baghdad’s Palestinian Hotel where journalists were killed by the not-so-friendly fire. The UAE government is trying to “secure the transfer of the media men from the office of the Abu Dhabi Television where they are besieged in the Palestine Hotel.”

THE Pakistan community in UAE has launched a campaign to collect food, medicines, clothes and blood for the Iraqis.

Pakistanis in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain have already donated generously and now the Pakistan Association in Dubai has made Pakistan Sports and Recreation Center in Sharjah the hub for collecting the donations.

The Car Dealers Association with a majority of Pakistani members is organizing a blood bank at Dubai Used Cars Automobile Zone where 500 people from 400 car dealerships are expected to donate blood in ‘Help Iraqi brothers’ campaign.

A team of Pakistani doctors, working in Dubai, has also announced to go to Iraq to treat the war victims.

Islam and the modern man

THE modern age is an age of turmoil, of mental anguish and spiritual crisis, of dissolution of accepted values and cleavage between faith and reason, science and religion. The soul of man is crying for a faith which he could adopt with perfect intellectual integrity, moral honesty and spiritual satisfaction, and which could unequivocally recognize inherent dignity of man and universal equality and fraternity of mankind. Which of the religions is most likely to succeed in solving the religious and moral predicament of the contemporary man is a question of tremendous importance?

Development of the science of history and full emergence of historical sense has been, in recent times, posing serious problems for many a living religion. The modern man refuses to admit any concept as religious belief unless it is established as a historical fact, unless its historicity is proved. Mythological characters, fabulous tales and flights of aboriginal imagination cease to guide man in his practical life. Criticism of religion and systematic study of faiths has, in recent times, created serious doubts about the historical validity of many accepted beliefs and led to reassessment of their sources and their value.

Critics of religion today affirm that much is not known about the life, personality and activities of several founders of religions such as Jesus, Rama, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha and others. Their personalities are shrouded in the mist, and no effort, howsoever serious, has been able to bring them into the light of history. Religious belief in these great personalities has floundered on the rock of historical facts and the religions they represent cannot be based on an appeal to historical facts at a time of serious questioning.

The only figure, amongst the founders of the great religions, who withstands the most severe historical criticism is that of Muhammad, (peace be upon him). Everything related to him or having a bearing on him, is in the limelight of history, fully authenticated and supported by most reliable evidence. The modern man, if he is confronted with the choice of a historical personality as his religious leader, has no alternative to him.

Historical research, moreover, has revolutionized concepts regarding the compilation, authenticity and genuineness of many a religious scripture. Higher textual criticism and examination of scriptures like Old and New Testament, Hindu scriptures, Buddhist texts, Zoroastrian literature and as recent a religious text as Guru Granth Sahib reveals that they are not free from addition and interpolation. Moreover, it has become highly improbable to establish connecting links between them and those personalities to whom their authorship is ascribed. Furthermore, in most of the cases, these personalities turn out to be either mythological figures or at least their identity is not now possible to establish.

The Quran is the sole religious scripture, which claims to have remained intact and whose authenticity has been established by history. No force of scholarship, not even the most severely adverse criticism, has succeeded in proving that it, or anything contained therein, is a later interpolation and was not originally handed down by the Prophet of Islam. If ever, authenticity and genuineness of a religious scripture is made the criterion of acceptance of that religion there is little hope that any religion other than the religion of the Quran could lay claim to success.

Technological and scientific advancement has elevated man from submission to natural phenomena, fate or stars. He refuses to bow before them as his gods, shapers of his destiny or objects claiming his reverence. Polytheism, belief in a number of gods, and prostration before the forces of nature, has become outdated, irrelevant, undignified and degrading for man. Man can now submit to only one God or to none else.

In other words, he has either to turn to Islam, the religion of uncompromising monotheism, of unadulterated belief in the oneness of God, if he, at all, needs any religion or he would go atheist. The choice before him lies between Islam and atheism, not simply between theism and atheism. Polytheistic faiths, which are below the dignity of man have lost every hope to win the mind and heart of the modern man. Islam, instead, dignifies man by placing him second only to God. Man is His vicegerent. This is one of the fundamental teachings of Islam. Everything, in the heavens or on earth, has been created for man and placed at his disposal.

The modern man has finally decided in favour of equality and universal fraternity of mankind. The ideologies based on the notion of superiority and dignity of clan, caste, colour or geographical bounds has been made target of severe criticism and rejected. Idea of the inherent superiority of the Hebrew or Aryan or white race or the caste of the Brahmans debases humanity and cuts at the very roots of the human brotherhood. Islam, on the contrary, establishes the basic unity and universal brotherhood of human beings by declaring differences of clan, caste, colour and geographical bounds as mere superfluities, accidentals beyond human choice and volition.

The Prophet announced in unequivocal terms that neither an Arab was superior to a non-Arab nor a non-Arab to an Arab, that no white was nobler than a black nor a black than a white. Every human being had descended down from Adam and Adam was created out of dust. The sole criterion of nobility and dignity was piety. The Quran laid down that the most exalted in the eyes of God are those who are most pious and God-fearing. Islam teaches that true beliefs and sincere acts, which are the objects of free choice, form the real basis of human dignity and superiority, not those factors which are out of the bounds of human reach.

Some religions like Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism taught that renunciation of material world was the highest form of religious activity. Man cannot aspire to attain spiritual heights unless he severed every connection with the material world which was in itself bad and filthy. Obviously religion and spiritual sublimities according to such ideologies become the prerogative of a selected few. It is denied to common man who is ordained to be content with a very superficial and low form of religion. The disastrous after-affects of such an idea are not difficult to gauge. The religious would recede to caves and jungles and the world would remain populated with those who would have no love lost for any higher religious values and attainments.

The modern man earnestly believes that he needs a religion which could satisfy his social urges and instincts, integrate the mundane and the spiritual, blend work and spirituality into an indivisible whole. Islam admits that the practice of renunciation of material world was adopted in good conscience and with a praiseworthy motive but as it countered the social nature of man its demands were in practice hopelessly unrealizable. This position has time and again been vindicated by history. The modes of compulsory worship in Islam are congregational and social in nature. It teaches that the success in life hereafter depends upon how he takes his mundane and material life. The Prophet and his companions have practically demonstrated that the highest moral, spiritual and religious accomplishments could be achieved while fully participating in this-worldly activities.

Islam, moreover, revolutionizes the very concept of the nature of worship. It lays down that any human activity, howsoever materialistic or secular it may seem to be, is convertible into an act of worship provided it is carried out while observing certain limits and conditions and with good intentions.

Religion upholding renunciation as the loftiest religious activity condemn man-woman relationship as something essentially dirty. They instinctively hate and denigrate woman. Modern man stands in revolt against the idea that sex is basically an evil. This revolt has assumed the proportions of a formidable movement. The whole edifice of sexual ethics has been pulled down and the movement has adopted the dimensions of rebellion against religion as such. Islam views anti-sex and anti-woman attitude as a negation of healthy and wholesome values of human life.

Irrational suppression of basic human urges and instincts causes untold suffering to man, leads to erosion of private and public morality and blocks his way to attainment of spiritual values. Islam recognizes indispensability of sex but nonetheless abhors irresponsible sexual activity. It regulates man-woman relationship on the basis of individual and social responsibility, mutual love, understanding, respect, spirit of compromise and consideration for each other. Thus sexual relationship besides satisfying one of the most powerful instincts provides the foundation stone for a morally oriented social structure.

The attitude of Islam towards reason is most reasonable. It does not rely upon miracles nor on blind faith. It persuades man to use reason and make intelligent decisions in all matters, religious or mundane. The Quran abounds in appeals to reason and exhortations, to adopt rational attitudes and praises those who do so. Nevertheless, to guide man’s intellect, refurbish his faculty of decision making, provide him with moral principles of universal and eternal validity, apprise him of the purpose of human life, its raison d’etre, Islam introduces the principle of Wahy, the Divine Revelation, as the ultimate and infallible source of knowledge and the final arbiter of good and bad, virtue and vice, right and wrong.

The real objective, the highest achievement, the summum bonum, of religion, which the human soul craves for, is man’s direct experience of his Creator, his encounter with his God, the attainment of Ihsan. Islam holds that this can be achieved only when human reason and intellect are guided, supervised, assisted and channelled by the knowledge provided by the Wahy.