UK to discourage use of mosques as sanctuary: DATELINE LONDON

A POLICE raid on a mosque to remove an Afghan couple who had refused to leave Britain after their asylum bid had failed has sparked a controversy about the use of holy places as sanctuary by asylum seekers. The raid was condemned by Muslim groups.

Now the government seems to have realized that the police have made a mistake by raiding a holy place. Authorities are treating this as an eye-opener and are seeking to prevent asylum seekers from using mosques as sanctuary following the police raid.

The British immigration minister, Beverley Hughes, wants to hold talks with Muslim elders to work out ways of avoiding a repeat of the incident, which has outraged many British Muslims and civil rights campaigners. The police had used battering ram to smash down the door of Ghausia Jamia Mosque, in West Midlands, to evict Farid Ahmadi and his wife Feriba.

The Afghan couple had refused to be deported to Germany after staying in Britain for two years.

The couple is now in a detention centre in west London. The raid was widely condemned by Muslim and human rights campaigners. Christian priests like the Bishop of Barking, Roger Sainsbury, also condemned it. Mr Sainsbury said it was culturally insensitive to break down the door of a place of worship. Talks are being held between the police and Muslim elders to defuse the situation.

EXTRADITION: Britain and the US seem to be in a cold war over the extradition of some UK-based suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. A latest attempt by Washington to extradite 40-year-old Egyptian-born Yasser Al Siri on a charge that he funded Al Qaeda was failed in court on Monday after the home secretary ruled that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

The US government believes that the London-based Al Siri is a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist and who had sent money to the son of the man convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, an event seen by many as an inspiration for the Sept 11 attacks.

A judge at an east London court rejected the demand for extradition on the ground of insufficient evidence against him. An earlier charge against Mr Siri was that he had been part of a conspiracy to kill the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Masood, the anti-Taliban leader who was assassinated only two days before Sept 11.

This latest move by a British court has further angered the US authorities whose earlier attempt to extradite another Al Qaeda suspected terrorist was failed a few months ago for insufficient evidence against him. The US authorities accuse the Algerian-born Lotfi Raissi of being the pilot who trained the Sept 11 hijackers.

In the high security Belmarsh jail, there are a number of alleged Al Qaeda terrorists, awaiting extradition to the US. Although a very close ally of the US, Great Britain is sticking to its own laws as far as the cases of extradition of suspected terrorists are concerned.

Lankan attack mediocre without Murali: SWINGING DRIVES

AS I write this, India is on the verge of losing the first Test at Lord’s and losing it comprehensively unless some miracle happens or rain washes out play on the last day. It has, so far been, a miserable Test for India, the highlight of this misery being the failure of Sachin Tendulkar in both the innings.

The “little champion,” as Sunil Gavaskar calls him, was psyched out by Nasser Hussain. He saved Simon Jones the much hyped Welshman as England’s answer to Shoaib Akhtar and Brett Lee as Sachin came out to bat. Jones is quick but he represents raw pace and hasn’t got his compass fine-tuned. But he seemed to unsettle Tendulkar who took a knock on his elbow.

The Indian innings was never allowed to get started on the morning of the third day. Hussain got his bowler to go ground the wicket and to aim for the rib-cage. It was good, aggressive captaincy. Even though the track was flat and described as “a belter,” the Indians chose not to counter-attack. Only Rahul Dravid and Vangipurappu Laxman seemed equal to the task and Dravid was out to a ball that jumped at him and Laxman ran out of partners.

India had started badly when it chose to leave out Harbhajan Singh, going by the conventional wisdom that in England, one should play three seamers. With the exception of Zaheer Khan, the other two seamers neither had the pace nor were they able to move the ball, in the air or off the seam and England was able to amass 487 without too much sweat.

Virender Sehwag, opening the innings for India played a breezy innings and a most attractive one but India needed serious runs and this meant Tendulkar coming off. He certainly looked off-colour and he scratched around and should have been caught by Graham Thorpe at slip off Jones. But he was out to a shot that he would not have played in the nets and in the second innings he was bowled by an inswinging yorker with plenty of daylight between bat and pad.

It was a peach of a delivery and would have bowled most batsmen but not a batsman of Tendulkar’s class. Is Tendulkar showing that he is human, after all, and like all batsmen, great and small, he’s going through a lean patch?

Jones is an exciting prospect for England. Hussain has used him as a shock bowler, in short bursts. I think he will be a handful on bouncier wickets provided he can get his line and length right, and, provided too, he has the stamina. He showed that he was no mug with the bat and played a cameo innings with some clean hitting.

The irony is that he would not have played had Darren Gough or Andy Caddick or Alex Tudor been fit and the England selectors are not known for having an eye on the future. On England’s tour of Australia, later this year, he would be my first choice and yet he may not make the team!

It was bad enough that that triangular that Pakistan was to host was shifted to Nairobi but we seem to have run into some in-fighting between the Kenyan Cricket Association and its Sports Ministry. The President of Kenya has had to intervene. Sri Lanka too appears to having some problems on the administrative front and the decision to ‘rest’ nine of their senior players for the second Test against Bangladesh was a strange one. Apart from being a little insulting to the visitors, Sri Lanka had been mauled on its tour of England and would have been a team short of confidence. The best way to regain confidence is to start winning.

A Test match is cricket at the highest level and is not an occasion to blood new players wholesale. Muttiah Muralitharan who has recovered from a shoulder injury showed that he was match-fit when he destroyed Bangladesh in the first match. He should have played in the second Test and is clearly unhappy that he did not. So too is the captain, Sanath Jayasuriya.

Sri Lanka will need to get its act together for the triangular in Tangiers for it will be pitted against Pakistan and South Africa. At present, it gives the impression of a house divided against itself. And if I was a Sri Lankan sports official, I would see to it that Muralitharan is kept happy. He is half the team and without him, the bowling is less than mediocre.

Pakistan will not have Shoaib Akhtar for Tangiers. He has chosen to ‘rest’ in England. I have no quarrel with that. But we were getting confused signals, as if to suggest, that he had just trotted off without permission. That is not, of course, the case. But Shoaib has got the reputation of being a loose cannon, somewhat. But I don’t think he would let Pakistan down when the team needs him.

Pakistan has developed into a fine, fighting unit. It has got to stay that way. Pakistan will be playing Australia in Nairobi and then playing in the ICC Trophy in Sri Lanka. These games will be a rehearsal for the World Cup next year. The players and the team management should be on the same wave length. Happily, they are and everyone concerned should ensure that it stays that way.

Back to ‘Azad’ ghazal movement

THERE is possibly no such thing as stagnation in literature. Maybe the lack of appreciation of the new breed of writers is incomprehensible by the older generation and hence this inappropriate word for lack of coming to grips with the new sensibility.

Having put forward a reasonably valid argument, I would like to say that there is surely something as the decline of classical discipline and, as a result thereof, a logical decline in the competence of effective expression. This state of affairs could give rise to the inability of artists to have artistic tools. We are, perhaps, faced with this grave situation today and quite a few artists operating today don’t know the norms of discipline. It is quite understandable on their part to escape from these disciplines under some notions of the autonomy of art. Once again the rule of the game doesn’t provide them any immunity. Only those can break the rules who know how well to observe them.

A monograph known as Takhleeqiat Pasant Tehrik has recently been published. Its leader is Farhat Abbas Shah — a poet known to be quite a popular one among the youths having more than 35 books of collections to his credit. His popularity is beyond my comprehension and the only reason which comes to my mind that he has perhaps found an audience which is as impatient with the classical discipline as he himself is. So it is the Catch 22 like situation.

Farhat Abbas Shah is a popular writer. There is another young poet, Wasi Shah, who is also popular. These two, I am told, have been able to publish their collections of poetry with big print orders. Thus, disproving the common notion that poetry collections — at least of the new poets — were not in demand. Wasi Shah is known to have sold more than 20,000 copies of one of his collections. Someone tried to put this figure at 50,000. I dread to even mention this figure. I don’t grudge these poets’ popularity. Their popularity suggests that even the concept of ‘classical norms’ stands in need of a drastic change and the time has perhaps come for accepting that poetry is no more a discipline of creative expression rather it is one’s right to inflict anything in the name of poetry on readers — specially when they are willing to pay for it and even willing to experience ecstatic feeling when it is composed by an orchestra.

The only thing worth noting, however, is that the musical group promoting such poetry has to have a Junoon Group like orchestra so that the voids of printed poetry were duly made good by the noise of the instruments’ ‘melody’. I could substitute the word in quotes for ‘noise’ — also in quotes.

My readers know it well that I am a bit conservative. I am for melody, not noise. I am for a poetry bending to disciplines — even of the prose poetry vintage — but when it comes to Ghazal, it is beyond my taste to agree to the notion of Azad Ghazal. The banner of Azad Ghazal has been aloft for quite sometime but I am unable to appreciate the effort of any poet wedded to this genre. The difficulty is that no poet has remained embedded to this genre for more than a few months or years. He had to bow out of the genre for lack of audience or readers to appreciate.

Incidentally the field of humour also failed to own up such poets otherwise they could be classified enemies in the group of humour writers. I believe Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi would agree with me on this point. Yusuf Nazim has already agreed in one of his sharp-shooting articles which was anything but humourous. He played a butcher’s role. I think that the brutal satirist in him got the better of him but the purpose was noble. After all, he couldn’t send the humorists of this persuasion to a reformatory. There is no such thing which has been coined as a phrase for the knight- errants of literature. If not contemplated on the plane of phrase-making, how could one then look for the implementation of idea.

What has forced me to broach this theme — Azad Ghazal — is Farhat Abbas Shah’s book ‘Ghazal Ka Muqadamah’. I believe that he must have forgotten to have the ‘prefix’ Azad before Ghazal to make it apter but Farhat Abbas Shah has now grown so vehement in his advocacy of Azad Ghazal that he would like us to believe that anyone who doesn’t accept Azad Ghazal as Ghazal is not a lover of Ghazal at all . In this book which has been declared to be ‘Asri Adab Ki Muttawazi Tarikh’ and dedicated to Khwaja Muhammad Zakariya — perhaps for his fondness for Akbar Allahabadi’s digs at Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.

Farhat Abbas Shah has discredited all those critics who may not be having time or patience to go through his outright denunciation of those who don’t agree with him. Granted that every two lines — I won’t be able to call it a couplet make some sense but they rob us of our arithmetic and undermine the relationship and music — two of the cardinal disciplines which even the students of Dars-i-Nizami had to go through a few decades before.

He has also refused to take into account that his defender Anis Nagi and his associates in the Nai Shaeri Ki Tehrik had even wasted away Miraji because he was using conventional language in his poetry and was opposed to equate language with the calculus or algebra which the Nai Shaeri (New Poetry) believed to be the sine qua non of the Nai Zaban. My readers — at least some of them would like to refresh themselves that the advocates of New Poetry were opposed to the Moderns like Miraji and N.M. Rashid for the crime of using conventional language and they wanted to throw all the classical masters along with their Diwans into the River Ravi or Indus whichever river was nearer to them. My goodness, it was the most unfortunate times to live in. The late ‘50s or early ‘60s when Professor Shannon’s views on language, coupled with Wittgenstein’s views on Linguistic Analysis, were sought to be applied to Urdu. Some of our men of letters are inducted in the Cultural Compliance squad and they have to deliver the goods by sticking to a simple statement that literature ought to be autonomous. Today it is Post-Modernism holding the belief that there is no more any central or fundamental issue — such as eradication of overt or class composition leading to inequity — and the issues needing redressal have to be peripheral, marginal and not central or basic.

Farhat Abbas Shah, thus, promises to be an innocent crusader. He has not said a word against the conventional language. That’s why it is proved that Anis Nagi has chosen to walk on his own theory because, in lending his support to Farhat Abbas Shah, who is quite a brilliant young man, he has abdicated his conventional views about New Poetry which even didn’t own up Miraji and N.M. Rashid. I still don’t know what made the exponents of New Poetry own up Munir Niazi as their ‘Guru’. Munir Niazi is nostalgic about his past memories in a poetic language which corresponds to the emotional culture it wants to promote. He is the promoter who knows what to promote and in which form of poetic language.

I would expect that Farhat Abbas Shah would better settle to call his Langri Ghazal or Azad Ghazal as a two-line Nazm to be better called Do-Satri as Himayat Ali Shair once floated the idea of Sulasi, a three line composition to distinguish his composition from Haiku or Mahiya. The irony of the situation is that Punjabi’s most beautiful art form is also being sacrificed at the altar of Japanese.

We are already known as the only people who could learn a foreign language at the expense of our languages and now we are throwing centuries old forms of our poetry without realizing that we are not going to be an example of Japan Number One on the ladder of progress but sliding down to get the title being Number One in illiteracy and poverty not before long.

So my dear Farhat Abbas Shah, better try to set your second lines of the ‘couplets’ to be the epitome of correct equation between arithmetic and music and I would like to assure you that, by doing so, you won’t be losing anything by your chances of remaining an insignificant poet. You should better try to be Poet Number One because there is no end to wishing and becoming one provided adequate effort could be made to achieve your goal.

Rising crime against women: SINDHI PRESS DIGEST

KAWISH writes that soon after the Meerwala gang- rape as per the decision of a panchayat meeting, another jirga verdict has shocked not only Pakistan but the entire world. In a village of the Mianwali district, Punjab, a jirga bypassed the courts of law by trying to obtain freedom for four murder convicts by offering the hands in marriage of eight girls of the convicts’ family, majority of them minor, to some over-aged and married men of the victims’ family. This event is another example of the rising tribal trends in society and of ineffectiveness of law-enforcement agencies.

The breaking of news about jirgas deciding the fate of innocent women has begun lately in Punjab but in Sindh such events are order of the day. According to press reports, women in these jirgas are traded like a commercial commodity. Presided over by tribal/feudal lords and religious leaders, these jirgas serve as a tool to persecute the weak.

Besides, the administration supports this illegal system in one way or the other. As a result, these private courts have assumed the form of parallel judiciary in rural areas, rendering the police ineffective to a greater degree in maintaining the law and order.

It is encouraging that the Supreme Court took prompt notice of the Mianwali incident but its role does not end here. To restore the writ of law, the apex court, the government and the conscious circles should take measures to put an end to rampant violations of human rights by jirgas held across the country.

Tameer-i-Sindh deplores two horrifying incidents of Karo-kari killings that occurred recently. In the kutcha area of Lakhi Ghulam Shah, Shikarpur district, an indebted man declared the son of local shopkeeper Karo with his eight-year old daughter. In retaliation, the shopkeeper’s son accused some relatives of the accuser of having illicit relations with some women of his family. Ultimately, at a jirga sitting, he withdrew the charges after receiving a fine of five cows from the accused.

In another incident in nearby Chak village, a man, on his wedding night, killed his wife after accusing her of not being virgin. The man had purchased the girl for Rs60,000 but had paid Rs15,000 only. This money was spent on the bride’s dowry by her father and, according to reports, on his demand for payment of the remaining amount, his son-in-law ought to wind up the matter by killing his wife after accusing her of being Kari with her cousin. Before doing that he had taken gold jewellry and other dowry items from her.

These two events adequately demonstrate how the savage ritual of Karo-kari is exploited by the perpetrators of this crime but, alas, no government has ever taken any step to curb this barbaric trend. If the Musharraf government can amend the Constitution to derive a political advantage, cannot it introduce some legislation against Karo-kari killings? It can and it should. If courts of law dispose of cases of Karo-kari killing and send culprits to the gallows within one month, this savage custom can be uprooted in three months.

A drug addict killed his two sisters, aged 16 and 18, in Lashari Goth near Karundi on being asked to refrain from drug abuse, writes Sach. Sindh seems to be burning in the fire of restlessness but more often it is only the women who fall prey to the crime born of this state of mind. This is because women are the weaker section of society, and violence against them usually goes unnoticed and unpunished.

The unheeded protest of a poor and old woman, Huzooran Abro, is yet another such example, according to Ibrat. She has been observing token hunger strike outside the Hyderabad Press Club to impress upon the police and authorities the urgency of recovering her kidnapped daughter, but to no avail.

Her frantic cries have gone unheard of by the police who have even ignored the directives of the federal interior minister, the governor and the IG in this regard. Whether her meeting with Chief Secretary K.B. Rind will bear any results is yet to be seen.