THE Council of Islamic Ideology was established in 1962 in Gen. Ayub Khan’s regime with the sole purpose of giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the parliament. What it had been doing for so long is debatable.

The CII Chairman, Dr Qibla Ayaz, in 2020 tells the media that many activities and issues are against the Shariah and un-Islamic, and that these have been in practice since long.

The CII chief criticised the National Accountability Bureau’s laws and said that they were incompatible with Islamic laws on crimes and punishment, declaring them as being below human dignity. However, he failed to mention whether the CII had recommended any amendments to these laws to make them compatible with Islamic laws and Shariah.

In my opinion the CII should either be dissolved or restructured and made a division under the religious affairs ministry for better cohesion among federal government institutions.

S. Zaki Hasan
Karachi

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AT the conclusion of its two-day meeting last week, the CCI woke up to find that the National Accountability Ordinance 1999 has some sections that were against the Shariah. Hats off to the CCI mandarins!

It took a decade for the Council of Islamic Ideology to learn that some provisions of the NAB Ordinance were not only incompatible with the Shariah and Islamic teachings but also below the human dignity. No wonder that some federal ministers have questioned the raison d’etre of the CII’s existence.

H. Sakina
Karachi

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2020