Dr. Sarfraz Naeemi- the head honcho over there at Jamia Naeemia- has been killed in a suicide attack on the mosque. He had given a fatwa against the Taliban recently... and called them enemies of Islam and Pakistan. He was absolutely right and he paid with his life.
However a few years ago... Sarfraz Naeemi had given this Khutba:
"The suicide attacks are not haram [forbidden in Islam] but are the supreme form of jihad."
Now therefore we must learn a lesson from this. Sarfraz Naeemi succumbed to the so called "supreme form of Jihad". While we mourn his passing, we must realize that this was the logical extension of the argument our Islamic scholars have been spinning for years.
We must make a break from such violent interpretations of Islam now... lest we don't have a country or a religion any more.
Villagers angered by mosque blast attack Taliban By Our Correspondent
Monday, 08 Jun, 2009 | 03:33 AM PST |
UPPER DIR: Two Taliban commanders and their four fighters were killed in an armed action taken by a tribal Lashkar in the Doog Darra area of Upper Dir district on Sunday.
(According to AP news agency 11 militants were killed in the attack.)
The Lashkar was formed in Hayagay Sharqi, and was supported by people of Hayagay Gharbi, Doon, Kilot and Miana Doog villages, after the suicide attack on a local mosque during Friday prayers that killed over 30 people, including several children.
The Lashkar stormed Taliban bunkers in Doog Darra, Salam Bekay, Ghazigay, Shatkas, Panaghar and Maluk Khwar and torched about 20 houses of people who harboured militants.
People from several other villages joined the Lashkar to expel Taliban from their area.
According to local people, both sides were using heavy weapons in fierce clashes between the Lashkar and the Taliban.
Sources said the village force was attacking Taliban positions in Shatkas, Miana and Doog Bala.
Meanwhile, people of Maluk Khwar and Panaghar villages, who were active supporters
of the militants, also parted ways with them after the mosque blast and announced support for the tribal Lashkar and vowed to evict militants from the area.
Doog Darra area, it may be mentioned, was attacked by planes in the third week of May.
Two men of the Lashkar identified as Shah Khalid and Mohammad Ayaz were injured in Sunday’s clash.
The militants, holed up in their stronghold of Shatkas and Gazigay, were putting up stiff resistance, the sources said.
Agencies add: The incident underscored a swing in the national mood towards a more anti-Taliban stance, a shift that comes as suicide attacks have surged and the military wages an offensive in the Swat valley.
DCO Atif-ur-Rehman said some 400 villagers formed a Lashkar and attacked five villages in Doog Darra area.
The militia has occupied three of the villages since Saturday and is trying to push the Taliban out of the other two.
The government has encouraged local people to set up militias to oust Taliban fighters.
‘It is something very positive that tribesmen are standing against the militants. It will discourage the miscreants,’ Mr Rehman said.
He said around 200 militants were putting up stiff resistance in their strongholds surrounded by the villagers.
‘We will send security forces, maybe artillery too, if the villagers ask for reinforcement,’ he said.
President Obama’s landmark speech was extraordinary and unprecedented. It marks a paradigm shift in US’ relationship with the Muslim world and is a recognition that our common earth needs to be saved from destruction and mindless violence. President Obama is proving himself to be the change that he promised. Yet as a Pakistani I feel that the speech was delivered at the wrong forum in the wrong city.
Let us forget and forgive the president for his glaring omission of Kashmir which he had rightly identified as a major flashpoint on the world map during his campaign. Even without Kashmir, the speech would still have a far greater impact had it been delivered in Islamabad instead of Cairo. Unlike Cairo where you have an unpopular but entrenched despot, Islamabad has an embattled democratic government which is fighting perhaps the most important civil war in world history since the American civil war itself. Infact its significance might be greater for it will determine the future of the entire Islamic civilization. Obama’s presence in Islamabad would have bolstered that effort greatly.
And unlike Cairo, Islamabad is the capital of the second largest Muslim country and population after Indonesia with 165 million Muslims within Pakistani borders. Indeed most of the world’s Muslims live outside the Arab world. Indonesia has more than 200 million, Pakistan 165 million, India has 145 million, Bangladesh has 140 million. Three of the major core Muslim majority countries are non-Arab- Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. Considering this, Islamabad should have been the logical choice of this address.
Obama spoke of the diversity of the Muslim world and of women’s rights. Unlike Cairo which is dominated by Sunni Islam and is ethnically homogenously Arab, Islamabad is the capital of a state which is far more reflective of the diversity, both ethnic and sectarian. Consider for example the fact that Pakistan has both the second largest Sunni (after Indonesia) and the second largest Shia populations (after Iran) of the world. It is a land where many languages are spoken and many ethnicities live and its history is older than that of Egypt. As for women’s rights, it is Pakistan which as Obama himself pointed out elected a woman prime minister twice. Islamabad and the rest of Pakistan was the scene of the lawyers’ movement, a thoroughly secular movement for constitutionalism and fundamental rights- much of what Obama himself claims to uphold. All this would have helped Obama underscore his message of common bonds with Islam much more than his performance in Egypt.
Still a very important opportunity has been extended to us and we must clutch it with both hands. Our common humanity dictates us to do so.
Seven Principles on which the left should seek to reinvent itself in Pakistan:
1. Faithful allegiance to Jinnah's conception of Pakistan as an egalitarian, cosmopolitan and democratic social welfare state based on rule of law and equality of opportunity.
2. Immediate, unconditional and effective land reforms.
3. Provincial autonomy through residual powers lying with provinces
4. Affirmative action for religious minorities, women, depressed classes and linguistic minorities.
5. Education reform and access to all citizens of Pakistan
6. Provision of health care should be state responsibility.
7. Foreign policy based on rational self interest within reason and in consonance with international law
What Ishtiaq says is basically two fold… that in 1946 elections Punjab Muslim League used Islam through “Barelvi Pirs” against Unionist party (what he forgets is that Unionist Party as well as Congress also used Islam against the Muslim League) and that people like Raja of Mahmudabad promised Quran and Islamic state….
Ishtiaq Ahmed's omissions are also two-fold:
1. If Raja of Mahmudabad did promise “dictatorship of the Quran” which he did, Jinnah expelled him from the Muslim League. This is well known. 2. Barelvi Pirs etc constitute the “low church of Islam” not the “high church”. Muslim League’s use of Barelvis … only as late as 1946 …. was in response to the use by the Congress and then the Unionist Party of the “high church” i.e. Deobandi Islam.
Ishtiaq Ahmed also makes horrendous factual errors in the said article:
1. He claimed that Jamaat Ahmaddiya was ambivalent to the Pakistan Movement till Zafrullah Khan was won over… this is an absolute lie. First of all Zafrullah Khan vetted the Lahore Resolution which is considered the starting point of the Pakistan Movement. Secondly Jinnah’s famous visit to the London Ahmaddiya Mosque in 1933 was where the Imam of the mosque, Ibrahim Dard, had persuaded him to go to India and re-organize the Muslim League .. and Jinnah had promised to consider it. Jamaat Ahmaddiya had in the mid-1940s engaged the famous geographer George Spate to carry out a “Pakistan Survey” in aid of the Muslim League. A detailed report was issued which was reprinted by the Dawn a few years ago. 2. He claimed that Shias remained ambivalent. Muslim League leadership was mostly Shia. Ironically the Raja of Mahmudabad that Ishtiaq Ahmed quotes was also staunchly and fanatically Shia.
The facts are:
1. Almost every Islamist Mullah organization Jamiat-e-Ulema-Hind (apart from the small breakaway Usmani faction), Majlis-e-Ahrar, Khaksar Tehreek , Jamaat-e-Islami etc opposed the Pakistan Movement.
2. That it was Gandhi who through his Khilafat movement brought these Mullahs into politics.The roots of this dischord were found in the Khilafat movement… Achyuth Patwardhan, one of the Socialist stalwarts in the Congress, has given a remarkably candid and self critical analysis of the Congress Party vis-a-vis Khilafat:
‘It is, however, useful to recognise our share of this error of misdirection. To begin with, I am convinced that looking back upon the course of development of the freedom movement, THE ‘HIMALAYAN ERROR’ of Gandhiji’s leadership was the support he extended on behalf of the Congress and the Indian people to the Khilafat Movement at the end of the World War I. This has proved to be a disastrous error which has brought in its wake a series of harmful consequences. On merits, it was a thoroughly reactionary step. The Khilafat was totally unworthy of support of the Progressive Muslims. Kemel Pasha established this solid fact by abolition of the Khilafat. The abolition of the Khilafat was widely welcomed by enlightened Muslim opinion the world over and Kemel was an undoubted hero of all young Muslims straining against Imperialist domination. But apart from the fact that Khilafat was an unworthy reactionary cause, Mahatma Gandhi had to align himself with a sectarian revivalist Muslim Leadership of clerics and maulvis. He was thus unwittingly responsible for jettisoning sane, secular, modernist leadership among the Muslims of India and foisting upon the Indian Muslims a theocratic orthodoxy of the Maulvis. Maulana Mohammed Ali’s speeches read today appear strangely incoherent and out of tune with the spirit of secular political freedom. The Congress Movement which released the forces of religious liberalism and reform among the Hindus, and evoked a rational scientific outlook, placed the Muslims of India under the spell of orthodoxy and religious superstition by their support to the Khilafat leadership. Rationalist leaders like Jinnah were rebuffed by this attitude of Congress and Gandhi. This is the background of the psychological rift between Congress and the Muslim League’
Pakistan was a movement led by middle class largely westernized Muslims who had no truck with religious dogma.
Mukhtar Mai, Glamour Magazine’s woman of the year 2005, ties the knot, for reasons she defines as “to support women’s rights.” I hope that this woman who has not backed down in the face of oppression in the name of culture, tradition and religion will continue to hold on tight to that principle even when the honeymoon is over. There are some troubling signs in this new relationship. One is that the groom, Mr. Gabol is an unstable character, younger and indelibly lacking in the maturity she possesses, and was a little too quick to commit suicide with sleeping pills when she turned him down in 2007.
Interestingly, his wife (yes he was married) tried convincing Mukhtar to marry him (the law allows for multiple wives and ample opportunity to ignore the rules about getting permission from the prior wives).
Expectedly, his first wife, Shehla, seems not to take things too seriously, and defiantly loves the camera. She told journalists her and Mukhtar are “like sisters.” How biblical. Agreed that women should make alliances, but my issue with this is that the story of Mukhtar is the story of triumph over tragedy that the shackles of traditionalism confers on women, and yet we now see Mukhtar herself stepping into a complex relationship which is sadly typical of Pakistan’s favorite soap opera theme: one man and two women.
The good news is that Mukhtar seems to be a bit more steadfast and aware of everyone’s rights, including Shehla’s. She insisted Gabol signs over the land he owns and allocates a pportion of his monthly salary to his first wife, as precondition to the second marriage. She also took her time to decide, which is really buying more happiness, and more importantly she refused to move to the neighboring village with him.
Mr. Gabol said he was happy about the fact that he is the husband of a famous woman, but it remains to be seen how he really will stand by her side after he marries her, and after she will still be Mukhtar Mai. At the end, she needs to find something other than her 2 girls school and 1 boy’s school to entertain him with, or he will get bored like he did with Shehla. Pressure is not new to Mukhtar, but this kind takes a new emotional muscle.
I am maintaining an “I don’t know” stance on this. Yes its wonderful that a stigmatized rape victim defied local dogma and married in “holy” matrimony, but with the fall of Swat to the hands of Taliban thugs, and the release of the flogging video of the girl from Swat, there is so much to lose if Mukhtar becomes a victim of someone else’s expectations. She is a national asset in the hands of another man. How enlightened can a man be in and around Multan, feudal capital of Punjab? But then again, like I said I don’t know. How bold and emancipated can a woman be from the same region.
Mukhtar shocked the world by being a poster girl for women’s rights. Yet, when the mundane takes over the creeping up sun every day, he may just may not yell at her for leaving the corners of the rotis thicker or shove her around for attending to him later than she should have when he’d come for his visits, or storm out in a fit of anger if she prefers her school kids to his aspirations. I don’t know if she’ll feel weary and tired for having fought too many battles on too many fronts, and maybe say, this one let me try the local witch doctor solution and endure with the quiet grace of a woman. I don’t know. Still I hope that she and he become the poster couple for a well balanced marriage partnership.
Any film on domestic violence is not an easy one to make; Deepa Metha is getting some vitriolic reviews from India for directing a film limited in technique, plot and dialogue. This barrage of misguided critique is in fact the very essence of the reactionary logic Indians, and South Asians largely, adopt when faced with a complex problem – shoot the messenger.
Likewise, there is absolutely no support for a woman who chooses to react either way on the issue of being a rugmat, a punching bag or a stress ball for a perpetrator, who in 98% of domestic violence cases, is a man. Society and its gatekeepers of the construct of reality blame her, for creating a fuss, general disorder, disharmony, familial discord and what not, for, if she’d rather choose to keep it indoors muffled under the covers of the rule of the mighty, there would be no need to change things. And above all, all South Asia spends an insane amount on weddings precisely to raise the stakes so high that it is ominous for it to not work out. The higher the cost of the wedding, the higher the risk of sunk cost and the more likely the lady will not step out of her tight corner, facing the wall.
So Deepa Methta made a film about a problem 25% of the world’s woman face, and all some people care about is how it was delivered? A standing applause is what it deserves not only for delivery but for the courage it takes to put so much disaster of that magnitude on screen. The Kafkaesque shots alone and their timing are more frightening than the sheer terror of breaking of a young woman’s sprit. Nothing breaks sprit more than poverty: The poverty and sickness that expatriates marinate in as they leave their homelands making it though the day for survival and respect. They often strung their lifestyle on the line of irony, so low that even hanging out in malls while day tenants stayed at their own home was not quite undignified. They refused to change, hence polluting all things great about an already advanced and egalitarian society like Canada.
Chand, played by Preity Zinta comes to Canada, like many before her have, to meet her husband for the first time at an airport arrival lounge. His shyness is ominous, and his mother, most western women would faint at the site of. In between the cacophonous lot are the father in law, who is like a dog that is waiting to be put to sleep and a sister in law whose unemployed husband and two kids with personality disorders are too much of a burden on the house already on half rent.
Heart-shaped school projects of the kids on a fridge, sofa prints that appear only in Indian homes, the cheap motel decors that appeal only to desis who binged on Bollywood candy songs and the blankets that Chand wore in Punjab India all put the viewer far too close to a reality that is inescapable. Particularly ethnic is the embodiment of the Punjabi girl who never seems to remove her yearning for her mother in her cry out for pain. Chand is a poetess at heart, waiting to see her mother give her strength at a long dehydrating journey though a desert and she finds her under a tree. Repeating these verses to herself at a time of not just utter insanity, defined by repeated abuse, but escalation of the level of damage, a smaller and smaller gap to recuperate.
At a time of transition, she finds herself with no familiarity, no reliable friend to listen and give perspective and not even a call back home.
Chand draws her strength from her imagination, setting herself free from the shackles of the mundane, by inventing a serpent who turns into a kinder version of her abusive husband, Rocky, played by Vansh Bhardwaj. There is a much talked about cycle of violence in the domestic abuse, which goes something like this – the perpetrator attacks the victim, the victim recovers from shock and harbors feelings of inadequacy and entrapment, the terror of irrevocable mistake for ending up in a state of terror, soon the perpetrator turns to normalcy by either brushing the violence under the rug over dinner, or a cup of tea, and relieved at the option other than having to construct an elaborate plan of empowerment, the victim sooths her broken and bruised self into the comfort and balm of familiarity. And say if the perpetrator is apologetic, claiming the excuse of being provoked to disrupt happiness to which he has a God-ordained entitlement to, then, all the better for the victim, she has to do even less work and fall for the glory of being the magnanimous forgiver. Until it happens again and again reaching full circles until she is killed. 70% of all Canadian emergency health cases of women are related to domestic violence, and still some critics had the audacity to claim Deepa Mehta’s film portrays a “false” picture of NRI families that are settled abroad.
This is the cycle of violence for domestic abuse, but for the first time someone has talked about the cycle of recovery. For any woman who is a victim of spousal abuse, the escape route is almost impossible to come by independently, and for women like Chand, whose sense of cultural alienation only exaggerates her helplessness, it is even tougher. Her memoir is personal and subjective and very inventive. It opens the door to several ways any victim could burrow though tight corners.
Other Human Rights voices have claimed that the major flaws in the film are that it provides no legal recourse, and one should ask those voices to really talk less and read the difference between a documentary and a feature film.
The murder of a gentle dreams of possibility is terribly bloody. Deepa Mehta has done an extraordinary job in using all textures and a unified theme to deal with how people go about living with cold blooded cruelty.
And how very delicate and vulnerable a girl, bred to marry, now black and blue, asks her husband, her only solace for a future, “Mei tenu change naii lagdi?”(Don’t you like me?)
She a new media professional, a modern Pakistani woman who hates to cook.
He a secular lawyer who derives mephistophilian pleasure out of disturbing the comfortable and rarely comforting the disturbed.
They have nothing in common except their children and Hotel Mohenjodaro.
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