These days when Government College University Lahore wears a barren look drained of intellect, someone like Najaf Yawar, who heads the Business Studies Programme, is like a waft of fresh air. He is cultured, suave, smart and charismatic -- everything it takes to be a thorough professional.
During the last few years, a mass exodus of teaching staff from GCU has adversely impacted its academic standards as well as its research standing, but Najaf Yawar opted to stay put. In relatively dire circumstances, the Business Studies Department (along with the department of Persian) remains at the forefront of the University.
Following his unblemished stint as director of Business Studies, Yawar somehow fell victim to a controversy. While interviewing for admission a female candidate wearing a veil, his colleague merely asked the girl a question regarding the verification of her identity. She was reportedly not asked to remove her veil. Instead the question put to her was: "how can we verify whether the photograph is yours or somebody else’s?"
Such questions are absolutely valid given the security situation of the country. The candidate insisted for the female faculty member to do the needful (verification) if at all it was necessary. Some argument ensued and the student went off in a huff and made some statements on social media and levelled accusations against the interviewing panel. She tried to justify her stance by invoking moral and religious edicts, unmindful of the fact that all females have to remove their veils for the verification of their identity before NADRA officials. Then why all the fuss?
The social media went berserk and many disparaging remarks were passed, which is lamentable to say the least. For Najaf Yawar and his colleagues, it was extremely stressful. After looking at the responses on Facebook, I felt like empathising with them for being bullied in a callous way.
It is true, however, that the practice of bullying academics cuts across nationalities and cultures. In our case, the situation is somewhat peculiar. However, to make sense of that practice, one needs to historicise it and also to put it in a wider context.
It appears that persecution of academics and scholars is a concomitant feature of advancement of historical forces. Socrates, Galileo, Copernicus and Bruno stood up against the forces of obscurantism, sacrificing their lives. Eventually history redeemed them, though after a considerable time had elapsed since their persecution. Even in the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci, Marc Bloch and Federico Garcia Lorca suffered the same fate.
In the subsequent era, new grounds in scientific theory were broken and the West led the march of humanity towards progress and relative prosperity. Now in the educational milieu of the West, persecution of academics is nothing but a sordid saga, consigned only to the history books.
Western establishments and the literati in general have at last come to realise the futility and inanity of attacks against an individual upholding a different ideology. To quite a large extent, they have built their intellectual moorings squarely in reaction to the ghastly act of obliterating such personalities. In our part of the world (you may read it as the Muslim world), academia continues to be vulnerable. Sadly, ultra rightwing establishments have bullied and systematically hounded scholars adhering to different sets of ideas. They have been forced to legitimise the autocratic rule of the Muslim rulers. Some of them demonstrated the temerity to pick holes in their method of governance and they then paid a price, usually with their lives.
A few of my friends might point to Syed Qutb’s execution by Gamal Abdul Nasser’s regime (on August 29, 1966) and Maulana Maududi’s incarceration in the wake of Anti-Ahmadi movement of 1953 to counter my assertion. The irrefutable fact, however, remains that several academics belonging to both sides of the ideological divide were hounded out during the Ayub regime. Many of them were transferred to far-flung areas. Consequently, most of them left teaching and joined other professions.
The crux of the argument rests in the fact that most of those bullied and hounded were mavericks who ventured to challenge the status quo. Those hailing from the religious right were few and far between.
In Pakistan, one disconcerting aspect is the deployment of religion as an instrument to bully academics. As stated earlier, it is not a new phenomenon. Dr Farhat Mehmood, a veteran academic from GC University recalls, "It was the in late 1960s that the academics were physically abused by a student offshoot of an Islamic party. However, in the 1980s, the academics with the reputation of being liberal or leftist were made to suffer in one sense or the other".
It was during the Zia regime that religion was used for bullying college teachers and also university academics. Dr Munir, Mushahid Hussain, Sajjad Naseer and Dr Mujeeb (all of them from the Punjab University) are some such people who received a raw deal at the hands of the Islamists. The writer is a witness to Prof. Yaqoob Mir being publicly humiliated by the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba operatives at the F.C. College Lahore when he was the principal.
The frequent invocation of Islam in academic issues and debates reflects ominously on the overall state of education in Pakistan. This has had a particularly debilitating effect on social sciences and humanities. Thus the question worth asking is -- whether it is at all possible to conduct higher education in the social sciences and humanities in Pakistan, given the existence of such a mindset.
Keeping in view the situation at hand, one can at best empathise with Najaf Yawar. He is the most admired of all teachers but, in this situation where he is distressed and flustered, there is hardly anything that one can do. Academics are being bullied and are helpless too.