Sinning believer

When someone gives you a choice to be branded as a ‘hypocrite’ or a ‘sinning believer’ after quoting from your column, there is a strong desire to retort. But living in Pakistan and surrounded by stark realities of human suffering on various counts, you could indulge as much in debating abstract and obscure ideas emanating from a warped sense of history.
So before I move on to discussing the real issues that emerge on a daily basis, in this piece as well as in the future, I feel the urge to make some final comments on what Dr Muzaffar Iqbal has argued last week and a couple of weeks earlier.
On the one hand, he says that there is something divine about the idea of a union of Muslim states and on the other, he impresses upon the earthly economic benefits to be achieved as a result. He relies on an amalgam of history and religion to belabour his point.
The Umayyads, the Abbasides, the Safavids, the Fatimids, the Ottomans, the Sultanates of Delhi, the Mughals, et al, were empires and not caliphates. Any possibility of a caliphate ended with the martyrdom of Hazrat Ali. Also, many major Muslim poets, scientists and scholars between the ninth and the 16th centuries, whose achievements are boasted about by the orthodox interpreters of religion today, espoused a different view of the world from the similar interpreters of religion in their times. Hence, they were defamed, degraded and condemned by the so-called custodians of faith.
Besides, it will help us if some examples of intellectual achievement or large-scale public service for all humanity are found from the past four hundred years of Muslim history. As far as the fate of 1.6 billion Muslims today is concerned, it is linked with the liberation of the oppressed, wretched, exploited and dispossessed everywhere. To me, that is the true spirit of Islam.
I learnt it from Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Ali Shariati besides others who think that Islam stands for the liberation of humanity, not Muslims alone. If brute force is applied in Afghanistan, it was also applied in Vietnam, Korea and Latin America. Canada, where the learned columnist lives, sent troops to Afghanistan after 9/11 as a part of Nato-Isaf. He could have at least stopped paying taxes to the Canadian government in protest. Although, history tells us that the Taliban also took over Afghanistan by applying brute force.
In Pakistan, our men, women and children are targeted and blown apart by terrorist outfits in the name of religion. And, mind you, this did not begin with the re-advent of the Americans with their allies in 2001. Our own foreign and defence policies coupled with a complete indifference towards meeting the basic needs of the masses are primarily responsible for our predicament. Remember, the conservatives welcomed the Americans to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Another blatant reminder to those who think, even after 1971, that sharing a faith is enough to unite peoples is the turmoil in Balochistan. It is the equitable sharing of resources and realisation of equal rights that keep people together and happy. While the federation must reach out to the Baloch faithfully this time around, Baloch too must not boycott the upcoming elections. The participation will help them negotiate their rights better. No outsider can interfere if we make the right choices. Same is true in dealing with sectarianism.
Once again the martyrs of Kohistan remind the civil and military powers of how urgent it has become to eliminate the causes for religious extremism. Otherwise, we fall apart.

The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and author. Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com