Speakers at a conference on Tuesday termed intolerance and illiteracy the major causes of turbulence on the soil of the Pakhtuns and called for efforts to promote Pakhtun culture.
The conference titled Peace and the Pakhtuns was held at the Pashto Department of the University of Peshawar. Vice-chancellor Prof Dr Azmat Hayat Khan was the chief guest. Prof Aseer Mangal and Prof Islam Gohar were among the speakers.
They said maintenance of peace had become a global challenge, adding that world powers were uninterested to address the root causes of violence and unrest in Muslim countries.
The speakers criticised western media for portraying a negative image of the Pakhtuns.
The western media is manipulating the facts, one of the speakers said, adding external powers were using the soil of the Pakhtuns as a battlefield for their financial and strategic gains.
Prof Aseer Mangal said Pakhtuns were peace-loving people and believed in mutual harmony as evident from Pashto poetry. He dubbed inequality and lack of dialogue as the main cause of the poor image of Pakhtuns in the world.
In his address, Prof Dr Azmat Hayat underscored the need for promoting Pashto language and literature to make it a language of the market, which he saw as the solution to the problems confronting the Pakhtuns. Language keeps a nation alive. The world wants to know about us but we have been unable to present our real picture. The classics written by our forefathers in Pashto literature had not been translated into various languages and this was the reason that Pashto was the least understood language in the world, he added.
Other speakers said there was a dire need to adopt a national policy based on mutual cooperation and positive approach to overcome the problems confrinting the Pakhtuns. Prof Islam Gohar in his welcome address underlined the importance of the seminar.
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