Saturday, December 25, 2021
Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari pays glowing tributes to Father of the Nation Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on his 146th birthday.
Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has paid glowing tributes to Father of the Nation Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah on his 146th birthday being celebrated tomorrow across the country. In his message on the occasion, the PPP Chairman said that attempts were made by the dictatorial forces and their cronies to dent the ideology of the Founder of the Nation and drift the country from his vision but the democratic forces led by PPP have always foiled their designs through monumental struggles. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the tallest personality among his contemporaries and he dreamt an egalitarian country for the Muslims in the sub-continent to live in peaceful cohesion. He said that it was only Quaid-e-Awam Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who accomplished the dream of Quaid-e-Azam by gifting the first-ever unanimous 1973 Constitution to the nation, founded strong economic base in the country and an stronger defence by launching nuclear programme. Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto took steps for making Quaid’s Pakistan a welfare state where the rights of women, children and the marginalized segments were given protection and promotion. He pledged that people of Pakistan and the PPP would following the vision and mission of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah as his Party is the true torch-bearer of the ideology of Pakistan.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25942/
Pakistan slips on a slippery slope of religious militancy
#Pakistan - The promise of a secular Jinnah
By Areej Fatima
Whether Jinnah wanted an Islamic state or a state for Muslims is as contested a subject as it gets. I will try to substantiate the latter by taking examples from his personal and political life, values, ideals, public statements and practices.
A firm believer in Hindu-Muslim unity, Jinnah initially joined the Congress to work towards that goal. He aspired to be the Muslim Gokhale, a prominent Indian liberal. On the establishment of the Muslim League in 1906, the Quaid dismissed its agenda drawing a comparison with British conspiracy to divide and rule. Later in 1913, he joined Muslim League and got Lucknow Pact to his credit in 1916. Jinnah was bestowed with the title “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” for his selfless efforts towards uniting people of India on one platform irrespective of their religious identity.
Even though ironic, it was actually Gandhi who first created division on the basis of religion and later became a beacon of secularism. He first used the religion card to support the Khilafat Movement and recruited Muslim fundamentalists and Hindu conservatives in the Congress which Jinnah was strongly opposed to and asserted that “it must lead to disaster.” He finally resigned from Congress in 1920 out of frustration over the divisive religio-political policies of Gandhi and Congress. Jinnah then used the platform of the Muslim League to propagate this vision of Muslim-Hindu unity and Indian nationalism.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah supported the “Inter-Faith Marriage Bill” and banned child marriages. Moreover, he was a part of the Fabian Society (The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.) in England. Jinnah was impressed by Mustafa Kemal Attaturk who was a secular dictator, so much so that his daughter Dina nicknamed him “Grey Wolf” which was essentially Attaturk’s title. He was an Anglo-Saxon man at heart and his lifestyle is a clear manifestation of that.
Jinnah found himself in a quandary when on one hand, he wanted inter-faith unity rooted in Indian Nationalism and on the other, he needed to defend the interests of the Muslim minority of India. Eventually, he had to choose the latter after contemplating the power deficit that Muslims would have hypothetically faced in a united India under Hindu rule. The Quaid had realised that the Indian Muslim conundrum was not as much religious as it was political. Since he had already seen the indifference of the Hindu-led Congress towards Muslims’ demands, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution and laid the foundation for the creation of Pakistan.
Ayesha Jalal in her book, “The Sole Spokesman,” argues that Jinnah wanted to use Pakistan as a bargaining counter only and that in the later stages it was Congress that insisted on Partition while Jinnah was against it. According to her, Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan did not entail partition and it was not a Pan-Islamic call, rather a “secular polity with political choice and safeguards.”
When a Muslim Leaguer chanted the slogan “Pakistan ka matlab kya, La Ilaha Illallah” at the last session of the All India Muslim League, the Quaid-i-Azam refuted him and said: “Neither the Muslim League Working Committee nor I ever passed a resolution [called] ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya’ - you may have used it to catch a few votes.”
Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah expressed his desire to keep religion and state separate in his famous speech; “You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, calling religion a personal matter, Jinnah assigned each citizen equal value, rights and responsibilities; “You will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”
There are many examples of Jinnah appointing non-Muslims to important offices after the De Jure birth of Pakistan. One of them is Jogendranath Mandal who served as the country’s first minister of law and labour and also was the second minister of Commonwealth and Kashmir affairs. Sir M Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmedi, served as the first Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Jinnah warned against the threat of sectarianism. In a public meeting on March 21, 1948, he said: “Provincialism has been one of the curses; and so is sectionalism -Shia, Sunni, etc. You should think, live and act in terms that your country is Pakistan and you are a Pakistani.”
In contemporary Pakistan, religious bigotry, discrimination, extremism, sectarianism and violence are not only normalised but institutionalised. The weaponisation of religion by the state has become a Frankenstein that will not spare anyone, if not neutralised. Today, religious minorities cannot hold important official positions and they are shunned by the state. In our false and inflated sense of religious self-righteousness and pride, we have arrogantly disowned intellectual greats like Abdus Salam, Atif Mian, Pervez Hoodbhoy and others over religious differences.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan that persecutes people on religious grounds is not what the Quaid had envisioned and he would be very displeased to see where we are now. Jinnah did not struggle for a haven for Muslims only to witness the Muslim majority become the oppressor instead. Religion is for individuals, not for states. A state cannot have a religion since it is itself a socially constructed entity. Any social contract that brings people together should be based on the safeguard of equal rights and opportunities for all, regardless of petty racial, ethnic, linguistic or religious differences.
When states acquire a religion and legislate upon such divisive lines, incidents like the Sialkot mob lynching of Priyantha Kumara become inevitable. The only hope for a better, peaceful, inclusive, welfare-oriented future lies in the separation of religion and state. Blasphemy laws should be scrapped from the constitution as they aggravate the prevalent religious intolerance. Pakistanis have to be trained in a secular, democratic tradition and taught the wisdom in accepting and respecting diversity and tolerating differences of opinion. In this regard, awareness about the right of Freedom of Thought, Speech and Expression is indispensable.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/919630-the-promise-of-a-secular-jinnah
Pakistan’s misfortune is to have the soul brother of Erdogan in power today - The pitfalls of ideology
RECEP Erdogan, president of Turkey, says his faith in Islam stops him from raising bank interest rates. His hard-line position sent the lira tumbling from one low to another; in the past three months it has lost half its value. In spite of a partial recovery, Turks are still saddled with an inflation rate so high that supermarket employees are barely able to keep up with changing labels. But Erdogan has not budged: “As a Muslim, I will continue doing what our religion tells us. This is the command.”
Command? Dear Mr President, surely as one who aspires to be a Muslim hero you have read the Quran. Therein stands the clear injunction: “Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest/usury” (2:275). “Forbidden” here does not mean negotiating what is low or middle or high — forbidden means zero, exactly zero. Haram is haram. This is why all early Muslim scholars rejected interest.
Many scholars still do today, particularly Arabs and Pakistanis. In 2014, the top ulema of Pakistan belonging to the Fiqhi Majlis said that even the so-called Sharia-compliant Islamic banking merely renames interest as profit and, as such, is deception. All banking, they concluded, is haram. Historically, banking was absent in Muslim countries until the 18th century because nothing except zero interest can be allowed.
Recep Erdogan and Imran Khan have given the driving seat to emotion and the back seat to reason.
The Ottoman rulers of Turkey were, however, not ideologues. As pragmatists who ran an empire, they broke the ban on banking because they well knew that no banking meant no trading. This Western innovation had to be adopted come what may. But, to be safe, they first looked around for muftis who could justify European banking — and found some. One can endlessly debate whether these justifications are genuine or manufactured.
But in Erdogan’s Turkey, state and religion have been joined together; ideology has trumped pragmatism. Still, puzzles remain: how come an interest rate of six per cent is somehow un-Islamic but a 4pc rate is okay? What about 5pc? Erdogan is untroubled by such questions because he is an Ertugrul-like figure in his own imagination, convinced of his absolute wisdom. He recently lashed out at Turkish businessmen who are unimpressed by his faith-driven economic policies. After chairing a cabinet meeting on the falling lira, he accused them of “scheming to topple the government” and said their hopes would be in vain.
Read: Lira plunges again after Erdogan rules out higher rates
Erdogan is just one example where ideology — whether religious or secular — gives the driving seat to emotion and the back seat to reason. Turkey is in trouble, but the United States is in still deeper waters. Even in the post-Trump era many elected officials — both in the Senate and Congress — are ideologically charged, radical, right-wing crackpots who deny climate change and conflate gun-control with a communist takeover. Some lawmakers tacitly or openly supported the Capitol’s takeover by a mob. Will dysfunctional America get back on the rails? The world is watching.
Pakistan’s misfortune is to have the soul brother of Erdogan in power today. Forget the falling rupee — it will surely make some small recoveries soon and, for a while, everyone will be satisfied again. Much more serious is that our schools are producing hordes of ignorant, bigoted, hyper-religious Sialkot-type lynchers who are totally skill-deficient. This will get far worse when the ideologically motivated Single National Curriculum (SNC), the brainchild of PM Imran Khan — becomes fully operational.
The SNC conjoins regular schools with madressahs. Across the country, regular schools are being dragged down and turned into seminaries. The pre-SNC situation was bad enough with abysmally low achievement levels in reading, writing and reasoning. SNC, by making the rote-learning system still stronger, will deal the death blow. On the one hand children will memorise vastly greater amounts of religious materials. On the other hand, only a single official textbook is specified for each subject. A student memorising selected parts of that book can get full marks.
Read: Education — PTI’s plan exposed
On a global level, Pakistani children presently stand at the bottom of achievement levels. Inferior to their counterparts in Iran, India and Bangladesh, they are almost always absent from competitions like the international science and mathematics Olympiads. When they do compete, they perform poorly. The solitary exception is invariably an O-A level or IB student linked to a foreign examination system.
This under-achievement kills the possibility of Pakistan doing well in science and technology even into the 22nd century. Lacking scientists, engineers, and technicians of quality, Pakistan has reached a dead end. CPEC’s billions failed to ignite industrial, engineering, scientific, or business activity. The country has no space programme, no biotech labs turning out new products, and no significant indigenous hi-tech industry in any domain. Last year, Pakistan’s software exports — a measure of brain power — stood at barely $2 billion (India’s were $148bn).
On the academic front, Pakistani professors churn out thousands of so-called research papers every year but these are mostly worthless. Today, the Pakistan Academy of Science is stuffed with persons having fake credentials; its office-bearers have the highest national honours but they stand exposed by international organisations as cheaters and plagiarists. The continuing revelations of one such organisation, Retraction Watch, are like water off a duck’s back. None in the PAS so much as bat an eyelid at the exposés — fraud and bluster has become a way of life.
These grim problems can be overcome if there is a desire to be ruthlessly honest. But when aggressive self-righteous zealots grab the reins of power, the chances decrease. Such dogmatists make reform impossible by asserting that they — and they alone — know the truth. Their moral absolutes lead to strong emotions, diminished reasoning capacity and dysfunction in governance.
Buoyed up by Pakistan’s victory in Afghanistan, on many occasions PM Khan — who greatly admires Erdogan — has gleefully lauded the Taliban as a liberating force. He has lauded the Pakistani madrassahs that produced the Taliban and showered funds upon them. Now he wants our regular schools to emulate Taliban-style education — hence SNC. By official notification dated Dec 21, co-education in Punjab’s schools will be phased out. In fulfilling PM Khan’s ideological fantasies, Pakistan will pay a terrible price.