Blame It On The Rain

In between the wailing of a 17 year old girl who was held down and flogged mercilessly in front of a crowd of people, I can hear Mushtaq Minhas from ‘Bolta Pakistan’ insisting that this is a ‘non-issue’ and that he and Nusrat Javed are wasting their time discussing it. The word ‘conspiracy’ floats in and almost word-for-word, Minhas parrots the words of Muslim Khan, a Tehreek-e-Taliban representative, when he says the release of the video is a conspiracy to defame Islam.

A logical, rational person may point out to Minhas that the real defamation of Islam comes when illiterate, ignorant men repurpose the laws of the Quran to make their lives easier, and use the verses of our Holy Book like a weapon against defenceless women and children. A logical, thinking human being will point out that the cornerstone of the Prophet’s life, whom we are to emulate, was compassion, decency and honesty, and that he never would have allowed women to be locked up inside 4 walls, that the first muslim society was an open, tightly-knit community, where men respected women, rather than slandering them. A decent compassionate human being would have put himself in the position of those women under siege in the valley of Swat, and would have agreed, that while other issues pertaining to women in Pakistan are swept under the carpet, that ANY discussion of this sort is preferable to the silence. An intelligent man would have used this to bring up the wretched practices of Karo Kari and marrying women to the Quran; a smart man would have understood that this has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with humanity.

But, like Nawaz Sharif, like Zardari and their respective parties, Minhas considers himself a God. They aren’t human beings, they cannot make a mistake; because whenever anything shows them up in a bad light, there’s always a conspiracy being hatched in unknown dark rooms, by unknown dark men, to defame these Gods. Otherwise, who knows, they may have to acknowledge the flaws in their own ideologies, and admit to making a mistake. Gosh! That would be a tragedy of unimaginable dimensions, wouldn’t it?

On the other side of the coin is the jubilation that everyone feels at Iftikhar Chaudhry’s suo moto notice, and I can’t help but wonder what that will achieve? When Nawaz Sharif arrogantly claimed that he will not accept the courts of Pakistan as an authority over him, he set a precedence that will have long-lasting, detrimental effects on this country. Right after his debacle, the Taliban decided that they, too, have no need to accept the authority of Pakistan’s Civil Judiciary on Swat (and their concerns have nothing to do with PCO/non-PCO judiciaries – all of Pakistan’s judges are irrelevant to them). Under this basis, and as soon as Zardari signs the ‘Nizam-e-Adl’ bill into law, CJ Chaudhry has no jurisdiction over the Taliban, and certainly cannot order anyone into his court. Even if he did, who is going to bring them in? Our police forces have no jurisdiction to the valley of Swat anymore. We sold it to the devil a few short weeks ago. Short of bombing them back to the Stone Age, all we can do about Swat is sit back and watch.

Rather than languish on the sidelines, however, let’s stop letting these damn mullahs and politicians get away with blaming everything on the rain (have you noticed how nothing is ever their fault? It’s always either a conspiracy or the previous government’s fault, or the policies of ‘foreign hands’). Let’s kill this precedence now, put aside this irrational fear of discussing what has become taboo, and let us acknowledge these truths:

1. The leaders of this country are neither infallible nor angels. They have faults, they make many mistakes, and if they can’t own up to their mistakes, they should be discarded.
2. The mullahs in this country are neither infallible nor angels. Their interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah is just that, their own interpretation, colored by their own experiences and cultural norms, and either they accept that they too may be wrong, or they acknowledge that they want to be viewed as Gods, not humans; and when they do, we should discard them.
3. The laws of Islam are immutable, but they need to be applied according to the world we live in, and not subject to one section of society’s interpretation of them. Ijtehad can and should be applied to every law in the Quran, and an open discussion should be held on what is or is not acceptable in today’s world. Our religious parties, and some not-so-religious parties, have made this impossible by using their own man-made laws to silence dissenters. How long do we live in this shadow without losing every vestige of self-worth and individualism?

This needs to be done openly, and with the involvement of all sections of society, or we will soon be a bitter parody of Afghanistan under Taliban rule. We need to develop a culture where we listen to the other’s point of view and learn to live with dissent.