ARE TERRORISTS REALLY HIDDEN?
{Authored and Shared by Saadia Asad}
Currently there is an army operation going on by Pakistan Army to root out the terrorists hiding in North Waziristan. That is all well and good because we need to be rid of these heartless people, bent upon destroying us at all levels: security, sports, infrastructure, communications, international ties and so on But what of the terrorists with whom we are living day in and day out.
These are the people who beat up or behead their own sons and daughters for contracting love marriage, these are also the people who stand by and watch these proceedings without uttering a word, and these are the lawyers who let rape victims run away from court premises. These kind of terrorists are not living in hiding: who let a mentally disturbed man burn to death for blasphemy, who rape a five year old and abandon her to die, unwilling to admit DNA as a proof of a rape carried out or raise the marriage age for girls, who refuse to register FIRs, let witnesses be killed on their way to testify and accused get away. The weapons of these un-hidden terrorists are not guns and bombs, but narrow minds, swollen egos, illiteracy, misshapen ideas of self-glory and above all ignorance.
Pakistan faces external threats from terrorists whose motivation is power and dominance, internally from terrorists who are feeding and acting on their ignorance and being exploited.
If our army is fighting the former kind at borders, how to fend those off among us?
Countless young are sacrificed almost daily, on the basis of ill-conceived ideals of religion and honor. The corrupt and ineffective police, education, judicial system and governance bar the common man to exit this cocoon of misconceived ideas. Except for a few articles in newspapers, rarely does anyone raise a voice against these offences. Our education, our electronic media, our intellectuals and social workers need to form a front against these acts of social terrorism.
Together we need to rid society of this archaic, regressive mindset to create a society where young men and women can make, and stand up to their choices without fear of being persecuted and cry out foul with the conviction of being heard and dealt with fairly. Initially a system has to give support and protection, to later on get strong, supportive, progressive and patriotic members willing to work for its betterment, rather than bring destruction upon itself and others.
Saadia Asad
LHR. Pakistan
I totally endorse Ms. Saadia Asad and heartened that Pakistani women are speaking up as they are the one’s really being abused by the “archaic, regressive mindset”. This mindset is unchecked because of illiterate clergy busy at every street and corner of our country spreading their twisted understanding of religion. The literate ones, so called Ulema, are too busy contemplating on petty differences of sects, deciding who is shaheed and who is not and failing to guide the faithfuls. Media in our country is playing the role of vultures, always sniffing for next headline and not following up on the cases like of the Salman Taseer’s murderer Qadri or false cases of blasphemy, stoning to death, honor killings etc. because they are cowards and corrupt just like majority of our people. Coward and corrupt nations finally end up like Iraq – where a monster ruled for twenty+ years and all these Ulema and Jihadis never raised their head and when foreign intervention dislodged him all the “brave” are going at each other for some piece of meat. Our history shows that we understand only force and it will eventually be the use of force that will destroy the evil mindset in our country. I have no hope from our scholars and intellectuals at all to ever wake up and interpret Islam keeping the passage of time in mind and come out of 7th century, making Islam relevant. Only those survive who adapt.
Babar
Many Western writers have deeply probed the bitter struggle in the Muslim world between the forces of religion and law and those of violence and lawlessness. When empires fall, they tend to stay dead. The same is true of government system. The fall of the Soviet bloc dealt a deathblow to communism; now no one expects Marxism to make a comeback. After the World War One, the Middle East was divided into small states. But Islam’s political and religious ideology remained alive within its concept of Islam din wa dawla. Within this concept, Islam in its past, exclusively paid attention to things and matters that appear to be of this world and is thus recognized to be more of a socially and politically world-based religion. Its concept of divine sovereignty, akin to the sovereignty of the natural law, and man as the conductor of politics—a Khalifa, or viceroy of God—makes it easy for different cultures and traditions to accept. For the West the Islamic political system (not religion) must be stamped out just as communism; and this is the core of current conflict between the world of Islam from Marrakesh to Indonesia and the Western democratic idealism. Addressing the Security Council, Michael Gorbachov said that in the new world order there is no place for ideologies, and the Western powers not only seconded his call, but jumped into arena declaring that Shari’ah law of political Islam in the modern Muslim world is a serious threat to democracy. Even Muslim scholars are not explaining that the Shari’ah law evolved tremendously from the time of the 1st Caliph to the day of fall of Ottoman and Mughal Empires. The fundamentalists are being educated to jump back to the period of the 1st Caliph so that the progress of 13 centuries of Muslim rules should be wiped out and Muslims, just like India and now China accept the Western Civilization as the only one civilization to rule the world.
What is being viewed today as terrorism, is being sponsored by the Western powers to destabilize every Muslim State. It is a strategy of keeping the Muslims involved in a long fight between themselves. On the one hand the terrorist groups are being financed by the US satellite state of the Saudi-Wahhabis and on the other hand state armies of the Muslim countries like Pakistan are asked to finish them. The ideology of Abdul Wahhab which helped destroy the Ottoman-Caliphate is being used to kill the concept of Islamic Civilization. Terrorism in Pakistan can stop overnight if the Saudi Wahhabis stop funding the terrorist groups active in KP and Afghanistan.
Mirza Ashraf
The basic conflict in the Muslim world is the Shia-Sunni divide. The raw religious intolerance feeds into tribal, regional and economic issues. Perhaps the greatest curse for the mideastern muslims is oil. It has allowed Saudis and Iranis to export their peculiarly narrow visions of Islam to the far reaches and raised an entire generation for violent sectarian warfare. Sunnis are killing Shias and vice versa for their faiths reciting the same Allah Akbar. The extreme positions filter through whatever governance that exists. Instead of involving into a singular vision what is emerging is the fanatic lunacy of ISIS that has dismembered Syria and dismantled Iraq.
It is too simplistic to state that such conflicts are being sponsored by the west. The US and western policies have been inconsistent but the muslim ummah is being denigrated by the actions of its own religious and political leaders. Until they learn to respect their age old differences and agree to coexist in harmony as they have for over a thousand years, there is going to be little peace and less order.