Category Archives: History

The Art Of Capturing The People’s Mandate

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A chronological history of systematic subversion of Pakistani people’s mandate.

Written by : Dr. Nazzir Mahmood(The News July 28, 20180)

Shared by : Mirza Ashraf

In the seven decades of Pakistan’s existence, at least seven strategies or tactics have been developed in the country to capture or steal people’s mandate.
These tactics – or tools if you will – have been used with various degrees of success in the past 70 years, but one common feature among them is that most of these tools were perfected in the 1950s and then used again and again in each succeeding decade. So, what exactly are these tactics that have been so useful and how people keep falling prey to them?
First, topple the government or its leader without resorting to any no-confidence motion. This tool was first used within the very first week of Pakistan’s creation when the elected government of Dr Khan Saheb in the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was removed without a no-confidence motion. It is an established practice that if a national or provincial government needs to be removed, the opposition introduces a no-confidence motion and if the ruling leader or party does not have enough support in the concerned assembly, they lose the confidence vote. This is the legal and constitutional way of removing a government or its leader.
The removal of Dr Khan was not the last such episode. In fact, this engendered a plethora of such removals from both the centre and the provinces. The chief ministers of East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh were repeatedly removed at the behest of the central government. You will find not a couple, but dozens of such incidents in the history of Pakistan. The names are too many to cite here, but from Dr Khan, Ayub Khuhro and Fazlul Haq to the Bhuttos and the Sharifs, there is a long list of leaders whose mandate was captured or stolen.
Second, call them traitors and deprive them of their popular support. For this, a leader or a party does not need to be a popular leader across Pakistan. If you are a provincial or regional leader, or you are not likely to win many seats in the elections, even then you can be labelled a traitor. The condition is that you must deviate from the dominant narrative. If that narrative is of hatred and religious discord, you just need to talk about peace and harmony and you qualify to be a traitor.
Perhaps the first leader to be declared a traitor was Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and then there is a long line of them: Molvi Fazlul Haq, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Suhrawardy, Fatima Jinnah, the Bhuttos, down to the Sharifs. All these leaders have carried the proud stigma of being a traitor at various times. This tool is useful against big, medium and small-scale leaders alike. Even if your party or leader is not likely to win a couple of seats in elections, your defiant mood and questioning nature can deprive you of whatever meagre public support you command.
Third, create a conspiracy case. If declaring a traitor doesn’t do the trick, go a step further and concoct a conspiracy case that can substantiate allegations of treason. Be it the Rawalpindi, Agartala and Hyderabad conspiracy cases or the airplane high-jacking case, all have been used to prove that those who differ from the dominant power – civilian or military – run a risk of being involved in a conspiracy against the state. The hollowness of these cases can be gauged from the fact that even after being convicted in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case, Faiz Ahmed Faiz still commanded people’s respect. The Agartala and Hyderabad conspiracy cases were abolished by Gen Ayub Khan and Gen Ziaul Haq respectively, when they outlived their utility. The airplane high-jacking case died its own death when Nawaz was exiled.
Fourth, physically eliminate the leader. Liaquat Ali Khan was perhaps the first leader of a national stature who was eliminated in this fashion. Irrespective of what wrongs he committed, Liaquat Ali Khan was the leader of the house and commanded majority support. Though the real conspiracy behind his assassination was never fully disclosed, those who benefitted the most from his elimination included Malik Ghulam Mohammad, Iskandar Mirza and Gen Ayub Khan; all three of them became the heads of state one after the other. In the presence of Liaquat Ali Khan, perhaps none of them could have been elevated to such a lofty position.
Be it the judicial murder of Z A Bhutto or the terrorist attack on Benazir Bhutto, they deprived people of their favourite leaders. But physical elimination is not done by assassination alone. You can also exile a leader for 10 years like Nawaz Sharif, or put him/her behind bars for a long time such as Asif Zardari. Those who do all of this are never answerable in any court, even if the cases against those assassinated, incarcerated or exiled are highly controversial and lack any semblance of judicial accuracy. You may also capture the mandate just by creating an atmosphere in which leaders’ safety is always under threat.
Fifth, you may steal peoples’ mandate by abrogating laws and writing your own constitution. Ghulam Mohammad used his own interpretation of the law and the federal court stamped it for him. Maj Gen Iskandar Mirza abrogated the first constitution that had come into being after almost a decade. Gen Ayub Khan formed a constitutional commission of judges but then ultimately wrote his own constitution, promulgated in 1962 and arrogated all powers to himself, thus depriving people of their mandate for over a decade. Gen Yahya Khan abrogated the 1962 constitution and gave his own legal framework order.
Gen Ziaul Haq and Gen Musharraf mutilated the constitution so much that it took decades to restore some of its original countenance, though a portion of it is still bleeding and mauled. But this was not done by dictators alone. Even Z A Bhutto made changes to the constitution that have had a lasting impact on the minorities. Nawaz Sharif in his 1990s’ incarnations made such loathsome changes to the constitution that it started resembling a document from the Middle Ages. In this disenfranchisement of large segments of society, the judiciary was hand-in-glove.
Sixth, to capture the mandate you can use the media to your heart’s content to tell the people that the leaders they love are a worthless bunch of crooks or nincompoops. The print media was used effectively against the second prime minister of Pakistan, Khawaja Nazimuddin in the early 1950s. Then both the print and electronic media were used against Fatima Jinnah. After toppling Z A Bhutto, a series of programmes were shown on PTV that maligned Bhutto and his family. In the 1990s, the media was again used against the Bhuttos, when the Sharifs were relatively favoured.
Finally, the seventh tactic, or tool, to capture people’s mandate is to simply manipulate the elections. Perhaps the first such practice was used against Mirza Ibrahim, then on a massive scale against Fatima Jinnah in the 1960s. This manipulation can range from installing outright hostile caretaker governments, such as Ghulam Ishaq Khan did when in 1990 he made Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi the caretaker prime minister while the latter was stiffly against Benazir Bhutto, or installing Jam Sadiq Ali as caretaker chief minister of Sindh who surpassed all levels of indecency against Benazir Bhutto and her party, which enjoyed popular support at the time. So much so, that the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad had to be created to capture the mandate.

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Saint Valentine’s Day-The story behind is hardly romantic

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Who was Saint Valentine and why he was murdered-by Paul Ratner

Valentine’s Day is named after St. Valentine, who has become known as the patron saint of lovers. He was a rather mercurial figure about whom little is known.

Who was St. Valentine and why does he somehow bless the hearts of lovers in the middle of February? One can imagine some combination of a cherubic Cupid and a saintly old man with a nice smile fulfilling that role. The truth is, of course, more complicated. First of all, there was not just one Saint Valentine. And the one we most commonly associate with the holiday was a martyr who happened to be beheaded on February 14th in a story that is hardly romantic.

There were actually three men named Saint Valentine who all lived around the same time in the third century AD. Two of these men, known as Saint Valentine of Rome and Saint Valentine of Terni, lived in Italy. And the third was in a Roman province in North Africa.

The one we officially celebrate on Valentine’s Day is the Saint Valentine of Rome, but it’s likely the stories of several Valentines merged into one over time since “Valentius” (meaning “worthy,” “strong” and “powerful” in Latin) was a popular moniker at the time. Several martyrs ended up with that name.

The church itself has some doubts about what specifically happened in Saint Valentine’s life. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius I described St. Valentine’s as a martyr like those “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.” He knew how little was really known about the saint while establishing February 14th as the day to celebrate St. Valentine’s life.

Trial of St. Valentine

Circa 260 AD, The trial of St Valentine, patron saint of lovers. Original Artist: By Bart Zeitblom (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

St. Valentine of Rome was supposedly a temple priest who was executed near Rome by the anti-Christian Emperor Claudius II for helping wed Roman soldiers who were not allowed to marry in the Christian faith.

St. Valentine of Interamna (modern Terni, Italy) was a bishop who was also martyred. It is additionally possible they there the same person – one biography says Bishop Valentine was born and lived in Interamna but when he was on a temporary stay in Rome, he was imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded there on February 14, 269 A.D. 

According to one storyline, the Roman Emperor went to such measures against Valentine because the saint tried to get him to convert to Christianity. This just enraged Claudius who tried to get Valentine to renounce his faith. The martyr refused, so the emperor ordered him beaten with clubs and stones and subsequently executed.

One or both of the St. Valentines are thought to be buried in a cemetery in the north of Rome. Little is known about the third Valentine in North Africa other than his supposed martyrdom.

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Elizabeth I’s Alliance With Islam

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Shared by Syed Ehtisham.

An interesting Tudor historical story, Muslims will surmise Its your call to analyze.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/sultan-queen-elizabeth-england-islam-jerry-brotton/

The Secret History of Elizabeth I’s Alliance With Islam

Catholic Europe shunned England so the Protestant queen traded with its enemies—and changed her country’s culture forever.

Queen Elizabeth I of England reached out to Islamic leaders “for hard-nosed political and commercial reasons,” says author Jerry Brotton

By Simon Worrall

PUBLISHED 

In 1570, Elizabeth I was in a bind. She had been excommunicated by the Pope, and her country was shunned by the rest of Europe. To avoid ruin, England needed allies. The queen sought help from a surprising source: the Islamic world.

The Tudor period has supplied endless popular entertainments—from Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth movies to the television series The Tudors—but this story has rarely been told. Jerry Brotton explores the forgotten history of English-Muslim alliances in his new book The Sultan and the Queen. Speaking from his home in Oxford, England, Brotton explains why Elizabeth believed Islam and Protestantism had more in common with each other than with Catholicism and how this cultural exchange may have inspired Shakespeare’s plays and turned the queen’s teeth black.

From Donald Trump to Brexit supporters, many Westerners view Muslims as a threat and want to close the borders. But 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I made alliances with the Shah of Iran and the Ottoman Sultan. What can Elizabeth I’s relations with the Islamic world teach us?

A lot. They can teach us that there’s a form of pragmatic exchange and toleration and accommodation, which trumps ideology. One of the key stories in the book is the issue of trade and the way trade collides with religions. The reason Queen Elizabeth develops this relationship with the Islamic world is theology initially. She’s establishing a Protestant state and England has become a pariah in Catholic Europe. So she reaches out for alliances with the Islamic world.

What flows from that is an exchange of trade and goods, regardless of sectarian and theological differences. Elizabeth is not reaching out to Sultan Murad III because she’s a nice person and wants religious accord. She is doing it for hard-nosed political and commercial reasons.

Elizabeth’s alliance with Murad III was essential to her self-preservation, yet this story has largely been left out of Tudor history. Why do you think that is?

In the last few years, there’s been a parochial identification of the Tudors, reflected in the way they have featured in recent TV shows, like The Tudors. It has become an index of Englishness, connected to whiteness and Christianity. But it never tells the wider story of what’s going on internationally. I started working on 16th-century maps and what the maps were telling me was that there was an exchange between the Islamic and Christian worlds, which wasn’t being told in the official histories.

Look at Tudor portraits. It’s all Orient pearls, silk from Iran, or cotton from the Ottoman territories. The English language changes, too. Words suddenly enter, like sugar, candy, crimson, turban, and tulip, which have Arabic or Persian roots. They all come in with the trade with the Islamic world.

Elizabeth did her best to convince Sultan Murad that Protestantism and Islam were two sides of the same coin and that the true heresy was Catholicism. I’m confused …

What she does very shrewdly, when she starts to write to the Sultan in 1579, is say: Look, you and I have many similarities in terms of our theology. We do not believe in idolatry or that you should have intercession, i.e., a saint or a priest will geEt you closer to God. Protestantism says you should read the Bible and then you will be in direct contact with God. Sunni Islam says the same: You have the Koran, the word of the Prophet, you do not need saints or icons.

Elizabeth is doing this politically. What she’s saying is, you’re fighting Spanish Catholicism; I’m fighting Spanish Catholicism. What nobody mentions, of course, is Christ. [Laughs] Islam believes Jesus is a prophet, but not the son of God. So in all the correspondence, they step around this issue. They always talk about the fact that they both believe in Jesus but not how they believe in Jesus.

The first recorded Muslim woman to enter Britain was called Aura Soltana. She has an amazing story, doesn’t she?

She does. Another extraordinary figure, Anthony Jenkins, one of the earliest Englishmen to establish diplomatic and commercial connections with Persia, is on his way back to England, traveling up the Volga River, in what we now call Greater Russia. In Astrakhan, he buys this woman, Aura Soltana. It’s not clear whether this is a slave name or the name of the place she’s come from, but he takes her back to England.

At around this time, a similar figure is established as a lady-in-waiting in Elizabeth’s court. If it’s the same person—and I believe it is—she becomes a kind of fashion adviser to the queen, telling Elizabeth how to wear certain kinds of shoes or materials. Her exotic background made her exactly the kind of person to whom Elizabeth could say, “Oh, you’ve just come back from Moscow, what are the latest catwalk fashions?”

The subject of this painting by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger may have been the first Muslim woman known to enter England.


Photograph by The Print Collector, Getty

There’s a tantalizing painting of an anonymous woman by Marcus Gheeraerts, called The Persian Lady, which some people speculate is of this woman. She’s dressed in a very opulent, oriental fashion. It could be our lady Aura Soltana, a slave who ends up in Elizabeth’s bedroom, dressing her. It’s an amazing story.

Among other goods, English merchants imported over 250 tons of Moroccan sugar into London every year. Is it true Elizabeth’s love of sugar turned her teeth black?

For further reading click.

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How Victorian Muslims celebrated Christmas submitted to TF by Tariq Khan

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How did Victorian Muslims celebrate Christmas?

 

By Tharik Hussain

Al Jazeera, 15 December 2017

At 6am on December 25, 1888, the winter sun was yet to rise over the English city of Liverpool.

A Victorian terrace house was feverish with activity.

The soft glow of candlelight emanating from 8 Brougham Terrace revealed men and women busily putting up decorations and preparing food for the big celebration ahead, Christmas Day.

In one corner, a familiar Victorian scene of a woman playing the piano and directing hymn rehearsals, the singers’ voices muted by the howling of a bitter north-easterly wind as it rattled the thin panes of glass.

This was Britain’s first mosque and Muslim community preparing for their very first Christmas Day.

At 8am, having led the tiny congregation in the early morning prayer, the Imam finally opened the mosque doors.

Imam William Henry “Abdullah” Quilliam founded the mosque after embracing Islam in 1887, aged 31 years old.

He was greeted by more than 100 of the city’s poor, who had been invited to enjoy a charitable Christmas breakfast inside what locals called “Islam Church”.

As the group of recent converts served the paupers a hearty meal of “sandwiches, bread and meat, seedloaf, bunloaf, bread and butter, tea and coffee,” the music began.

Hymns praising the birth of the Prophet Isa, or Jesus, rung out through the venue. By evening, numbers swelled. Word had got around, and the Muslims offered a “substantial tea” and small musical concert to the visitors.

The entertainment began with “mesmeric performances” by two young Muslims before “some delightful airs upon the zither, the fairy bells and the mandolin” by one Miss Warren.

The finale was a “magic lantern” show and photo series from the imam’s recent tour across distant Muslim lands.

These descriptions of Victorian Muslims at Christmas were taken from the pages of The Crescent, the country’s first Muslim newspaper.

It was published by the Liverpool Moslem Institute between 1893 and 1907 and was recently made available online by the Abdullah Quilliam Society – which is based at the historic mosque – in partnership with the British Library.

“This reminds us there was an earlier generation of Muslims, looking to spread the word of Islam through finding points in common rather than things to argue about,” said Timothy Winter, a prominent British Muslim scholar.

 

Winter, the dean of Cambridge Muslim College and lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, converted to Islam in 1979. He has worked extensively with the archives.

 

Britain’s first Muslim community mostly comprised English converts.

 

The Christmas scenes, described in every January issue of The Crescent, may come as a surprise.

 

Winter said the festivities demonstrated a willingness to appropriate local traditions, something that was easier because the group had grown up with them.

 

“They possessed a spirit of openness and hospitality and were more concerned with God and truth and conveying the word [as opposed to] boundary issues and questions of identity and difference,” Winter told Al Jazeera.

 

The Victorian Muslims were not celebrating Christmas in the Christian sense, said Humayun Ansari, professor and author of The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800.

 

They simply wanted to reach out to the community.

 

In doing so, Ansari said, Quilliam and the early British Muslims were “indigenising” their Muslim identities.

 

“What Quilliam is doing in these early examples is trying to communicate that Islam is more familiar to the Christians of Britain then they think. He is trying to show that it is not something foreign and alien, but part of the Abrahamic tradition,” Ansari told Al Jazeera.

 

“These early British Muslims were taking elements of British indigenous culture deemed acceptable within the Islamic framework and marrying them with their religious identities. In doing so, they offer a roadmap and blueprint for what an indigenous British Muslim identity might look like today.”

 

In addition to the mosque, the Muslims of Liverpool founded a school, orphanage and a museum

 

At school, students were taught a curriculum that integrated Islam with mainstream British education, including music classes.

 

They took part in literary and debating events titled A night with Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell and Ancient Britons.

 

In the playground, boys played football and cricket.

 

The Crescent newspaper, edited by Quilliam, regularly published inspiring quotes of notable Brits such as Shakespeare and Lord Tennyson.

 

Quilliam’s role and influence were such that he was given the title of Sheikh Ul Islam of Britain by the Ottomans, and when he left Liverpool in 1908, it seems his community disbanded too.

 

Today, there are more than 2.5 million Muslims in Britain and, unlike Quilliam’s community, they hail from a multitude of ethnic and cultural backgrounds and observe Islam differently.

 

“The Victorian Muslims were a small community, almost exclusively white English,” said Sadiya Ahmed, founder of Everyday Muslim – an organisation which preserves Britain’s Muslim heritage.

 

“Today, we have Muslims in Britain whose families have come from all over the world as well as those who are ethnically English, and this inevitably means they approach Christmas in a number of ways,” she told Al Jazeera.

 

The issue recently came to the fore when Tesco, a supermarket brand, released its festive advertising campaign featuring a Muslim family celebrating Christmas.

 

Critics threatened to boycott the company because they saw Islam as incompatible with Christmas.However, others welcome the advert as embracing multiculturalism

“Some [Muslims] will completely shun it as a Christian festival, believing it has nothing to do with Islam,” said Ahmed.”Others will embrace it as a secular British tradition, putting up trees, exchanging presents and eating a halal turkey on Christmas Day. And then there will be those viewing it as a celebration of the birth of an important prophet of Islam.”Britain’s Muslim community is far more diverse today than it was when Quilliam was alive, and this is why their views on Christmas are equally diverse.”

Picture: The Liverpool Muslim Institute was founded by the Liverpudlian William ‘Abdullah’ Quilliam [Courtesy: Abdullah Quilliam Society]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/12/victorian-muslims-celebrate-christmas-171214134651020.html

 

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