Advocates of Secularism

Most of the religious Pakistanis remain concerned over the growing approval of secularism among the masses. They want Pakistan to be an ‘Islamic Welfare State’, while those who support secularism want it to be a religion free state and make religion a private matter of individuals. As the polarity increases, so does the blame game. People blame the Western governments of promoting secularism in Pakistan through their propaganda campaigns, and consider it as a part of war on Islam. They openly express their anger against the so called ‘enlightened moderate’ Pakistanis who are supposed to be the flag bearers of secularism in this country. But they fail to recognize the most effective advocates of secularism; they themselves.

There are many factors that effect the increasing demand for secularism in this country, but religious extremism is among the most important and effective ones. The face of Islam depicted by religious zealots in this country scares away even many practicing Muslims. Why would a person want to live in an ‘Islamic Welfare State’ if he wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of his individual liberties assigned to him by the Creator Himself? Why would a non Muslim want to live in a state where he wouldn’t be able to practice his religion? Why would a Muslim want to live in a state where he’d be persecuted because he belongs to a different sect of Islam?

What people see is that those who claim to be the ‘caretakers of Islam’ have proved to be the most violent, intolerant and illiterate lot. They’ve killed people for even very minor disagreements from their point of view. They can declare anyone heretic without even listening to his argument. They don’t know how to discuss and resolve disputes. How would such people run a state? No doubt, they’ll make people experience hell right in this world. Though these people claim to be Islamists, but Islam has suffered the most because of them. Muslims were supposed to attract people towards Islam, but they’ve scared the world away from it. As long as these ‘caretakers of Islam’ exist, people will always oppose the establishment of an Islamic state.

The fact is that in Pakistan people become ‘religious scholar’ because they couldn’t become anything else. The dumbest child of the family is sent to religious school by the parents. So, garbage in, garbage out. Pakistani society has got plenty of garbage polluting its religious environment and distancing people from Islam. Of course it’s not always the case. There are many learned and considerate scholars as well. But their number is very small as compared to the illiterate Pakistani mullahs. And apart from their number, their influence among the masses is also quite negligible as compared to their intolerant and less competent counterparts.

If someone is really worried about the growing secular mindset among the Pakistani society, and he’s really sincere with his religion and his country, he should strive to lessen the influence and power of illiterate mullahs, and promote those who’re more competent, learned and considerate. People will have to develop religious institutions that would produce a new generation of religious scholars competent enough to establish an Islamic welfare state, and prompt parents to give their intelligent children to Islam, not the rejected ones.

The first step towards the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan is to defeat the advocates of secularism in the society. People will never go for an Islamic state until they are not shown the true Islam. The way extremists have depicted Islam has been instrumental in promoting secularism. Establishment of Islamic state will start after the end of so called Islamic extremism in this country.

Economic Scrimmage and Sanctity of Human Life

 ‘When in ancient world, communities tried to settle down, they always looked out for a suitable place. The best fortune of community would be settling down in an area of fertile land, where they would be able to live prosperously and the surplus natural wealth would not lead them to fight among themselves for control. With time, however, tendencies to mutual competition for the resources gave rise to discrepancies and divisions which led to deciding the fate of these social orders. If the differences and urge to get more was transformed into a tendency to get more from outside their lands by force, it led to formation of empires, or otherwise infighting erupted and the infringement of the nation led some other one to take them over, as this is the nature of the real world as we know it.

This is one of the facts of the world that no one can deny. No matter how much someone adores the Romans; it is a fact that they attacked and ravaged thousands of miles of Lands and killed millions of people just to ensure ‘safe trade routes’. All praises can be offered to the Arab civilization for their exceptional military gains and outstanding cultural achievements, yet one can find out that the genuine Arab reason for taking control of other lands vanished soon after the four caliphs, and demographic reasons along with economic, military and sometimes ethnic priorities took over the mainstream hypothesis of ‘spreading Islam’ as the main reason to press or take over other nations. Similarly, the Ottoman control of Mediterranean for about three centuries was not due to genuine Islamic preaching, but was enforced largely due to the paradigm of naval deterrence for safe trade routes. From the start of the world, up till today, economic factor has been the most vital in Nations fortune, as it ensures the survivability of the people as well as the prowess required to exert the hegemonic pressure on other sections who are deterred into accepting the writ of a power. The wars between Carthage and Rome for example were fought genuinely due to economic reasons which made virtually impossible for two communities to co-exist while at the same time compete economically. The war ended at nothing but gross destruction and consequent annihilation of Carthage, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children paid the price of being in an economic competition.

The new world of today, too, presents something different if we look at it from the naïve perspective mapped out and commented upon by media persons. We find nations going to war for something different. But in reality, the paradigms have not changed even if ways have somehow. It is regrettable to see the economic deprivations of many countries and then finding out that leading industrial countries were behind it. The exploitation of the economically weak by those who have power is the side of coin internationally ignored, because the ‘internationalism’ in itself is a concept best suited to those who tend to engulf maximum natural resources of a country. The lucrative economic leverage through oil was the major reason for Iraq war, which left no less than seven hundred thousand people dead and millions wounded for the rest of their lives. It leaves behind a country in shambles and a shattered economy which will take decades to come to the point it was in 2003. The propaganda machinery worked, blinded the people and everybody was suddenly thinking that Iraq was the only demon to be stopped at all costs. It happens every time. The great powers do not just attack by telling and yelling the actual reasons. They always attack and desecrate under cover of some reason which most of the time is falsely generated so as to convince that their aggression was ‘mandatory’ or ‘necessary’ somehow. Hitler attacked Poland after convincingly preaching to the people of the Reich, that Polish soldiers were behind an attack on a German outpost; which today has been established was orchestrated by German establishment themselves. Even if someone looks closely, all of the patterns followed by Nazis during their World Conquering stratagems were economically driven and wealth oriented so as to provide for the people of the Reich, a constant source of income as well as reason to keep giving the war their blood and hard work.

The continuum of the megalomaniac and resource hungry nature of powers has brought the world in an unexplainable yet worrisome state of affairs. One country’s mothers send their sons to the battle field, thinking they are going to lay down their lives for the sake of honour and greatness of their land. These gentlemen on the other hand are involved in atrocities and misconduct on some of the most deprived sections of the world, in order to retain or sometime restore the hegemony of the big players involved. Every conflict has some hidden economic agenda; every battle has something to do with resources. There exists one genuine question after this entire hullabaloo-which one of those ‘warriors’ is right.

The answer is simple. The sanctity of a single human life is something that has to be honoured and respected. In all religions of the world, in every philanthropic concept of the world, the sacredness of human life is above everything regardless of time and space. It has to be understood that killing some innocent destitute may restore ‘Government’s Writ’ (The best narration nowadays used to by the governments to evade the blames of atrocities done by them on their own citizens) or it may bring ‘Peace’ (The common rhetoric used by the supreme to attack and vandalise the weak nowadays), but it is but something called brutality and barbarism-and these two things always fire back not in matter of years, but days and months. If some religious sect is killing people-innocent people- they are wrong, because they destroy the sanctity of the human existence and life. If some country does the same, they are wrong- no matter how strong their economy is, or how strong this propaganda machine is working. It has to be established that those who are defenceless, are human beings after all, and that under no pretext-be it economy, security or peace- can their right to live and prosper be deteriorated or even questioned. In the world of today, where even the best of the ideologies are seemingly incapable of holding back devastation and destruction by one another of human beings, this seems to be the only and constructive way to idealize and construct the ideas of one’s self.