Ban or confront?

The following column "Ban or confront?" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, May 21, 2010".

When we get angry, we start digging hard into the earth on which we stand until the time our toenails start bleeding profusely. When we are scared of thunder or lightning or a storm or a beast that scares us with his power to make us extinct, we hide our heads in the sand on which we stand. Neither would we prepare to fight to defend ourselves nor move away to avoid the imminent danger. We have become ostriches. We yell a lot but look away from the real challenges that face us. Small brains and large bodies.
Some of us ostriches have learnt to prevaricate by way of becoming suicidal instead of taking on the questions we are confronted with. Many of our youths are goaded to blow themselves up and kill scores of innocent people around them by self-conceited clerics and vested interest. No one who matters in the Muslim world belonging to the religious, political, cultural or academic elite has demonstrated a will or a drive to take the masses out of the abyss of darkness, ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=240315

 

 

 

Side-effect

The following column "Side-effect" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, May 14, 2010".

The song my niece Misaal likes the most these days is from this new Bollywood production, "3 Idiots". She has fed it as the ring tone in her grandmother's cell phone. Her three-year-old younger brother has learned to sing the refrain all the time, "Bolo (say) all is well."

Perhaps all is well now. There was a time when half of the children of school-going age in Pakistan did not go to school. Out of a hundred and sixty thousand public primary schools across the country, more than eighty thousand lacked clean drinking water, toilet facilities and boundary walls. Our colleges and universities produced degree-holders who were terribly unequipped when it came to required knowledge and skills to perform an ordinary job to earn their living. Our teachers were shamefully low paid and lacked adequate training opportunities. Curriculum taught in both public and private schools was not only dated, and partly irrelevant, but also encouraged narrow-mindedness, myopic worldview and confusion in children and young people. In those times, a young girl would go blind due to a curable infection in some remote part of Balochistan because it would take her father one week to organise a few thousand rupees and another week to be able to take her to Karachi. Maternal mortality was so high that about 75 mothers died everyday in childbirth. Poverty was growing at an alarming pace and so was class difference. New factories were not being set up and existing shut down. Power-cuts were rampant and energy and electricity shortages had brought the indigenous economy to a grinding halt. The state was being run on lending from international financial institutions.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/arc_news.asp?id=9&arc_date=5/14/2010

 

 

 

New Arrivals!

Dear All,

 

This is to inform you that followings Magazine/Journal are recently added Development Resource Centre (DRC).

 

·         The Economist

·         South Asia Journal

·         Newsheet (Shirkat Gah)

·         Jehd-e-Haq (HRCP)

 

 

 

Contra Sufism

The following column "Contra Sufism" by Aziz Ali Dad , source "The News-Saturday, April 24, 2010.

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."
-Michel Foucault

Amar Jaleel wrote a wonderful article 'Antithesis of Sufism' in this newspaper on April 8. He laid bare the hypocrisy of those who pretend to be Sufis but act contrary to the principles of Sufism. But there is another dimension to Sufism, which is what it does to people who sincerely follow its tenets. After the tragedy of 9/11, Sufism is being flaunted as panacea for religious fundamentalism among Muslims. This article is an attempt to explore the issue of repercussions of following Sufism and its viability in addressing the modern age challenges especially when it gets entangled in power relations.

Nobody can deny the role of Sufism in creating syncretistic tradition in Islam by molding itself according to local cultures and practices. Also, mysticism is an essential element of human psyche. Mysticism in Islam helped in spiritual and moral uplift of the community, but it has essentially remained a subjective domain which could not cater to the challenges emanating from objective world or exogenous factors confronted by Islam in its formative phase.

The emergence of the Mu'tazilite school of thought in the eighth century was necessitated by failure of jurists and Sufis of the time to provide rational answers to some philosophical questions. For example, Wasil ibn Ata parted ways from his Sufi mentor Hasan al-Basari on the issue of free will and determination and sought answers in philosophy. By doing so, he paved the way for the first rational school of thought among Muslims – the Mu'tazalites. It was the enquiring mind and intellectual courage of the Mu'tazilites that enabled them to face squarely the intellectual challenges posed by other religious and philosophical schools of thought. Had they remained in the cocoon of Sufism and dogmatic enclosure of clergy, they would not have been able to engage with philosophical questions of their time.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/arc_news.asp?id=9&arc_date=4/24/2010

 

 

 

Successors?

The following column "Successors?" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, April 16, 2010".

The senators belonging to different factions of Pakistan Muslim League staged a walk-out from the current session of the Senate protesting against the remarks made by an Awami National Party senator in one of the appearances he made on a television talk show. He perhaps mentioned that the leadership of the Muslim League included people who ate pork and consumed alcohol. I couldn't watch the programme but supposedly morality of parliamentarians and Islamic values in the backdrop of Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of the republic were being discussed. It was alleged that the ANP senator made a reference to the eating habits of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, father of the nation and president of the All India Muslim League which later became the Pakistan Muslim League. The senator denied the allegation and said he did not mean to imply the Quaid-e-Azam and respected him fully. He asserted that his comments were being blown up disproportionately.

To the citizens of Pakistan, is it really of any consequence today what Mr Jinnah ate or drank when young? Or for that matter whether Allama Iqbal used to drink or not? What matters to us now is the governance and state of affairs in the country Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisioned and struggled for. None of the factions of the Muslim League have anything to do with the ideals, views and practices of Jinnah. Their claim to being the successor party or parties of Jinnah's Muslim League and staging a walk-out on that pretext is totally unjustified

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=234395

 

 

 

Alumni Library Membership Renewal

I am pleasure to inform you that our membership of “Monash Library” has been renewed and the databases can easily be accessed now.

 

Link: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/services/alumni-databases.html

 

If anyone (from the SPO family) is interested to know more about it or visit the website than I am available in this regard at SPO National Center. (The user name and password will be provided to check/visit the site).

 

 

Options left

The following column "Options left" by Harris Khalique , source "The News-Friday, April 09, 2010".

Left, it seems, is regaining consciousness. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century scattered political groups and parties that in the past subscribed to various hues of socialist ideology are making their presence felt by trying to create wider alliances among themselves and aspiring to merge into one big political entity. One has been writing on the subject for some time and just recently, a national newspaper has published a number of articles on the possibilities for and challenges to Left politics in Pakistan. From the recent past, we mustn't forget the untiring efforts of progressive writers and publishers including Late Hasan Abid, Wahid Bashir, Rahat Saeed, Amir Riaz, Muslim Shamim, Tufail Abbas, Zahida Hina, Wajahat Masood, Dr Jafar Ahmed, Ayub Malik, Dr Tauseef Ahmed Khan, Dr Shah Mohammed Marri and some others like them who kept the flame burning during the 1980s and 90s through their magazines and other publications when there was practically nothing happening for the Left in the real political world. Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences was one of the few institutions which held us all together on a wider scale by organising meaningful and well-represented meetings of enlightened and progressive individuals from across Pakistan and abroad.

When it comes to organising political workers and whatever was left of the left-wing leadership on a mass scale, key members of the Inqilabi Jamhoori Workers Committee, Dr Hassan Nasir, Taj Marri, Mirza Maqsood, Ramzan Memon and Farhat Parveen deserve a lot of praise for triggering the process of creating a new, viable and modern national political party in December 2005. They were joined by the stalwarts of erstwhile Qaumi Mahaz-e-Azadi and the National Workers Party led by veteran politicians Mairaj Mohamed Khan and Abid Hasan Manto, respectively. A simultaneous effort was underway in Peshawar where Pakhtunkhwa Democratic Forum was established by Fazle Raziq, Anwar Durrani and Advocate Shahab Khattak. A little later, Prof Jameel Umar and Shazia Khan embarked on the same journey from Lahore and put in a lot of effort to bring everyone together. The scribe was a part of a group established in 2006 by Ashfaque Saleem Mirza, Rao Tariq Latif, Rana Shafique, Marvi Sirmed and Zeeshan Noel Christopher, which focused more on reaching out to new people besides old comrades.

For more details: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=233363