The Lessons of Peshawar Massacre

On 16  December 2014 132 children and 9 teachers were massacred at a school in Pakistan. The responsibility for this carnage was claimed by PakTaliban, whose fugitive leader, Mullah Fazlullah – it was he who gave the order for Malala Yousafzai’s near-fatal shooting - lives in Afghanistan. 

General Raheel Sharif

In the days following the atrocity the Chief of Pakistan Army, General Raheel Sharif, and the head of Inter-Services Intelligence, General Rizwan Akhtar, flew to Afghanistan. Pakistan media reported that the generals had taken with them evidence of Indian complicity in the Peshawar atrocity (training of PakTaliban murderers and equipping them with sophisticated weapons and communication equipment). They met the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and the top commander of occupying powers US and NATO, General John Campbell. General Sharif’s demand for the arrest of Fazlullah, and his handover to Pakistan, seems to have been unsuccessful.

Following the return of Pakistan’s generals there were reports that Pakistan Air Force jets had flown out into Afghan airspace and bombed Fazlullah’s hiding place in Afghanistan. There were rumours that Fazlullah had been killed. 

Mass murderer Fazlullah

While these reports appeared in the Asian press [for example:  http://gulfnews.com/news/world/pakistan/pakistan-taliban-leader-mullah-fazlullah-killed-in-air-strike-1.1429620] they were generally absent from western media. The US media, some 95% of which is said to be controlled by a handful of wealthy families, appear to have avoided mentioning the F word altogether! Fazlullah probably survived the Pakistani attempt to kill him. Is he being protected by the powers that be?

 
Pakistan’s descent from high ideals of Islam into a cauldron of Mullahism and West-worship

Pakistan, a homeland for the Muslims of India, was the vision of the great Muslim poet-philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal. To realise that vision required a leader with extraordinary qualities, able to resist the will of the British imperialists and of the Hindus of Indian Congress political party (who saw themselves as the natural heirs to the British). The Muslims were fortunate to have found in Muhammad Ali Jinnah a staunch Muslim who saw no conflict between Quranic guidance and modern life. He articulated Iqbal’s vision, and his own, in interviews and speeches.

Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

In December 1943 Jinnah gave an interview to a British journalist, Beverley Nichols, in which he described the ‘vital principles’ of Pakistan as: The Muslims are a Nation. He elaborated further: “You must remember that Islam is not merely a religious doctrine but a realistic and practical Code of Conduct. I am thinking in terms of life, of everything important in life. I am thinking in terms of our history, our heroes, our art, our architecture, our music, our laws, our jurisprudence”.

In a radio broadcast to the people of the USA, in February 1948, Jinnah talked about the constitution of Pakistan yet to be drafted: “it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam. Today, they are as applicable in actual life as they were 1,300 years ago. Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy. It has taught equality of man, justice and fair play to everybody. We are the inheritors of these glorious traditions and are fully alive to our responsibilities and obligations as framers of the future constitution of Pakistan. In any case Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims – Hindus, Christians, and Parsees – but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan”.

Jinnah, the modern Muslim for whom the Message of the Quran was independent of the time period in which humanity lived, was opposed by the Muslim priest class which rejected the idea of Pakistan and sided with the Indian Congress party. The mullahs went further, some declaring Jinnah and Iqbal as ‘kaafir’.

The great irony of Pakistan today is that the mullahs, who fought Jinnah and opposed Pakistan Movement, have claimed the country in the name of their distorted version of Islam, a throwback to the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance. This insanity is matched at the other extreme by the West-worshipping class of Pakistanis, for whom Islam has little meaning, a “religion” at best. For them the fount of wisdom is located in the West, to which they look for guidance in their lives. These self-styled “liberals” are as destructive for Pakistan as is rampant mullahism.

Way forward for Pakistan

The mysterious way in which PakTaliban sprang up in 2007, and the way their distorted understanding of Islam has been encouraged and exploited, point to international intrigue. Pakistan military’s response to PakTaliban’s atrocities is to attack them and kill as many as possible. This may turn out to be a futile exercise if nothing is done to stem the flow of arms and finance to PakTaliban. 

While the body of Pakistan is being ravaged by inhuman actions of PakTaliban, its soul is being assiduously destroyed by West-worshippers who are hell-bent on imposing an alien language and its associated Anglo-American culture on Pakistan.

As I see it, there is only one solution which will work in the long run but it does require a great deal of patience in the meantime. This solution is a rapid spread of education in Urdu, a language Pakistanis understand and which is intimately connected with their culture and religious traditions. The education needs to be broadly based: it must encourage individuals to reflect on Quranic Guidance themselves (as demanded by Quran) and provide them with scientific, technical and linguistic knowledge which is necessary for material prosperity in current world conditions. Without reforming Pakistani society we are faced with an eternal struggle between the forces of darkness: rabid West-worshippers against mad mullahs espousing a religion which negates the spirit of Islam.

English Translation of Hamid Mir's column in Jang, 27 March 2014

In the course of some exchanges on Twitter I ended up promising an Indian gentleman to translate parts of Hamid Mir's article on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, published in Jang today. The original article can be read here . I have already posted several blogs relating to Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, most recently here which is relevant in the context of comments Hamid Mir has made.

Jaswant Singh and Muhammad Ali Jinnah

In his article Hamid Mir shows that Jinnah was neither secular nor a maulvi. The main points he makes are:

      Jaswant Singh is one of the founder members of BJP. A few years ago he wrote a book entitled “Jinnah” in which he said that those really responsible for the division of India were Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, not Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Hindu leaders could have  worked amicably with the secular and liberal Jinnah but they antagonised him needlessly.

 
This book infuriated the leadership of Bharatia Janata Party because the BJP and Congress had always held Jinnah responsible for the break-up of India. Jaswant Singh was expelled from the BJP following publication of his book. He maintained that he had been expelled because he dared to present some plain historical facts.

    Some BJP members supported Jaswant. In their view he had laid bare the fake secularism of BJP’s political rival Congress. Moreover, by holding the Congress leadership responsible for the division of India the book had actually benefited BJP at the expense of  Congress.

      It was also thought that L K Advani considered Jaswant Singh a dangerous political rival because of his previous experience as Foreign and Defence Minister, which would make him a candidate for the office of Prime Minister. Advani thus manoeuvred to have him expelled from the Party.

     Jaswant Singh’s exile lasted 10 months before he was admitted back into the party. For the 2014 Election Jaswant Singh wanted his party’s ticket for his traditional constituency in Rajasthan but his request was refused. He said he was being punished for declaring Jinnah to be a secular politician. He announced that he would fight the election from his constituency as an independent.

       It is now obvious that Narainder Modi has taken control of BJP and he has pushed aside not just Jaswant but Advani as well. Modi is now the sole candidate for Prime Ministership from his party.

     Jaswant Singh is not the first Indian writer to consider Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah a secularist. Previously, a lecturer in Political Science at Delhi University, Dr Ajit Javed, authored a book “Secular and Nationalist Jinnah” in which he acknowledged the honesty, courage and fearlessness of the founder of Pakistan. He also stated that the demand for the establishment of Pakistan was merely a political ploy to put pressure on Congress. He claimed that Maudoodi [a religious leader active in politics] refused to lead the Janazah prayer for Jinnah and instead performed a prayer of thanks.

     Many claims made in Ajit Javed’s book defy historical facts. Apart from the Indian writers there are also some Pakistani writers and intellectuals who do their best to present Jinnah as secular. Their amazing antics include:

    (a) always quoting a brief excerpt from a single speech of Quaid-e-Azam (one delivered on 11 August 1947),

    (b) taking delight in quoting falsehoods or half-truths contained in American author Stanley Wolpert’s book “Jinnah of Pakistan”, and

    (c) always referring to Jinnah’s wife Ruttie as a Parsee even though she had converted to Islam before her marriage to Jinnah and she was buried in a Muslim cemetery after her death.

       Quite recently, an English language magazine, published in Karachi, showed a picture of Quaid-e-Azam, with a white beard superimposed. An article in the magazine lamented that some people were trying to present Jinnah as a maulvi!

It is true that there are people who look only for Shariat in the speeches of Pakistan’s founder while they ignore references to justice, equality, tolerance and democracy. On the other hand, those people who are hell-bent on proving the Quaid to be secular are guilty of intellectual and historical dishonesty. It is well known that the founder of Pakistan entered politics as a member of Congress but, over the years, his political evolution and maturity took him to the Muslim League. He was neither a maulvi nor a secularist. He was an ordinary Muslim, free of sectarian and religious prejudices. He married Ruttie for love, whose Muslim name was Maryam. Owing to his legal practice and political activities he could not spend as much time with her as the couple would have wished. There were ups and downs in Jinnah’s marriage. When Ruttie died Jinnah was inconsolable and he wept uncontrollably at her grave.

    In 1929 Jinnah defended Ghazi Ilm Deen in court and in 1931 he refused to speak against Bhagat Singh.

    It was Allama Iqbal who persuaded Jinnah to study Islamic laws. Iqbal’s letter to Jinnah, dated 28 May 1937, is extremely significant. In it the great poet-philosopher is telling his friend that putting genuine Islamic laws into practice in a Muslim state will mean each and every individual will have a right to an assured income. This letter also mentions Islamic Sharia. 

Later the same year, on 16 September 1937, Jinnah ensured that a Shariat Bill, concerned with Muslim Personal Law, was passed by India’s Legislative Assembly. When this Bill was introduced in the Assembly it was criticised on the grounds that the shariat followed by each Muslim sect was  different which made the Bill highly controversial. Jinnah overcame that objection by getting Muslim members of the Assembly to agree to a common concept of shariat acceptable to their respective sects.

     In one of his books Mufti Rafee Usmani has written extensively about Quaid-e-Azam’s meetings with his father and other Muslim scholars. He says there were some religious leaders who had issued fatwas of Kufr in relation to Jinnah while other religious leaders (Ashraf Ali Thanvi, Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, Mufti Muhammad Shafee etc) supported him. They also severed their links with Dar-ul-aloom Deoband.

    Mufti Muhammad Shafee issued a fatwa, declaring support for Congress to be Kufr. On 23 March 1940 it was not just Pakistan Resolution that was passed but also one supporting the Palestinian Muslims. Jinnah worked hard to end sectarian differences among Muslims and to organise a conference of Muslim scholars of all sects. Many religious leaders and scholars supported Jinnah in his efforts to unify Muslims and to establish a separate homeland for them.

    Quaid-e-Azam had met the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Bana and they were in close touch. In his speech on 1^st July 1948, at the inauguration ceremony of State Bank of Pakistan, the Quaid spoke about the importance of conducting banking on Islamic principles. It was not a theocracy that Quaid-e-Azam wished to establish but an Islamic welfare state in which non-Muslims had the same rights as those that Rasul-e-Kareem gave to the Jews of Madinah in the Madinah Pact.

    In brief, Quaid-e-Azam was just an honest and sincere Muslim who was neither a secularist nor a maulvi.

Libya! Here we come!!

With hindsight, my blog The Fall of the American Empire last February may have been a bit premature. I had underestimated the cunning and sheer ruthlessness of the USA Administration. The Americans, and their sidekick the NATO countries, are adept at turning a blind eye to the worst sort of barbarities so long as their interests are not threatened. Bahrain, the oil-rich state under the USA's thumb, is a good example where it is OK for the rulers to kill their own citizens without fear of condemnation by the USA or NATO.  Not so Libya, another oil-and-gas play not totally subservient to modern-day imperialist powers. 

I was taken by surprise at the speed with which the "conscience" of NATO countries has been aroused following the deaths of hundreds of Libyans at the hands of the tyrant Gaddafi. The hypocrisy of western governments and a lot of the comment in the newspapers is nauseating.

Not a mirage! Loaded with 'gifts' for Libya

French Mirage bombs Libya

  

      

The destruction

..... and the inevitable funeral

At this very moment the Indian Army in Kashmir is engaged in genocide - over 100,000 Kashmiris are said to have died over the last decade. Far from there being UN resolutions condemning the actions of India's government, the USA president and the British Prime Minister visit India so they can sell their goods and services there. They both act as if they are totally ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Indian army in Kashmir.

Israel continues to act against the Palestinians exactly as the German Nazis treated the Jews of Europe. As the recent Al-Jazeera/the Guardian revelations show, the USA is complicit in the macabre game of murder and humiliation in which the Israel government has been engaged for years.

For the last several years the USA has been regularly attacking Pakistan with pilot-less aircraft, the so-called drones, which rain down death and misery from the skies on the hapless Pakistanis. According to the USA journalists, over 97% of those who die are innocent citizens while fewer than 3% are "terrorists". The world is silent and Pakistan's puppet of a president declares he is "not worried about collateral damage"!

In Afghanistan routine killings of ordinary citizens are common, both by the foreign occupation forces and by the local Taliban. It is difficult to tell which of these two parties is more barbaric. The invasion of Afghanistan is a mystery, based on one-sided accusations by the USA. An Arab fugitive hiding in that backward country is said to have plotted, and successfully carried out, an ingenious and highly intricate attack on the "twin towers" of New York and on the Pentagon building! No one ever explained how the third tower collapsed mysteriously or why the evidence was removed from the scene of the crime and destroyed.

Then, there was Iraq, the oil producer. Its government was accused of possessing  weapons of mass destruction and the country was invaded. A million Iraqis have since died but the UN has done nothing to punish those who took the decision to invade. The war criminals Bush and Blair roam free!

When the dust has settled on the "liberation movements" of the resources-rich Middle East we'll probably find that the real winners are not the people of those lands but the governments of the USA and the NATO countries, who will somehow manage to install pliant yes-men as rulers. If you doubt this, take a good long look at the two stooges - Zardari and Gilani - who head the government of Pakistan. I still think the American Empire is heading towards a fall but it won't be a dramatic event similar to the breakup of the Soviet Union - it will be a slow collapse spread over a number of years. 

Tailpiece

Johann Hari is one of the foremost journalists in the UK. He writes for The Independent where his article, "We're not being told the truth on Libya", was published on 8 April. It is a compelling read, the link is:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-were-not-being-told-the-truth-on-libya-2264785.html

My own comment on this article was:
"Johann Hari, you are spot on. The ruthless honesty you show in your articles seems to frighten a lot of people because, in moral terms, the western democracies appear little better than dictatorships and police states. Can you turn your formidable intellect to the question of how the rotten western political systems can be improved? A system that can transform the fresh-faced candidate Obama into the duplicitous monster he is today 
is hardly worth preserving."

Dialogue with a Giant

 Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan.

In December 1943, Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, gave an interview to a British journalist, Beverley Nichols. On returning to England from his tour of India, Nichols wrote a book, “Verdict on India” (publisher: Jonathan Cape). One of the chapters in this book has the title “Dialogue with a Giant”, a reference to Quaid-e-Azam. Extracts from this chapter are presented below. On the occasion of Pakistan’s Independence Day this month, we would do well to reflect on how far we have moved from Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan as a nation united under the banner of Islam, not so much a religion as a Code of Conduct. What this interview - and several of the Quaid's speeches - show is that, the Quaid was neither secular (as claimed by the so-called liberals) nor was he a religious demagogue in the sense that so many of Pakistan's self-styled religious leaders are.  

Nichols:

How would you describe the ‘vital principles’ of Pakistan?

Jinnah:

In five words. The Muslims are a Nation.

Nichols

When you say the Muslims are a nation, are you thinking in terms of religion?

Jinnah:

Partly, but by no means exclusively. You must remember that Islam is not merely a religious doctrine but a realistic and practical Code of Conduct. I am thinking in terms of life, of everything important in life. I am thinking in terms of our history, our heroes, our art, our architecture, our music, our laws, our jurisprudence …… [pause]

.... [continuing]:

In all these things our outlook is not only fundamentally different but often radically antagonistic to the Hindus…….  Take one example, the eternal question of the cow. We eat the cow, the Hindus worship it. A lot of Englishmen imagine that this ‘worship’ is merely a picturesque convention, an historical survival. It is nothing of the sort. Only a few days ago, in this very city, the cow question became a matter for the police ……. But the cow question is only one of a thousand.

Nichols:

Are the Muslims likely to be richer or poorer under Pakistan?

Jinnah:

Supposing you were asked which you would prefer, a rich England under Germany or a poor England free – what would your answer be?

Nichols:

It’s hardly necessary to ask.

Jinnah:

Quite. Well, doesn’t that make your question look a little shoddy? This great ideal rises far above mere questions of personal comfort or temporary convenience. What conceivable reason is there to suppose that the gift of nationality is going to be an economic liability? A sovereign nation of a hundred million people – even if they are not immediately self-supporting and even if they are industrially backward – is hardly likely to be in a worse economic position than if its members are scattered and disorganized, under the dominance of two hundred and fifty million Hindus whose one idea is to exploit them.

….. the Muslims are awake …  they’ve learnt, through bitter experience, the sort of treatment they may expect from the Hindus in a ‘United India’. A ‘United India’ means a Hindu-dominated India. It means that and nothing else. Any other meaning you attempt to impose on it is mythical. ‘India’ is a British creation, it is merely a single administrative unit governed by a bureaucracy under the sanction of the sword. That is all. It is a paper creation, it has no basis in flesh and blood.

Nichols:

The ironical thing is that your critics say that Pakistan itself is a British creation – that it is an example of our genius for applying the principle of ‘divide and rule’.

Jinnah (with some heat):

The man who makes such a suggestion must have a very poor opinion of British intelligence, apart from his opinion of my own integrity. The one thing that keeps the British in India is the false idea of a United India, as preached by Gandhi. A United India, I repeat, is a British creation – a myth, and a very dangerous myth, which will cause endless strife. As long as that strife exists, the British have an excuse for remaining. For once in a way, ‘divide and rule’ does not apply.

Nichols:

What you want is ‘divide and quit’.

Jinnah:

You have put it very neatly.

Nichols:

You realize that all this will come as something of a shock to the British electorate?

Jinnah:

Truth is often shocking. But why this truth in particular?

Nichols:

Because the average, decent, liberal-minded voter, who wishes Britain to fulfil her pledges, and grant independence to India, has heard nothing but the Congress point of view. The Muslims have hardly a single spokesman in the West.

Jinnah [bitterly]:

I am well aware of that. The Hindus have organized a powerful Press and Congress – Mahasabha are backed up by Hindu capitalists and industrialists with finance which we have not got.

Nichols:

As a result they believe that Congress is ‘India’, and since Congress never tires of repeating that India is one and indivisible, they imagine that any attempt to divide it is illiberal, reactionary, and generally sinister. They seriously do believe this. I know that it is muddle-headed, but then a democracy such as ours, which has to make up its mind on an incredible number of complicated issues usually is muddle-headed. What they have to learn is that the only liberal course, the only generous course, the only course compatible with a sincere intention to quit India and hand over the reins of government  ….

Jinnah:

And the only safe course, you might add, is …

Both: PAKISTAN!

To appreciate Islam more as a Code of Conduct and less as religion (as commonly understood), you might like to click on the following link:

http://sakibahmad.blogspot.com/2009/10/islam.html