Consult a dictionary first, buddy

The esteemed Council of Islamic Ideology has declared the term "gender equality" vague and un-Islamic in its review of the National Commission for Status of Women Ordinance 2000. My first reaction to this news article in yesterday's Dawn was, "Lol!"

Is the term un-Islamic because it is vague? If the CII was unsure about what gender equality meant it should have asked for some clarification from the government, or better yet, from anyone with a dictionary. Instead, after deeming the term ambiguous, it goes on to find it un-Islamic on the grounds that men and women are anatomically, physically and mentally different.

Now I guess I should follow my own advice and put forward some points for clarification from the CII (just in case it frequents this blog). 

1. What does the non-indentical biology of men and women have to do with ensuring that the government and the law's treatment of men and women and their access to opportunities is identical?

2. Going by your reasoning, will you also be recommending dissimilar treatment by the state and the law for people who are physically or mentally dissimilar, for people with more or less limbs and higher or lower IQs for example?

3. And if you do intend to discriminate against people with low IQs, will you be recommending to the government that it kick idiots like yourselves off advisory bodies which get so much media attention? That sure would be nice!

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan

"In whose hands shall the administration and the empire of India rest? Now, suppose that the English community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations – the Mohammedans and the Hindus – could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable. At the same time you must remember that although the number of Mohammedans is less than that of the Hindus, and although they contain far fewer people who have received a higher English education, yet they must not be considered insignificant or weak. Probably they would by themselves be enough to maintain their own position. But suppose they were not. Then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood flow from their frontier on the north to the extreme end of Bengal. This thing – who after the departure of the English would be conquerors would rest on God's will. But until one nation has conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land." – Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Meerut, 16 March 1888)

This speech by Sir Syed was made three years after the Indian National Congress was founded. If you remember your Pak Studies, then you must know that Sir Syed was extremely opposed to the INC, believing, somewhat irrationally, that it was a conduit for Hindu supremacy.

What really surprised me about this speech was not how easily and firmly Sir Syed dismissed the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity over fifty years before the Pakistan Resolution, but how extremely aggressive he was. This talk about making blood flow and about making the other nation obedient makes him sound less like a progressive intellectual and more like a firebrand. It doesn't quite jibe with his image as a reformer that we Pakistanis have, but makes him sound queasily close to the religious fanatics of today.

The Lucky Irani Circus

It has been in town for the past two months, in the field outside Aladdin Park. It is now up in the Clifton Beach Park for the next week. If you have an hour to kill over this week, I strongly recommend that you check it out. They have everything from contortionists to trapeze artists to clowns and midgets. One of the performances involved a young girl climbing a twenty feet ladder that was balanced on a man's forehead. She climbed to the top, took a bow and climbed down, while the man balanced the ladder without his hands. Scariest thing ever!

It's Eid again...

I don't know why Muslim holidays can't be spread out more evenly. Didn't we just celebrate Eid ul Fitr? It seems like only yesterday when the entire country was starving itself and now it is slaughtering cows, goats and camels by the hundreds of thousands for a big feast.

I just saw a white Corolla leading a camel down 26th Street. The camel was tied to its rear bumper and the Corolla was moving at snail's pace (or should I say camel's pace) in front of it. Only in Pakistan, I say, only in Pakistan.

A bearded man with glasses and a skull cap was sitting in the open trunk along with two young boys, whose excited eyes were glued to the languidly moving camel. I have to admit the animal was very cute. Unfortunately, by now it is probably flailing around in a pool of its own blood, dying of a slit throat, and serving as the centerpiece of some upper middle class family's unnecessarily barbaric ritual of obeisance to its "Most Merciful and Most Kind" god.

I really don't like this holiday.

What I really mean by education

Remember those hypotheticals that your seventh grade school teacher asked you when she didn't have a teaching plan: "If there was one thing you could change about Pakistan, what would it be?" The twelve-year-old me's answer was invariably education: "I'd want all 170 million people of our country to be educated." Today, I would answer more specifically: "I'd want all 170 million people of our country to be able to read, write and think for themselves."

The Garage School (TGS) is an NGO that is working to make the twelve-year-old me's wish come true. TGS runs two primary schools in DHA, Karachi – one literally out of a garage – and provides free education to young boys and girls from the low-income Neelum and Shah Rasool Colonies. Excellent, excellent work, the twelve-year-old me would say, but after visiting TGS the 22-year-old me was only dismayed at the kind of education TGS is imparting to its students.

The emphasis of the school is entirely on discipline and rote learning. To impress me, a teacher asked the brightest student in her class to tell us what he knew about Pakistan. What followed was a verbatim recital of a passage from some textbook on Pakistan. In a breathless monologue, the boy quoted, "As a Pakistani, it is our duty to worship God, respect our parents and love our countrymen. Pakistan is a great nation that was formed in 1947. It has four provinces. The first province is Punjab. Its capital is Lahore..." So on and so forth. Later, the entire class parroted, with some assistance from the science teacher, slogans against smoking cigarettes and chewing paan. The children were basically being mass-programmed to follow the values that the school thought appropriate.

I know, this happens here at the best private schools too. Schools like to produce obedient and disciplined students, who have just enough brainpower to regurgitate all the axioms they want to feed them but not enough to think independently or question anything, least of all the schools and their axioms.

But that isn't the kind of students that schools should be producing. It won't give us a population that can innovate and revolutionize or engage in rational debate, tolerate a diversity of opinions and adapt quickly to change. It will simply produce people who can read and write and at most hold a low level white collar job. Students deserve more than that; and we as a country need more than that. Much, much more.

Well isn't this a big relief!

According to The News, "The Sindh coalition government has decided to revoke the Police Order-2002, and expressed a unanimous view that no political party was behind the recent ethnic violence in Karachi, and only those elements who did not want political reconciliation in the province were behind the mayhem."

Well, isn't that just dandy. How nice to know that after the riots in which 50 Karachiites were murdered, the government has vindicated every political party of all blame. What a relief that our irreproachable political parties were not responsible. And how very shocking it is to learn that those who were responsible – these unnamed spectral elements, who will surely be caught and tried in public very very soon – were actually out to sabotage our poor helpless political parties' big group hug moment.

Shucks! Lead me to a polling booth so I can vote this unfairly victimized government right back into power.

Rumors

The rumor is that Karachi is up in flames because of some MQM-Pathan tussle over land around some new expressway.

The rumor is that the police, which has received shoot to kill orders from Sindh's Interior Minister Zulfiqar Mirza, is standing by as activists of political parties shoot people down in front of them.

The rumor is that this was all planned well ahead of time, with months of hysterical talk about Talibanization of Karachi, which sought to blur the distinction between Pathans and the Taliban.

The rumor is that Pathan students from some college in Karachi were asked to leave. When they didn't people put Elfi super glue in their eyes, ears and noses.

The rumor is that there are people out for blood slicing ears off people of other ethnicities for no reason other than, well, their ethnicity.

The rumor is that some men broke into an Urdu-speaking colony – Raees Amrohvi Colony in Orangi – entered a house and shot everyone inside.

These are all rumors, unverified stories that are spreading like wildfire across the terrorized city while our glorious media is busily giving us a minute by minute run through of what happened in Mumbai five days back. The best that the media can give us about what is happening in our own backyard is the following:

"Members of two ethnic communities [notice how the ethnic communities are not even named] went on a rampage and attacked each other." Dawn (01/12/2008)

The Daily Times talks repeatedly and vaguely about "miscreants" wreaking havoc in the city in yesterday's paper regurgitating the rumors that are circulating in the city.

From all this it would seem that, much like in some B-grade horror flick, an entire city has suddenly lost its mind and is going around mindlessly killing each other. Any kind of insight into why the riots started, who is behind it and why the law-enforcement agencies are unable to stop it is apparently too much to expect from both the government and the media.

Meanwhile, there are more rumors about why mum is currently the word. The rumor is that the media is terrified of the MQM. That after the MQM censored Geo twice over the past month or so, it has decided to not stick its neck out.

The rumor is that since most of the big media outlets' head offices are in Karachi, they prefer not to piss the MQM off.

The rumor is that the MQM made certain that another episode of May 12-like heroic reporting would not occur and that the ransacking of Aaj's office is still too fresh in the media heads' minds to offer more incisive reporting.

The rumor is that the troubles are in such out of the way areas of Karachi – Orangi, Sohrab Goth, Banaras etc – that for cameramen to go out there would be like going into Fata. Therefore, the TV coverage of the riots is also minimal.

In the meantime, the death toll climbs up each day, as violence collects more half-lived lives.

In the meantime, as rumors and bloodthirsty rioters overrun the streets of Karachi, we, the ever-stoic and ever-ignored people of Karachi, stay quietly in our homes hoping for yet another crisis to quickly loosen its grip on our beloved yet battered city so that we may pick up our lives again and guiltily thank our stars that it wasn't our turn this time around.