 Civil Society > Global Village Versus Faith Tensions
Muslim fighting Muslim?
Pakistan en route to the Dark Ages
By Humayun Gauhar
Commenting from Karachi, Pakistan
Islam’s enemies have got to be just plain stupid. When we Muslims have ourselves pressed our self-destruct button, why are our enemies splitting their guts to destroy us? Just tell me: Do our enemies need to do anything when we Muslims are busy doing their dirty work for them? When Muslim is busy killing Muslim with such bloody single-mindedness? Do Islam’s enemies need to destroy Muslim countries when we are destroying them so efficiently? Do our enemies have to wreck our economies when we are wrecking them by our own actions?
They don’t need to lift a finger. All they have to do is sit back and enjoy the spectacle while we destroy ourselves. Then, after we have committed collective suicide, our enemies will enter the breach with impunity and take physical control of our countries in order to “save” the global economy. We are such ignoramuses, so divided, so alienated, so distanced from the spirit of our great religion, that having done the work of the enemy we will welcome foreigners to run our countries to bring us law, good order and peace.
When Saudi Arabia falls, America will find enough people from a vast pool of toadies-in-waiting with good English and bad conscience to become their satraps and intermediaries. If authority in Pakistan collapses, it will not be mullahs purveying their own peculiar brand of un-Islamic Islam who will fill the breach. It will be the Americans again, to protect the world from our nuclear arsenal. Here, too, they have well-known toadies, stooges and satraps-in-waiting cosseted abroad ready to become their showcase rulers.
The irony was palpable at Islamabad’s Convention Centre. Here was the President making an eminently sensible speech on “Enlightened Moderation,” the only realistic course for Muslims, and there was Karachi’s newfound peace being shattered by multi-dimensional, multifaceted violence unleashed by different groups that enter the vacuum left by the absence of authority.
Here was the President talking of galvanizing the moribund Organisation of Islamic Conference (what a name, the epitome of impotence) into action, and there was Saudi Arabia, the country in which the OIC is headquartered, being rocked to its foundations by Muslims who would have us believe that they are Islamic revolutionaries but in reality are bloodthirsty terrorists who kill human beings with less thought than they would crush an ant. In two blood-soaked days, Karachi was back to its bad old days. In a series of bombings, Saudi Arabia’s oil industry is being wrecked in order to wreck the global economy.
But if the mullahs and terrorists think that they will fill the breach, they have another thought coming. The West will not allow Pakistan with its nuclear power and Saudi Arabia with its oil to fall into the hands of primitive obscurants to play merry hell with the world. They will step in and take control, even of Mecca and Medina, having seen that they can get away with taking control of Karbala and Najaf with not a bark from any Muslim government except the hapless, leaderless people of Iraq. Perhaps we who were ‘granted’ independence by our various colonisers need to fight bloody liberation struggles before we can become nations, truly liberated, not just physically, but more crucially, mentally.
As long as Muslim keeps fighting Muslim, Muslim keeps killing Muslim, on the pretext of ethnicity or some dogma instilled into them by obscurantist clerics, all of which, ethnicity, dogma and cleric are anathema to Islam, so long will they continue to slide into the Dark Ages.
Today, the only course left open to us is to shun the self-appointed cleric who passes by the title (usually self-conferred) of “scholar” or “mullah,” get educated so that we can start thinking for ourselves and not timidly let the mullah do our thinking for us, get united in a collective struggle for human progress and economic development and catch up with those who once took knowledge from us and then left us far behind, all because we have fallen into the quagmire of obscurantism.
Humayun Gauhar is a columnist for The Nation in Pakistan and editor of Blue Chip magazine.
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