By Irfan Husain
14 Nov 2020
IT must
have been around 1980 when my son Shakir visited me in Paris with his mother. I
was doing a course in public finance on a French government scholarship for
civil servants, and he was all of five.
After a
morning of sightseeing with Shakir dangling on my shoulders, he announced that
he was hungry. I set him down outside an outdoor café at the edge of the Centre
Pompidou and asked what he wanted. Looking around, he pointed at a ham
sandwich: “That”, he said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Gently, his
mother explained that the meat in the sandwich was forbidden to Muslims.
“What?” he exclaimed with horror and incomprehension. “You mean there are
different gods here and back in Pakistan?”
This is a
question I still haven’t been able to answer over the last four decades. And
now, the conundrum has returned to trouble me again. In media reports published
in Dawn and all across the world, the UAE has relaxed many of the social
constraints that prevented its Muslim population from falling prey to
un-Islamic temptations.
Saudi
Arabia, too, is on the same path, with its de facto ruler, the heir apparent
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, permitting women to drive, opening cinemas and
permitting the two genders to work together. As my old friend Moni Mohsin would
have said in her Diary of a Social Butterfly, “What cheeks!”
But the UAE
has gone even further by allowing unmarried couples to cohabit, letting Muslims
drink, and taking so-called honour killing off the menu.
Apparently,
these changes have all been made in order to increase tourism and foreign
investment.
So where
does this leave Pakistan? Don’t we want to see our tourism and foreign
investment grow? Or, as Shakir asked, do we have different gods? As we have
seen during Imran Khan’s tenure thus far, neither tourists nor foreign
investors have exactly broken down the door to come to Pakistan.
It is clear
that we march to the beat of a different drummer. For us, the world can go to
hell in a hand-basket as long as our mediaeval practices don’t change. We can
consume as much dope as we want, beat our wives, starve our children, rob and
kill as long as we observe our ignorant grasp of Islamic laws.
Never mind
that in Islam women are protected; and as far as I know, there’s no ban on
cinemas, music or sports. Mullahs have exploited our ignorance of Arabic to
block all fun-loving activities. Finally, Arab rulers have decided that enough
is enough, and it’s time to move on.
It’s clear
that the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been influenced by Trump and
his son, as well as the prospects of enhanced trade and tourism exchanges with
Israel. Israeli tourists are generally well off, and the country’s high-tech
industries can transform economies. And of course, their arms technology is
well known.
But these
two countries aren’t the only ones to jump off the extremist bandwagon. Turkey
has been a secular state for a century. In Morocco, Tunis, Egypt, Malaysia and
Indonesia, you could get a drink without a fuss for decades. You still can.
Pakistan
and Afghanistan remain the outliers. After Bhutto imposed prohibition in 1977
to counter the right-wing alliance, he regretted his decision in his brief
death cell account If I Am Assassinated. Afghanistan was a happy destination
for hippies until the coup in the mid-1970s and the following civil war that is
still being fought.
So what
drives these tribal practices? Obviously, tribalism has long dominated
European, African and Asian societies, and their rules — evolved over the
millennia — have come to play a major role in determining the direction of
society and the economy. But with time, technology and the shifts in power from
rural to urban centres have changed the status quo. Feudalism has given way to
corporate clout. In backward countries like Pakistan, feudalism still rules the
roost.
And yet,
survey after survey shows us that Pakistanis, young and old, hold deep
religious beliefs. But that’s not the point. Millions of Muslims around the
world are extremely religious, but that doesn’t stop them from having a drink
at weddings.
Now, I’m
not advocating drinking at all. I’m just suggesting that people should be free
to choose. This is what the UAE has just done.
There are
many among the clergy who love to impose their will on the rest of us, and this
is what I oppose. By the same token, women must be allowed the freedom to
choose their life partners, and not be subjected to their parents’ will in the
matter. Marriage ought to be a happy occasion, and not a time for fear and
violence.
Occasionally,
marriages don’t work out, and that’s just too bad. Why should parents take on
the responsibility for divorce?
Original Headline: Different gods
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/arab-mullahs-exploited-our-ignorance/d/123483
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