There are countless Malalas
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Why is it so easy to rage at the Taliban? Why is it so hard to rage at the conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and continue to sustain it
The Taliban is a festering sore on the body politic, oozing rotting and smelly pus. But the sore is a symptom of a much deeper malaise and that malaise has to be identified and addressed.
The Taliban has no regard for targeting 14-year old girls. But where in the rest of Pakistan is there any consideration for girls? Is it in Karachi, where children beg or sell trinkets to take money back to their families where every other member works? Is it in Lahore where teenaged girls sell their bodies to make a living? Is it in Dera Bugti, where girls are traded to settle family feuds?
Malala Yusufzai went to school, that is her crime. It is an act that too many girls in Pakistan cannot afford to commit, regardless of the Taliban’s presence, because there is simply no system of education in the country.
The Taliban relies on its twisted interpretation of shariat to claim that targeting 14-year old girls is justified. But what discourses and interpretations of reality enable us to justify the deprivation and neglect faced by all these girls in Pakistan? What do we say? We know it’s not Islam, so what is it? Is it feudalism? Is it capitalism? Is it poverty? Is it laziness? Is it misfortune?
Why is there no ‘war against misfortune’? Is there a drone that can target poverty and also eradicate disease as a collateral damage?
Why is it so easy to rage at the Taliban? Why is it so hard to rage at the conditions that gave rise to the Taliban and continue to sustain it—the semi-feudalism, the predatory capitalism, the thousand and one mafias, the relentless machinations of imperialism and the military? How have we the scions of anti-military all of a sudden started pulling at its shirt asking for it to wipe out the Taliban? What is all of this if not intellectual and moral bankruptcy?
Reprehensible as the shooting of Malala Yusufzai is, it does not justify imperialist drone attacks on peoples living in tribal areas. Reprehensible as the targeting of a 14-year-old girl is, it does not justify the Pakistan Army’s often indiscriminate operations that have led to the displacement of millions of people. And, reprehensible as the Taliban’s transparently idiotic and self-serving discourse is, it is not Pakistan’s biggest enemy.
Pakistan’s biggest enemy is our unwillingness to transcend our own hypocrisies. We chase after the news of the day, today it is workers burning in a factory, tomorrow it is a plane crash, the day after it is the shooting of a 14-year old girl. We have no commitment to a programme for the transformation of society, of addressing the day-to-day struggles of working people. We have only a commitment to applying cosmetics on these festering sores.
One might go away, but another will always take its place. It is the disease that needs to be treated.
| Akram Javed can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |
Comments
1. We, the Muslim have misconceptions that we are the best nation of the world, and consequently have the rights to rule over the world : This imperialist impulsed to rule the world is not just visible in the sub-continent,it was felt in the earliest parts of Islam, in the first period of caliphate.
Iqbal's poetry is the best exponent of this thought: " In his epic poem Tariq ki Dua, Iqbal has heightened the beauty of the Tariq’s Prayer
by adorning it with the robe of poetry. The poem :-
Read:
“O Lord! These bondsmen have set out in Your path for Jihad. They are the seekers of Your good pleasure. They are mysterious as well as the keepers of mystery. Their true state and position is known only to You. You have taught them high-mindedness and, now, they will not settle for less than world-leadership and Divine Rule. These proud men listen or yield to no one. Save them.”
“Revive, once again, in the heart of the Momin, The lightning that was in the prayer of ‘ Leave Not’
Wake up ambition in the breasts, O’ Lord! Transform, the glance of the Momin into a sword.”
Tariq’s ki Dua, is a passionate Narcissism of Iqbal for the renaissance of the Muslim world. What a true Muslim can yearn except that other nations should live under burden of the yoke of the believers of Islam because other peoples are inferior to the Muslims
The second misconception that our religion has added many times more respect and veneration to female gender.
2. These two conception gave birth two plagues [a} Narcissism {b} Chauvinism.
The plight of the Muslim world signifies that they are living in fool's Paradise. The second assertion that they respect more the soft sex negated with the following example which they often quote for the verity of their claim. The ‘ glory’ of our culture is to make fair sex sub-human beings. Their witness is half. Their share in property is half. If a wife refuses to extinguish the sexual fire of her husband for certain reasons angels begin to fling curses upon her till break of the day. Women are not fit for an important position in the government offices. They are inferior, and cannot enjoy the bed of more than one person, while a man can enjoy the warmth of his four delicate sex with the addition of his maid salves countless. In our culture the glory of a woman is in becoming subhuman within the four walls and a machine for the production of babies., What more this culture has left to humiliate the half of the humanity. Would my friend like to tell me?
Clive Stafford Smith Reprieve lawyer wrote to Obama -
"I plan to say sorry to the innocent victims of drones in Waziristan – to Sadaullah, for
example, the 15 year old student who lost both of his legs, one eye and most
of his dreams when a Hellfire missile struck his home in September 2009."