Daily Times

Civilisation has credited both destruction and mystery of creation to God. Let’s face it: the divine cannot be brought to any court of law for the destructive forces — violence, war, famine and the rest. Instead, there must be acceptance and a submission to the order. The destruction, however, resulting from the direct consequences of bad governance ought not to be submitted to. People need to revolt. Yet, the default position of this country is confusion between the two. The personal and subjective ethos becomes the political. We are an ‘InshAllah’ country.

The term loosely translates into ‘God willing’, and is used at the end of any sentence where one talks of the future. This is seemingly a cultural layer we wear to wrap our eastern outlook on life, nothing more than myth, hence harmless. But it is not; it is instead the magnet that draws one to the illogical, and simultaneously, messes with the internal moral compass we are inertly born with. It supercedes the ultimate morality of self-preservation that we must cultivate in order to prevail as a people. It creates a separation between our actions and the change we can introduce in society, be it in the form of standing up to the mob that is about to set a Christian colony on fire or the desecration of an Ahmedi graveyard.

This happens because the word is a religiously-loaded word, not a temporal one. Therefore, it is an exclusivist word, and its practitioners are exclusivist, believing that, of course, there is only one right interpretation of the divine. Why is this dangerous? Those that do not fit our straitjacket interpretations die in the hands of the army of God, plentiful in Pakistan. And our response to that carnage against minorities becomes a loop of more InshAllahs.

The greater tragedy though is that the word lacks the one ingredient that human endeavour has used to line the world’s largest cities with skyscrapers, formulate bill of rights and abolishing slavery: motivation. Motivation that empowers one to take action based on one’s given powers.

Language builds the original system software our minds use to regulate behaviour. As a part of our cultural lexicon, one cannot undermine the effect the word has on our collective actions as a nation. Complacency, inaction and downright laziness prevail. Worse, there builds a great big wall between us and the ‘other’, making them easily dismissible in the whirlpool of religious extremism.

If Pakistan was an exemplary state giving its Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and others equal rights and protection, InshAllah would be a reinforcement of those positive values. Now, however, with everything going on, when leading pop singers get together and release a rock song to celebrate nothing but bigotry, misogyny and genocide it is revolting. Art has always been by its nature a means of change in society: What message of change does, “Hath utha kar maang dua, Naya Pakistan” convey? Certainly, a transfer of responsibility from citizenry to the divine.

No religion preaches mere lip service. Nor is it a favour to Islam to propel sales of an album by the use of religion and feed the nation anti-depressant pills through goody goody jingles while it burns. It is for days like these Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote, “Zard patton ka ban jo mera desh hai/ Dard ki anjuman jo mera desh hai.”

The irony is that for years we have blown air into the coals of our anti-Israel hate in our love for the Palestinians, yet, today when we are squeezing our own minorities to flee for their lives, there is an eerie silence. There is nothing to sing about today, except relive the pain of Karbala for what we have put Shias through in this country. Ask the Christian woman of her devastation as she lost her life’s entire savings in Joseph Colony, Lahore, when a mob attacked hundreds of residents for being Christian. She will not be singing until we amplify her voice, stop the attack on her people and remove our obsession with religion itself, and keep Islam’s message of brotherhood. And if someday she does sing, InshAllah will not be her choice word. And this is her Pakistan too.

It’s imperative we make our language more inclusive. It’s the least we can do.

The writer is a technology and media professional and a freelance writer based in Lahore. She can be reached at aisha.f.sarwari@gmail.com and her Twitter handle is @AishaFSarwari