Daily Times

“The players all played
at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure,” and she is not alone. In the Mumliqat-e-Khuda-daad-e-Pakistan (God’s country Pakistan), another such cry resounds. It seems the queen got her wish at least once; how else would you describe what happened to the erstwhile governor of not so very yore. Poor chap, much like anyone of us — you or I. You, if you can read this article as is without the benefit (or otherwise) of translation; you, who are fortunate enough to have found a comparatively better education in a system that has developed faults along ‘class lines’.

So let the propagandising begin. First things first.

Am I a fan of Salmaan Taseer?

Not really. To be fair I was a critic of most of Mr Taseer’s policies. That is not to say that I had designated him to the same depths of the trash bin of ineptitude that most Pakistanis had thought fair for him before his sudden and tragic dismissal from office and life. The guy had his minuses and his pluses — like any one of us. Or must the age-old adage of ‘let he who is without sin, cast the first stone’ be repeated?

His chief political opposition (tells a lot about a person, by the way) gave the man many unsavoury epithets but that was their job, was it not? Can they truly be blamed?

But how will we deflect blame from the needless gossiping about the Governor’s many ‘private’ faults that we all partook of aplenty? From the corporate water cooler to the motorcycle parking — whenever individuals have congregated for a shared cigarette — ‘the Governor’s latest antic’ was one of the topics of ‘choice’.

What we forgot was that the man was, again, just a man; that his private life was just that — private; that both the spirit of Islam and modern, secular and broadminded thought encourage healthy exchange of ideas of a ‘constructive’ nature. Needless destruction is abhorrent to progress.

I submit to you that the events surrounding Mr Taseer’s murder and this society’s relationship to those events is indicative of a society gone as mad as Alice’s Hatter. How appropriate, then, for the echo of the minaret to reach every dim-witted Islamic-drone (not that every drone is dim-witted, no sir). How appropriate for a fast-lumpenising society with a majority represented by the Mumtaz Qadris of the world out to empty their payload into the collective laps of the nearest, most vocal, liberals.

“Off with his head,” they say, they cheer.

Is not the call of the Sunni Ittehad Council barring all (gasp) kind of Muslims (they would say it if they could, you know) from protesting against the murder of Salmaan Taseer just that — an infringement of your constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly and freedom of expression?

Do you feel the sting of that slap on your face? I do.

But what is the point of prattling on and on stating the obvious over and over again ad infinitum? I do not want to sound like some kind of impotent ‘senior analyst’ trying to instill the fear of God (literally) into the liberals. That is not my purpose.

My purpose is to furnish the wake-up call our dear bearded ‘peaceful Muslim ulema’ have so considerately served all of us all hot and passionate; but I wish to furnish it cold so you can feel the flash-burn of intense chill as you savour its sour taste. Nothing less seems to rouse us from our collective slumber. We are a nation of a so-called secular, so-called moderate, so-called peaceful and so-called progressive majority besieged by the horse-carts and wagon-trains of literate cavemen — or are we?

I do not want to add the word ‘shaheed’ (martyr) in front of Salmaan Taseer’s name — not because his assassination was not important or because it carries no weight. I do not want to do it because I hate playing on the enemy’s turf. And over the last few years I have felt that, increasingly, anyone and everyone dying an unnatural death in Pakistan has somehow attained ‘shahadat-dom’. I mean, even grammatically the word has lost its pristine meaning — it has become mundane and everyday. But let us not stoop to sheer semantics, either. Let us talk of important things.

We are in a state of war, my friends. And if you do not ‘get with the programme’, so to speak, and do it ‘pronto’ — soon you would not even remember what the freshness of original thought even felt like.

We need a change; a revolution, yes, but I am sick and tired of people dressing up evolutionary practice as revolutionary change. We need the Renaissance too, and much like in the experience of Europe, it would not come cheap.

The only question is: what are you going to do about it?

The writer is a war correspondent from Pakistan and has been associated with journalism for six years. He can be reached at tagwman@gmail.com