Daily Times

“And every tongue, through utter drought,

Was withered at the root;

We could not speak, no more than if

We had been choked with soot.

Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, Albatross

About my neck was hung.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is shame. There is shame at the direction the state appears headed in — away from sanity, and towards what should be clinically avoided with every strain of logic and passion.

The article that I wrote last week highlighted the scourge of religiosity and the urgent need for remedying the fault lines: “The days of cosmetic cure are over for changing the tide of national direction. It is time to go back to the board to draw, in absolute clarity, all that needs to be reviewed, starting with the Objectives Resolution. To be recognised as a Muslim, and to be a good Muslim, one doesn’t need the crutches of the Objectives Resolution. In fact, it hides the human that you may be, giving you a face that you may not like, that others may not like — a face drenched in the burden of religiosity”.

While writing the piece, I could not imagine that we would degrade ourselves further so quickly with the members of the national assembly, from across political divides, moving and endorsing the passage of a resolution demanding that the Physics Centre at the Quaid-e-Azam University be named after al-Khazini — a Byzantine-origin astronomer of the 12th century.

The resolution was tabled by Captain (R) Safdar, son-in-law of the former, now disqualified-for-life prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. It is on the floor of the same parliament that Safdar had earlier ranted ceaselessly against the naming of the centre after Dr. Abdus Salam in 2016 on the grounds that he belonged to the Ahmedi community.

More recently, he had led legislators down the parliament corridors chanting slogans in favour of the assassin Mumtaz Qadri, and the head of Tehrik-e-Labaik-Ya-Rasool Allah (TLYR), Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who held the twin-cities hostage at the head of a few hundred militants staging a sit-in at Faizabad, and did not budge till the government had capitulated unequivocally before him by accepting all his demands.

History bears testimony that sustainable polities are not built on the skulls of the innocent. These stand on foundations enshrined in durable human values of tolerance and empathy. We have arduously banished these virtues from our midst, rendering ourselves hostage in the vice-like grip of a vile community brandishing death. Cowing to them will not bring relief. On the contrary, it is likely to further perpetuate their evil stranglehold in an environment where we are already gasping for breath

There is some confusion regarding the proposed legislation. According to a reliable source, Department of Physics is part of the Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU), whereas the National Centre of Physics (NCP), which is no jurisdictional part of the QAU, was named Abdus Salam Centre of Physics in the recent past. Perhaps, it is this centre which the parliamentarians, in their jaundiced wisdom, have renamed after al-Khazini.

This one step is yet another indication of the fast-growing intolerance in the society which is virtually bursting at the seams. From not accepting him as a Muslim to denigrating his singular achievement in the annals of science to desecrating his grave, Dr. Abdus Salam, and the larger Ahmedi community are subjected to a host of crass humiliations which are unprecedented in this age and time.

Pakistan, from its very inception, has been a victim of myriad insecurities, both real and unreal. This phenomenon is virtually inbuilt in the national psyche. From its puritanical pretensions to its aggressive posturing, the space between these two extremes has been blurred to a point of extinction. So, our very existence is subsisting on the sharp edge of whatever we may believe, or command, or project to our people, and to the larger world outside. In doing so, we have exposed ourselves to high-voltage tension in our everyday engagements and interactions, making us easily excitable, vulnerable and fragile.

Espousal of this intolerant culture has diminished the space that we could have had to build a peaceful polity that everyone would be comfortable with. This space has been hijacked by the bigoted and the obscurant proponents who are using it to drive a wedge among various segments of the society, thus cultivating a culture of violence whose manifestations are increasingly visible in our midst.

The case of Asiya Bibi, a Christian lady, is a glaring example of this mindset. She was accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 2010. Her appeal to the High Court was rejected in 2014, but the Supreme Court suspended the death sentence in 2015. That’s where the case rests today with Asia languishing in virtual solitary confinement, confronting the prospect of being hanged to death for a crime she denies having committed.

Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti, former governor and minister respectively, who actively pleaded for her release, were brutally murdered.

There have been instances of those accused of blasphemy having been killed inside the prison houses where they were lodged. Even a police guard shot dead one such prisoner. Lawyers representing those accused of blasphemy have been killed. There are also close to a hundred non-Muslims who have been murdered by the fanatics on charges of blasphemy, but the killers were never apprehended. Whole habitations of those adhering to different religious beliefs have been burnt down, but the perpetrators have walked away free.

These and others are the albatrosses that are hung around our necks as we continue stooping under their dead weight. We don’t realise that there would come a time when we would not be able to carry this weight any longer, and if we still insist on doing so, we would be buried underneath this monstrosity.

In this age of judicial activism, the benches should spare some time to address this gross travesty. Justice is not a requirement of the Muslim population alone. It is a requirement of all those who live here, more so the impoverished and the wretched. They are the ones who don’t have the resources to fight their cases, and nowhere to go for support. They rot in jails amidst humiliating and sub-human conditions until erased from memory.

History bears testimony that sustainable polities are not built on the skulls of the innocent. These stand on foundations enshrined in durable human values of tolerance and empathy. We have arduously banished these virtues from our midst, rendering ourselves hostage in the vice-like grip of a vile community brandishing death. Cowing to them will not bring relief. On the contrary, it is likely to further perpetuate their evil stranglehold in an environment where we are already gasping for breath.

It is time to rise, not against this or that government, or this or that people, but against a set of inequitable laws which have killed the human within us and transformed us into becoming totally insensitive to the plight of those who suffer because of their religious belief or social conditions. Their equal right to live in peace has been cruelly snatched from them as they languish on the fringes of existence, forever fighting for two measly morsels a day.

Marcus Tullius Cicero said that “if we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it”. Let’s speak out to make the difference and shed off the albatrosses that we have carried around our necks, for far too long!

The writer is a political and security strategist, and heads the Regional Peace Institute — an Islamabad-based think tank. Email: raoofhasan@hotmail.com. Twitter: @RaoofHasan

Published in Daily Times, May 8^th 2018.