Daily Times

There’s an advertisement on television channels showing a housewife inviting a cab driver to have an Iftar meal with her family. Besides seeking blessings associated with the holy month, the invitation is also a gesture of appreciation as the cab driver has driven all the way from his home to return some grocery items the woman had forgotten to pick up from the cab on reaching her home at the end of the ride. The cab driver had noticed the items lying on the back seat of the car when he was parking the car at his home. In an extraordinary display of compassion, the man gets back behind the steering wheel and heads towards the woman passenger’s house to return the items. She is impressed and reciprocates his kind act with the invitation.

Apparently, the woman rider’s act appears quite magnanimous. Seen another way, however, the story shown in the ad, especially the generous Iftar invitation, is a manifestation of how we prefer being seen as generous but without first clearing what we owe to others.

For instance, the ad misses the point that the woman rider should have paid the driver for the cost of the additional trip he took to return the forgotten grocery items. A better social messaging would have been if she had been shown insistently paying for the cost of the additional trip. Justice and fairness is a must in our social conduct, while piety and generosity are virtues that add value to our conduct on top the former two traits.

The aforementioned ad mirrors our socio-culture dichotomy with regards to attitude towards fulfilling our duties like paying taxes versus our desires to be seen as overtly kind and generous. Millions of people do charity while conveniently evading taxes; so many among us offer five prayers daily, observe fasts without a lapse, and perform pilgrimage to Mecca, and yet we don’t conduct our businesses fairly. For example, we resort to black marketing or denial of minimum wage payments and social security to our workers.  This is ostentatious religiosity, where symbolism is preferred over bringing our personal character in sync with the intent and spirit of the religion.

People may be encouraged to pay their taxes if the ulema exhort them to do so through their Friday sermons. But why would the ulema deliver such a sermon if it will eventually result in less funds coming their way in the form of charity?

As a result, we witness instances where for-profit national and multinational companies undertake flashy corporate social responsibility campaigns, more often than not, aimed either at public relations and image building, eventually bringing sustained profits, or at removing attention from their corporate malpractices.

Similarly, barring a few exceptions, those we usually see doing good and generous deeds in the holy month of Ramazan indulge in such virtuous behavior for reasons ranging from image building to keeping up with the Joneses or for atonement of wrongdoings which go on interrupted rest of the year. For example, a housing tycoon in this country is seen as a Good Samaritan for his acts of generosity, more so in this holy month, despite all his stories of land grabbing.

The problem with this flamboyant religiosity is that the acts like saying one’s prayers, fasting, donating money and food to the poor, and even going  on pilgrimage, have neither led a great majority of people to spiritually transform their lives adopting a socially responsible character nor helped to remove systemic injustice and corruption from our society. Despite this ever-increasing fervour towards religious rites and the rise in individual and corporate philanthropy, reported at PKR 260 billion in 2016, economic inequality between the poor and the rich remains scandalously high. In the absence of organised giving, mosques and madaris form the biggest institutional recipients of all those billions in philanthropy. Consequently, while the religiosity bloats, the rate of economic inequality remains unchecked. For inequality, the richest 20 percent in Pakistan consume seven times more than the poorest 20 percent.

While state’s failure in this regard is evident, a great deal of responsibility also lies with our ulema for showing little motivation to propagate the virtue of being a responsible citizen of the state among masses. If, for instance, the ulema exhort masses for payment of government taxes through their Friday sermons, people will find it more convincing to pay their taxes regularly. But then why should they be motivated to do so as it will eventually result in less funds coming their way? It’s for no other reason that one never hears such a Friday sermon where payment of taxes as a duty is emphasized as much as charity. With our preference for charity at the expense of paying for what we owe to the government, we’ll only keep nurturing the sea of poverty and inequality that surrounds our islands of prosperity.

The writer is a sociologist with interest in history and politics. He’s accessible on Twitter @ZulfiRao1