View Point                                                  Abid Ullah Jan

The Blip in NWFP

For many the news that parliament of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province passed a bill to implement Shari'ah is far more painful than Mr. Bush's declaration of war on Afghanistan and Iraq, which eventually took lives of thousands of people, and continues to occupy and subjugate millions of people against their will. The anticipated fear of Shari'ah is so overwhelming that it blinds us to the injustices, discrimination and exploitation underway all over the world. Compared to the big bangs in Baghdad, it's not even a blip in NWFP.

Will NWFP government now starve 4,500 to 4,800 children to death per month for the coming ten years? Will it kill more than one million people in NWFP by depriving them of food, medicine and the spare parts necessary to repair their water and sewage systems? Will they use cluster bombs against civilians in major cities? Will Shari'ah compel government functionaries in NWFP to bulldoze homes, shoot children, UN officials, journalists and peace activists?

Will people in NWFP get so desperate that they would turn to blowing themselves into pieces just to let the world know that they prefer death over living under Shari'ah? Will NWFP government now engineer endless massacres such as Qana, Dair Yasin, Baldat al-Shaikh, Khan Yunis, Sabra and Shatila, and Trqumia? And lastly, who will do more damage to NWFP: the "neo-Taliban" or the US which will use any trick up its sleeves to discredit and demonise them? The world has yet to realise that the Taliban didn't kill as many Afghans in 5 years as the US killed in a couple of months with its 22000 bombs to dislodge them. Moreover the invisible genocide continues. (1)

Realistically speaking, nothing even similar to the above will happen, nor has the world turned upside down when an insignificant assembly in the remotest part of the world chose to live by what is part of its national constitution and raison d'être of the state. We really need to find out what makes us consider blips as bangs and bangs as blips.

A closer look at the state of affairs reveals that proponents and promoters of democracy are making two strategic errors. They are embracing one and violating the other principle of democracy to the extreme. There is a fundamentalist obsession for the principle of separation of Church and State - it doesn't matter if 100,000 Algerians are killed but religion should be kept separate from politics. On the other hand, no one minds clear violations of the principle that calls for respecting the will of the majority. We are witnessing this denial of the majority's will in country after country in a bid to defend the former principle.

These two extremes would become the final nails in the coffin of democracy- yet another addition to the list of failures of the man made systems at the hands of its champions and promoters. The principles of democracy and human rights can make the rhetoric attractive, but limiting their use to protestations of kindness and gentleness signals its imminent demise. People on the ground see that the U.S., or nor one for that matter, is not the final arbiter to allow or deny a people the right to have limited or full implementation of their religious values in the state system. A news report recently said that the U.S. will accept "limited Islamisation" in Pakistan. (2) The people read in the same report that the US "supports Musharraf's decision to keep controversial Presidential powers, acquired through LFO, under his belt." Then people keep on reading the headlines: "US support emboldens Musharraf,"(3)"US makes U-turn on Iraq council: A planned Iraqi assembly to elect an interim council was quashed by US officials,"(4) "US 'To Appoint Iraqi Leadership',"(5) and so on. The strategic mistake is to consider US the epitome of goodness, the owner of democracy and freedom - as if such values are product of the American experience alone. No one has forgotten that slavery, abolished by Islam 1400 years ago, was still a legal institution in US till December 1865.(6) It could get rid of its apartheid just less than 50 years ago. How then can it sit in the judgement seat for filtering values and norms that belong to other religions? How can it approve dictatorship for others under the pretext of "assurance against any possible Talibanisation of the governance system"?(7)

Compared to the organised and concerted anti-Taliban campaign, it just needs a single diligent researcher to sit and compile atrocities committed in Afghanistan since October 07, 2001 to shatter the myth of Talibanisation. The point is that the US can never go onto country after country because its commentators believe the US doesn't need WMD "to justify the war." It is justified because the US needed to put Iraq "onto progressive path" and "America's future…rides on building a different Iraq."(8) The question is, how many countries would it invade and how many thousands people would it kill to secure American's future or making them progressive in the image of the United States of America. Given a chance to kill this many people and do as much destruction, with as much available force as the US has at its disposal, anyone can come up with any system to call it suitable for addressing all human needs. One just needs to sit and assess the damage that has never been done in human history to impose a system, irrespective of its being right or wrong.
We have given enough chance to faithless systems for running human affairs and addressing their needs. We have experienced inhumane, merciless, totalist political dominations. Whether it was godless communism or the ongoing godless secularism, the life of spirit and the inquiring intellect has been equally denounced, harassed, and propagandized. Let us give faith a chance. Only by the resurrection of religious faith can mankind be kept from total destruction. Even if we deny faith a chance, it's the future any way. The material order rests upon the spiritual order. With the weakening of faith and the moral order, things fall apart; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Hellenic and the Roman cultures went down to dusty death after this fashion. The Romans generously liberated the Greek city-states from the yoke of Macedonia. But it was not long before the Romans felt it necessary to impose upon those Greeks a domination more stifling to Hellenic freedom and culture than ever Macedon had been. The American Caesars are acting likewise.

Remember, it was faith, not the US provided weapons alone, that defeated communism in Afghanistan. Neither the US-published Jihad literature bolstered Afghan resistance to communism, nor would the US-sponsored ban on such literature reduce Muslim resistance to imposition of godless system in the Muslim world. Therefore, the wise course is to help small governments, such as that in NWFP, develop systems and gradually nurture them in the true spirit of Islam. Let us guide them if they deviate from the true spirit of Islam. But sweeping them off their feet is a folly. Just as sweeping them off the feet in Algeria has helped us achieve nothing, sweeping them off their feet anywhere else will not help us gain anything other than more misery and pain.

End Notes

[1] Mohammed Daud Miraki, "The Silent Genocide from America," See http://www.rense.com/general37/InvisibleGenocid.html
[2] Alam, Absar. "US okays MMA, Musharraf alliance," The Nation, June 02, 2003.
[3] Shahzad, Syed Saleem. "US Support emboldens Musharraf," Asia Times, June 03, 2003.
[4] Prusher, Ilene R. "US makes U-turn on Iraq council," Christain Science Monitor, June 03, 2003.
[5] BBC, June 01, 2003. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/
[6] 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
[7] Alam, Absar. "US okays MMA, Musharraf alliance," The Nation, June 02, 2003.
[8] Friedman, Thomas L. "Because we could," The New York Times, June 04, 2003.