The sister of the Lal Masjid clerics has protested that the title "maulana" has been dropped from the names of Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi by the press, media and government spokespersons. Her protest has generated a lot of lively debate among armchair pundits and the public at large. Those "for" and those "against" are fairly distributed and the point is moot.
I am not about to comment on this. By now everybody is quite fed up with the subject of Lal Masjid because all one has heard so far from the commentators is mere speculation and no facts.
Those who can give us the low down on the affairs of the masjid, the intelligence agencies, are silent. I have been bombarded by this issue right left and centre, not only through the channels of press and television but personally cornered by colleagues, friends even the rickshaw drivers and the salesmen in the minimart I patronise. It is nothing but idle chatter and I am so sick of the subject I feel if someone says "Lal Masjid" I shall see red.
Symbols of sanctity have been exploited in the past and continue to be exploited. How many parks and empty plots in Karachi have been occupied for setting up mosques without formal permission! They are in thousands. Any attempt to enforce the law and remove the encroachment leads to sanctimonious protest by the exploiters as well as the public who see it as violation of a holy place. As if pious use of a place renders something illegal legal. The encroachments also include other misuse. A number of these mosques have power and water connections without charge. The authorities are expected to forgive it all in the name of holiness.
Another form of encroachment which exploits pious sentiments is the setting up of mazar of some saint. Mazars are good business ventures. There is a joke told in almost every Muslim country - since this business exists everywhere - about a mazar which was very popular but on investigation the "saint" buried inside turned out to be the mujawar's ass.
In the city we do not have many of these mazars but on the busy highways connecting the port city to the interior, it is a fairly common sight to see a few green flags fluttering by the side of the road and soon the solid structure appears and later visitors arrive for ziarat or to have the jinn exorcised from their daughters (it is usually girls who are possessed). That these are fakes was evident when the National Highway became less frequented by travellers and the Super Highway became the favourite route. Soon the flags appeared along the virgin landscape and the "pir" business began to be established along the Super Highway.
It is not just the ignorant who fall for sanctimonious ploys. The advertisement agencies exploit the public's pious sentiments by misusing pictures of the Holy Ka'aba, the Roza-e-Rasool, offering free tickets for Umra. These are used as promotional gambits and, sorry to say, are very successful in popularising the bank branches, petrol pumps and products the advertisements project.
In my days at the Karachi University much was done by the Department of Islamic History to make the students rational and realistic Muslims. In the first year Islamiat was a compulsory subject and we had a teacher with a sense of humour who gently moulded our attitude. Returning our papers of the first test he set us he casually asked what 786 stood for, which some students had written on the top of their papers.
He pointed a finger to a pious-looking female expecting her to answer him. He chose well. She stood up and in a shocked voice brimming with righteousness said, "How don't you know what it means, Maulana sahib? It means Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim!"
Unperturbed, he said he had asked the same question to a colleague who, indeed, told him what she had said; whereupon the head of the Department said, "If numbers represent the Word of God then we could substitute numbers for the holy verses we recite in our prayers. In fact, why not total the numbers and say them in one go". After this metaphorical rap on the knuckles no student ever wrote 786 on their test papers again.
I have not gone back to the university since I left it four decades ago, but a contemporary who recently went there reported that the place had changed. Fanaticism ruled even in the English Department where the majority of students wore beards or burqas. We had both studied in the English Department and among our contemporaries there were only one or two girls who arrived in a burqa which they shed in the Ladies Common Room and donned again when they went home. As for beards they were non-existent in the entire Humanities Faculty.
Here am I, a modern Muslim with short hair and lipstick and no outward show of piety. So is the colleague who was shocked at the attitudes prevailing in the Karachi University today. Among our contemporaries the well-known figures are Nasreen Jalil our Naib Nazima, ex-Senator Javed Jabbar, humourist and playwrite Anwar Maqsood, music director Suhail Rana, actor Waheed Murad, Sindh Assembly Speaker Muzaffar Hussan Shah, Senator Nisar Memon and PPP Sindh Assembly member Nisar Khuhro. These are some of the well-known figures but judging from their personalities you can gauge the attitude of the rest of us.
Attitudes matter. So if there is rampant abuse of symbols of sanctity it is not just the ignorant but the educated and the institutions of higher education who must be held as culprits for the growing intolerance, the religious masquerade and the exploitation of religious sentiments.
In our days the foreign students who came to Karachi to learn about religion joined the university. Today they join the seminaries. Islamic History was very popular with foreign students who were mostly Palestinians and Malaysians. Two of the Malaysians were my friends and the letters I received from them after they went home showed they had become teachers in schools and colleges, they did not become savants in seminaries.
Today it is generally held that piety should be evident in beards and burqas. This is another exploitation of symbols of sanctity. Anyone not conforming to this outward show is dubbed a kafir or at least a west-influenced, therefore ignorant, Muslim who needs to be shown the right path. It is amazing how many people glibly criticise the West and modernised Pakistanis.
The same people are not averse to the benefits of modern science and technology. Show me one person who preaches simplicity who does not own a car, a mobile phone, a TV and computer, patronise allopathic medicine and prefers hospital to hakims for the treatment of fatal diseases like cancer. These are the people who are just as West-influenced as the rest of us who adopt all that is good from the West but at the same time are as concerned when the West does something that abuses the sanctity of our religion and culture.
It is a contradiction of the concept of orthodox piety to call the burqa and beard brigades morally conservative. They are plain fanatics. They wish to exploit conventional piety for other types of profit, political or material. One of their justifications is that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam. It was not created to be a theocratic state, but perpetuate to safeguard the social and economic status of Muslims of the subcontinent.
The Muslims of the 1940s were God fearing people, too, but in the movement for Independence they did not follow any mullah, they followed a man in a three-piece suite and called him Quaid-i-Azam, the supreme leader. They were inspired by a poet who wore a shirt and trousers and called him Shair-i-Mashriq.