No other country is better qualified than Pakistan to underscore the imperative of inter-faith harmony and peace among various civilisations. A war that originated in Afghanistan as a result of competing colonial interests of two superpowers and then turned into an America-led Nato expedition against the alleged perpetrators of 9/11 tragedy, has now spilled over into the Pakistan territory with all its attendant lethal fallout.
Not a day passes without either an incident of suicide bombing within or a missile attack from across the border. Even Pakistan's territorial sanctity has been violated by none other than its own allies in the so-called war on terror. Its miseries have been compounded by an all round economic failure that too has primarily resulted from the ill-conceived and badly executed policies of a regime that drew its strength and staying power from an alliance it forged with the principal party to the war in Afghanistan. If a hot war is raging on its western border, in the east it is confronted with a kind of cold war imposed by neighbouring India.
Not only the neighbour is engaged in a surreptitious game of bruising Pakistan economically, its high-handedness in the occupied Kashmir, a Muslim majority state, tends to provoke anger among Pakistanis, their brothers-in-faith. Rightly then, President Zardari called upon the inter-faith conference, hosted by the United Nations, to address the root causes of extremism and terrorism.
President Zardari's exhortation to combat the "hate speech" against Islam, which of late has acquired high-decibel sonority in the West generating a wave of Islamophobia, received instant endorsement of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. "Anti-Semitism remains a scourge", said the UN chief, observing that Islamophobia has emerged as "a new term for an old and terrible form of prejudice". Surely, the two were talking about the incessant anti-Muslim campaign in the Western media, which sometimes appears in the shape of blasphemous cartoons and sometimes in extolling the condemned Salman Rushdi's works.
That some governments in Europe have upheld this hate speech in the name of personal freedom and fundamental rights should tell us why even as they 'respect' the individual's rights, they embrace and deal with, ruthless dictators in the Third World. There are these UN resolutions calling for plebiscite in Kashmir so that the people of the state may exercise their right of self-determination, but who cares, as the struggle for it by the Kashmiris is being crushed with brute force?
Instead of asking India to respect the UN resolutions, the governments in the West are competing with each other, in clear violation of the NPT, to help that country strengthen its potentially weapon-oriented nuclear programme. This double standards policy and selective discrimination that serve as the root cause for mounting frustration, sometimes bordering on defiance, among the Muslims that President Zardari was hinting at.
The very fact that while the Western scholarship produced 'Clash of Civilisations' and remains committed to backing up illegal occupation of Palestinians' land rendering them homeless by an anti-Semitic mindset in Europe, the Islamic world has always embraced the logic of inter-faith harmony. It was Pakistan, a Muslim country, which kick-started the UN peace mission to bring peace in the Mindanao, the Philippines. It is Saudi Arabia that initiated and co-hosted the pioneering inter-faith conference at Madrid last June. In contrast, we would like to know what prompted the invasion of Iraq by the United States: Was it the removal of Saddam Hussein, the West's own creation to counterbalance Iran, or the Iraqi oil?
And for that matter, has the world benefited by the Nato invasion of Afghanistan to dislodge Taliban? We hold no brief for the Taliban, but isn't it a fact that when it ruled Afghanistan the country was free of opium and one could travel in complete safety, day or night, from one end of the country to the other? Is it democracy or warlordism that Afghans are now getting? Of course, there are also intra-faith tensions, but this is not a new phenomenon. It has been there in all religions and at all times, but it has never been a threat to international peace the way it is depicted by the inter-faith distrust now.
We hope the United Nations would initiate a wider discussion on the five points proposed by President Zardari in his address. Unless hate speech is outlawed, one's faith is held sacrosanct, bigotry manifested in Islamophobia is combated and dialogue instead of clash of civilisations is encouraged, international peace would remain uncertain and insecure.