Serving the enemy

Serving the enemy By HUMAYUN GAUHAR


The enemies of Islam have got to be just plain stupid. When we the Muslims have pressed the self-destruction button, why are our enemies splitting their guts to destroy us? Why do our enemies need to do anything when we the Muslims are busy killing each other with such bloody single-mindedness? Do Islam’s enemies need to destroy Muslim countries when we are destroying them so efficiently? Do they need to wreck our economies when we are already doing the job so effectively?
They don’t even need to lift a finger. All they have to do is sit back and enjoy the spectacle while we eradicate our existence. Then, once we have committed collective suicide, our enemies will breach with impunity and take physical control of our countries in order to ‘save’ the global economy. We are such ignoramuses, so divided, so alienated, so distanced from the true spirit of our religion, that having done the work of the enemy we will welcome foreigners to run our countries to bring us law, good order and peace. It seems this is the condition we are happiest in – subordination as underlings. We will not approve anyone from amongst ourselves to rule us, whether democratically chosen or otherwise, unless it is someone from own little group of self-seekers. If that cannot happen, let outsiders rule us and let the devil take the rest. We will then ingratiate ourselves with our foreign masters as toadies and satraps. We will aggrandize ourselves, accept their titles and prizes, as long as no one else from amongst us is ruling the roost.
That is the position in which we are the happiest and I am sorry to say, most law abiding. That is how a handful of British ruled us for a century and more. That is how the Americans will rule us tomorrow. Our present political ‘leaders’, most of them, hail from families that became rich and powerful as Britain’s toadies. Now wait for the American toadies to spring up like mushrooms, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Saudi Arabia falls America will find enough people from a vast pool of toadies-in-waiting with good English and bad conscience to become their satraps and intermediaries. If authority in Pakistan collapses, it will not be mullahs purveying their own peculiar brand of Islam who will fill the breach. It will be the Americans again, who will rise to occasion and protect the world from our nuclear arsenal. Here too they have well-known toadies, stooges and satraps-in-waiting cosseted abroad ready to become their showcase rulers.
What of our famous ‘silent majority’? The din of their silence is deafening. All they can do is watch in horror made mute by their impotence. The cacophony of their silence is broken only by hushed whispers in the illusory security of their homes. Whispers that should be a clamor straining for collective action but which sadly get drowned in their tumblers of whisky, to be forgotten till the next evening’s news brings its sad tidings. Their daily excitement is telephoning, SMS-ing and E-mailing one another to be first with the awful news to signify their comical importance, to show how close they are to the decision-makers. “I found it first,” they proudly declare later. “No, I knew it before you, ask Allah Ditta.” And so it goes: a sublimation of guilt, an excuse for inaction, a reason for silence. They are like junkies, drugged out on the excitement of bad news, violence, murders, kidnappings, assassinations, rape, arson, bombings, loot and carnage. And, oh yes, on rumours of imminent change.
Come elections, they stay at home resting or partying with their TVs switched on at night when the results come in. Their phones buzzing to be first with the news of ‘who’s won’, ‘who’s lost’, ‘who’s election was rigged’, ‘who has spent how much on his campaign’ (“says my source”) or anything more to demonstrate their ‘importance’. Then, when they find that the same old crooks have got back into our assemblies, they curse everything under the sun from the ISI to crooked money to the small minority that bothers to come out to vote. Everyone and anything except themselves, the 75 percent somniferous who opted out to vote in the first place. It is pathetic. They deserve no sympathy. They deserve what they get. If they don’t come out of their slumber they will soon become slaves, and rightly so.
The irony was palpable at Islamabad’s Convention Centre. Here was the President making an eminently sensible speech on ‘Enlightened Moderation’, the only realistic course for Muslims. And then there was Karachi’s new-found peace being shattered by multifaceted violence unleashed by different groups that enter the vacuum left by the absence of authority. Here was the President talking of galvanizing the moribund Organisation of Islamic Conference (what a name—the epitome of impotence) into action.
And there was Saudi Arabia, the headquarter of OIC, being rocked to its foundations by Muslims who would have us believe that they are Islamic revolutionaries but in reality are bloodthirsty terrorists who kill human beings with less thought than they would crush an ant. Within two blood-soaked days Karachi was back to its ‘bad’ old days. In a series of bombings Saudi Arabia’s oil industry is being wrecked in order to shake the global economy. Breach is being piled upon breach with various criminal groups and terrorists jumping into the pit of ignominy, creating havoc to implement their nefarious agendas or further their demented ideologies.
It is not just one thing or the other. There is a war in progress at various levels by various gangs for various purposes. All they will end up achieving is that Pakistan, just beginning to see its collapsed economy stir back to life, will collapse again, and this time it will not be the economy only. All they will end up achieving in Saudi Arabia is a vacuum with nothing except a band of terrorists with their Stone Age mindsets to replace it. But I have news for them. If the mullahs and terrorists think that they will be able to fill the breach, they have another thought coming. The West will not allow Pakistan with its nuclear power and Saudi Arabia with its oil to fall into the hands of primitive obscurants to play merry hell with the world. They will step in and take control, even of Mecca and Medina, having seen that they can get away with taking control of Karbala and Najaf with not a bark from any Muslim government besides the leaderless people of Iraq. Perhaps we who were ‘granted’ independence by our colonizers need to fight a liberation struggle before we can become nations, truly liberated, not just physically, but mentally.
In Karachi there is a turf war in progress between two gangs of alley cats that are allowed to pass as political parties and permitted to contest elections, enter our parliaments and get form a government to gain cover their criminal activities. This is what happens when you set the cat to guard the milk—it drinks the milk. But other cats want to ‘guard’ it too so that they can also drink it and blame someone else. A cat fight ensues for control of the milk called Karachi. Seeing their chance, mad dogs of war—the terrorists with their demented agendas, jump into the breach. There is chaos and the milk gets ruined and spilt.
As long as Muslims keep fighting other Muslims on the pretext of ethnicity or some dogma instilled into them by obscure clerics, all of whom are anathema to Islam, they continue to slide into the Dark Ages. The time is not far before they slide so far down the abyss that there will be no clawing back up from it. All they might achieve for some time is an inquisition led by self-appointed clerics, as were the Ayatollahs’ in Iran and Taliban in Afghanistan. Where kangaroo courts headed by frenzied half-baked clerics would pronounce a summary ‘judgment’ and send hundreds of innocents to horrific deaths without any semblance of justice.
It will suit the Americans just fine before they can step in and take charge. This is a religion that came to preach equality and egalitarianism by ridding of tribalism, ethnicity and sectarianism and bringing about tolerance in humankind. Today, the only course left open to us is to shun the self-appointed cleric who passes by the title (usually self-conferred) of ‘scholar’ or ‘mullah’. The masses should be provided with education so that we can start thinking for ourselves and not timidly let the mullah do their thinking for them. We must be get united in a collective struggle for human progress and economic development. And we must catch up with those who once took knowledge from us and then left us far behind, all because we have fallen into the quagmire of obscurantism.