Month: May 2009

SANSAD News Release, May 27, 2009

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) held a Public Forum on Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka on Sunday, May 24 at Cafe Kathmandu, 2779 Commercial Drive, Vancouver.
A gathering of South Asians originating in various countries and other Canadians that filled the café in Vancouver – well known as a site for intellectual and rights-based discussions -, heard from Hari Sharma, President of SANSAD, Chelliah Premrajah, a Tamil community, Labour, and Church activist, C. Pathmayohan, an activist in the Tamil community, Raj Chouhan, MLA, Peter Julian, MP, and Don Davies, MP. Indran Amrithanayagam, a Tamil poet and a member of the US Foreign Service, read some of his new poetry dealing with the current situation in Sri Lanka – both at the beginning and at the end of the forum. The presentations were followed by a vigorous discussion and collection of funds for humanitarian relief of the victims of war in Sri Lanka. The funds will be directed through appropriate agencies to ensure that they reach the people in need.

The following resolution was adopted by the gathering:

Whereas the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been systematically deprived of their rights since the adoption of the constitution of 1956,

Whereas their attempts to seek political and social justice has been repeatedly and systematically thwarted, compelling many of them to take up arms in a struggle for liberation,

Whereas the current military victory of the Government of Sri Lanka over the LTTE has been achieved at the cost of immense loss of civilian lives against the appeal of the international community, including the United Nations for restraint and the complete denial of access to the press and relief agencies,

And whereas hundreds of thousands of displaced people, a large percentage of whom are severely injured, are currently confined in camps without adequate supply of food, clothing and medicines and denied relief from international agencies,

Therefore be it resolved that we express our commitment to provide what relief we can for the victims of war in Sri Lanka and demand that the Government of Canada contribute generously to humanitarian relief in Sri Lanka and demand that international agencies be allowed to deliver it to the needy.

We further demand that the Government of Canada use its diplomatic power to champion the establishment of political and social justice for Tamils in Sri Lanka because without such justice there is no possibility of a secure peace in Sri Lanka.

We express our solidarity with the Tamil diaspora in Canada and demand that the Government of Canada remove and desist from any labeling of the community that discriminates against them.

By: Ernesto Che Guevara

978-81-87496-85-4, LeftWord, May 2009 Paperback.pp. vi+79
Categories: Latin American Studies/Politics/Biography
List price: Rs 150.00 / $ 8.00
Book Club Members price: Rs 105.00 / $ 5.60

http://www.leftword.com/bookdetails.php?BkId=232&type=PB

About the Book:
A hitherto unpublished work by Che Guevara

“Now St. Karl is paramount, the axis, as he will be for all the years I remain on the face of the earth…” So wrote young Ernesto Guevara referring to Karl Marx in a letter to his mother from Mexico in October 1956.

Che learned from the German revolutionary, and in his extensive travels never ceased immersing himself in the classic works of Marxism. Many of Che’s comments about Marx might also refer to Che himself, such as his observation:

“Such a humane man whose capacity for affection extended to all those suffering throughout the world, offering a message of committed struggle and indomitable optimism, has been distorted by history and turned into a stone idol.”

Written after Che’s 1965 mission to Africa, this unpublished biographical introduction to Marx and Engels will assist a new generation to understand not just the key concepts of Marxism but also to learn more about the author himself, whose image and example continues to inspire rebels on every continent.

Contents

Editors’ note
Marx & Engels: A biographical introduction Notes
Che’s reading list on Marx and Engels

GUERRILLA WARFARE

By: Ernesto Che Guevara

978-81-87496-84-7, LeftWord, May 2009 Paperback. pp.xiv+157
Categories: Marxist Classics/History/Latin American Studies
List price: Rs 250.00 / $ 12.00
Book Club Members price: Rs 175.00 / $ 8.40

http://www.leftword.com/bookdetails.php?BkId=233&type=PB

About the Book:
A classic text on revolution by Che Guevara

A bestselling classic for decades, this is Che Guevara’s own incisive analysis of the Cuban revolution — a text studied by his admirers and adversaries alike. This is an account of what happened in Cuba and why, explaining how a small group of dedicated fighters grew in strength with
the support of the Cuban people, overcoming their limitations to defeat a dictator’s army.

This new edition features a revised translation and a foreword by Harry “Pombo” Villegas, Che’s comrade in Bolivia and Africa, who was one of the few survivors of Che’s Bolivian campaign.

“The positive feature of guerrilla warfare is that each guerrilla fighter is ready to die not just to defend an idea but to make that idea a reality.
That is the essence of the guerrilla struggle. The miracle is that a small nucleus, the armed vanguard of a great popular movement that supports them, can proceed to realize that idea, to establish a new society, to break the old patterns of the past, to achieve, ultimately, the social justice for which they fight.” — Che Guevara

Contents:

Editorial Note
Ernesto Che Guevara
Foreword by Harry “Pombo” Villegas
Dedication to Camilo by Ernesto Che Guevara

I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF GUERRILLA WARFARE
1 The Essence of Guerrilla Warfare
2 Guerrilla Strategy
3 Guerrilla Tactics
4 Warfare on Favorable Terrain
5 Warfare on Unfavorable Terrain
6 Urban Warfare

II. THE GUERRILLA BAND
1 The Guerrilla Fighter: Social Reformer
2 The Guerrilla Fighter as Combatant
3 Organization of a Guerrilla Band
4 Combat
5 Beginning, Development, and End of a Guerrilla War

III. ORGANIZATION OF THE GUERRILLA FRONT
1 Supply
2 Civil Organization
3 The Role of Women
4 Health
5 Sabotage
6 War Industry
7 Propaganda
8 Intelligence
9 Training and Indoctrination
10 The Organizational Structure of the Army of a Revolutionary Movement

IV. APPENDICES
1 Underground Organization of the First Guerrilla Band
2 Holding Power
3 Epilogue: Analysis of the Situation in Cuba,Present and Future

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By Katie Hafner (New York Times)

They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

“That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.

“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.
New York Times for more

(Le Monde Diplomatique)

Wikipedia’s egalitarian ethic and cooperative process have led to accusations that ‘verifiability’ is replacing accuracy. But expertise is alive and well on the online encyclopaedia – as long as you know where to look.

by Mathieu O’Neil

The internet was invented by “hackers” – computer engineers and students influenced by the counter-culture, and therefore resistant to traditional forms of authority and hierarchy. The only status sought by hackers was the recognition of excellence in coding, freely granted by their peers. That expertise should be autonomous from state or business contexts was confirmed by the development of free software, where remunerations are wholly symbolic. The opening up of online production to non-hackers – Web 2.0 – has expanded the challenge to conventional expertise to a mass scale, with some troubling consequences. But it also opens up new possibilities for political engagement.

In online collaborative projects, information, just like computer code, is produced independently. In weblogs and wikis, respect and responsibilities are not attributed to participants because of a diploma or a professional identity accredited by an institution. Respect and responsibilities derive entirely from the work accomplished for the project. On Wikipedia, the wildly successful free encyclopaedia which anyone can edit, contributors (“editors”) classify themselves according to their edit or article counts, to the type of articles or sub-projects to which they have contributed, to the accolades they have received from their peers and other statistically quantifiable criteria.

The rejection of classical expertise assumes a second form on the internet. If everyone can have a say, but accreditations are banned, how will the digital wheat be distinguished from the chaff? For free software aficionados on the Slashdot community weblog, as for the users of commercial powerhouses Amazon and eBay, the solution is to calculate the average opinion of participants regarding the reputation of posters and commenters on Slashdot, and of reviewers and sellers on Amazon and eBay. The same goes for the popularity of shared information or links in “social media” such as Reddit and Digg, as well as for the PageRank algorithm which generates Google’s search results (1). The “wisdom of the crowd” – the automated aggregation of multiple individual choices – will quasi-magically produce an ideal result. That’s how things are supposed to happen, at any rate.

The Wikipedia project shares this faith in the epistemic correction of the multitude, sparking talk of a “hive mind” (2). Wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian. The core principle of a wiki is that anyone can create a page on the website, modify an existing page or change the site’s structure by creating or removing hyperlinks. Editors who register an identity on Wikipedia, even if it is pseudonymous, can create a personal page listing their contributions and the marks of appreciation they have received from their peers; like every page on the wiki, personal pages comprise a “talk” or discussion page which in this case serves as a personal message board. In addition, registered editors can create a “watch list”, a page which automatically lists any changes made to articles they are interested in.

This capability stems from a wiki’s built-in failsafe mechanism: any modification to a page generates a new version of the page and archives previous ones. Editors can consult the history of an article’s creation as well as easily revert to an earlier version if problems arise. The result is a vast proliferation of articles, known as “mainspace” and underlaid by a submerged layer, the “talk” or “meta” pages where editors discuss article content and site policy. Articles are never signed, unlike the debates on talk pages.

Ruthless precision in thinking
The Wikipedia development model, defined as “commons-based peer production” by Yochai Benkler, requires a high degree of autonomy of participants, who self-attribute their tasks. Some participants may deceive others, or deceive themselves, as to their true level of competence; but Benkler reckons that peer review or the law of statistical averages (provided the number of participants is high enough) will be sufficient to regulate flawed self-assessments (3).

Mass peer production, based on transparent communication between participants, cannot abide the isolated stance of the traditional expert. Wikipedia’s co-founder and chief spokesperson, Jimmy Wales, wrote in June 2008 that an open encyclopaedia requires a “ruthless precision in thinking” because, in contrast to the “comfortable writers of a classic top-down encyclopaedia”, people working in open projects are liable to be “contacted and challenged if they have made a flawed argument or based [their] conclusions on faulty premises” (4). What this boils down to is that in Wikipedia expertise is no longer embodied in a person but in a process, in the aggregation of many points of view, the wisdom of the crowd.
This is why the inclusion of draft articles, known as “stubs”, no matter how rough, is encouraged: there is always a chance that they could be collectively edited and become pearls of wisdom. For wisdom to emerge, the crowd needed to be there in the first place. To ensure that recruitment was massive and remained constant, the Wikipedia experience had to be fun and immediate: the key concept is “You can edit this page right now”. The advantage of this development model is that projects can improve very rapidly. For example, it has been empirically shown that the rigour and diversity of a Wikipedia article improves following a reference to it in the mass media, which brings in new contributors.
Le Monde Diplomatique for more

By Santaro Rey (Asia Times Online)

North Korea’s decision to carry out its second nuclear test on Monday could have far-reaching consequences, if South Korea and Japan conclude that nothing can be done to persuade Pyongyang to denuclearize. Under such circumstances, developing their own nuclear weapons might become increasingly desirable for Seoul and Tokyo.

North Korea shook the world – literally – in the early hours of May 25, carrying out its second nuclear test, at a site in the northeast of the country. Significantly, the latest detonation was much more powerful than its first nuclear test, carried out on October 9, 2006, which was widely believed to have fizzled. The Russian military and the South’s Defense Ministry estimated Monday’s blast to have yielded 20 kilotons, or roughly the same as the American atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki at the end of World War II in 1945.

That North Korea decided to conduct a second nuclear test was not surprising. Pyongyang’s official media had been warning since April 29 that it might conduct a test, as an expression of its displeasure at the United Nations Security Council’s criticism of its failed satellite launch (in reality a test of its long-range Taepodong 2 missile) on April 5. Nonetheless, the test came sooner than expected, and unlike its predecessor, Pyongyang did not provide official advance notice in its state-controlled media.

Factors driving the test
North Korea’s decision to test the bomb likely had several motivations. Firstly, given that the October 2006 test was widely considered to have fizzled, yielding less than 1 kiloton, Pyongyang needed its own reassurances that it had a fully functioning nuclear weapon. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) confirmed as much, when it stated, “The test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons.”

Asia Times Online for more

De-baptism organisers say the initiative is a response to what they see as increasing stridency from churches – for instance Pope Benedict XVI’s recent comment to AIDS-ravaged Africa that condom use could further spread of the disease.

Do you disagree with your parents over religion?

In Britain, some people clearly do: more than 100,000 Britons have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.

The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a London bus poster which triggered protests by proclaiming, “There’s probably no God.”

“We now produce a certificate on parchment and we have sold 1,500 units at three pounds (4.35 dollars, 3.20 euros) a pop,” said NSS president Terry Sanderson, 58.
John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be “de-baptised,” held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old.

The male nurse said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name.

“They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an announcement in the London Gazette,” said Hunt, referring to one of the official journals of record of the British government.

So that’s what he did — his notice of renouncement was published in the Gazette in May 2008 and other Britons have followed suit.

Michael Evans, 66, branded baptising children as “a form of child abuse” — and said that when he complained to the church where he was christened he was told to contact the European Court of Human Rights.

Expatica France for more

A prize-winning quantum physicist says a spiritual reality is veiled from us, and science offers a glimpse behind that veil. So how do scientists investigating the fundamental nature of the universe assess any role of God, asks Mark Vernon.

The Templeton Prize, awarded for contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”, has been won by French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who has worked on quantum physics with some of the most famous names in modern science.

Quantum physics is a hugely successful theory: the predictions it makes about the behaviour of subatomic particles are extraordinarily accurate. And yet, it raises profound puzzles about reality that remain as yet to be understood.

The bizarre nature of quantum physics has attracted some speculations that are wacky but the theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things.

Some suggest that observers play a key part in determining the nature of things. Legendary physicist John Wheeler said the cosmos “has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it has been observed to happen.”

D’Espagnat worked with Wheeler, though he himself reckons quantum theory suggests something different. For him, quantum physics shows us that reality is ultimately “veiled” from us.

The equations and predictions of the science, super-accurate though they are, offer us only a glimpse behind that veil. Moreover, that hidden reality is, in some sense, divine. Along with some philosophers, he has called it “Being”.

In an effort to seek the answers to the “meaning of physics”, I spoke to five leading scientists.

1. THE ATHEIST
…
2. THE SCEPTIC
…
3. THE PLATONIST
…
4. THE BELIEVER
…
5. THE PANTHEIST
…

BBC for more

By Mahfuzur Rahman (Daily Star)

[Khuda or Khoda means God in many South Asian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu; and is of Persian origin. Whereas it has the same meaning as Khuda, the word “Allah” is of pre-Islamic Arabic origin.

The Arabic-speaking world that is mostly Sunni predominantly uses Allah; whereas, the Persian-speaking Shias in Iran commonly use Khoda. The Sunnis try to impose their influence on the Muslims at large since they make up about 85% of the world’s Muslims, with the Shias making up the remaining approximately 15%, and each of them have many sub-branches. Since the mid-1970s, a wave of religious idiocy has swept the Muslim countries that has resulted in tragic consequences.

South Asia is not immune from this undesirable influence.
We are citing two articles from South Asia: an older article from 2003 from Bangladesh’s Daily Star and a recent one from Pakistan’s Dawn published a few days ago. Ed.]

On a trip from Dhaka to north Bangladesh during my recent visit to the country, I was struck by two phenomena. First, there was something unusual about some of the mileposts along the highway. In many places, as we headed for the Jamuna, they would often have a painted-over strip, a blank. The name of a particular destination has been systematically erased. You guessed right. The blank space, staring ever so briefly as you sped past it, once spelled out Bangabandhu Setu. The sign was gone, moved and painted over, almost certainly at state expense. How amazing, though, that a dumb, blank milepost could still speak volumes!

It is, however, a second phenomenon that I have chosen as the theme of the following paragraphs: many signboards, especially those at the boundaries of local administrative districts, that not so long ago wished Khoda Hafez to the exiting travellers, now say Allah Hafez instead. I, of course, never doubted the sincerity of those who put up the slogans invoking God’s protection on roads infested with unsafe automobiles and marauding drivers. I am also sure the Supreme Being now being called upon, in fresh paint, to protect the lives of the users of those thoroughfares is the same One whose name used to be invoked on the old signs. Why then the change? Is there something of significance in the changeover, also made at considerable cost, from Khoda Hafez to Allah Hafez, just as there is meaning, albeit of a different nature, to the erased milepost sings? Or is this another exercise in triviality in which we as a nation seem to excel? I am not sure, but let us explore.

A great wave of Allah Hafez is sweeping Khoda Hafez not merely off roadside signs and hoardings but from its niches of every description. Say Khoda Hafez as a parting wish to a friend whom you may have met in the course of normal business of life, and you can now be sure to receive an Allah Hafez in return. My brother, cousins, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, almost one and all, reel off an Allah Hafez hot on the heel of my Khoda Hafez. If my departure after the meeting is somehow delayed by a few moments — that is, after I have already said Khoda Hafez, and they Allah Hafez — they are likely to take the opportunity to say Allah Hafez for a second time. This, I suspect, is to nullify my Khoda Hafez. But wait. There is more to come. A close relative of mine, fully grown though still a bit short of my advanced years, glared at me the other day and solemnly proclaimed: “to say Khoda Hafez is act of gunah”. Five- year olds have returned my Khoda Hafez with a defiant Allah Hafez.

And, yes, television newscasters now end their news bulletin with Allah Hafez, invariably on the state-owned TV channel but also on other channels. So do radio broadcasters. Ministers in the present government of the country, as well as other political leaders, never fail to end their speeches with Allah Hafez. (This, by the way, does not mean my endorsement of Khoda Hafez either in the public domain.)
Inquisitive as ever, I asked all and sundry how did such a sweeping change come about. This was met, for the most part, with a shrug and a strange I-don’t-know-but- this-is-the-proper-thing-to-do reply. A senior friend of mine told me that this was entirely a political matter. And he was not joking. Astonished, I asked for an elaboration. “Arey bhai”, he proceeded to explain, “the Awami Leagers say Khoda Hafez; the BNP- wallas say Allah Hafez. Satisfied?”

Of course I was not satisfied with the answer, even though the politics of the situation did seem to ring a bell. But surely the matter cannot be entirely as trivial as that. I soon promised myself, as well as a few others, that I would go to the bottom of it all. I now proceed to redeem my pledge.

I believe even the most ardent exponent of Allah Hafez will concede that whether a Muslim says Allah or utter Khoda, he or she means one and the same Supreme Being. This concession is, in fact, not a matter of magnanimity on the part of the Allah Hafezites. It has the force of logic behind it: if by uttering Khoda Hafez one can lose his Faith, then all the countless millions who must have uttered it in the historical past would have to be considered non-Muslim. A dreadful thought indeed! My ancestors, bless their souls, many of them devout Muslims, were all attuned to Khoda Hafez. They certainly did not belong to aiyyam-e jahelia. There can be little doubt therefore that Muslims mean the same Supreme Being — I shall be using the term quite often for the sake of neutrality between “Allah” and “Khoda” in the present context — no matter what name is used for Him. There must therefore be some compelling reason for the rush to abandon Khoda Hafez in favour of Allah Hafez. What is it? To start with, is the latter expression more Islamic?

“Allah” is certainly the preeminent name of the Supreme Being to Muslims. But this may come as a surprise to many that the word Allah has pre-Islamic roots. Some defenders of Allah Hafez are cagey about the pre-Islamic roots of the word even though Allah’s greatness certainly does not depend on considerations of etymology of words used to describe or address Him. There is some recognition in the Allah Hafez camp of the historic connection. Take the following sentences, for example: ” The word “Allah” was not unknown to the Arabs before Muhammad (Sa) (13: 16, 29: 61-63 etc.) They also had knowledge that man was a servant of Allah: this is seen in the name Abd Allah.” [Shankhipta Islami Biswakosh, Brief Islamic Encylopaedia, (in Bengali). Islamic Foundation Bangladesh. 1982. Vol. I. p.67. The translation is mine. The numbers in parentheses are those of Qur’ânic suras and verses, respectively.] The Biswakosh also acknowledges that, “According to some linguists the word Allah was derived by adding alif and laam to the word ilah.”

Daily Star for more

By Nadeem F. Paracha (Dawn)

The first time Allah Hafiz was used in public was in 1985 when a famous TV host, a frequent sight on PTV during the Zia era, signed off her otherwise secular show with a firm ‘Allah Hafiz.’

As most Pakistanis over the ages of six and seven would remember, before the now ubiquitous ‘Allah Hafiz’ came ‘Khuda Hafiz’.

The immediate history of the demise of Khuda Hafiz can be traced back to a mere six to seven years in the past. It was in Karachi some time in 2002 when a series of banners started appearing across Sharea Faisal. Each banner had two messages. The first one advised Pakistani Muslims to stop addressing God by the informal ‘Tu’ and instead address him as ‘Aap’ (the respectful way of saying ‘you’ in Urdu). The second message advised Pakistanis to replace the term Khuda Hafiz with Allah Hafiz.

The banners were produced and installed by Islamic organisations associated with a famous mosque in Karachi. Ever since the 1980s, this institution had been a bastion of leading puritanical doctrines of Islam. Many of the institution’s scholars were, in one way or the other, also related to the Islamic intelligentsia sympathetic to the Taliban version of political Islam and of other similar fundamentalist outfits.

However, one just cannot study the Allah Hafiz phenomenon through what happened in 2002. This phenomenon has a direct link with the disastrous history of cultural casualties Pakistan has steadily been suffering for over thirty years now. Beyond the 2002 banner incident, whose two messages were then duly taken up by a series of Tableeghi Jamaat personnel and as well as trendsetting living room Islamic evangelists, a lot of groundwork had already taken place to culturally convert the largely pluralistic and religiously tolerant milieu of Pakistan into a singular concentration of Muslims following the “correct” version of Islam.

The overriding reasons for this were foremost political, as General Ziaul Haq and his politico-religious cohorts went about setting up madressahs in an attempt to harden the otherwise softer strain of faith that a majority of Pakistanis followed so they could be prepared for the grand ‘Afghan jihad’ against the atheistic Soviet Union with a somewhat literalist and highly politicised version of Islam. The above process not only politically radicalised sections of Pakistani society, its impact was apparent on culture at large as well.

For example, as bars and cinemas started closing down, young men and women, who had found space in these places to simply meet up, were forced to move to shady cafes, restaurants and parks which, by the mid-1980s, too started to be visited by cops and fanatical moral squads called the ‘Allah Tigers’, who ran around harassing couples in these spaces, scolding them for going against Islam, or, on most occasions, simply extorting money from the shaken couples through blackmail.

Then, getting a blanket ideological and judicial cover by the Zia dictatorship, the cops started to harass almost any couple riding a motorbike, a car or simply sitting at the beach. Without even asking whether the woman was the guy’s sister or mother (on many occasions they were!), the cops asked for the couples’ marriage certificate! Failing to produce one (which in most cases they couldn’t), hefty sums of money were extorted as the couples were threatened to be sent to jail under the dreadful Hudood Ordinances. The same one the Musharraf government eventually scrapped.

Some of these horrendous practices were duly stopped during the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments in the 1990s, but the cat had long been set among the pigeons. Encouraged by their initial successes in the 1980s, Islamist culture-evangelists became a lot more aggressive in the 1990s. Drawing room and TV evangelists went about attempting to construct a “true” Islamic society, and at least one of their prescriptions was to replace the commonly used Khuda Hafiz with Allah Hafiz.

This was done because these crusading men and women believed that once they had convinced numerous Pakistanis to follow the faith by adorning a long beard and hijab, the words Khuda Hafiz would not seem appropriate coming out from the mouths of such Islamic-looking folks. They believed that Khuda can mean any God, whereas the Muslims’ God was Allah. Some observers suggest that since many non-Muslims residing in Pakistan too had started to use Khuda Hafiz, this incensed the crusaders who thought that non-Muslim Pakistanis were trying to adopt Islamic gestures only to pollute them. The first time Allah Hafiz was used in public was in 1985 when a famous TV host, a frequent sight on PTV during the Zia era, signed off her otherwise secular show with a firm ‘Allah Hafiz.’ However, even though some Islamic preachers continued the trend in the 1990s, it did not trickle down to the mainstream until the early 2000s. As society continued to collapse inwards — especially the urban middle class — the term Allah Hafiz started being used as if Pakistanis had always said Allah Hafiz.

So much so that today, if you are to bid farewell by saying Khuda Hafiz, you will either generate curious facial responses, or worse, get a short lecture on why you should always say Allah Hafiz instead — a clear case of glorified cultural isolationism to ‘protect’ one’s comfort zone of myopia from the influential and uncontrollable trends of universal pluralism?

Dawn for more