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By B. R. Gowani

The female literacy rate in Pakistan is a mere 36% compared to 63% for men. This literacy rate denotes only reading capability — that is, it doesn’t show how intelligent or smart the person is and is not a measure of the critical thinking prowess. The country does not believe in women’s rights or in human rights for its citizens — except for the elite class.

The beautiful Swat Valley is now the base of Maulana Fazalullah. He is known as “Mullah Radio” for his operation of an illegal FM radio station. Many schools have been blown up here – the majority of them were Girls’ schools.

The Militants’ Menace

Extremism has seeped into the veins of Pakistan (and many other Muslim countries) that are being destroyed by this poison. And when it infiltrates the system of education, you don’t need a panel of pundits to forecast the country’s doom.

In its fanatic zeal to fight communism, the United States played an important role in weakening the secular elements in the Muslim countries, hence strengthening the militant forces there. The influence and violence of these zealots is disturbingly visible in Pakistan and most other Muslim countries and in countries with sizeable Muslim populations. Learning institutions are meant to be centers which facilitate the creation and free flow of secular ideas. But that is not the case here. The social science fields are also not flourishing as freely as they should, in order to meet the demands of free rational enquiries, because of the fear and interference of the religious elements.

Although a truly free environment has never existed in Pakistan; recently, however, the environment has become unbearably suffocating. Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam University, ranked as the second best university among the Muslim countries, has three mosques and the fourth one is being planned. However, it has no book store! It is a sad commentary on the state of education there, when more importance is given to mosques — which should have no place whatsoever in learning centers — than a book store, which is so critical to a university.

The educational curriculum of subjects related to science and technology between the Muslim countries and, not only the western countries, but even India, Brazil, and China, is disappointing.

Eminent physics Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy points out that it has not always been like this:

“Islam’s magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body’s circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”

A tiny minority [albeit, rising] of these religious zealots has succeeded in intimidating the society at large. The result is that very few female students dare to be seen without veils in Pakistani universities.

The faculty members at the Quaid-i-Azam University agree “that over time most students — particularly veiled females — have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions.” And the reason is the rising and violent power of the fanatics. A former student of the university issued the following warning on April 12, 2007, on FM radio:

“The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-e-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. I think I will have to send my daughters of Jamia Hafsa [Islamic seminary in Islamabad, Figure 4] to these immoral women. They will have to hide themselves in hijab otherwise they will be punished according to Islam. Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.”

It’s a very serious matter when such a prestigious university is labeled as a brothel and the women are threatened by these Muslim criminals who justify their actions with the excuse of the dreamy hereafter.

In certain areas of Pakistan bombing of schools have become common place, leaving thousands of students without any place to learn.

Musharraf’s Involvement

Since the 1980s, Pakistan has become the epicenter of religious fanaticism with very bloody and destructive consequences. And so it was up to the governments of Pakistan to rein in this menace.

When General Pervez Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, the Taliban peril, with all its barbarity and hatred of women, was already entrenched in Afghanistan. The US support of the Taliban had waned for many reasons. The people of Pakistan were fed up with the corrupt civilian leadership. It was a golden opportunity for Musharraf to strike at the Taliban by cutting off all kinds of aid, but he wasted the opportunity. This was his biggest crime.

The second biggest crime Musharraf committed was to allow the radical madrassas to flourish. At least some of the $11 billion in aid that Pakistan received from the US in the wake of September 11, could have been spent on ransoming as many children as possible from the madrassas and placing them in secular schools. This could have made a huge difference in their lives. He wasted that opportunity too. Instead, many more children joined the madrassas after September 11, 2001. (Many financially desperate parents send their children to madrassas where they receive free boarding, lodging, and food.) Even though Musharraf himself is not a religious person, he acted like a politician and joined hands with the Islamic parties in order to weaken the opposing secular and semi-secular political parties.

What do the radical madrassas produce? They produce war mongers, women-haters, and intolerant bigots. In these places, one sees students reciting the Qur’an in Arabic, a language they don’t understand, with their heads rocking back and forth like drug addicts. They are also taught Urdu, Pakistan’s national language with the alphabet letters being associated with words such as gun, jihad, etc.

Everything is in the Scripture

In every religion, there are followers who have this fantastic notion:

“The things the scientists are discovering now are already in our Holy Book [Gita, Qur’an, Bible, Hebrew Bible…].”

If such was the case, then:
• Moses would have used helicopter to see the God on Mount Sinai, instead of climbing it —(unless he liked hiking);
• Jesus’ resurrection from the dead could have been telecast live on TV;
• Muhammad could have used a spacecraft for his journey to the heavens;
• Krishna could have fought the Kurukshetra battle in a Toyota van covered up as a chariot;
• Buddha could have known about disease, old, age and other unpleasant things at a much earlier age through the internet.

Many devout people claim that the Qur’an has all knowledge in it. If that were true then computers, super colliders, satellites, and more would have been invented by the time of Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE.

To clarify my point: Let’s put a group of young children in a madrassa and let them keep on reciting Qur’an for a few years. Then what? Are they even going to be able to manufacture one pencil? No. (This holds true for all religious texts.)

Did Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Abdus Salam, and hundreds of thousands of others become scientists by reading the Vedas, Bible, Tanekh, Qur’an, and other religious scriptures? If that was the case, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, then in the Netherlands, would have returned back to Pakistan in 1974 (when India exploded its first nuclear bomb code named the “Smiling Buddha”) and researched the bomb-making formula from the Qur’an and named it the “Laughing Allah.”

For the believers, reading the scriptures may provide personal solace and strengthen their belief and it may provide some values (including violence, which many of the scriptures contain.) That’s fine. But for those people and countries who want to survive and progress in this cutthroat world – they need to have modern education and state of the art technology. Pakistan and other Muslim countries cannot survive on Islam and the Qur’an. The custodians of these nations will have to rethink their strategy; and … time has almost run out.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY

Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens. Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a “gentleman dining companion” whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.
Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush countryside and the exciting adventures of the Underground Railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are “what I fancy most.”
Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings.
“The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather,” Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded Dissenters from the Anglican Church. Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda — in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios — to the “sacred cause” of abolition. Wedgwood’s cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption “Am I not a Man and a Brother?,” was “a must-have solidarity accessory.”
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Indonesia
By Okamoto Masaaki (associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan) can be reached at okamoto@cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp.

A new breed of politics?

The fall of Suharto and the resulting social and political upheaval made many Indonesians feel insecure, feeding the proliferation of various kinds of violent groups offering their own particular brands of ‘security’. While some such groups are ethnic-based, others cite religion as a pretext when pursuing their political and economic interests. These groups have successfully gained formal political power at the local level in places like Jakarta, Madura, Lombok and Bali. Continuing insecurity and the persistence of rampant corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN), combined with the atmosphere of political openness, has also prompted a yearning for social justice among the Indonesian people. Through its particular brand of grass roots activism and Islamic morality the PKS has been perhaps the most successful of the post-New Order political parties to tap into this desire for a politics free of the habits of the past.
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By Daya Varma

Notwithstanding compromises made by the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League in the past, its impressive victory against Zia Khaleda’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in the December 29 elections in Bangladesh is a refreshing development and a decisive verdict against fundamentalism.
The Indian subcontinent is never short of springing surprises of optimism notwithstanding chronic poverty and interludes of violence and discord. The backward nation of Nepal rose like no one had ever imagined; a despotic monarch is gone and the Communist Party of Nepal is on a pragmatic rather than a reckless path. The ever powerful General Musharraf is finally gone; that is an achievement although no one is sure that the control of the Pakistan Army on civil life has ended. Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which allowed the massacre of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, had to lick its wounds in the 2004 parliamentary elections. Not only that – in the recent provincial elections too, BJP’s hold on some states and its influence in other provinces has declined. The Mumbai terrorist attack has not materialized into a major India-Pakistan conflict – at least as yet. In the recent elections in Kashmir, far more people went to the polls than can be accounted for due to police and army coercion; an entirely new situation is ripe for a meaningful solution.
To top it all, the people of Bangladesh did something which surprised even the hardened skeptics. First they forced an election against the wishes of the military-cum-bureaucracy. And when the elections were finally held on December 29, 2008, fundamentalists were not just edged out but rather trounced. It is estimated that the voting percentage was nearly 70%; this in itself was a momentous warning to military-bureaucratic rule, which invariably thrives on promises to root out political and other forms of corruption.
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(Submitted by Feroz Mehdi)

by Najam Sethi

A PEACE delegation comprising human and womens rights activists, media peaceniks and party political representatives from Pakistan recently visited New Delhi. They went with a threefold objective: to “ condole” the Mumbai attacks and express solidarity with Indians in their hour of grief, to explain how and why Pakistan too is a victim of the same sort of terrorism that is threatening to afflict India, and to try and put the peace process and people- to- people channel back on track.
In view of the adverse travel advisories put out by both countries and the war paint put on by both media, the delegation risked being branded “ unpatriotic” in Pakistan. But the two leaders of the delegation, Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and Imtiaz Alam, Secretary- General of the South Asia Free Media Association, are known as fearless crusaders in the region for doggedly promoting the cause of peace between India and Pakistan. Given the goodwill they personally enjoy in India, they threw caution to the wind at home and embarked on their journey across the border with great expectations.
In the event, however, even they were surprised by the consistently frosty, sometimes hostile, reception that they received at private, official and media forums in Delhi. It seemed as if all of India, public and private, had consciously united to send out one harsh message to Pakistan: that India is deeply wounded and will not take another such attack lying down. This is perfectly understandable.
THE terrorist attack was on the Taj Mahal Hotel, the pride and symbol of resurgent modern India; it humiliated Indias “ powerful” security establishment by exposing its gaping weaknesses; and the terrorists targeted innocent civilians rather than any specific military or intelligence organ of the state or government, thereby signaling their intent to wage war on India, Indians, and indeed the very idea of secular India.
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By Amy Goodman

Karl Rove recently described George W. Bush as a book lover, writing, “There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one.” There will be many histories written about the Bush administration. What will they use for source material? The Bush White House was sued for losing e-mails, and for skirting laws intended to protect public records. A federal judge ordered White House computers scoured for e-mails just days before Bush left office. Three hundred million e-mails reportedly went to the National Archives, but 23 million e-mails remain “lost.” Vice President Dick Cheney left office in a wheelchair due to a back injury suffered when moving boxes out of his office. He has not only hobbled a nation in his attempt to sequester information – he hobbled himself. Cheney also won court approval to decide which of his records remain private.
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By J. MICHAEL COLE
Michael Ignatieff, once a respected academic, authored a handful of important books on human rights, nationalism and ethnic conflict in the 1990s, making him the pride of many Canadians — even if, from 1978 until 2000, he lived in the UK, and then in the US, where he was director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. Blood and Belonging, The Warrior’s Honor and The Rights Revolution were all must-reads, proof, we thought, that intellectuals had a role to play in describing, and perhaps influencing, the politics of our time. Despite his almost 30 years of exile, Canadians counted him as one of theirs, someone who reflected the ever-elusive “Canadian values.”
Then Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and more importantly, the US launched its mass disinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11.
Strangely, during that period Ignatieff became more conservative in his views and penned justifications of his own to support the actions of the US government in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Empire Lite,” which served as both catchphrase and title of one of his books, followed by The Lesser Evil, epitomized Ignatieff’s radicalization. Where in the past Ignatieff had sided with the downtrodden, and where he had been so perceptive on the idiosyncrasies of nationalism, the academic now argued that empire — supported by force of arms and buttressed by an architecture of racism, lies and deceit — was a good thing, even if, in retaliation for Sept. 11 and in the name of “nation-building” a la US, Washington ended up slaying more Afghan civilians than died on that fateful morning in September, and many, many more in Iraq.
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