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John Negraponte’s appointment by President George Bush as intelligence supremo came as a shock to those who worry about the direction which the Republicans have set for this country.

All comparisons are odious but my mind went back to that morning in Islamabad when Mian Nawaz Sharif informed his cabinet without a preamble that a man called Tarar — less a name, more a tongue-twister — was to be Pakistan’s new president. There was absolute silence, finally broken by that old political wheeler-dealer, Mian Yasin Watoo, for whom no ruler of the day could do any wrong. “Congratulations, Mian Sahib,” he said.

The Internet is the people’s medium. It is there that people bare their souls, vent their anger, express opinions that newspapers won’t print and the television won’t show. The new intellectual and political Columbuses of the day are the bloggers. While there is no shortage of nuts and fruitcakes on the Net, there are some very sensible people out there who want to share with others what they know and what they think.

Negraponte’s appointment has caused a big surge in postings. One citizen writes, “Make no mistake about it: Mr Negroponte represents the use of force, of violence, to cower opponents to the philosophies he subscribes to, and, there are many more like him the direction of this nation at this time… People are being positioned in various roles in this administration, with something in mind, folks. Negroponte represents the values of this administration. Chief of Intelligence, and the kind of intelligence that represents the reasons for everything this administration does. And it doesn’t have much to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with the use of to the body and violence to the soul. . “

The case against Negraponte is a credible one. There were grave human rights violations by the Honduran military during the 1980s when he was ambassador there. A CIA report noted that the American embassy had suppressed sensitive data. Two US citizens, Father James “Guadalupe” Carney and David Arturo Baez Cruz, disappeared during his tenure. Carney who had come to Honduras in 1983 as a chaplain to a revolutionary group which was captured by the Honduran army, “disappeared” along with nearly all of the 96 members.

There are those who say that during his tenure (1981-85) Negroponte oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. Another allegation against him is that he was involved in “carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua.”

Negroponte supervised the construction of an airbase where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans. Records also show that a special Honduran intelligence unit trained by the CIA and the Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

An anonymous poet has summed up the feelings of many Americans with a moving prose poem:

Who are we as a nation, a people?
Do we value the sanctity of life, all of life?
If so, why do we declare that some wars are just?
If so, why have we condoned torture?
Do we value the quality of life?
If so, why do we sacrifice the environment for our convenient way of life?
Do we value self-knowledge and awareness?
If so, why do we choose to delude ourselves, and live in denial on very important issues, such as the environment, torture and war?
I was telling a new acquaintance the other day,
we have the resources, inner and outer resources, to solve our problems.
We choose not to solve our problems
Why is this?
We have blinded ourselves to the full value of our imagination
Imagine clean energy for everyone, and it can happen
Imagine enough food for everyone and it can happen
Imagine that we stop using up the world’s resources, and learn to recycle everything, and it can happen
John Lennon was right, that’s why he was shot.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

While there is no doubt that Muslims are more sinned against than sinning, it is also true that we need to take a good hard look at our own conduct and how we appear to others. There is no point in screaming: “They hate Islam and they hate Muslims anyway”. We should calmly and dispassionately go into some of the things that we say and do in Islam’s name. By continuing to sulk and playing the stricken party, we will help everybody except ourselves.

It is in this context that a recently published report by the Centre for Religious Freedom, New York, should receive attention, not only of those who do not come out of it looking very good, namely the Saudi authorities, but of others who wish to restore the image of Islam and remove what they believe are misunderstandings in the West about one of the world’s great religions and its adherents.

The Centre is a division of Freedom House, founded more than sixty years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and others who were concerned about what they saw as threats to peace and democracy. The study undertaken surveyed more than a dozen of the principal mosques and Islamic centres in America, chose 200 of the books and publications they housed, 90 percent of them in Arabic, had them translated and then analysed. All documentation had some connection to the Saudi government. Not all, but many of the mosques surveyed receive financial support from the kingdom. In some, the staffing is done by the Saudi government. The results were quite shocking as much of the literature being distributed by these religious outlets preaches hatred for other religions and cultures. The bulk of the material was gathered in 2003, some as recently as November 2004.

A typical tract declares that America is the “abode of the infidel”, the Christian and the Jew. “Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law. There is consensus in this matter, that whoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself.” Another says, “Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.” The last bit is for graduating Muslim students in America. The book from which this is taken is called ‘Greetings from the Cultural Department’ of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Washington.

The Saudi view of freedom to think is as follows, according to another publication, “Freedom of thinking requires permitting the denial of faith and attacking what is sacred, glorifying falsehood and defending the heretics, finding fault in religion and letting loose the ideas and pens to write of disbelief as one likes, and to put ornaments on sin as one likes.” The view being propagated is that the world is divided into the abode of the faithful and that of the infidel and Muslims in the latter should behave as if they were on a mission behind enemy lines. “One insidious aspect of this propaganda is its aim to replace traditional and moderate interpretations of Islam with Wahabi extremism,” the analysis points out, while stressing that the Wahabi view of Islam is a minority view because the vast majority of Muslims finds such interpretations of religion foreign to the tolerance Islam preaches, including the Quranic injunction against coercion in matters of religion.

The study found literature distributed by the kingdom “replete with condemnations of Christians and their beliefs.” One booklet said, “It is basic Islam to believe that everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever, and must be called an unbeliever, and that they are enemies of Allah, his Prophet and believers.” Another publication said that churches and synagogues were not houses of God and whoever lets these places remain open and to preach is an infidel. Another one said that those who reside in the “land of unbelief” and accept their ways become “unbelievers” and Allah’s “enemies.”

The Saudi embassy also distributed fatwas for the guidance of Muslims. One said that it is forbidden for a Muslim to become the citizen of a country governed by infidels. Another laid down that he who leaves a Muslim land to live in a non-Muslim one has disobeyed Allah. One publication said, “Satan and his soldiers have found a home for themselves there (democratic world) … and anxiety, worry, fear, terror, sickness and death have become prevalent. Democracy is in need of someone to save it from itself.” Another held democracy responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century.

According to the Freedom House study, “For Wahabis and other salafist interpretations of Islam, women are considered a perpetual source of ‘fitna’ or discord in a social and moral sense.” In a collection of fatwas found at the major Islamic centre in Virginia, one fatwa rejected the idea of women teachers instructing adolescent boys, “A 10-year old boy is considered adolescent because he tends to like women and because, at this age, he is able to get married and can do what men do.” Another held that the enemies of Islam “want the woman to become a destructive tool, bait they can use, to hunt down those who have weak faith and uncontrollable desires.” A textbook for high school students asked, “The masculine woman who smokes and drinks and wears men’s clothing, and drifts with men in the gathering place of hippies, is she human? These cattle-like groups of boys and girls having sex on the streets, in the woods, the night club and in any place, are they human?”

One bright sign is that Crown Prince Abdullah is more than aware of the dangers of narrow, intolerant interpretations of Islam. He convened a meeting in December 2003 as part of a “national dialogue” that found “grave defects” in Saudi school curricula and called for reform. A multi-million dollar public relations campaign has also been launched in the West to correct the kingdom’s image. A two-day international conference on terrorism held in Riyadh in the first week of February this year also shows that Prince Abdullah is deeply concerned about the problem and is intent on dealing with it. However, so deep run the roots of intolerance and a distorted view of the world that has been propagated for so long, that it is not going to take time and commitment. The Freedom House report concurs. “We have confirmed that as of December 2004, the retrograde, unreformed editions of Saudi textbooks and state-sponsored, hate-filled fatwa collection remain widespread and plentiful in many important American mosques.”

Asra Q Nomani, the journalist and writer, who lives in a small West Virginia town has taken on — and frontally, too, — the Muslim male religious establishment of Morgantown. The community is small but its men are determined to keep women “in their place”. As the traditional practice goes, women are only to enter the mosque from a special entrance and pray separately from men, generally in a basement or a balcony. Asra, a direct descendant of Maulana Shibli Nomani — her infant son is named Shibli — refuses to abide by this upstairs-downstairs system. She is therefore “on trial” for having dared to enter the mosque through the front and sat down with other men to pray. In another time and place, the pious gentlemen who consider her actions heretical, would have burnt her at the stake or embedded her in sand before stoning her.

Asra, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was temporarily living in Karachi to research and write a book when her old friend and colleague Daniel Pearl arrived there with his wife Mariane. Asra offered to put them up in the house she was renting. After Pearl’s kidnapping, she became the sheet-anchor for Pearl’s pregnant wife. Pearl, by all accounts a warm and trusting man, never returned — and all because he was a Jew. Asra is a fighter. Diminutive she may be, but afraid she is not. As I write this, I hear that she is going to march to the Morgantown mosque on a certain day and stick on its front door 99 precepts that she believes enshrine the rights of women in Islam.

Asra says the precepts are the result of the soul searching that she began when she faced the dark side of injustice and intolerance in the Muslim world. She calls 7th century Medina, a “City of Illumination” because it embodied the highest values of Islamic teachings on compassion, tolerance and equity. “I want us to create cities of light in the Muslim world of the 21st century with doors opening — not slamming shut”, she declares.

Asra has just published a book — Standing Alone in Mecca: an American woman’s struggle for the soul of Islam — that describes her pilgrimage to Mecca with her mother and Shibli, whom she is raising alone. When she was in Karachi, she fell in love with a Pakistani who walked out on her under family pressure. Little, innocent Shibli is the fruit of that association. Asra wears this as a badge of honour. To her Morgantown detractors, she is a sinner who should be stoned, or at the very least, kept out of the House of God. Asra, a woman, has defied them and that is what they cannot accept.

She writes in her book, “One of the issues working against American Muslim women — an issue not much discussed outside the Muslim community — is the de facto takeover of many US mosques by puritanical and traditional Muslims, many from the Arab world.” At another place she writes, “I believe there are some fundamental changes the world of Islam must make in order to be true to the spirit of the religion. First, we must live by the golden rule common to all religions and philosophies of the world. We must respect others. Second, we must open the doors of Islam. Saudi Arabia must open the doors of Mecca and Medina to those who are not Muslim. Muslims around the world must open the doors of their mosques to women and those who are not Muslim. Third, we must open the doors of ijithad in the Muslim world. Fourth, and finally, we must honour and respect the voices and rights of all people.”

Asra has prepared an Islamic bill of rights for women in mosques and another bill of rights for women in the bedroom. Article three of the latter asserts that women have the Islamic right to make independent decisions about their bodies, including the right to say no to sex. That means they are not their husbands’ vassals but their equals with a will and personality of their own. Where Asra’s campaign will carry her, it is hard to say. What is not hard to say is that she is never going to give up or give in.

On her next visit to Washington, she plans to pray in the main section of the Islamic Centre. Her crusade is best summed up in her own words, “Since the beginning of time, women have been judged, banished, and punished without being able to tell their story. I will not accept the same fate. All women have an intrinsic human right to express their voice and stand up for justice.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

It seems like that famous jewel in her nose, Musarrat Nazir too is lost somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. She has not sung, recorded or released a song for at least a dozen years. She has also snapped contact with all except the chosen few of her family, who, when asked, prefer to say nothing as to why she has decided she prefers anonymity, when fame lies at her feet. Artists are temperamental and should not, cannot, be judged by standards that apply to those not so gifted.

While everyone is free to do what one wishes to do, the question remains whether it is right for those who have much to give to others – in Musarrat’s case her unique voice with its wonderful timbre – can justify their refusal to do so. After all, Musarrat’s voice, though physically hers, in reality belongs to her listeners, to the millions across the world whom she captivated, first on the screen and many years after she had left the movies, through her music.

I am aware of dark hints she passed through a time of personal difficulties and all had not been well with what was – and one hope remains – a dream marriage. I do know though that the shadow that had fallen across the lives of this most remarkable couple was lifted, largely because of an old friend of theirs who travelled all the way to Canada from Pakistan to help with what repair work such situations need. Both Musarrat and Dr Arshad Majeed, her husband and my old Sialkot friend, have sort of withdrawn. Contact with old friends stands – by and large severed – and letters sent and calls made fail to evoke a response. There was a time when the only reason I, for one, travelled to Toronto was to spend time with her and Arshad, the loving husband for whose sake she turned her back on a movie career that was then at its height. There were many attempts over the years to lure her back to the movies but she showed no interest. She would just say, “That part of my life is over.” Her work, however, speaks for itself and she would remain one of the loveliest and most memorable of stars, shining through a succession of Punjabi films. One of the great believers in her talent as an actress was Khurshid Anwar who put her in two of his Urdu movies, Zehr-e-Ishq and Jhoomar .

Musarrat and Arshad eventually settled down in a small town in Ontario to raise a family. The children are now grown. One of her sons makes documentaries; the other is a musician and the daughter, a senior producer with CBC, the Canadian radio and television network. Musarrat may have left the industry but she has never been forgotten. The tomboyish heroine of Mahi Munda lives in the hearts of her fans. It was 1979 when, unexpectedly, she broke her silence and released a long-playing record in London that contained such hits as ‘ Mein kamli’ and ‘ Jogi uttar paharoon aaya’ . The compositions were largely those of Arshad whose talents go beyond medicine and psychiatry. For the next few years, she did not have to look back, releasing one hit after another.

When I think of her, I see her running barefoot under the trees on a hushed Punjabi early summer evening, looking for that lost little gold-fringed jewel in her nose. While she has run back into the mud-walled village dwelling that is her home, she is being scrutinised by her stern and unsmiling elders who are long enough in tooth and claw to know why young girls lose what they lose on lazy summer evenings. In those few snatches of music of that runaway hit – Mera laung gavacha – forever lies preserved the romance of Punjab. Musarrat’s admirers transcend the generation gap. They include those who were only a twinkle in their mother’s eye when she left the movies to get married and immigrate to the cold wastes of Canadian winters; and they include those like Pran Nevile who phoned me from Delhi the other day saying there is no day in the week on which he does not listen to Musarrat because, as he put it, “In her voice I hear the Punjab that I love.”

Some years ago, Musarrat and Arshad wanted to return to Pakistan. In fact they bought a home in Lahore which they still keep and which I call aaseb-zada because it is only inhabited when they visit; for the rest of the year it is abandoned to ghosts, assuming that ghosts exist. However, Musarrat believes in taking no chances and had all kinds of religious and purification ceremonies performed one year, just in case the place was indeed haunted. Arshad wanted to set up a hospital in Lahore but after months of running around and a lot of money down the drain, he gave up. When I asked why, his answer was, “My difficulty was with attitudes. Nobody said no but little got done. At times, I felt that nothing was really taken too seriously by those who were paid out of public funds to make decisions and serve the people.” I should add that, unlike the bulk of Pakistanis who live abroad, Arshad is not a whiner.

Musarrat could always sing. The first time she sang was when at the age of sixteen, wearing a burqa, she was taken to the Lahore radio station by her father. The celebrated broadcaster Saleem Shahid – Salman Shahid’s father – gave her an audition and was captivated by her voice. The song broadcast from Lahore was ‘ Ni mein galyaan de raah takdi’ . When I asked her if she remembered that song, she said, “The tune yes, the words no.” She broke into the movies in the 1950s because of Anwar Kamal Pasha and immediately captured the people’s attention. She was cast in roles that showed her as a bit of a tomboy, un-self-conscious and outgoing. Her looks were delightfully wholesome. Her popularity went beyond Pakistan and the number of her fans in East Punjab was legion.

Some years ago, I asked her about the movie industry as it was in her day. She said it was like a family; everyone was nice and respectful. “We were a bunch of very young and very happy, hard working actors. I cannot recall a single unpleasant incident from those days.” She was also chaperoned by her father to the studios: being just a simple, artless girl from a middle class family of Punjabi Kashmiris who had broken into the movies. I asked her if there were “romances” as the Urdu movie magazines of the day reported. “We were pretty straight-laced, believe me,” she said.

In 1993, I wrote that the good news was that Musarrat is soon going to release an album, having recently sung a number of kafis that are both beautiful and moving. She also had plans to return to Lahore but it never happened. The album, though ready, was never released and the visit to Lahore, if it did take place, was brief. As for that laung , she is still looking for it, while we, her fans, are looking for her.

It was such an irony. Right across the street from the headquarters of the United Nations, in the conference room of an expensive hotel, the organisers of a conference on Kashmir were not prepared to make even a reference to any of the six resolutions of the Security Council that recognise the inalienable right of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to determine their future.

The “Fourth International Peace Conference”, held on February 24 and 25 in New York, which chose as its theme ‘Peace Initiatives in South Asia: exploring possible options for Kashmir’ was organised by the Kashmiri-American Council. Given the practicalities of life, the Council operates within a given circumference. While some of the good work it has done for the cause in the past cannot be denied, it has its limitations that it can only infringe at the risk of going out of business. More than that one need not say since in the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz : Jaan jayain ge jaan-nay walay.

The “international” aspect of the Conference left a great deal to be desired. Predictably, no Kashmiri leader — except Mirwaiz Umar Farooq who landed a day after the conference ended — was able to come, the Indian government having once again been unable to complete work on the travel documents of those invited. That is the official explanation; in simple English, it means, it refused permission for them to travel. So much for the ongoing peace process. In a way, it is good the Kashmiris from the Valley — barring Prof Hameeda Banu who is now more into NGO land than Kashmir — did not come because they, too, would have had to adopt a document that did not have the courage, if also not the permission, to even mention the Security Council resolutions.

Only one Indian turned up –a senior editor from the Times of India newspaper. Kuldip Nayar, the Indo-Pak peace groupie, had to stay back as his doctors wanted to take a closer look at his ticker. There were two Europeans, one a member of the Norwegian parliament who has been part of this kind of landscape for several years, and a young woman from Holland who runs some sort of an NGO. The Indian ambassador to the United Nations, who was invited to speak, declined and even left town. He could have sent his number two but didn’t. The old war horse Munir Akram, Pakistan’s man at the UN, whom a number of countries would like to chase out of the UN and Pakistan’s foreign service itself, came and spoke with a passion that was refreshing in a room where the words United Nations and self-determination appeared to be taboo.

The question that should be asked and truthfully answered is if there is a change in Pakistan’s basic position on Kashmir. Such conferences as the one in New York are good indicators of which way the wind is blowing in Islamabad. Since Gen Pervez Musharraf, for reasons not entirely clear to those who take an interest in Kashmir and may know a thing or two about it, appeared to have pushed the Security Council resolutions aside, an area of darkness has developed around Kashmir. The Indian establishment and that country’s press believe that Pakistan has finally recognised the futility of those resolutions and their ever taking effect and has thrown in the towel. Unilateral concessions never work because when you take the table to negotiate, you really have very little to negotiate with. It is like going into business after squandering your capital. And this is what is wrong with governments where all important decisions are made by a single person. No viewpoint other than the decision-maker’s goes into them, which is a recipe for disaster.

It is time those in Pakistan who have been in charge of Kashmir — and it is not the Foreign Office — were divested of that responsibility. Doesn’t anybody have to answer for turning a democratic movement for self-determination into a byword for terrorism, for playing favourites in the Kashmiri struggle and for sponsoring meaningless conferences on Kashmir at massive expense? Is there to be no course correction, no reappraisal, no reassessment and no rendering of accounts? Folly not wisdom is at work. And if experience is any guide, that is the way it is going to remain.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

One of the most colourful characters to have appeared in the world of diplomacy, I am sorry to record, is gone. I have a message from his grandson, young Jam Umair Ali, that tells me that his grandfather, Jam Amir Ali, died on 28 September last year and asked whether I would sometime write about him, as I did a decade ago. Yes, indeed, because they don’t make ’em like the old Jam any more.

Umair Ali writes of his grandfather, “His career was so clean. He lived his life honestly. He never took advantage of his powers or of his contacts. He was the eldest and the pagdhaar of the Jam family. He would keep a collection of his pictures with kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers and other politicians. He had very good relations with Zia-ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.” The last bit sums up the Jam. A man who could have good relations with both Zia-ul-Haq and ZAB had earned the right to stand on the highest rung of the ladder and crow.

Some years ago, Syeda Abida Hussain told me that Jam Amir Ali had come to see her with his entire family in tow. “He was most charming. Such an artless and simple man. He just wanted everyone in his household to meet me, just say hello, no more,” she recalled. No, he did not want anything, she added. This kind of person is to be valued because such is our state now that we don’t even give anyone the time of day unless there is something in it for us. Someone said the Pakistani philosophy of life can be rendered in just one line, “I can’t do anything for you; what can you do for me?”

Iftikhar Ali, who worked as the Associated Press of Pakistan’s UN correspondent for fifteen years, and to whom I owe a good deal of what I know about Jam Amir Ali – I never met him – tells me that when the Jam was Pakistan’s ambassador to the Maldives, courtesy Zia-ul-Haq, Maldives being the size it is, the ambassador’s residence was practically in front of the chancery. It was the Jam’s view that it was inappropriate for an ambassador to be seen walking to work. He had, accordingly, made it a practice to get into his official limousine with the Pakistan standard proudly fluttering down the breeze and take a round of the island before driving into the embassy. He was what they call an ambassador with style.

Not having written about our men abroad for a while, I feel I should mention that despite my efforts to have Mohammad Shah, (the Geneva chauffeur dismissed by Ambassador Ahmed Kamal for not saluting him) reinstated, I failed. But all that has changed. Ahmed Kamal is no longer in service, although living in New York like all good Pakistanis and working at the UN. Muhammad Shah is a rich man and runs the only Pakistani restaurant in Geneva. I am told he is in a position today to hire Ahmed Kamal and give him more money than he presently earns. That is life for you.

But let us hurry to the United Nations. The year is 1981. Jam Amir Ali is a member of the Pakistan delegation to the UN General Assembly. Niaz A. Naik, who in retirement will become Nawaz Sharif’s Track II man in New Delhi, is Pakistan’s Permanent UN Representative. Every delegate is given a few sheets of paper by the Mission which he is asked to read out at this or that UN committee. Jam Amir Ali is also given his brief, but he buttonholes Naik and indicates that he prefers to speak to the General Assembly rather than a committee. Naik resists the suggestion for some days but since persistence pays, he agrees in the end. He asks the Mission to prepare a speech for the Jam.

On the appointed day, Jam Amir Ali is all aglow, as he sits in the General Assembly, waiting his turn. When it comes, he whispers to Naik, who is sitting next to him, that he is going to add a few words of his own. The ambassador urges him to “stay with the text.” The Jam reads out the text, which is oozing with the usual clichés. Once he is through with that, he turns to the President of the General Assembly, nods, and delivers a short speech that has become a UN classic. The simultaneous interpreters, the world’s best, for once fall silent as they are unable to match Jam’s runaway lyricism that transcends ordinary speech. After he is done, the British ambassador rushes to the Pakistan corner looking for a copy. The next day, several delegations are seen lined up at the UN record section for a copy. There is no question that the Jam’s speech is the highpoint of the 1981 General Assembly.

So famous does Jam Amir Ali’s speech become that the late King Hussain reads it out at a palace dinner in Amman, where present among his guests is Pakistan’s ambassador to Jordan, M. Sheheryar Khan. So here is that classic text, obtained from the official record of the United Nations.

“Now sir, in conclusion, I humbly submit that the dilemma for the resolution of the conscious outlook is the only remedy. It is said that abhorrence for the learned in his infidelities and the inept in his devotions – our times are impatient of both and especially of the last. Let us not be pestered with assertions and half-truths, with emotions and scuffle. In the closing decades of the 20th century, these cannot conceivably solve any problem and indeed it is the source of positive danger to mankind – or words to that effect. It declares that this community of interest, in interests makes all men, otherwise differently interested partners in the great enterprise of replacing evil with good and good with better, so as to achieve the best possible. It is a proverb that to cut the cakes is never conducive to mankind. Also it is not humanitarian to be with farrago of twisted facts. God save us from the sprangles of cataclysm. And the scuttles of the ship should be repaired expeditiously by this august body. It is said that one man’s mickle is another man’s muckle. In conclusion, I greatly appreciate and express my warm gratitude to you by giving me the floor of this august house. Thank you.”

And thank you Jam Amir Ali for introducing us to the sprangles of cataclysm and for proving that one man’s mickle can never be another man’s muckle.

The Kashmir Study Group was set up by Farooq Kathwari as if Kashmir needed any more study than it has been subjected to since 1947. There is no issue that has been studied in greater depth and more extensively and longer than Kashmir. It has been examined from all angles and not only by Indians, Pakistanis and Kashmiris but by a succession of statesmen, diplomats, strategists, tacticians and academics who did not belong to the subcontinent.

It is not possible for anyone to come up with a solution that has not been proposed before. Three wars have been fought over Kashmir and a fourth one was a matter of touch and go at the time of Kargil. Had Nawaz Sharif not rushed to Washington — ceremoniously seen off at the airport by his Chief of Army Staff — and had Clinton not intervened personally, a war would have erupted, not only across the Line of Control but along and across the international boundary. There are many in this country who believe that never did the world come closer to a possible nuclear exchange since the Bay of Pigs than during Kargil.

Farooq Kathwari, is a Kashmiri who, thanks to a lucky break, and his talent of course, made a pile of money in America. He heads Ethan Allen, a nationwide maker and importer of expensive furniture. Several years ago, he set up the Kashmir Study Group, no doubt with good intentions, but the million dollar exercise took the wrong road from the word go. His first mistake was confining membership to retired American diplomats, and retired or working academics. The group has 25 members, Kathwari being the 26th, as well as the chairman, since he pays the bills. With the exception of two, possibly three, the rest are Americans. Nine of them are academics, six of them are retired ambassadors and two are members of Congress. What does one call it? Inverse racism? After all, doesn’t the Kashmir issue concern the people of India, Pakistan and Kashmir. Or does the group see it as the white man’s burden? One wonders.

The first report of the group issued in 2000 came up with the idea that a portion of the state should be made a sovereign country, without an international personality, enjoying free access from India and Pakistan, who should, in turn, be in charge of defence and foreign affairs. The Line of Control was to be left untouched until such time as the two countries decided otherwise. That amounts to giving permanence to the Line of Control which is a line of conflict. Demilitarisation was to take place and displaced people given the right of return. Nothing came of the proposal, as nothing should have been expected to come of it. Some members of the Group travelled around and the chairman made several trips to the subcontinent, meeting government and political leaders. Unlike India, in Pakistan, he has always been received at the highest level. What they told him is not important; what is important is that the grand Kashmir Study Group proposal withered on the vine because it had no roots in the soil.

Five years have passed since that report and I for one had thought that the Group was dead and, at last, sleeping the sleep of peace. It appears not to have been so. A new report has now been released and its main virtue may lie in its being only two pages long. It seems the Group and its members have been practising multiplication tables, since in the new report, instead of one “sovereign entity”, there are now five. They even have names. Two of them, Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas (which actually are Azad Kashmir but annexed by Pakistan, with a chunk gifted to China), are to be administered by Pakistan: what is left, by India. (Wo allag baandh ke rakha hai jo maal achha hai.). The Line of Control stays in place, so India can relax.

What is wrong with the Kathwari proposal and all such proposals is not their “what”, but their “how”. There is no point in pontificating on what a Kashmir solution should be. Everyone has a solution but the problem remains unresolved and the Kashmiris keep dying. What is needed is for someone to propose how a settlement can be made. Farooq Kathwari’s two reports say not a word about “how”; they just jabber on and on about “what”. I wish the million dollars or so he has wasted on this pointless exercise, he had instead sent to those children in Kashmir who have lost their fathers, those mothers who have lost their sons and those young brides who have lost their husbands. That would have been a true service to both the cause and the people.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I wish I could bring better news to my favourite left-hander Saeed Anwar, but if I were him, I would take guard one more time, covering leg and middle. What lies in store for him he could have least expected, and not after he grew himself a beard that knows not what a pair of scissors looks like. He turned his back on the world of cricket and told everyone he was going to bat for God. But I am afraid it is too late for Saeed Anwar, if Maulvi SM (does not stand for what it sounds it stands for) is right.

Maulvi SM oozes piety and knows all the rules in the book. He told a group right here in Washington the other day – which included my informer – that the left hand was not only unclean but cursed. Its use, except for the most unmentionable bodily functions, amounted to committing a sinful act and no one should have any illusions that it was going to be otherwise. It would appear from what he said that were it not for the unmentionable uses to which the left hand may be put, it really has no business to be there. Perhaps the safest thing would be not to have a left hand at all.

One from amongst those present, being a cricket nut, asked where in SM’s view, stood left-handed batsmen and bowlers. The answer he received was short and straight. “They are hell-bound.” Asked if the hell-bound squad would include Saeed Anwar and Wasim Akram, SM. said he was sorry but those two were indeed going to the place mentioned. No, there would be no cricket there either, only flames and hot water and some most disgusting things to drink.

Was SM serious? He may or may not have been serious, but that is exactly the kind of “spiritual” menu that many of the faithful are eating from these days. One Pakistani TV channel has been spreading the sort of Islam that could well make the viewers believe that all left-handers are going to hell. I think of my friend and hero, Abdul Hafiz Kardar who surely is in heaven but not if SM and his tribe are to be believed. This TV channel runs a programme where the presenter – a very oily gentleman who also sings and can’t seem to wipe off the goofy smile he wears on his mug – always has two bearded gents on his show, one belonging to one sect, the other to the other, who come out with the most fantastic answers to equally fantastic questions. Before I come to that, I would like to point out that to have two clerics belonging to two different sects means that the programme takes it as a given from the world go that there is a division among the followers of Islam. While on the one hand the “ulema” talk of sectarian harmony, I am sure if the other was dying of thirst, the one with a drink of water in his hand would immediately start walking away from the dying man.

One of the callers on this programme – and it depresses me to say that it was a lady who lives in New York – wanted to know if she would need to perform ablution after she had taken a shower. She was told she would have to because taking a shower was a mundane, physical act and did not purify the body or prepare it for its supplication before God. She would have to perform ablution otherwise prayers offered in her unregenerate state would not find acceptance. I thought of Iqbal and how everybody talks about him and nobody reads him. Iqbal wrote, “: Ye ummat khurafat mein kho gaiyee” (The faithful have lost their way in ridiculous practices).

In the Canadian province of Ontario, a battle is raging between progressive Muslims and those who practise and preach an extremely narrow-minded and illiberal version of religion. The latter want that matters pertaining to personal law and family disputes should be subjected to the judgment, not of the Canadian justice system, but arbitration tribunals under Shari’a, something that Muslim women believe will end up trampling their rights and subjecting them to hardship. Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian woman journalist who lives in New York and writes for a leading London-based Arabic newspaper, wrote the other day, “According to most interpretations of Shari’a, women are not treated equally to men. For example, a woman inherits half of what a male relative does. Even more problematic, there is no consensus on shari’a … So whose interpretation of Shari’a would Ontario Muslims follow? And who would have the authority to decide? Would it be the Canadian Council of Muslim Theologians, for example, which in answer to a question on their website about women drivers, said, ‘To the extent of necessity, it is permissible for a woman to drive … driving will not be permissible for leisure and going around unnecessarily.’”

Tarek Fatah, a Pakistani-Canadian who is one of the leading voices of progressive and enlightened Islam in Canada, has argued that imposing Shari’a would amount to imposing “the racism of lower expectations where under the garb of diversity Muslims are being encouraged to ghettoise and withdraw from the mainstream.” Syed Mumtaz Ali of the Islamic Institute for Civil Justice, who has promoted the idea of Shari’a arbitration tribunals for years, has already denounced Muslim opponents like Fatah as “not real Muslims.”

While all this has been going on, Freedom House, a private American group, has issued a report that concludes after studying literature distributed to various mosques in America through Saudi government outlets that religious hatred is being spread and Muslims are being exhorted to hate Jews and Christians. The Quran calls followers of both religions people of the book, but that is something the radicals are not willing to accept. I recall my meeting with a friend’s son in London, who though born, raised and educated in Britain, has gone completely “fundo.” He told me that all those who were not Muslims would burn in hell forever and forever. When I suggested that he might make an exception for “people of the book,” he said that their books had been superceded by the Quran and if they wanted to be saved, they would have to become Muslims. My attempt to quote a verse from the Quran that negates what he was saying had no effect on him whatsoever. I gave up because I remembered what Faiz Ahmed Faiz had once toldme in London. He had said, “There are those who are misled by God, as the Quran itself mentions more than once, and we mortals can do nothing about them.”

Gen. Pervez Musharraf talks of “enlightened moderation” (is there unenlightened moderation too?) but I will believe him the day he strikes down the Hadood laws – and the day he produces his dogs again, one under each arm and gets photographed with them.

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