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Where is Dubai going? That is a question I have come back with after four days in that amazing place. It has more high-rise buildings than the rest of the Arab world put together. More are coming up, including what will be the tallest in the whole wide world – so eat your heart out Kuala Lumpur, New York, Tokyo, Chicago and Toronto, to name but a few. Out there in this little sandy sheikhdom by the sea, they are building, building, building, come hell or high water, though mostly it is hell, at least for the poor Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos and others who do the building. Since everyone seems to believe that God lives in the sky (and not everywhere), maybe the Sheikhs of Dubai have chosen this novel route to reach Him. Will they find what they are looking for when the last floor of the tallest building has been built? Or have they already found their God, whose name is Mammon, the god of money to whose glory this temple called Dubai seems to be dedicated?

Every time one drove by “the tallest,” one’s attention was duly invited to the great marvel. It is being built by Emaar Properties, which must be owned by those who own Dubai. Burj Dubai, as “the tallest” is named, is described as an “iconic supertower.” Those who thought that Giorgio Armani just made high-fashion clothes should stand corrected as the next phase of the supertower will incorporate the first Armani hotel with 172 guest rooms and suites, restaurants and a spa covering more than 40,000 square metres. “History is rising. The tower is taking shape. This is an endeavour whose scope and magnitude reflects the ambitions of the city of Dubai,” crows the company.

Another Dubai landmark is Burj al-Arab, the world’s only seven-star hotel. It looks like a dhow, the seafaring boat that has been used here since time immemorial. One person described it as “high kitsch.” This hotel has no rooms, only suites, the smallest being 1,819 square feet. The largest is a whopping 8,396 square feet and costs $15,000 a day. The cheapest suite costs between $1,000 and $6,000. It is admitted by those who conceived this grand folly that it was built as a landmark and not to earn profits. Should they be reminded about the Tower of Babel and what befell that earlier monument to human vanity?

The population of Dubai was estimated this year at 4.04 million, with 3.23 million of those non-citizens. It occurred to me that if one day some of those millions decided to take over the Emirate, they would just have to take to the streets and have the government in the bag by dinner time. But this was just a passing thought. No such insurrection is likely. There are things Dubai has done that those Muslim countries which seem to treat Islam more as a debilitating burden than a tension-free way of life should follow. It is a secular place where life is governed by the principle: live and let live. Dubai has three Hindu temples, one consecrated to Shiva and the other two to Krishna. There are also three churches: Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox. While proselytising is not permitted, it is not pounced on as long as the process does not become a public nuisance. The Emirate has a crematorium, which should be a reminder to Saudi Arabia, a country that refuses to allow its soil to be used to dispose of the remains of non-Muslims. So, if you are down Saudi way and the Maker sends for you, you will have to be flown out of the Kingdom for burial or cremation or bird feed. You can live and work in Dubai, but you cannot become a citizen or acquire permanent residence. I suppose that is understandable. Were that to change, Dubai would eventually become an extension of India or Pakistan or both.

Every correspondent knows that the best informed men in any town are its cab drivers, and it was no different in Dubai. My cabbie, a young man from Ravi Road, Lahore, with a college education, said he had no plans to return because he was making good money and being treated with respect, neither of which was possible in Lahore. I asked him what it was that he liked most about living in Dubai. He said: “It is a place where the law is enforced and respected, regardless of who you are. If you break the law, any law, you will have to answer for it. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Dubai Arab or a Filipino or a Pakistani.” He said that if two foreigners get into a brawl in public, they are picked up and put on the next flight out. A woman could go out in the middle of the night on the street and be safe. He was a great admirer of the crown prince, Prince Muhammad, who oversees Dubai’s development and its running. The Prince is said to be out and about in Dubai at odd hours to see how projects are working and ifthings are as they should be. He is once reported to have said that on one side of the road, there were mosques and on the other nightclubs, bars and places for those with time and money to spend. The rule in Dubai is, he added: don’t interfere with others. You do your thing; and let the other person do his.

Dubai has 2,700 hotels and it is not always easy to find a room. People come for business or pleasure and accomplish what they have come for and leave. There are no taxes and not too many questions asked if money is brought in and lodged in the Emirate. One of the most wonderful things about Dubai is that it is full of working women who come from all over the world. No one interferes with them. I saw young women, both Arab and foreign, standing at bus stops along with men, but no one bothered them or gave them the kind of aggressive, lascivious looks that are the lot of women in Pakistan. I asked my driver friend what happens if someone teases a woman in public. “He will be taken away in less time than it takes to count up to 10. Such nonsense is not tolerated. No, sir, not in Dubai.”

Can we please get Prince Muhammad on loan for a couple of years so that he can do up Pakistan and make it the kind of place we once thought it would be?

Washington has no camels and, consequently, no camel kids, although it has plenty of beasts of other varieties, an area in which it could be a close second to Islamabad. So the question is: if there are no camels here and no camel kids here, what is Ansar Burney doing in this town?

Washington has never lacked in visitors from the Islamic Republic, the most recent being a dozen of them, most representing the national parliament, who came, sight-saw and returned, which would make the area’s department stores the sole beneficiaries of their presence here. The lawmakers, who should be renamed lawbreakers, suffered no financial ill effect of their whirlwind tour, which included Britain, financed as it was by that soon-to-be-extinct species (give Shaukat “Shortcut” Aziz a year or two), called the Pakistani taxpayer.

Ansar Burney is here as a guest of the State Department, which earlier this year declared him one of eleven “heroes acting to end modern day slavery”. The citation said that Burney “has worked relentlessly to bring to light the plight of thousands of South Asian and African children trafficked to Arabian Gulf countries for exploitation as camel jockeys.” The Department said that “as a result of Mr Burney’s efforts, the Government of the United Arab Emirates established its first-ever shelter for rescued child camel jockeys, and rescued 68 such children and repatriated them through the shelter.” Noting that Burney oversees that shelter, the citation quoted him as saying, “Much more needs to be done to rescue, rehabilitate and repatriate thousands of trafficked children throughout the Gulf region.”

Burney, I was to learn, has more influence with the government of the United Arab Emirates than with that of his own country. Asked if he had ever had the occasion to be in touch with or come in contact with Gen Pervez Musharraf, Burney replied bashfully that although he had written to him any number of times in the last six years, never once had he even received an acknowledgment, much less a reply. I wanted to offer him the consoling thought that once Gen Musharraf is done with the construction and commissioning of the Kalabagh Dam, he would surely be writing to Burney, but since there were several Americans present in the room, most of them State Department officials, I decided to keep this bit “within the family”. Also, since I heard Gen Musharraf tell those women in New York not to wash “our” dirty linen (in that area at least we are self-sufficient) abroad, I have been rather circumspect in that respect, in the process even once earning the ire of the much-admired Asma Jehangir.

There is no question in my mind that like Abdul Sattar Edhi, Burney is a man driven. It takes a lot of courage to go into the Sheikhdoms of the Gulf and spotlight the great evil, which they see as a worthy tribal tradition, namely children made to ride camels at breakneck speeds. It is no small wonder that Burney has not been liquidated because the Sheikhdoms tolerate no interference in what they see as their strictly internal affairs. Of course, the credit for what success, Burney has achieved in the UAE must ultimately go to such enlightened princes as the Al-Nyhans who acted.

Burney says camel racing using child riders is spread across the region, including Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. He says according to UAE people, there are 2,500 to 3,000 camel children in the Emirates, a figure he places at between 5,000 to 6,000. So far, he adds, only 1,000 have been recovered. There is a new law in the UAE requiring that no camel rider should be below the age of 18 or less than 45 kg in weight. They are now using robots to the extent of 80 percent. As for the rest, they are still using underage children. Some of the children used are as young as four. They are kept undernourished to prevent them from gaining weight. Some children, Burney said, receive no more than two cookies a day to eat. He knows of cases where children drank seawater to quench their thirst.

And who are these children? They are our children: from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Sudan and Ethiopia. They are either abducted or sold by their parents. Some of the recovered children when restored to their parents were sold again. There is also large-scale trafficking in under-age girls. In the Gulf region, Burney said deflowering an under-age virgin is considered the ultimate tribute to masculinity. Asked if Pakistan’s diplomatic missions in the region have been helpful to him, he replied that they find him an embarrassment and have told him that because of his activities, he is jeopardising Pakistan’s delicate relations with Arab rulers.

When his attention was invited to a claim by minister of state Tariq Azim that he had finalised arrangements to bring home 22 children and that he had already had 360 of them repatriated, Ansar Burney merely smiled. When pressed for an answer, he said, “Mr Tariq Azim Khan is welcome to claim credit for something he has had nothing to do with. He may have gone to the Gulf, but it must have been to attend to business other than recovering camel kids. As far as I know, he has never once visited a camp where these children are kept nor the racing tracks on which they are made to race their camels.”

I think there is yet hope for us if we have people like Edhi and Burney who are motivated by considerations not known to ministers of the government who are more interested in seeing their name in print and their face on a TV screen.

Since I do know that Gen Musharraf reads this newspaper, I hope he will write to Ansar Burney.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Meeraji is all but forgotten. There wasn’t a poet like him before he burst on the literary scene of undivided India in the 1930s and there hasn’t been one since. He, the most enigmatic of Urdu poets, also its most abstruse, has had no imitators because he is inimitable. Meeraji stands alone, all by himself on a pedestal in a wilderness that few visit. Thirty-seven years were all that he was granted on earth. He died six months short of his 38th, in the general ward of a Bombay hospital, all alone. His work, both unique and startling, had its detractors and there was no shortage of those who admired it for its imaginative sweep, rooted as it was in the myth, religion and history of ancient, pre-Islamic India.

Born in Mozang, Lahore, in 1912 – the same decade that marked the birth of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Noon Meem Raashad – Meeraji never finished high school, which makes his subsequent scholarship and his vociferous reading of world literature an amazing accomplishment. He once wrote: “By race I am a Kashmiri – an Aryan – and in terms of my place of birth, I am a Punjabi. In matters of language, I am an Urdu speaker, and my intellectual and poetic temperament is conditioned as much by East as by West.” He had scholarly knowledge of English, Hindi and Sanskrit. His first writings appeared in the famous children’s magazine Phool from Lahore in 1926. From 1938 to 1941, he worked as deputy editor of Maulana Salahuddin Ahmed’s Adabi Dunya and then for All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1942 to 1945. Among his colleagues were such literary luminaries as Mukhtar Siddiqi, Noon Meem Raashad, Muhammad Hasan Askari, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Upinder Nath Ashk, Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishen Chander. Meeraji became associated with Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq almost from its inception and remained involved with it until the end. In 1946 he returned to Lahore briefly, only to depart for Bombay where he started Khayal , a monthly that lasted until 1949, the year of his death. It was a turbulent and intensely creative life that he lived like a Bohemian. He was slovenly in matters of personal hygiene and his onanism bothered many, but it did not bother him. Five collections of his poetry and prose were published in his lifetime, four of them by Shahid Ahmed Dehlavi’s Saqi Book Depot, Delhi, one by Maktaba-e-Urdu, Lahore.

It will always remain one of the late Altaf Gauhar’s contributions to Urdu literature that he undertook the difficult and time-consuming task of having the verse of Meeraji put together and published in London by Urdu Markaz, in 1988. The 1,080 page volume was edited by Jamil Jalbi. What remained buried in the pages of forgotten magazines was ferreted out by literary sleuth and researcher Sheema Majeed and published in a slim volume from Lahore in 1992.

In a moving foreword to Meeraji’s collected poems, Altaf Gauhar, who came under Meerajis’s influence as a student in Lahore, and who spent a great deal of time in his company, wrote, “Meeraji Sahib, here is the collected editon of your work. Some people think that by publishing this book, your friends are repaying a debt, but I think it is more in the nature of fulfilling a duty. Had your poems not been brought together and published, it would have left a great chasm in the history of Urdu literature … You came and went, but so lasting an imprint of friendship have you left behind that we have never stopped missing you. One continues to talk to you, alone, and with others, and even when one is doing other things. Sometimes, one even begins arguing with you. You may remember that once I recited a line of verse to you about the dead rising and walking out of their resting places to take to the streets, and you kept staring at me without saying a word for a long time. I also see you standing in the open door of a train that is moving away. You are singing about a heron running with the breeze. Perhaps that was a moment to which one should have paid attention. Who were you? A wandering mystic, with flowing locks, bead around his neck, some metal balls in his hand, who passed through, having lost his way home? And when he saw that this was a land where untruth alone prevailed, he went back to where he had come from. His time here was brief, he touched the lives of all those who came to know him. Meeraji, you loved life, which is why you drank it down in one gulp. As for us, our lives have been spent searching for just one drop. But, one by one, your friends have begun to leave for the place where you went.” These lines were written in 1987. Altaf Gauhar went Meeraji’s way 13 years later.

Meeraji was born Sanaullah Dar. He took the name Meeraji after falling in love at first sight with a Bengali girl by the name of Meera Sen, who was a student at FC College, Lahore. He first saw her in 1937 or 1938 at the University Grounds where a student sports meet was taking place. She was no beauty but like most Bengali women, she had large, lovely eyes and long, black hair, the hallmarks of what Altaf Gauhar once said was the real magic of Bengal. Sanaullah Dar never met her and only once did he try to speak to her, but she paid no attention to him and walked on. He had a picture of her, clipped from a newspaper, which he would gaze at for hours, sometimes with a magnifying glass. Off and on he would burst into tears. There is no evidence that Meera Sen ever knew who her lover was, nor could she have even dreamt that her name would live in Urdu poetry long after both she and the poet lover she never knew were gone. For some reason, Meeraji associated the raga Jai Jai Vanti with Meera Sen, and tears would well up in his eyes whenever he heard it being sung.

It will be appropriate to end this remembrance of Meeraji with a translation of his one poem that is directly addressed to Meera Sen. It is called Tyag or Renunciation. Here is how it goes, although I have failed to invoke the magic of the original: Today I have said farewell to you and my heart is sad/On its door I have scribbled the words: ‘I’ve forgotten’/Were someone to come and ask, ‘Does Meera live here?’ I would answer, ‘What did you say? I do not understand’/But why does it happen that when I hear a dulcet voice/My heart misses a beat and I say to myself, ‘Could this be Meera’s voice?’/Why is it that when I hear people talk of love/I am carried back to the times when we were together and the things you said to me?/Sometimes, I get the feeling that in my hand I hold another’s/And then I whisper, ‘Yes, I love you.’/I raise my eyes and I see you walking away, taking slow steps/I begin to follow you, helplessly, involuntarily/But this day, today, I have said farewell and my heart is sad/And on its door, I’ve scribbled, ‘I’ve forgotten.’/Were someone to come and ask if Meera lives here?/I would answer, ‘What are you saying? I do not understand.’

Yasin Malik deserves to be supported because the road he has taken will one day lead that distraught woman to the home from which she was expelled

Yasin Malik was the first man in Kashmir to pick up a gun. He was also the first man to lay it down. It is ironic that a country that never tires of proclaiming Gandhi’s name, appears least inclined to follow his ways. India sees its future greatness in becoming a military power next only to China.

This is not the India Gandhi dreamt about. But there are still some who walk the same lonely path that he did. Yasin Malik, who is visiting America these days, is one such.

He is only 39 years old, 20 of which have been spent in his struggle to win a place on the table, on which only India and Pakistan sup, for his people. Whether he succeeds or fails, one thing is certain: he is not going to give up.

The one Kashmiri leader he admires is KH Khurshid, who was the first man to demand international recognition for Azad Kashmir in 1958. This was seen as treason and he was duly punished for demanding a place on the table for the Kashmiris. It is therefore understandable that Yasin Malik should admire Khurshid.

Yasin Malik has been arrested by the Indian government as many as 100 times. He has suffered torture and solitary confinement in some of India’s most notorious jails. And yet he is not bitter. He does not look back: he looks ahead. He went around 5,000 Kashmiri villages in two years on a signature campaign that demands a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute, but not without the direct involvement of Kashmiris. Yasin Malik’s mission has a direct spiritual linkage to Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave’s approach.

Where does he think things stand today? He supports the current peace process between India and Pakistan but considers it incomplete because it has excluded those who should have come first: the Kashmiris. He says the peace process has left the people of Kashmir out in the cold. Consequently, there is no joy or sense of optimism in Kashmir.

When the first bus left Srinagar for Muzaffarabad, seen off by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, there were only 3,000 people present, 2,000 of them government servants. The Kashmiris feel alienated, once again. It is time that the sad history was changed.

He also wants India and Pakistan to stop “playing favourites”. They should go down to the grassroots. Leadership cannot be conferred from above. It has never worked and it will never work. It is like the two countries have placed three jokers from the pack on the table and declared that they (the jokers) speak for the people of Kashmir. This has no credibility.

And who are those three “jokers”? Omar Abdullah, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and Mehbooba Mufti. Yasin Malik fervently believes that it is not in India or Pakistan’s national interest to play favourites. “Let the Kashmiris decide who their leaders are. Don’t thrust them on the people through the media.” He maintains that if the political will exists, then it should not be difficult to identify and involve the true representatives of the people of Kashmir in the peace process. But so far there is no such indication.

Yasin Malik is also convinced that without bringing in the leaders of the militancy in Kashmir, India and Pakistan will never be able to come to a settlement. He says since 1988, the movement in Kashmir has been militant-oriented. The government of India has been negotiating with the militants elsewhere and things are moving forward. Why can’t New Delhi do that in Kashmir, he asks?

He points out that despite the peace process, there has been no let-up in violence in Kashmir. Why? Because the militants have been left out, as if they did not exist, when they do exist and they do matter. “Violence and peace process cannot go together,” he says.

On his last visit to Pakistan, he spent six hours with Syed Salahuddin whom he found responsive to his ideas, unlike on an earlier meeting when the chief of the Jihad Council was cynical about the peace process. Yasin Malik’s argument with those who maintain that the peace process is a sham is simple. He urges them not to sit it out but to join it; if the process is a fake, they would soon find out. However, it would be wrong to denounce it without testing it themselves, he stresses.

Have the governments in Islamabad and New Delhi begun to recognise that? Not so far, he thinks, but he is determined to keep hammering home this point. “If you don’t involve the militants, the peace process has no future,” he declares. He abhors violence. He says such barbaric acts as the Diwali bombings in Delhi have no place in human society.

Yasin Malik has sensible advice for our leaders. “Stop announcing Kashmir solutions publicly. Get down on the table with your stated positions and surely there would be found a meeting point. But it can’t be done through media declarations.”

Yasin Malik is a man of wide sympathies and he is completely free of religious prejudice. At some risk to his life, he walked into a Kashmiri Pandit camp in Udhampur, a stronghold of Shiv Sena and the RSS. He recalls the moment.

An old woman walked up to him and with tears rolling down her cheeks, she asked, “Ramchander Ji’s banbas lasted 14 years. We have been in exile for the same period. When will our banbas end?” Yasin Malik deserves to be supported because the road he has taken will one day lead that distraught woman to the home from which she was expelled.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

“To the world you remained a mystery, but you saw the world as nobody had seen it before. Nature is obsessed with keeping its secrets but never again will there be another who knew what lies at the heart of things.”

This is a snatch from Iqbal’s tribute to Shakespeare and one of the most eloquent as tributes go. Quite truly it has been said that numerous expressions that we take for granted and never really think about come either from the Bible or Shakespeare. It is not heresy, but the Bard beats the Bible any day of the week.

“What’s done cannot be undone,” is from Macbeth , as is, “If it were done, when ‘tis done, then t’were well it were done quickly,” a play actors are most superstitious about, never referring to it by name, but always calling it “the Scottish play.” The last quote relates to the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth who has been pushed on to “do the deed” by his wife. Macbeth is a play about ambition and what price some are willing to pay in its pursuit. And no one has described ambition better than Shakespeare in this one line of verse from Macbeth , “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’er leaps itself, and falls on the other.” Are women more ambitious than men, and stronger, as Lady Macbeth is? The jury has been out on this since the 17th century.

We have all heard – and used in writing and speech – the line “sweet are the uses of adversity.” It comes from that most delightful of Shakespeare’s plays: As You Like It . In school, my exercise book had the following lines printed on the front cover under the blotchy picture of a hilly landscape complete with a running brook. The lines read: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt/Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks/Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” That is Shakespeare too, and it is from the same play – As You Like It – in fact it is the continuation of the “sweet uses” quotation.

One of the expressions I find myself always using is “salad days.” Until recently, I had not realised that it comes from Anthony and Cleopatra . “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood.” One often hears or reads, “An old man is twice a child.” It comes from Hamlet , a play that asks more questions than it answers. The phrase “the shadow of a dream” also comes from Hamlet .

Not everyone who has used the saying “All that glisters is not gold” knows that it comes from The Merchant of Venice . And what about “Fair is foul and foul is fair”? It is from Macbeth when the man who would be king first comes upon the three witches who predict his rise to power through murder. And shouldn’t this line from Anthony and Cleopatra be posted at the front door of every newspaper and news agency office in the world? “Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news.” There are two lines from Sonnet XCIV that many of us know, but few suspect that they were written by the Bard’s magic hand, “Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Another commonly used phrase “a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance” occurs in Hamlet .

The following two lines that every schoolboy knows come from Hamlet , “Neither a borrower nor a lender be/For loan oft loses both itself and friend.” And how many times has one not heard someone, often a politician, say, “I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning.” Well, it is from King Lear , that some consider Shakespeare’s greatest play, although there are others who disagree. It is perhaps the greatest play written about power and the ingratitude of those to whom one has been kind; although the famous lines “Blow, blow, thou winter wind! Thou art not so unkind as Man’s ingratitude” is from As You Like It. Shakespeare’s most cynical play and one that underscores disillusionment is Measure for Measure which contains the famous line “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”

Of the four great tragedies, Julius Caesar abounds in one memorable passage after another. “I am constant as the northern star” is from that play. And from Mark Anthony’s classic oration after the murder of Caesar come the lines, “The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones.” And of course no reference to Julius Caesar can be complete without the line, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And what about this, again from Julius Caesar ? “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.” Another famous line that one often forgets comes from King Lear is: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

The phrase “give the devil his due” is from Henry IV, part I. And “to paint the lily” comes from King John and “too much of a good thing” from As You Like It . The Tempest , one of Shakespeare’s last and most imaginative plays, also carries some of his most memorable lines such as “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” “The milk of human kindness” occurs in Macbeth and the line “There is no fettering of authority” is from All’s Well that Ends Well . “Jealousy, the green-eyed monster” is from Othello . And “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is to have a thankless child” is from that great play about power, loyalty, love and filial ingratitude, King Lear. One often hears it said that the world is so and so’s oyster not knowing that the line comes from The Merry Wives of Windsor : “The world is mine oyster, which I with sword will open.”

We sometimes say of a person that he has a “lean and hungry look,” little realising that we are repeating Shakespeare’s description of Cassius from Julius Caesar . And the phrase “the common herd” is also from Julius Caesar , as is “the Ides of March.” The line “This is the winter of our discontent” occurs in Richard III and “brevity is the soul of wit” is from Hamlet . How many of us know that “The better part of valour is discretion” occurs in Henry IV, part I and “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is from Hamlet . “O brave new world” is from The Tempest and “A plague on both your houses” comes from that most lyrical of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet . It is only proper, therefore, that my favourite lines from that play should end this tribute to the amazing genius of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

“When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

I have been trying to look for a word that would describe the lack of sensitivity that Pakistan’s political and official elite exhibits in the name of “serving the people”, but so far, I have failed to find one which would be vile or graphic enough to express my feelings. Suggestions are welcome.

At a time when we have been urging the world to come to Pakistan’s aid so that it can deal with the aftermath of a disaster of Old Testament proportions, whole cart-loads of our lawmakers who make no laws, only thump desks or praise the government, have been travelling around world capitals, not on a dollar a day, but several hundred dollars a day, all at the Pakistani people’s and taxpayers’ expense. What is even more depressing is that these paid holidays should have been sanctioned and approved by the prime minister of the country who, being a banker in an earlier birth, should know something about the value of money and the principle of accountability.

It is disgusting that while the nation grapples with its grimmest crisis, at a time when every penny should count, a 12-member delegation has been out and about in America and elsewhere at state expense. It is all the more reprehensible that nine of its members are members of the National Assembly and the Senate. This band of potential shoppers is led by Hamid Yar Hiraj, minister of state for commerce, his travelling companions being Ms Kashmala Tariq, MNA, Senator Fauzia Fakhar uz Zaman, Senator Ms Pari Gul Agha, Chaudhry Bilal Aziz, parliamentary secretary for local government and rural development, Makhdumzada Basit Sultan, parliamentary secretary Establishment Division, Chaudhry Bilal Ejaz, parliamentary secretary to the Information and Broadcasting ministry, Rehman Naseer Chaudhry, MNA and Engineer Gyan Chand Singh, MNA. Three of the members — Jawed Asghar, Muhammad Shoaib Sethi and Munir Akbar — are businessmen, though it wasn’t clear if they had paid their own way or whether this honour too had been bestowed on the people of Pakistan.

At the embassy of Pakistan on the evening of Thursday, December 8, representatives of the Washington-based Pakistani press were invited to meet the delegation. Earlier, the delegation had been asked to make an appearance at the Woodrow Wilson Centre — courtesy its director for South Asia, the personable Bob Hathaway — but only three of the distinguished members turned up. We were luckier, there were four of them, two being businessmen. Everyone else was missing.

Asked where the “leader” Hamid Yar Hiraj was, we were told that he had flown to Japan. Why he had flown to Japan was not explained. And where were the others? If anyone knew where they were, such privileged information was not shared. These days, every Pakistani worth his or her salt has family in the United States. So maybe that was where they were, in the bosom of the family.

Other Pakistanis from privileged classes have children at US universities. When asked who pays the enormous expense university education here entails, one is always told, “O they are so bright, they are all on scholarships.” (Pass me the sick bag, Mickey.) The spokesperson of the truncated delegation was Ms Kashmala Tariq, who talks thirteen to a dozen and is quick to shut up anyone who tries to get a word in edgeways, as she did her colleague, Ms Fakhar uz Zaman, when she tried to make an observation. “I am the spokesperson and only I will speak,” snapped Ms Tariq. Her reputation for a sharp tongue is more than well deserved.

Asked what the “delegation” had been doing in Washington and why it was here, we were told that it was generating support for earthquake victims and trying to get Pakistan a better trade deal from America. When reminded that only the other day, Commerce Minister Humayun Akhtar Khan had visited Washington, where he had seen all key members of the Bush administration on trade issues, Ms Tariq saw that as an effort to undermine her hard work over the last two days. And whom had the delegation seen?

After some prodding, an embassy official produced a list that named three members of Congress, all members of the Pakistan Caucus and all known and declared Pakistan backers. One of them, Congressman Dan Burton, Ms Tariq was reminded, had just returned from Pakistan, but she was not impressed. She said she had told him things he had known nothing about. What those things were, she did not explain.

Ms Fakhar uz Zaman when asked (at the risk of a rap across the knuckles from Ms Tariq) when she was planning to go back, replied that she was going to stay back to spend time with her daughter. The two businessmen did not utter a single word though they did shake hands with us when it was all over.

Another delegation of equal strength has been or until recently was doing the rounds in Europe in a bid to “raise public awareness for earthquake victims”. The highlight of their stay in London was a dinner hosted for them by High Commissioner Dr Maleeha Lodhi who is a hospitable lady and who did not know what else to do with this Harrods-bound crowd. There may be other delegations in other parts of the world about which one knows nothing. More may be on their way, as we go around the world with a large begging bowl.

Why Ambassador Jehangir Karamat did not block the visit of these wasters to Washington, when Munir Akram, our man at the UN, did so when a dozen of them were about to land for the General Assembly session which was practically over, I have no means of knowing. General Karamat likes not to make waves and is too nice a man to say no.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on these delegations, considering that General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister “Shortcut” Shaukat Aziz, between the two of them, visited 46 countries between July 2004 and June 2005. Why then grudge a piddly visit to the US to our elected representatives? So, Ms Tariq, no hard feelings please, all is forgiven. Come again and soon.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Mark Twain said about the weather: “Everyone complains about it; nobody does anything about it.” This is also true of those of us who complain about the army and what it does but make no attempt to understand the military mind. It is for this reason that Sohail Warriach’s new book Jarnailoon ki Siyasat should be read because it gives us a three-dimensional view of the intellectual universe inhabited by generals, some of whom overthrow civilian governments. Before we start screaming for the army to return to the barracks, we should understand why they left them in the first place. Warriach’s book is made up of 18 interviews with generals ranging from Javed Ashraf Qazi to Naseerullah Babar to Faiz Ali Chishti to Tikka Khan to the late “Tiger” Niazi and Rao Farman Ali to Ghulam Umar to Asad Durrani. Mirza Aslam Beg is missing, which only shows what a smart cookie he is.

Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, a pillar of the Musharraf regime, has been often called the godfather of the Taliban, since he was heading the ISI at a time when the Taliban’s star was high and bright. However, he denies that the ISI had anything to do with the rise of the Taliban and declares that the ISI did not give even a single bullet or gun to them, which can only mean that arms and guns must have started growing from trees. According to him, Afghanistan was a giant arms dump. It needed no imports from Pakistan. He says the ISI only made contact with the Taliban when they captured Kandahar. The Taliban were active in the narco trade, until Mullah Omar put an end to it, he concedes. He claims that no Pakistani army personnel were part of Taliban forces. He also insists that the ISI has no global agenda. He also denies that the ISI is a “state within a state,” insisting that it has no existence outside the Pakistan Army. He believes that the ISI does not get involved in domestic politics on its own, but is draggedin by politicians.

However, Gen Tariq, who was in the run for army chief during Benazir Bhutto’s time, holds her father responsible for politicising the ISI. He criticises Gen Aslam Beg for bribing politicians and expresses himself against the imposition of martial law. However, he asserts that politicians are inexperienced and cites the example of the late Zain Noorani, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, at Geneva who, under instructions from Junejo, concluded the peace accord on Afghanistan. Zia-ul-Haq and the army were opposed to the form in which the accord was concluded.

Another former general, Raja Saroop Khan, told the interviewer that the army remains fiercely loyal to its chief, but when asked why Gen Zia-ul-Haq had overthrown his chief, the prime minister, he replied: “I was speaking about loyalty within the army.” Asked if loyalty was not necessary outside the army, he said: “Loyalty is akin to two-way traffic.” He also argued that the Turkish model should be followed to avoid further martial laws. When told that this does not happen where there is a civil society, he replied that when Pakistan came into being, it had no traditions and so “we have had to make our own traditions.” What Gen Saroop said more than six years ago is important since it reflects the thinking of most army officers. He predicted that if differences arose between Gen Musharraf (then COAS) and the government, “he will definitely take a stand.” He described Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a “tremendous” book.

And that brings us to Gen Hamid Gul. More confusion has been spread in Pakistan by him than by any single individual one can think of. I recall the late Dr Feroz Ahmed saying to him, after having listened to him for about twenty minutes at a meeting in Washington: “General, you are a very confused man.” Asked point-blank if he, as head of the ISI, made the IGI, he replied that he wasn’t willing to admit anything “on the record.” When reminded that he had admitted that much in an interview with a US magazine, he replied: “Not at all, I have never admitted it, but without going into the whys and wherefores of IGI, there are many things that have to be done for the sake of the country. Supposing you are travelling in a bus and suddenly one of the passengers develops appendicitis and is about to die; if you are a doctor, you get hold of a knife and slash his belly to remove his appendix and the man gets well and the bus gets safely to its destination. And then you are told that you were not a qualified doctor and asked why you had taken care of the patient’s life-threatening problem with a sharp knife. The point I am making is that under certain given circumstances, democracy has to be helped to move forward. There are several things that I am unable to state but it is the end result that matters. The train of democracy had begun to move forward having been in jeopardy in 1985.” Asked if he meant that had IGI not been made, democracy would not have moved forward, he replied, “You can put it in whatever words you like.”

No wonder, then, that with surgeons like Hamid Gul, the patient has died not of a burst appendix but from profuse bleeding and the infection caused by the contaminated knife that has been repeatedly used to bring him back to health in a bus moving on a pitted country road. In an interview after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, Gen Gul said that the Taliban movement began when a woman was dishonoured. The Taliban, according to the general, also granted inheritance rights to women (something that must come as news to women). He said the Taliban were following what Islam has laid down. Asked if he was impressed by what he had seen in Afghanistan, he replied emphatically, “I was greatly impressed.” He regretted that no credit was given to the Taliban for providing free education. He also found complete peace and order in Afghanistan. “They have established the supremacy of the law and the authority of the central government.” The rest, as they say, is silence.

Gen Hamid Gul continues to regale the nation with his revolutionary ideas; newspapers and television talk shows remain the ground where he frolics. I wonder what would have happened had he become the army chief and taken over one day. So maybe Gen Musharraf is not such a bad deal, given the army’s incorrigible habit of overthrowing civilian governments every few years.

By the time this is in print, Talat Waseem, press minister at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, would have arrived home, her term of three years abridged for reasons best known to the abridgers by nearly a year. And yet there are those whose terms seem to multiply as if by magic.

While one can only wish Ms Waseem the best of luck as she scouts the bureaucratic wilds of Islamabad in search of an assignment commensurate with her 29 years of service, there is something seriously wrong with a system which is ruled by arbitrariness.

In other countries, civil servants have advance knowledge of the direction their career is going to take. This helps them plan their future and the future of their families. It must say something about us that after 58 years of independence, we have a state that is essentially lawless, where decision-making is whimsical. My friend Zafar Rathore, some of whose observations need to be framed and hung on walls, says that the way we now are is the way we always were. The concept of justiciable rights that the British brought outlived them by no more than a couple of decades. We have returned to our true natural state where the law of the jungle is the only law, he maintains.

The Pakistan embassy in Washington was one of the first to be established and it was the Quaid-i-Azam personally who appointed our first ambassador here, MAH Isphahani. He it was who acquired the magnificent residence on 2315 Massachusetts Avenue (since abandoned to rats and the inaction of the Pakistan Foreign Office) that became the chancery and remained so for the next 50 plus years. The “core professionals” who believe they run the world from Islamabad are not likely to restore this abandoned structure, considering that they never allocated enough funds for its proper maintenance when it was in use.

The ambassador’s residence that lies at the back of the chancery is in such a state of disrepair that the new envoy Jehangir Karamat has yet to move into it, although he has been here for a year. Many of the magnificent buildings that Pakistan purchased abroad in the first years of independence have since been sold. The lovely ambassador’s residence in London’s exclusive Regent’s Park was sold by a Lahore trader who had been sent to represent us at the court of St James. Dark stories of what led to that sale still circulate among those who know about such things.

Another prime property, worth millions of dollars in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill area, was sold for a pittance. Why doesn’t the National Accountability Bureau look into some of these outrages? This will have the added advantage of generating several foreign trips for its leading lights.

Ms Waseem is to be replaced by a member of her service. Pakistan’s past press representatives abroad have included outstanding information and media professionals. There were men like Iqbal Butt, Khalid Ali, Hamid Jalal, Amanullah Sardar, Ghani Eirabi, Abdul Qayoom, Jamiluzzaman and Syed Nazim Qutb. These men were on first-name terms with editors, TV anchors and star correspondents and, hence, were able to project the national interest at critical times. The other day, at an event at the embassy, Jehangir Karamat spoke about those who had served Pakistan in Washington. It was right that he did so because people forget. So let me go back in time to remember some of those who served Pakistan in Washington.

MAH Isphahani came in October 1947 and stayed until January 1952, followed by Muhammad Ali Bogra who was summoned to Pakistan in April 1953 to become prime minister. Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the prime of his life. He was succeeded by that great diplomat and gentleman par excellence, Syed Amjad Ali, who stayed until September 1955. It was during his time that Pakistan and the US signed their defence treaty.

Aziz Ahmed came in March 1959 and remained here until July 1963, followed by his brother G Ahmed who was replaced by Agha Hilaly, Agha Shahi’s older brother, who was ambassador until October 1971. He handled the delicate business of the Kissinger visit to China. General NAM Raza was sent in October 1971 and recalled in 1972. On the day Dhaka fell, a birthday party was in progress at his residence celebrating his daughter’s birthday.

He was succeeded by Sultan Muhammad Khan, the distinguished diplomat who counted Zhou en-Lai among his personal friends. He was replaced by Sahibzada Yaqub Khan who stayed from 1973 to 1979, making way for that fine soldier and human being Lt Gen Ejaz Azim who was here from 1981 to 1986. His successor was the quintessential ambassador, Jamshed KA Marker, who served until 1989. His successor Air Marshal M. Zulfiqar only stayed for a year and a quarter.

He was succeeded by Najmuddin Shaikh whose stay was brief, thanks to Nawaz Sharif. Syeda Abida Hussain breezed into Washington in November 1991 and went home with the Sharif government in 1993. Maleeha Lodhi came in January 1994, completed her term and returned for a second time when General Musharraf took power. Riaz H Khokhar did not serve out his full term and was replaced by Tariq Fatimi. Then there was Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, the “pink panther of Pishin”, whose departure to Iraq made way for Jehangir Karamat. He was here till the time of writing.

Moral: ambassadors come and go: the country stays.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Many of Saadat Hasan Manto’s beliefs are spelt out in his essays; but at times he chose a character in one of his stories to give them expression. One such instance is his classic story Sauraj ke Liye where Manto speaks through the central character Ghulam Ali: “Human beings should remain human beings. If you want to do good deeds, is it essential to have your head shaved, put on ochre robes or coat your body with ash? You may say that one is free to do as one wills, but I say it is because of such erratic conduct that one misguides others. Such people, flying high in the belief that they have found a superior level of awareness, forget that while in time their character, their ideas and their beliefs will evaporate into thin air, their shaven heads, their ash-covered bodies and their ochre robes are all that will survive so far as simple people are concerned. So many reformers have been born to mankind but what they taught has been forgotten. However, crosses, beards, sacred threads, metal wristbands and underarm hair are all that survive. We are wiser than the people who lived a thousand years ago. Why does it not enter the heads of our didactic counsellors that they are distorting the human personality? I often want to stand up and start screaming, ‘For God’s sake, let man remain man. You have already distorted his face. Now take pity on him; do not try to invest him with divinity because, as is, he is losing his humanity.’

The rise of religiosity, which its adherents mistake for religion, is not a recent phenomenon but it is more visible than it was, say, a quarter of a century ago. As Manto analysed it with such clarity, outward symbols, be they beards or metal wristbands or sacred threads worn across the bare chest, are outward manifestations of a sprit that is no longer there. The hijab, which has been gaining ground among Muslim women since the Iranian “revolution,” falls in the same category. Those who wear it believe that they are fulfilling the Quranic injunction and thus earning merit in the eyes of God. Their reading of the holy book is faulty, regardless of what Dr Farhat Hashmi, now saving souls on a visitor’s visa in Canada, might say.

Amna Wadud notes in her book Quran and Woman (OUP, 1999) Dr Fazlur Rahman’s suggestion that all Quranic passages, revealed as they were at a specific time in history and within certain general and particular circumstances, be given expression relative to those circumstances. It was just this kind of enlightened thinking that resulted in this remarkable scholar’s forced exile from Pakistan in the last days of Ayub Khan.

Another Muslim scholar, Dr Ibrahim Syed, recently wrote that those who claim that the Quranic verses are explicit about hijab base that position on Sura Al-Ahzab (33:59). The operative words in Arabic on which this interpretation is based mean (that women should) “lower their garments” or “draw their garments closer to their bodies.” Nowhere does the verse say that the face should be covered. In fact, the verse is devoid of the word ‘face.’ The advocates of hijab also quote in support of their position Sura Al-Nur (24:31). Dr Syed writes: “In the pre-Islamic period, women used to wear a cloth called khimar on their necks that was normally thrown towards the back leaving the head and the chest exposed. The reference in Al-Nur apparently instructs that this piece of cloth, normally worn on the head and neck, should be made to cover the bosom.” The khimar was akin to a scarf or the Pakistani dupatta . He writes: “So it is erroneous to conclude that the Quran demands (of) Muslim women to cover their heads” (which is what hijab-wearing “Nek Parveen bibis ,” to quote Kishwar Naheed, do).

Another Islamic scholar, Dr Abou el Fadl, wrote in 2001: “From the gross liberties taken in translating the (Quranic) text, apparently the translators believe that God wishes women to be like house-broken dogs – loyal, sweet and obedient. One can only ponder what type of rotted and foul soul imagines that God wishes to imprison women in a sewer of squalid male egos, and suffer because men cannot control their libidos. What an ugly picture they have created of God’s compassion and mercy!”

A Western scholar of Islam, Daphne Grace, in her 2004 book The Woman in the Muslin Mask, writes that, “Contrary to popular belief, the veiling of women is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Quran. It is claimed that the custom of veiling arises from the verse in the Quran telling believers to ‘cast down their eyes. . . and reveal not their adornment save such as is outward; and let them cast their veils over their bosoms.’” She quotes the scholar Fadwa El Guindi, who elaborated the translation of this passage to reveal that the original meaning was to “cover the cleavage of the breasts.” Grace writes: “The passage has been interpreted by men in some countries to indicate the requirement of the full veil . . . while in other countries (such as Egypt), a fashionable headscarf suffices. It is worth noting that the cover outlined in the Quran was intended to prevent the public flaunting of sexuality, and a parallel verse prescribed an equivalent modest dress code for men.”

El Guindi writes that the original use of the veil was to distinguish the status and identity of the wives of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) “so that they may be recognised and not molested.” (The Quran, 33:59). Another mention of the hijab occurs in the same Sura: “When you ask any of the wives of the Prophet for something, ask from behind a curtain.” According to El Guindi, the historic organ of the veil was a curtain, not between man and woman but between two men. Another Islamic scholar, Fatima Mernissi, has written that the boundary between forbidden space, which is hidden by the hijab, and permitted space, was to become a key concept in the Islamic world. She goes on to argue that “reducing or assimilating this concept to a scrap of cloth that men have imposed on women to veil them when they go out on the street is truly to impoverish this term, not to say drain it of its meaning.” She is of the opinion that the imposition of social spatial and religious restrictions on women was never inherent within the teachings of the Holy Prophet (pbuh).

She writes: “Paradoxically, and contrary to what is commonly assumed, Islam does not advance the thesis of women’s inherent inferiority. Quite the contrary, it affirms the potential equality between the sexes.”

And that is a good point to rest this case.

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