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Since visitors to Washington from Pakistan during summer are officials for the most part, it is nothing one particularly looks forward to, which is what makes the visit this week to Washington of Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin a good way to start the summer. Since Steve Cohen, who had them speak at Brookings, a gathering jointly hosted by Teresita Schaffer of CSIS and Michael Krepon of Stimson Centre, declared the meeting on Thursday afternoon “off the record”, I can only jump the rope if I wish to be sent to Coventry.

One line, however, needs to be shared. Said Cohen, quoting President George Bush, that Pakistan had a free press, but added, “When it is not being harassed by security agencies”. He said it was admirable that Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin had kept The Friday Times and Daily Times going against all odds. He called the two publications among the very best in the world.

I am not at liberty to say what Sethi and Ms Mohsin said at Brookings, but I can report what they said a couple of evenings earlier at an informal gathering organised for them by the Washington Policy Analysis Group, a high-sounding name for an outfit formed in this town over 15 years ago by Pakistani expats. The group used to meet in a restaurant called Kebab Masala, which went out of business several years ago, hence the name it was more popularly known by: the Kebab Masala group. We now meet in Aabshar, a Pakistani restaurant in Springfield, Virginia, a Washington suburb.

But before I turn to the evening with the two visitors from Lahore, let me narrate what the late Dr Feroz Ahmed, one of the group’s founding members, told General Hamid Gul after listening to him for half an hour at the Kebab Masala restaurant. “General,” he said, “You are a very confused man.”

Sethi, who had been asked to speak about Pakistan and in what direction it was headed, said that of one thing there could be no doubt: the General wanted another five years, starting with 2007. He also wished to remain in uniform and, what is more, he would rather have the present assembly give him those five years. Open question then: would the Pakistan parliament do what the Nigerian assembly did and say, “No, thank you.” Unlikely.

What Sethi found intriguing was that although the next elections were 18 months away, things had started heating up. This could only presage significant developments in the coming months. He found the economic indicators disturbing, with inflation running at eight percent and fuel prices having shot up by 50 percent in one year. Easy bank credit that had everybody driving a new car was going to be tightened and interest rates would go up. Both savings and investment had stayed stationary. A balance of payments crisis was in the offing.

In short, what awaits us is a long, hot and very uncomfortable summer. The prime minister, instead of taking material steps to deal with the expected drought, sends messages from abroad that the people of Pakistan should pray for rain, Sethi observed wryly.

Anti-Americanism was running rampant and even those within the ruling circle were asking questions about the wisdom of continuing with a war on terrorism that appears to have boiled down to “killing our own people”. Nobody any longer buys this terrorism gig. Government policy in the tribal areas, he said, is flip-flop. The army has suffered heavy casualties and the Taliban are increasing their hold and clout. Sethi said the Bush visit to Pakistan was a “disaster”. While India had been showered with gifts, the Bush administration had failed to even sign an investment treaty that the two sides had been negotiating for years.

So, people asked, he said, why is Pakistan doing America’s bidding in the region and what is it getting in return? He said General Musharraf had gone out on a limb to assist the US and yet every time, a US official spoke, after having said very nice things while in Pakistan about how much Pakistan was doing in the war against global terrorism, all one heard was, “Pakistan should do more”. This caused anger and irritation in Pakistan, especially in the army, which had lost hundreds of men fighting what was increasingly seen as America’s war, not Pakistan’s.

He said Pakistan also felt that the US was staging a “holding operation” in Afghanistan and it will one day up and leave. So Pakistan had to fend for itself. US and Pakistan interests in Afghanistan were not identical, he added. Then there was the heavy Indian presence in Afghanistan, which no Pakistani government could ignore.

And what does he see on the political chessboard? He replied that while General Musharraf would cement an alliance with the JUI, Nawaz Sharif’s party and the Jamaat-e-Islami were going to team up. He felt that Nawaz Sharif, who the couple met in London (at Sharif’s request) — the former prime minister apologised for what he had done to Sethi — had taken full control of his party. Shahbaz Sharif, the regime might have liked to do some kind of a deal with, had been sidelined. As for the PPP, it remained the most popular party and if there were free and fair elections today, it would be the biggest winner (which is why they won’t take place, in my view). Nawaz Sharif would do everything to keep his recent alliance with Benazir Bhutto intact, but would remain apprehensive about her striking a deal with the General.

There were contacts between the regime and Benazir but she had made it clear that the next time an emissary was sent to her, it should either be the head of the ISI or the MI. You can’t fault her for knowing the barrel through which power flows. Asked if Nawaz Sharif had changed, Sethi said he is wiser and has realised that it doesn’t pay to play footsie with the army. Will the two leaders in exile be any different were they to return to power? “I think they will be less corrupt,” Sethi replied, which is not a bad note to end this column on.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

When a high-powered National Cat Commission was announced, every newspaper wrote leading articles welcoming its formation. All important political, religious and social figures issued statements hailing the step. Even seminars and symposia were held in different centres of the Pakistan Council (since abolished. Ed.) on the subject. In short, there was a great deal of public enthusiasm following the dramatic announcement.

The terms of reference of the Commission were briefly as under: (a) to trace the history, culture and development of a small, domesticated, carnivorous quadruped, commonly known as the cat; (b) to conduct an in-depth study of the problems relating to the social and private life of cats; (c) to investigate into the causes of a growing sense of disillusionment in the feline community; (d) to suggest ways and means whereby the traditional ill will between cats and dogs may be permanently eliminated; (e) to study the psychology and temperament of wild cats and explore possibilities of domesticating them in the public interest; and (f) to inquire into the problem of brain drain among the country’s cats.

Mr Tomcat Whiskers, a very eminent tomcat who had been publicly honoured on a number of occasions, was made the chairman. Other members of the Commission were no less well known. Each one of them had distinguished himself in one sphere of activity or another. The Director General of Animal Husbandry was made an ex-officio member.

The first meeting of the Commission was held in the Lahore Zoo, close to the reptile house, in the course of which operational procedures, methods of investigation and other details were decided. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr Tomcat Whiskers and his colleagues posed for waiting press photographers and addressed a news conference. “This is a great day for cats. Their entire future depends upon your findings. Never before in the chequered history of the feline race has such an opportunity presented itself,” Mr Tomcat Whiskers declared to cheering reporters.

A detailed questionnaire in Urdu and English was issued a fortnight later. It covered practically every aspect of the Commission’s assignment. Through the courtesy of the press, television and radio, appeals were issued to the cat community to send replies. The response was enthusiastic. The Commission also undertook an extensive tour of the country, going to places as remote as South Waziristan and Gwadar. In all towns and cities, which the Commission visited, it held interviews and gathered oral evidence. Written memoranda from cat associations were also invited and received. Organisations like Cats for Democracy, the National Cat Front, the Anti-Canine Cat League, the Cat Call Group, the Daughters of the Cat Revolution and the Cat and Milk Federation sent representations to the Commission.

Mr Tomcat Whiskers then went on a world tour to study the problems of cats from an international angle. He visited most countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. He was accompanied by the Commission’s secretary, Miss Jennifer Pussy.

On the Chairman’s return, the Commission held a series of meetings, in the course of which the draft report was finalised. The report ran to 500 pages and contained 315 recommendations and 58 appendices. A date was fixed for its formal presentation. The ceremony was held in great style. It was shown on television and radio stations broadcast special programmes on that day. It hit the headlines in the national press. Cat rallies were held all over the country and processions were taken out. Months passed. People forgot about it, till Mr Tomcat Whiskers issued a statement to the press, asking the government to publish the report and implement its findings. The government read the papers but made no reply. A couple of letters and second leaders appeared in some papers in support of Mr Whiskers’ demand. But that was about all.

Six months later, the editor of the volatile Cat Times ran a front-page editorial, which said that if the report of the Commission was neither to be published nor implemented, the appointment of the Commission should not, in that case, have been made at all. An official spokesman, when asked for comment, stated the following, “No comments please.”

Mr Tomcat Whiskers was some time later booked for a twice-weekly television show. As for the editor of the volatile Cat Times , he was badly mauled by two Alsatians as he stepped out of his office one evening. An ordinary house cat when asked for comment, merely observed, “We ordinary cats are not interested in that sort of thing at all. As for Tomcat Whiskers, he is lousy on TV.”

I have only one thing to add to the Cat Commission affair. It is sobering to think that a column published more than thirty-five years ago in The Pakistan Times , Lahore, remains as valid today as when it was first written. Obviously, the more things change. . .

One General departs: another takes his place. An American friend, when he learnt of the appointment of Maj Gen Mahmud A Durrani as our man in Washington, said, “From four stars you have come down to two.”

“That can’t be helped,” I told him, “we couldn’t have gone higher because we have no Field Marshal, otherwise we would have sent him over.”

The last holder of this office has long been gone, living in civvy street, up in heaven. However, next time we decide on sending another ambassador to Uncle Sam’s Court, I suggest we send a Field Marshal. American republican spirit flies out the window when it comes to titles and honorifics. You can lose your job in this country but not your rank. Anyone who has ever been an ambassador, remains an ambassador till the last breath in his body. A secretary remains a secretary. Even lowly assistant secretaries who are received by the highest when they visit our land (and by joint secretaries when they go to New Delhi) are referred to as Mr or Madam Secretary.

And the number of those whose names are prefixed with Hon (short for Honourable I take it) is legion. My best efforts to find out who can be an Hon. and who can’t be one, have produced contradictory answers. I have been seriously wondering if it would not be a good idea to put Hon in front of my own name when my current stock of visiting cards runs out.

Any number of people have asked me — they think journalists know everything when the fact is that they are about as ignorant as the rest — why Gen Jehangir Karamat is leaving and why Maj Gen Durrani is taking his place. In this baseball-crazy country (Take me out to the ball game), often complicated situations are explained in terms of the summer game.

“Durrani came from left field”, I heard someone say. Being into cricket rather than baseball, I can only deduce that means to came from an unexpected direction. Any baseball fan reading this is welcome to correct me, in case. Before I move from baseball to generals and ambassadors, let me add that “dead fish” in baseball means a ball — called pitch — thrown with very little speed. It is also called a “dead mackerel”, a “nothing ball” and “salad” (which shows you what the average baseball fan thinks of things green when compared with, say, thick sausages heaped with mustard). And a banana in baseball is a pitch that veers away from its intended target. I mention these two terms to make the point that Gen Durrani has neither thrown a dead fish nor a banana but a Yorker that pitched six inches from the middle stump and took it away.

When the news first surfaced about Gen Karamat’s return home, I did something shockingly un-Pakistani. Instead of listening to as many stories as there are Mr Know Alls in this town, I asked the General himself why he was leaving. He told me why.

Let it be added for the record that Ambassador Karamat is the only Pakistani of note I know who answers every single message, no matter how trivial, addressed to him. He can also be reached on the phone, which no important Pakistani can ever be, either on his mobile — which is kept switched off — or on his phone which is picked up, if at all, by some sidekick who first asks you your name, your parentage, your caste, the colour of your eyes and hair, distinguishing physical marks and, last but not least your phone number and why you are calling. The call, of course, is never returned.

Gen Karamat said he wasn’t keen to come to Washington in the first place. He was happy living in Lahore (and who wouldn’t be!) and so was his wife. But when Gen Pervez Musharraf asked him for the third time if he would go to Washington, he agreed. Last year he said, he told the foreign secretary that he did not wish to stay beyond his two-year contract, which ends in November 2006. He followed this up with a formal letter reiterating that Gen Musharraf asked him some time later, if that was what he really wished, and when he confirmed that this indeed was his wish, Gen Musharraf asked if in that case he should look for his successor. “By all means,” Gen Karamat told him, thanking him for his courtesy.

How Gen Durrani appeared from left or right field to fill the breach, I do not know since I have not asked him. And rumours — despite Ayub Khan’s classic observation that in Pakistan all rumours are facts and all facts rumours — I do not rely on. Gen Durrani, an Armoured Corps officer — the fourth to come here as ambassador, and the sixth uniformed man to do so — is no stranger to Washington, having served here as military attaché for five years before becoming Gen Zia ul Haq’s military secretary.

He is also well versed in American think-tank culture and has many, many friends in that community, including our own Shirin Tahir-Kheli, one of Warrior Princess Condi Rice’s most trusted friends and aides. Most people will be happy about Gen Durrani’s big break because like all important people he cannot be short of friends (though the number of friends must have multiplied overnight, with many in Islamabad and Lahore, I hear, throwing the doors of hospitality open to him before he left).

Comrade Abdulla Malik once said to me, “Maqbul Sharif has been made editor-in-chief of The Pakistan Times. I don’t like it but I went over to offer him my congratulations because success, no matter achieved how or by whom, should be acknowledged.” So, Gen Durrani happy times in Washington. I’m sure we’re bound to like each other!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Saushad the maestro is dead, but his music lives. If ever a cliché was true, then this one is. In 1992, Naushad, an accomplished poet who wrote in the tradition of the great masters of Urdu poetry, published a collection that he called Aathwan Sur – the eighth note. The text was set in Urdu and the Devnagri script, since the younger generation of Indian Muslims is mostly unable to read Urdu.

In a brief foreword, Naushad wrote, “If you find anything here that you like, please consider it a reflection of the many accomplished men whose company I have been privileged to keep. If your eye, while scanning a poem, momentarily comes to rest upon a verse, it will be no more than a distant projection of the light that was Lucknow. And if you read a line that you like, please let its credit go to Urdu, that wonderful language which can transmute even prosaic thoughts so that they come to acquire the splendid beauty of a bedecked, bejewelled bride.

Naushad was born in a Lucknow that no longer exists. In 1992 when I was finally able to go to that city, which for me was like a dream come true, what awaited me was disillusionment. I looked far and wide for a bookshop selling Urdu books. I found none, except a tiny little outlet stocked with old and discarded books, none of which were any use to me. There wasn’t even a shop sign in Urdu. I went looking for Maktaba Nawal Kishore and found what looked like a weather-beaten, abandoned building with a sign which could barely be read. On the streets where Syed Naushad Ali grew up, I found ugly black pigs with their snouts in piles of rubbish. It was an apocalyptic vision akin to something out of a Fellini movie. But let me return to Naushad, the perfect master.

After Naushad returned to India in the late 1980s following heart bypass surgery in California, which he used to visit often, a friend of mine, Akhtar Mirza in Lahore, wrote to him, asking him to come to Pakistan and promising to take him to the accomplished mystic, the late Sufi Barkat Ali of Salarpur, for his blessings. Naushad replied that he owed his second life to God’s grace and the good wishes of his friends and admirers. My take on this exchange was somewhat different; I wrote to Akhtar Mirza that in case Naushad did come to Pakistan – which, regrettably, he never did – my friend should bring his spiritual guide all the way down to meet the man who had created music of such sweetness and beauty that for well over half a century, hundreds of millions of people, embracing several generations, had derived peace of mind and happiness from it. The perfect master, in my opinion, was Naushad and he it was to whom court should be paid. He was among the truly blessed because what divinity there is in human beings, must lie in music and poetry. The rest is dross.

Naushad was an attai , which means that like the great Khurshid Anwar, his musical gift was not bequeathed to him through lineage or miras , but acquired and learnt. Normally, professional musicians thumb their noses at those born outside the tradition, but when it came to men like Naushad and Khurshid Anwar, they considered it a privilege to sit at their feet and be touched by the spirit that permeates all great music.

Tracing Naushad’s musical journey that began in the early 1940s is like tracing the history of Indian cinema itself. It was his score for Sharda that became the toast of India. One of the numbers sung by a diminutive, black-eyed teenager from the back streets of Badshahi Mosque, Lahore, falls as sweetly on the ear today as it did more than sixty years ago. The number was Panchi ja, peechay raha hai bachpan mera, ussko ja kai laa and it was sung by Surrayya. Naushad was born the same day that saw the arrival in this world of Jesus Christ and Muhammad Ali Jinnah – December 25. The year was 1919. He was only seventeen when he arrived in what then was – and perhaps still is – the city of dreams, Bombay. Four years later, he scored his first movie, Prem Nagar .

In 1944, a year before the Second War ended, the great music blockbuster Rattan was released. Its ten songs were hits across the length and breadth of undivided India. It was Naushad’s genius that he even made the flat-voiced, Gujranwala-born Kiran Diwan, the male lead in the movie against Swarn Lata, join the inimitable Zohra Bai Ambalaywali in one of best loved songs of all times: Sawan ke badlo . In Anmol Garhi , he teamed up the silver-voiced Nur Jehan with another flat-voiced leading man, Surendra, to score a song that was to become Madam Nur Jehan’s signature tune: Awaz dey kahan hai. The immortal K.L. Saigol sang his last great songs for Naushad’s Shahjehan . The list of Naushad’s hit movie scores has been equalled by no other music director. Just consider this formidable lineup: Dard , Andaz , Aan , Mela , Anokhi Ada , Dulari , Jadoo , Dillagi , Babul , Baiju Bawra , Deedar , Mother India , Mughal-e-Azam , Kho-i-Noor , Uran Khatola , Ganga Jamuna , Mere Mehboob , Leader , Shabab , Amar , Ram aur Shyam . It is just amazing.

And consider the actors, actresses, singers and lyricists who are associated with Naushad’s music, all legends in their own right. Among the actors one will always associate with Naushad are: Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Raj Kumar and Bharat Bhushan. And the women? Just think of them: Nargis, Meena Kumari, Nimmi and that tragic beauty Madhubala, not to mention the Bombshell of the South, Vijayantimala. And now the lyricists: D.N. Madhok, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakil Badayuni, Khumar Barabankvi, Tanvir Naqvi. The singers who sang for him included K.L. Saigol, Zohra Bai Ambalaywali, Amir Bai Kranatki, Shamshad Begum (his particular favourite), Lata Mangeshkar, Surrayya, Nur Jehan, Muhammad Rafi, Mukesh, Manna Dey – and among the younger set – Anuradha Podwal, Muhammad Aziz and Kumar Sanu.

Naushad’s great gift lay in his ability to adapt the haunting folk music of Eastern Uttar Pradesh to the sweetest classical music raagas . His most memorable compositions are a blend of the two. I remember the late Agha Mubarak Ali of Amelia Hotel, Sialkot, a great connoisseur of music, once telling me that the hits of Naushad’s next movie can be pre-heard in the interval pieces of music that subdivide the lyrics in his current movie hit. And, added Agha, when you hear the new music, it immediately lodges in your heart and memory because you have already heard the essential melody before, though without knowing it.

Syed Naushad Ali is dead. Long live Syed Naushad Ali.

The Heritage Foundation is the flagship of conservative think tanks in Washington. That it was chosen first by Foreign Minister KM “Blameworthy” and, more recently, by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz should perhaps not have surprised anyone since neither can be accused of revolutionary tendencies. God forbid.

Washington is a city full of lobbyists and think tanks. Tanks of course don’t think: they merely pulverise whatever stands in their way. Then there are tanks of the other kind, such as those in which you keeps fish. And if you are Dr No, you keep piranha, which you hope will one day dine on James Bond 007.

I go to Heritage Foundation whenever I want to know what the twice born are thinking about the rest of the world, especially the dangerous lunatic fringe on the Left and, currently, the “Islamists”, a word of recent coinage, for which we need to send a note of thanks to OB Laden, which is what he should be called because his full name is too long for a headline. Shafiq ur Rehman called Muhammad Shah Rangeela, MS Rangeela, so why not OB Laden?

I was at the Heritage Foundation this week to hear someone I had always associated with the Guardian because that was the paper she used to write for when I was living in London. Of course, I had not realised that she had left the Guardian years ago and fallen head over heels in love with everything right-wing. For the last five years she has written a column for the London tabloid Daily Mail, which is to the Guardian what Al Qaeda is to the FBI.

Melanie Phillips was here to launch her book Londonistan, which, according to her, is what England has become since those bad jihadi Muslims made it their home. And why did they make it their home? Because of a spineless, pusillanimous, appeasing British Labour government, which has turned its back on European civilisation and way of life.

She said she was not an expert either on Islam, or on terrorism or on Islamic groups, but she spoke on all three with an authority that only ignorance and prejudice can foster. What had happened, she said, was that British culture and values had come under threat because of the disastrous policy of multiculturalism and the refusal of the British judicial system to deal with terrorism as it should be dealt with.

She warned her American hosts that while Tony Blair was a staunch ally — some say poodle — of George Bush, there was no guarantee that his successor would be the same. She stopped short of suggesting that Bush should take steps to make Blair prime minister for life. She called Great Britain the “weakest link” in the war against Islamic terrorism. She said Britain had been enfeebled because of its continued adherence to the rule of law and human rights when it came to Islamist terrorists. She said there had been an erosion of British identity.

Ms Phillips lamented that after the 7/7 attacks, the explanations given by the British establishment and media were entirely wrong. It was said that the fault lay with “us” because we had failed to integrate Muslims in British society and we also suffered from Islamophobia. She said the real reason was that Britain had been too hospitable to those who poured into the country in the 1990s from the Middle East and North Africa after the end of the Afghan war.

Then there were the Pakistanis, whose country had been “colonised” by Saudi Wahabism. She said concepts like freedom of speech and human rights should not be applicable to such elements whose sole mission was the destruction of the Infidel West.

I asked her after she was done what she proposed should be done to deal with the situation. Should all British Muslims be thrown out and a ban placed on further immigration of Muslims to Britain? While there was little doubt that this is what she would wish, she said it should be made quite clear that minorities could not dictate to the majority. While everyone was free to practise his religion, including Islam, no one could be permitted to sabotage the essential Western values of British society.

She said Britain had lost self-confidence and come to believe in supranational ideas — such as the UN and the International Criminal Court — rather than in its nationalist ideology. Minorities were seen as victims. She said the younger generation of British Muslims was torn between the beliefs of their elders and what it saw as the depravity and temptations of the West. She added the standard disclaimer that it was not her intent to “demonise all Muslims” although at one point she suggested that there was something intrinsically the matter with Islam when it came to violence.

I have since found that among the admirers of Ms Phillips’ book are the likes of Islam-baiter Daniel Pipes, unabashed Zionist Natan Sharansky (whom President George Bush admires) and Iranian imperialist Amir Taheri. Wrote Sharansky, “This book is powerful and frightening, but also courageous. In dictatorships, you need courage to fight evil; in the free world, you need courage to see the evil.”

Pipes piped in with, “In contrast to the overwhelming majority of her British compatriots, who prefer to avert their eyes from the radical Islamic horror growing in their midst, Melanie Phillips has compiled a unique record that fearlessly, brilliantly and wittily exposes this problem.”

And according to Taheri, “Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of British self-confidence and national identity and its resulting paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. The result is an ugly climate in Britain of irrationality and defeatism, which now threatens to undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defence of the free world.”

All I would suggest is that the Orwell Prize for Journalism that Ms Phillips received in 1996, she should surrender because the association of her name with that of Orwell is an insult to that great man and his memory.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Some months ago, I wrote about Shakespeare and how so many expressions and phrases that are now part of the English language and that we use without thinking in everyday speech come from the master, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe Theatre, London. Reading Shakespeare is a moveable feast. The Bard never ceases to astonish and every time you go to him, he sends you back with something new that you had either not noticed before or had forgotten.

So much of what he wrote is now in the nature of household words, which phrase, I hasten to point out, comes from Henry the Fifth . Next time you give one of your friends ‘short shrift,’ you should remember that the phrase comes from another of the Bard’s history plays, Richard the Third . And next time you go to an opulent Pakistani wedding that you think is full of ‘pomp and circumstance,’ do not please forget to tip your hat to the master who coined the phrase for his great tragedy of love, credulousness and jealousy, Othello .

Talking of stock phrases that we throw into daily speech, please credit the following to the Bard, and although they had been in use earlier, had it not been for Shakespeare, they might well have been lost to us. Consider the amazing list: sound as a bell (Much Ado about Nothing), to knit one’s brow (Henry the Sixth, Part 2), cold comfort (The Taming of the Shrew), give the devil his due (Henry the Fourth, Part 1), the dog will have his day (Hamlet), elbow room (King John), to play fast and loose (Love’s Labour Lost), mine own flesh and blood (occurs in six different plays), laughing stock (The Merry Wives of Windsor), bell, book and candle (King John), fool’s paradise (Love’s Labour Lost), in a pickle (The Tempest), out of the question (Love’s Labour Lost) , the long and short of it (The Merry Wives of Windsor), thereby hangs a tale (The Taming of the Shrew), set your teeth on edge (Henry the Fourth, Part 1), it’s high time (The Comedy of Errors), tell the truth and shame the devil (The Merry Wives of Windsor), the naked truth (appears in three plays and a sonnet), the truth will come to light (The Merchant of Venice), make a virtue of necessity (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), something in the wind (The Comedy of Errors) and I have not slept one wink (Cymbeline). Let me also throw into this lot, wild goose chase, cruel to be kind, good riddance and it’s Greek to me.

‘All the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players,’ comes from that most delightful of comedies, As You Like It . How many times has it not been said, ‘I waited for it with bated breath.’ Well, bated breath is the maestro’s handiwork in The Merchant of Venice , Act 1, Scene 3 . Her beauty ‘beggars description,’ is said of women who may be beautiful or may appear so to the beholder (a known symptom of that common seasonal ailment called love). ‘Beggars description’ comes from the Bard and refers to that old Serpent of the Nile, Cleopatra (Anthony and Cleopatra). There she is, floating down the Nile in her perfumed barge, whose stern is made of beaten gold and whose sails are purple. And ‘as for her own person, it beggar’d all description’; she was a ‘fancy work of nature.’

Next time a friend tells you he has ‘seen better days,’ you should know that without perhaps knowing it, he is quoting Shakespeare from As You Like It (‘True is it that we have seen better days’). And ‘brave new world’ does not come from Aldous Huxley but the Bard. ‘O wonder/How many goodly creatures are there here/How beauteous mankind is/O brave new world/That has such people in’t.’ (Miranda in The Tempest). And where does the phrase ‘not budge an inch’ comes from? The Taming of the Shrew . Speaker? The clown named Sly. ‘Cakes and ale’ is out of Twelfth Night and ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream . ‘The crack of doom’ is from that chilling play about human ambition, Macbeth and ‘the dogs of war’ from Julius Caesar (‘Cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war’). Next time you exclaim over a meal that it is ‘a dish fit for the gods,’ remember that you owe it to Julius Caesar , though the context in which the phrase occurs in the play is far from culinary (Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully/Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods).

‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is Sonnet 129 (‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action. . .’). ‘Flaming youth’ is from Hamlet (To flaming youth let virtue be as wax/And melt in her own fire). The most cynical lines in all of literature ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods/They kill us for their sport,’ we owe to King Lear . At least once on any given day, one hears someone say that such and such is a ‘foregone conclusion.’ Author? Shakespeare; play, Othello . ‘Frailty, thy name is woman,’ comes from Hamlet’s lips as he speaks of his mother who is an accomplice in the death by poisoning of his father, only to incestuously marry his brother. When someone tells you that ‘the wheel is come full circle,’ make a slight bow to the Bard and to what many consider his greatest tragedy, King Lear .

‘Good riddance’ is from Troilus and Cressida and ‘in my heart of hearts’ is Hamlet , although in the original text it is not ‘heart of hearts’ but ‘heart of heart.’ But we are allowed to take minor liberties with the maestro. Had it not been for Othello , one would not have worn one’s heart on one’s sleeve. ‘Infinite variety’ is from Anthony and Cleopatra and is said of the great temptress, the Queen of the Egyptians, Cleopatra (‘Age cannot wither her, not custom stale/Her infinite variety. Other women cloy/The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies.’)

I hope my lawyer friends, including the evergreen Naeem Bokhari, will not take it amiss if I remind them that it was the Bard who suggested through one of his characters that all the lawyers should be killed. See Henry the Sixth, Part 2 (‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’).

And what better ending to a tribute to that great magician can there be than the celebrated lines from Romeo and Juliet . Here is Juliet, the loveliest and most lovelorn of Shakespeare’s heroines: ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?/Deny thy father and refuse they name/Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love/And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’

Shakespeare is king. And no doubt about it.

General Pervez Musharraf recently said that he has got teeth, yes sir, and that he can use them too, yes sir. I am, therefore, asking him to employ that God-given, dentist-defying implement — if the situation so demands — to block a settlement of the Kashmir issue. Not that any such bird can be scanned flying on the distant horizon, but given the shenanigans of Uncle Sammy and the piano-playing Warrior Princess, who knows! Stranger things have happened.

Enlightened moderation requires that Kashmir remain where it has remained, barring periodic ups and downs, including a few wars now and then. There hasn’t been much change there since the Brits left us in an even greater mess than they had found us in when they came to buy our spices and molasses in exchange for hunter’s beef and marmalade.

It is neither my intention to stand in the General’s way, nor mar the operating style of the best (over)dressed foreign minister in the whole wide world. I make this modest proposal for the sake of those who will be out of work if the Kashmir issue finds settlement.

My heart goes out to the leadership of Azad Kashmir, including the general who was parachuted from a zebra-striped helicopter one day over the city of Muzaffarabad and who declared immediately on landing: Hi folks, I am your new president! “Yes sir,” they all said, as they came to attention and saluted him. Since nobody in Muzaffarabad wants to be taken to Dalai Camp (despite its breathtaking view of the Jhelum river) for rest and recreation, nobody has been foolish enough to ask where the prez came from or why.

Now consider this scenario: the Kashmir problem is one day resolved. What happens to the man who parachuted from the unidentified chopper over Muzaffarabad? And what are we going to do with the corps of in and out of office politicians who have ruled Azad Kashmir from Kashmir House in Islamabad all these years? They are going to be out of work. Now who would want that!

The First Warrior has already laid down the gun, which was fired for the first and last time back in 1947. And what about the “Barrister” whose only brush with the law has been on the wrong side? Who would know what to do with him! Also not one Kashmiri leader on our side of the divide has seen Kashmir. A couple of them will have a hard time finding it on a map.

In the event of a settlement, what worries me most is the future of the K Wing of the Invisible Soldiers Inc, only visible to those with X-ray eyes. It should be added that but for the Boys, no phone would ever get bugged and no unmarked car would rush through red traffic lights like a bat out of hell. What is going to happen to them? One great mystery about the Boys of the K Wing is that all their chieftains are called Abdullah. So much for inventiveness and imagination.

The Boys have been running K for as long as anyone can remember, more intensely since the One with the Antimony Eyes came down from Rawalpindi as punishment for our sins, which must be limitless since such punishment is visited upon us every few years.

The Boys run Op K not only in the land where the Indus flows and where their four-wheel-drives roar down the roads, but also way beyond it, not only in Uncle’s country, but also that place up north where good Americans go fishing. And one must not forget Londonistan or even dear little Belgium. I shudder to think of the mouths that will go hungry were the Kashmir problem to become a thing of the past. Here are people with families, so how can they be thrown on the street?

And what is going to happen to the K conferences that the Boys organise in many exotic capitals out of love for the people of K? The roster of speakers is almost always the same and if you have attended one, you need not attend another, but you do. Not long ago a couple were held in London, one is held every year in this country and the other day there was one in Cambridge, courtesy the munificence of that independent think tank in Islamabad headed by our own Warrior Princess. The happy thing about these gatherings of friends and family is that after they are over, everybody can go home without the K boat having been rocked or anyone’s feathers having been ruffled.

Americans like to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The same goes for the K carnival. Let the fun and games go on. As for the Kashmiris, if they have put up with what they have put up with for the last 59 years, surely they can put up with it for the next 59 also. As for those who are wondering about Track II, they should know that the Big Jock who has been cantering on that course for the last five years has no intention of finishing the race.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Tarek Fatah, the bane of Canada’s large and on-the-march community of screaming clerics, which now includes the Dar-ul-Huda lady, Dr Farhat Hashmi, wants to know why Muslims in Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria and Egypt rioted, causing death and destruction to protest the Danish cartoons, have said not a word about the planned destruction of the home of the Holy Prophet (on whom be peace) by the Saudi government. This indeed is a puzzling question and no one has so far come up with an answer.

I thought the best person to ask this question was the one who had asked it first. A call to Tarek Fatah in Toronto, the city that Farhat Hashmi has chosen to sink her fangs into, had him saying that the Muslims of the world had suffered a collective loss of rational thinking. Since they have no faith in themselves or their future, they have sunk into their past, he said. “My feeling is that the Muslim leadership is almost universally bereft of any integrity or courage. Since the attack on the Prophet’s mother’s grave was carried out by the rich and powerful ruling house of Saud, no one will dare speak or protest. Had a Bangladeshi committed this act, the Mullahs would have been exhorting their congregations and madrassa pupils to take to the streets. But they dare not speak against those who butter their bread.” He argues, “It was easy going against the Danes and calling for a boycott of Lego and Danish cheese, but did anyone ask for a boycott of Microsoft, General Motors or other essential luxury American goods or services?”

KH Khurshid has recorded that the Quaid-i-Azam would get worked up when someone would talk about the glorious age of Islam. He would tell the person not to regale him with stories of Islam’s past glory. “What are you today?” he would ask. Today, the Muslim leadership, both clergy and politicians, is caught up in a medieval cobweb; the peasant in the village, the worker in the sweatshop, is a realist and his ideas are progressive. Recently, Fatah heard a Muslim leader in Toronto tell a gathering that the Muslims of India were in the sorry state they were in because of the Taj Mahal, which, he said, should be demolished since it was sinful to build such structures. God, he said, was punishing the Indian Muslims because they had allowed this wicked structure to stand on the soil of India for so long.

There is no dearth of Muslims in Pakistan, America and Canada who fervently believe that God punished us with the October 2005 earthquake because of our sins and for neglecting our religious duties. Had everyone prayed five times a day and had all the men let their beards grow and had all the women put on not the hijab but the niqab , divine punishment would not have been sent down. If you ask them what those thousands of flower-like children, who were buried alive in their schools, had done to earn divine wrath, you are told that the punishment was collective and some innocents also perished, but had their parents not been sinners, they would have been spared. What can you do with a mindset like that, except to hit your head into the first wall you come to?

But to return to the demolition of the grave of the Prophet’s mother, ironically it is the British newspaper, The Independent , and not one from a Muslim country, that has carried a report about this outrage. Daniel Howden’s story, published on 19 April, says that, “Previously unseen photographs reveal how religious zealots obsessed with idolatry have colluded with developers to destroy Islam’s diverse heritage.” He talks of a “growing shadow” being cast over Islam’s holiest site, as only a few metres from the walls of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, skyscrapers are reaching further into the sky, slowly blocking out the light. “These enormous and garish newcomers now dwarf the elegant black granite of the Kaaba. . . The tower blocks are the latest and largest evidence of the destruction of Islamic heritage that has wiped almost all of the historic city from the physical landscape. As revealed (in an earlier issue, the) historic cities of Mecca and Medina are under an unprecedented assault from religious zealots and their commercial backers.”

The correspondent writes that the Wahabis live in “fanatical fear that places of historical or religious interest could give rise to alternative forms of pilgrimage or worship. Their obsession with combating idolatry has seen them flatten all evidence of a past that does not agree with their interpretation of Islam.” Irfan Ahmed al-Alawi, the chairman of the Islamic Heritage Foundation, told the newspaper that the case of the grave of Amina bint Wahb, the mother of the Prophet (pbuh), found in 1998, is typical of what has happened. “It was bulldozed in Abwa and gasoline was poured on it.” Today there are fewer than 20 structures remaining in Mecca that date back to the time of the Prophet (pbuh). “The litany of this lost history includes the house of Khadijah, the wife of the Prophet (pbuh), demolished to make way for public lavatories; the house of Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s (pbuh) companion, now the site of the local Hilton hotel; the house of Ali-Oraid, the grandson of the Prophet (pbuh), and the Mosque of Abu-Qubais, now the location of the King’s palace in Mecca.

“Yet the same oil-rich dynasty that pumped money into the Taliban regime as they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan six years ago has so far avoided international criticism for similar acts of vandalism at home.”

Dr Mai Yamani, an author, says it is time for other Muslim governments to ignore the Sauds’ oil wealth and speak out. “What is alarming about this is that the world doesn’t question the al-Sauds’ custodianship of Islam’s two holy places. These are the sites that are of such importance to over one billion Muslims and yet their destruction is being ignored,” she has said, adding, “When the Prophet (pbuh) was insulted by Danish cartoonists, thousands of people went into the streets to protest. The sites related to the Prophet (pbuh) are part of their heritage and religion, but we see no concern from Muslims.”

Al-Nour may be the next to go. Home to the Hira’a cave, it was here that the Prophet (pbuh) received the first verses of the Quran. According to the British newspaper, hardline clerics want it destroyed to stop pilgrims visiting. At the foot of the hill, they have inscribed a fatwa that says, “The Prophet Mohamed (pbuh) did not permit us to climb on to this hill, to pray here, to touch stones, and tie knots on trees.”

Let Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who claims to be Islam’s great defender, stand up and speak!

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