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Tarek Fatah, the enfant terrible of secular Islam and a permanent thorn in the side of the salafi establishment that is so firmly entrenched in the United States and Canada, has now put together in a book what he has been writing in newspapers, saying at public gatherings and declaiming in television and radio appearances - namely that Islam needs to be rescued from its self-proclaimed defenders and advocates who want to take the world’s billion plus Muslims back to a mythical past, instead of propelling them forward into the 21st century.

The book – Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic state – has been praised by reviewers, and castigated by those who see the author as one who should be placed at the business end of a canon and fired into the stratosphere. Tarek Fatah, a Marxist during his student days in Pakistan when he saw the inside of some of Pakistan’s least hospitable jails, has never lacked courage. Founder of the liberal and forward-looking Muslim Canadian Council of Toronto, he has never been afraid to take on the mullah establishment that controls the vast mosque and madrassa network that decades of Saudi munificence has fathered, not only in North America but almost everywhere else in the world. Those dragon’s teeth are now a rich and lethal harvest, poisoning the soil out of which they were made to grow, and infecting those who live on that soil and around it. The fight liberal Muslims are fighting today is an unequal fight, but it is fight for the soul of Islam. And it must be won.

Fatah writes, “My book is also aimed at the ordinary, well-meaning, yet naive non-Muslims of Europe and North America, who are bewildered as they face a community that seemingly refuses to integrate or assimilate as part of Western society, yet wishes to stay in their midst. Liberal and left-leaning Europeans and North Americans may be troubled with the in-your-face defiance of radical Islamist youth, but it seems they are infatuated by the apparently anti-establishment stance. This book may help these liberals understand that the anti-Americanism of the radical Islamists has little to do with anti-imperialism. In fact, the anti-Americanism of the Islamist is not about the United States, but reflects their contempt for the liberal social democratic society we have built and its emphasis on liberty and freedom of the individual itself.”

Fatah says he hopes to reach the neo-conservative proponents of the so-called war on terrorism and make them realise that their warmongering has been the best thing that has happened to the Islamist proponents of a worldwide jihad. “The invasion of Iraq was manna from heaven for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden could not have asked for anything more. I hope that the conservative Republicans in the United States and their neo-conservative allies in the West will realise that in the battle of ideas, dropping bombs helps the foe, not the friend.” He wants non-Muslims to understand that deep inside the soul of all Muslims lives a Rumi, an Averroes, and a Muhammad Ali. Equity and social justice run through every fibre and gene of the Muslim psyche. Poetry, song, and dance are as much a part of Muslim culture as piety, modesty and charity. Challenging authority has been part of the Muslim heritage.

Fatah does not mince his words. He wants Muslims to end the catastrophic lack of honesty that many of them have become accustomed to. He writes, “If all our theology is structured around the Sunni notion that one tribe and one race is superior to everyone else, and the Shia notion is that the family of the descendants of the Prophet (pbuh) have a divine right to be at the top, then our entire history is seen through this prism. And by choosing sides, they’re buying into the mythologies.” He finds the sermons of most mosques in the West to be politicised and concerned with only one agenda: that Western society is a satanic pagan one and that it is the obligation of every young Muslim to fight the pagan in jihad. “As for Muslims,” he told an interviewer, “we are being used as frontline troops by those who seek medievalism and are upset by any semblance of joy and modernity. We have to take sides. In the end, Muslims will be the losers if they don’t wake up.”

Fatah has also had the courage to question racism in the Arab world. He has lived in Saudi Arabia for 10 years and says he has witnessed Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims live like slaves in some Arab countries. Also, he is critical of the assumed superiority of the Quraysh Meccan Arabs over other Arabs, and that of Arab Muslims over Persian, Indian and African Muslims. It is no wonder, he writes, that Ibn Khaldun refers to Africans as “dumb animals.” Extremist clerics and their followers are chasing a mirage, he says. They are chasing the false dream of an Islamic state that was never contemplated in the Qur’an or by the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). True Muslims, he maintains, prefer to cultivate “a state of Islam.” They prefer to internalise Islamic spiritual values to help guide personal deeds and actions. For that, no special political state is needed. He points out that 95 per cent of Mecca’s heritage buildings have been destroyed in the last two decades, mostly to build lucrative high-rises overlooking the Ka’aba. Lost structures include the house of the Hazrat Khadijah, demolished to make way for public toilets; and the house of Hazrat Abu-Bakr, torn down for a Hilton Hotel. Even the old home of the Prophet (pbuh) is under threat from a project known as the Jabal Omar Scheme, which includes seven apartment towers and two 50-storey hotels. He finds it ironic that unlike the widespread protests at Danish caricatures, there has not been a whimper out of any Muslim at these sacrilegious acts.

Fatah’s message is best summed up in the following passage from his book: “My book is an appeal to those of my co-religionists who are chasing the mirage of an Islamic State. I hope they can reflect on the futility of their endeavour and instead focus on achieving the state of Islam. Islamists working for the establishment of an Islamic State are headed in the wrong direction. I hope to convince my fellow Muslims that clinging to mythologies of the past is the formula for a fiasco. I would hope they stand up to the merchants of segregation who have fed us with myths and got us addicted to a forced sense of victimhood. Conventional wisdom in the Muslim world dictates that to move forward, we need to link to our past. Fair enough, but in doing so, we have all but given up on the future, labelling modernity itself as the enemy.”Tarek Fatah’s is the voice Muslims need to hear, as opposed to the siren call of those who will only lead them to their destruction.

On behalf of all expatriate Pakistanis I express our appreciation to the anonymous gentleman (or could it be a lady seeking revenge!) for the recent entertainment provided to them on YouTube. God bless Madam Nur Jehan to whom the nation owes a collective apology because one of her best-loved numbers was subjected to some of the worst dancing ever recorded by a camera. She must have rolled her eyes as she sat by the banks of a flowing canal in heaven, cooling her feet in its waters, while on the giant plasma screen across from her flashed images of a tinny-voiced young woman in pink singing Madam’s memorable song about that girl on the bridge who has been stood up.

Madam was never without a sense of humour but she could not have been amused by this gentleman who is master of all our revenues as he danced out of step with the sure-footed beat of the song. Perhaps he should not be blamed at all. Nobody can be expected to keep his balance when he has fire water coursing through his veins.

Out here in America — and Europe for that matter — if a cop suspects that you have had a few while you are in the driving seat of a moving car (moving like a snake on the run from a stick-wielding schoolboy), he flashes his red and blue lights in your rear-view mirror (which means stop dead in your tracks), asks for your driving licence, checks it out (for unpaid parking tickets as well) and then asks you to step out and walk a few steps down a straight line. He may also ask you to touch the tip of your nose. Had our dancing chairman been subjected to these tests, it would have taken the cop in question two minutes to move him to the clinker and produce him before an unsmiling magistrate the next day.

Having had the privilege of knowing Madam the Great, I can assure those who have read so far that she would never have gone to the “nehar vala pul” to meet someone answering to the description of the chairman. Madam had taste and she was extremely snooty when it came to this particular department. The chairman would not have made the grade.

In fact had Madam been informed that he was hovering around that home of hers with the black steel gates in Liberty Market, she would have had German Alsatians set after him. A run down the Mall all the way to the old Gulberg market would have done wonders for the chairman’s waistline.

The day the video of the dancing chairman went up on YouTube, my phone would not stop ringing. It came to a point where I would pick it up and say, “Yes, thanks, chum, I’ve seen it.” There were 37 emails on my inbox on the first day, all giving me the link to what one Pakistani from New Jersey called “the mother of all videos”. On the second day, another email sent out to everybody I know advised, “Save the link or see it before it goes off the air because the Government of Pakistan has descended on YouTube like a ton of bricks, asking for the dancing chairman video to be taken down.”

While it is true that some links did not respond, with one saying that the video had been removed at the request of I-forget-who, the video (sorry chairman) is still there for anyone to watch. Try it, in case you missed it.

There are a number of things I don’t understand. If it was a private soiree, why was it being filmed? In fact, at one point, the singer suggested that the cameramen should stop filming. This most sensible bit of good counsel was disregarded because so high and happy the revellers were that such wise words could only have been ignored. The president was there as was Shortcut (who could not stop clapping) and other bigwigs whom I did not recognise, but obviously the pecking order being what it is in Pakistan, nobody lower than Grade 22 or its commercial or other equivalent slipped past security.

The chairman was dancing as if there were no tomorrow. God bless the people, the soil and the pristine water of Scotland for giving so much happiness to the world. On judgement day, all past, present and future inhabitants of that bonny land are going to be conferred with sainthood and transported to the Askari Villas of heaven for making so many of God’s creatures happy, though for a few hours at a time.

I don’t think the chairman’s talents can be allowed to be misapplied, indeed wasted, over such trivial pursuits as tax revenues to run the country. He should be made head choreographer of the PIA Arts Academy, which, having been abolished, should be re-established. Or he may be given Zia Mohyeddin’s job. After a performance like the one we have seen what better captain of the performing arts can we hope to get than him. As for Zia Mohyeddin, he should be required to read out prose and poetry every 31st day of every month that has thirty-one days.

There is just one regret I have. The video goes blank the moment the chairman pulls out a reluctant president to the floor — or what there is of it. But we can always let our imagination take up from there.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The first modern Urdu reportage, published in the 1950s, was Mahmood Hashmi’s Kashmir Udas Hai - as readable today as it was then. It remains a moving account of the upheaval that independence brought to the lives of millions on both sides of the arbitrarily drawn dividing line. Hashmi’s work is also the story of a great friendship between a Muslim - the author - and a Hindu, Apoorab Somnath. They taught at the same college and were as close as any two people can be. The maelstrom of 1947 forced one, Hashmi, to leave Kashmir carrying nothing with him but the memories that he recorded in what is an elegy for a world that had ceased to exist.

Hashmi moved to England and has lived there since. He remains one of the pioneers of Urdu journalism in Britain, having founded Britain’s first Urdu weekly, the Mashriq . Several years ago, he wrote an account of how that came to be, which was translated into English by eminent British Urdu scholar Prof Ralph Russell and published in an academic journal. Hashmi’s story and the story of Mashriq deserve to be told because few in Pakistan know anything about it. When Britain started to rebuild after the Second World War, what it lacked was manpower; thus it threw its doors open to immigration, bringing in thousands of young men from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir and several parts of Punjab.

When Hashmi arrived in England, he discovered that while the British were very happy to provide work to those who could not speak even a word of English, they felt ill-at-ease with educated people and found their English quaint, if not downright Victorian. The education these men had received from their English rulers failed in its first encounter with the language’s mother country. The immigrants were hardy people and they were determined to stay and do well. As time passed, they began to acquire confidence and grow roots in the alien soil that was now their home. A new Eastern enclave began to take form in Old Blighty and the first Urdu weekly was launched from the city of Birmingham in the Midlands by Mahmood Hashmi. His audience mostly consisted of those who could not read but would have the paper read to them by those who could. According to Hashmi, “When Mashriq appeared it was greeted eagerly, as though it too had come to them from their homeland, and it often happened that they would compare the paper with the letters which they received from home. This comparison was sometimes quite unfavourable. For example, if one of our readers had received a letter from home giving him news of the transfer of his local tehsildar or of the tour of some official, and this had not been mentioned in Mashriq , he would phone us up, rebuke us, and read us a lecture about how it was necessary for people who brought out newspapers to keep abreast of the news.”

Hashmi recalls that on one occasion he had asked a grocer to place an advertisement in Mashriq . He enthusiastically agreed, and when it was suggested to him that it would be a good idea if he repeated the advertisement every week, he happily agreed. But when after four or five issues, when he was asked to pay, he was both surprised and annoyed. He thought that newspapers existed to bring information to others, such as that relating to his grocery store. He just couldn’t understand where money had come into this arrangement. Another reader was so moved by a short story in the magazine that he sent Mashriq a self-addressed envelope, asking that it be sent to the story’s heroine Naseema as he wanted to meet her. Naseema of course was a fictional character. Then there were those who had only read the Quran in their village and who tried to read the paper on the basis of their ability to read the Quran - without of course understanding it. A good deal of the paper they could not quite manage to read.

At work in the factory, while their British mates were doing their football pools, these faithful readers could be found poring over Mashriq. As the paper grew in popularity, so did its coverage of the social and political life of the rapidly growing community, including protest marches - sometimes outside the Indian High Commission, at others its Pakistani counterpart. Mashriq also may have given birth to a lot of leaders keen to see their statements and pictures in the paper. Failure to oblige often led to an irate visit to the office and a confrontation with the editor. When the families of the immigrants began to join them from Mirpur and Pakistan, the paper had to add women’s and children’s pages. The immigrants moved up the ladder fast and it was not long before one of them was a justice of peace, and another was declared her school’s top student. Mashriq had the pictures of both on the cover.

Once a reader denounced Mashriq for printing a poem that described an English beauty as a houri . That, he protested, was blasphemous and un-Islamic.The poet replied that it was an Arab not an English houri , which made her perfectly Islamic. Hashmi writes, “I was with Mashriq for eleven years and four months. When I launched it, it was a challenge, probably much the same sort of challenge which the discoverers of new worlds experienced after crossing the oceans. Work on the paper was a sort of obsession. I felt as though I was waging a very great campaign. Along with a few friends I worked from seven in the morning until eleven or half past eleven at night and never took a break at the weekend; and yet I never felt tired. We were all very happy. Ahsan Malik did the calligraphy and also attended to the layout. Every now and then, he would make some addition to the headline that I had written. Khan Wali who came from Mora Kanyal, Mirpur, used to run the printing machines and until such time as we were able to afford a mailing machine he used to stick the stamps on the envelopes mailed to our annual subscribers. In addition to my work as editor, I had many other tasks to do. One of them was addressing the envelopes. Khan Wali was very particular that I shouldn’t make any mistakes in writing the addresses. For example, he would want to be quite sure that before the name of Choudhry Allah Ditta I had written ‘Qaid-e-Andhral.’ Adding the words ‘Qaid-e-Andhral’ made the address inordinately long, but he insisted that I write out the full name with the title.”

Mashriq is no longer published; or if there is a paper under that name it is not Mahmood Hashmi’s Mashriq . There are several Urdu dailies and many weeklies, but to Hashmi will always belong the credit of having been the first. As for Arab houris , they have many bearded claimants from among the faithful whose number in Britain, legal and illegal, has reached a figure that it is no longer possible to count.

Those like me who were hoping that Indiana and North Carolina will rid us of Bill and brood, will have to wait a few weeks longer. The lady whose funding has all but dried up since she began to look less and less likely to beat Obama to the nomination has started to reach into her own considerable fortune, all made after the couple left the White House. Bill makes $100,000 a speech and he is always to be found standing behind a lectern. Not bad for a guy who had huge unpaid legal bills when he left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This Democratic primary refuses to end. Hillary’s people say they are going to carry it right into the party convention in August. If that turns out to be true, a large number of boredom-induced nervous breakdowns are a certainty.

What is with these politicians anyway! They say one thing, and do another. They raise their right hand to strike an enemy, who being a politician himself knows that it is not the right hand that will strike him but the left, gets into the correct defensive position and before he knows it, he has been brought to the ground by the right hand that was not supposed to hit him.

The American poet Carl Sandburg really got it right when he said, “A politician should have three hats. One for throwing in the ring; one for talking through; and one for pulling rabbits out of, if elected.” As one visiting card begets another, in the same way, one quotation produces another, and then another.

May I, for example, suggest the following to the Army as its new recruiting slogan: “Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people — and kill them.” America is the land of the great one-liner and one of the past masters of this art was Groucho Marx, who said of television when it began to grow in popularity, “I find television very educating. Every time someone turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho was always brilliant and invariably funny. Once he said, “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” And on another occasion, “Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.” And then, “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”

It was Groucho who once sent this telegram to a club: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” The people of Kansas never forgave him after he said, “It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.” No great admirer of soldiery, he observed on one occasion, “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms”; and then again, “Military justice is to justice, what military music is to music.”

And on reading, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” And when someone mentioned to him a particularly striking woman, he said, “She got her looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon.” What he said about principles I recommend to all our political parties, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.”

However, when it comes to one-liners, the great Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn leaves all others sleeping at the post. Nobody has made the English language stand on its head like Goldwyn. Rejecting a movie deal offered to him, he said, “In two words im possible.” And on the eve of the release of one of his movies, he said, “I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman and child in America to see it.”

Another time he observed, “I am willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.” As an intimate love scene was about to be shot, Goldwyn told the director, “Tell them to stand closer apart.” Asked once by a journalist why he had gone into the business of making movies, he replied, “If I were in this business only for the business, I wouldn’t be in this business.”

In Lahore, a movie which is a flop is called “dabba”; in Hollywood, it is called a lemon or a turkey. Of one such movie, Goldwyn said, “Go see that turkey for yourself, and see for yourself why you shouldn’t see it.” When asked about a singer whom he was said to like, he said, “Can she sing! She is practically a Florence Nightingale.” Asked about a young woman trying to make it in the movies, Goldwyn bragged, “Give me a couple of years and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.”

When one of the people who worked with him urged him to make up his mind about a project under discussion, Goldwyn replied, “True, I’ve been a long time making up my mind, but now I am giving you a definite answer. I won’t say yes and I won’t say no, but I am giving you a definite maybe.”

Goldwyn once said, “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be one of the happiest man alive.” He did not like hospitals, about which he said, “A hospital is no place to be sick.” He is also credited with the classic direction, “Include me out” and on contracts, his wisdom has not been bettered. “An verbal contract,” he observed, “isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”

Goldwyn was also a master of the mixed metaphor. Consider, “That’s the trouble with directors. Always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.” And on another occasion, “You have got to take the bull by the teeth.” Once he said, “I don’t want yes men around me. I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.” Once while on a round of his studio, he stopped in front of a set and declared it be very dirty. When told that it was the set for a slum, Goldwyn shot back, “Well, this slum cost a lot of money. It should look better than an ordinary slum.”

When a friend told him that he had named his son after him, calling him Sam, Goldwyn replied, “Why did you do that? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Sam.” Once when he was given something to read and asked if he had read it, he came back with, “I read part of it all the way through.” When the big screen came to cinema houses, Goldwyn observed, “A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.” And of colour television, Goldwyn, who died in 1974, said, “Colour television! Bah, I won’t believe it until I see it in black and white.”

And he truly was one who could say, “God makes stars. I just produce them.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I once asked Abdulla Malik who the last Pakistani prime minister with a taste for poetry was. “You are making me go back, go way back,” he replied, then added ruefully, “nobody since Chaudhry Muhammad Ali.” Some months ago, Yousuf Raza Gilani was asked during an interview how he passed time in jail during the five years he was imprisoned. Gardening and poetry was his answer; Faiz Ahmed Faiz especially. Asked to recite his favourite Faiz verse, he obliged, but I could not fail to notice that what he had recited did not scan – or as we say in Urdu, “it was outside its weight,” or vazan se bahar . Dismissing the lapse as “one of those things,” I gave the man who was destined to become prime minister the benefit of the doubt, as umpires do with LBW appeals when they are not 100 per cent sure if the ball would have hit the stumps had it not been obstructed by the batsman’s pad or body.

I am not so sure now, certainly not since I finished reading Gilani’s autobiography Chah-e-Yusus se Sadda that a friend lent me on a visit to Vienna, of all places. Much of what he quotes by way of poetry does not scan. But then, what are a few dropped or misplaced words between friends – although I must confess I have never met him? His uncle, Hamid Raza Gilani, however, was a friend of mine, to which let me add a footnote. I once asked Madam Nur Jehan to name the man she found most attractive. Hamid Raza Gilani was the one she named from among the locals, and Charlton Heston from among those living beyond the seas. Since all three are now cavorting in heaven, Madam can finally make up her mind.

But let me return to Gilani’s book. First the title, which is derived from a verse by Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali. The prophet Yusuf, the most handsome of men, was thrown into a well by his brothers because they were jealous of him. Yousuf Raza Gilani’s five-year confinement came at the hands of a gentleman with whom, he has recently said, he has no difficulty working. I do not think the prophet Yusuf ever spoke to his treacherous brothers again. However, since Yousuf Raza Gilani is going to remain prime minister for the next five years, as Asif Zardari has assured us, it would be instructive for people to read his book. He wrote it while in custody when he had little hope of getting out, much less of becoming prime minister. Indeed God is great. He confers favours on those who least expect them.

The autobiography tells the reader a good deal about the author. First, it shows him as an adept infighter when it comes to local politics. He comes from Multan, which is known for its men of God and its wily politicians. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said to Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, “Sadiq, don’t play your Multani politics with me.” Bhutto should have known: he had dealt with all brands of politics and politicians. He was particularly wary of Shikarpuri politics from his own land of Sindh; but that should be left for another occasion. Gilani, whose family has been in politics for three generations, is immersed in this most fascinating of all games and professions. Dog may not eat dog, but politicians love to feast on fellow politicians. It has been said, “Do not hit a man when he is down.” No politician who plans to go places will miss the opportunity to hit an opponent when he is down as there can be no better occasion for getting even and settling scores, both real and imagined. All politicians have long memories, not necessarily for good turns done to them but for injuries, even slights, suffered.

Gilani’s book tells us first that the prime minister is not a pushover. In the event that, for some reason, or on account of changes in circumstances that we cannot foresee today, he is asked to move over and make way for he whose name encompasses the entire English alphabet, he will remain tethered to his place, which he no doubt believes is his because of a long political career crowned by five years in jail. Gilani was innocent of the ridiculous and frivolous charges brought against him; and yet during his time in prison he sought neither concessions nor special treatment, nor did he go down on his knees to his persecutors. He was in prison at the death of his mother, then his older sister, to both of whom he was deeply attached. He includes in his book a very moving note scribbled by his sister Nighat to him a day before she died. It says (and I translate): Lovelier than the moon/saint of saints/Yousuf Gilani/my father’s memento/Far am I from you/Prevented from meeting you/Tired am I of begging/Enough of this life I’ve had.

In politics there are always surprises. One surprise came the other day when Gilani said that it was the Pakistan Army’s duty to defend the physical and ideological frontiers of Pakistan. Every time I hear the words “ideological frontiers,” I want to reach for my gun (that I have never had). Asghar Khan was the first man to use this phrase in 1968, and ever since then it has been flung at us, mostly by those who have failed to defend either frontier. I was surprised that Gilani should employ these hackneyed words. This is out of character if his book is any guide to the sort of man he is. As Speaker of the House, he defied Benazir Bhutto more than once when he summoned jailed MNAs of the opposition under his powers as Speaker to attend a crucial session. He writes that the day he was elected Speaker, Benazir asked him to come for a party meeting in the evening. He declined, saying he was now the Speaker and no longer a party man. He did not go to the meeting, only joining his former colleagues at dinner later. The prime minister was not amused. But in the process, I am sure, she came to respect him more.

Gilani concludes his book by observing that the great tragedy of Pakistan is that despite the wishes of the founder of the nation, democracy has not been allowed to flourish. Dissent, he writes, is the life-blood of democracy and if you strangle that you bring about democracy’s death.

There are many, in Pakistan and abroad, who are hoping that he will remember those words.

Izzat Majeed, Lahore’s London-based millionaire, philanthropist and patron of the arts, was in Washington last week. He was invited to speak at the much respected Middle East Institute and I made it a point to be there, braving a steady drizzle, having left my umbrella on the Metro, as the underground is called here. If I were to add up the value of all the umbrellas I have forgotten on underground trains in London and Washington, I would be a rich man, though admittedly not as rich as Izzat Majeed, who owns a few banks and finances those who prospect for oil and such things.

One thing I will say about Izzat Majeed: He has never been afraid to cross swords with anyone. In the late 1970s, in an article in Mazhar Ali Khan’s Viewpoint, Lahore, he accused Faiz Ahmed Faiz of all people of “cultural terrorism” and of downgrading Punjabi.

Faiz, who never reacted to criticism, reacted this time. In a rejoinder, he wrote that some enthusiasts of Punjabi had come to believe that to prove your love for Punjabi, you must first detest Urdu as the handmaiden of decadent courts. Then there are those who in order to show their love for Urdu, despise Punjabi as the “gobbledegook of illiterate yokels”. This is nothing more than “petit-bourgeois linguistic jingoism”, frequently “veneered with progressive terminology,” Faiz added.

But back to 2008 and Washington. The Middle East Institute noted that Izzat Majeed had managed to put Islamic extremism in a wider historic context and several of his articles had intellectually confronted extremism that turns to violence. One of his pieces, ‘Open letter to Osama Bin Laden’, written in December 2001, became a subject of discussion in the New York Times.

Let me just quote the opening of that famous letter: “Look at what you have done, Osama bin Laden. The carnage in New York, in the full glory of a sunny day and the glare of ever-hungry television, has unleashed forces that are as ambivalent and as conspiratorial as any sea change in the river of history. Ambivalent because, like you, all that these forces of imperial power understand is that clear and present danger, however concocted, can only be met with the exercise of naked military might. But at the same time, sheer force needs to be tempered with political accommodation on a varied and shifting political and ethnic battlefield.”

Izzat Majeed is always provocative and he did not disappoint at the Middle East Institute either. He said the Sharia is a compendium of man-made laws, so no divinity attaches to it, as is mistakenly believed. That being so, Sharia must be brought in line with contemporary requirements. The scholars who codified these laws were obliged to acquiesce to the reigning Khalifa who considered himself God’s deputy on earth. Those who failed to do so, paid dearly for their failing.

He said there was not a single Muslim era of democracy. “And we have seen today what petrodollar Islam has done to us,” he added. He conceded that any move to challenge man-made Sharia is not likely to be tolerated by the “ritual and rote-based practitioners of Islam”. He also rejected the view that there is such a thing as the Muslim Ummah, arguing that the Ummah concept died with the birth of the nation-state. Asked about the infamous Huntington theory of clash of civilisations, he replied, “There is no clash because there is no common Muslim civilisation.”

Answering questions, Izzat Majeed called Pakistan an “essentially military state” that has always protected the Mullah. “There is a symbiosis between the Mullah and the Army,” he pointed out, adding that Islamic Sharia is “obsolete and needs to be reinterpreted”. He said the Pakistani Mullah is used to terrorising all others.

Pakistan seemed to be a lost case, one felt after listening to Izzat Majeed, who drones on in a deadpan voice. He said there are no bookshops in Lahore (next time, I suggest the Editor has him visit Vanguard, right on the Mall). He also declared that there is no civil society in Pakistan. The Mullah, he explained, has terrorised society. He castigated Pakistani textbooks prescribed for students from Class I to Class X, pointing out that they contain no reference to the Andalusian period. He should have added, but did not, that these textbooks date back to the Zia-ul Haq era and that several, if not all, of them have since been revised and much of hate material and obfuscation of history removed from them. He said petrodollars have taken over the madrassa system in Pakistan and promoted religious bigotry. He pointed out that “sabre-rattling” in the West strengthens the hands of extremists and radicals.

When reminded that the recent lawyers’ movement had shown that there was indeed a civil society in Pakistan, which was active and vibrant, he replied that there is no civil society in Pakistan in “generic terms”. What he meant by that, he did not make clear. Although he had insisted earlier that Pakistan is Mullah-infested and the people live under Army-supported clerical terror, he called the results of the February elections in the Frontier province “amazing”. The jihadi elements had been “rejected comprehensively” and the “anger and resentment of the people had manifested themselves,” he added.

He also said that there is no Sharia law in Pakistan as only lip service is paid to it. What Pakistan has is common law. Izzat Majeed regretted that Gen. Musharraf, who had a carte blanche from the United States, failed to bring in reform. Asked about FATA, he described the movement there as “anarchist” that could be fought off with the force of politics. When told that the media were free in Pakistan today, he replied that there are 65 TV channels, out of which 30 are religious outlets that “spew forth utter nonsense all day”. In the end, he called on the United States to interact with Pakistan’s civil society.

I left the Middle East Institute happy because between the time that Izzat Majeed had begun to speak and the time he had ended, I had seen, bingo, Pakistan’s civil society take birth.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s diaries, written between 1966 and 1972, cover 600 pages. On the face of it, they appear to have been competently edited by former US diplomat Craig Baxter. I say “appear to have been” because unless one has viewed the original manuscript, one cannot know what has been edited out or excised. A Pakistani editor – they do exist, let me assure Capt Gauhar Ayub Khan – would have been preferable because he would have had a more informed perspective on what is described. The Field Marshal had bequeathed all his papers to Altaf Gauhar; but for reasons that need not be gone into here, his wish that his highly trusted aide deal with them as he thought best could not be honoured. I do not find fault with Baxter’s effort; on the other hand, we should be grateful for the publication of the diaries because they do lift the curtain on several things, although they leave it dangling over many others. But that is the way it always is, be it with daily journals or autobiographies.

There are two questions whose answers one would hope to find in these diaries but one does not. The first is, why was the 1965 war fought and why was Operation Gibraltar launched? Ayub offers no explanation. In fact, in more than one place, he holds India responsible for the conflict. However, the fact is that, had the ill-fated and poorly planned and executed Operation Gibraltar not been launched, there would have been no war a month later. While it is true that the Pakistani soldiers fought with great gallantry and the officers brought honour to their calling, there were no winners. The second question that Ayub does not answer is why he violated his own 1962 constitution by handing over the reins of the state to Gen Yahya Khan, his commander-in-chief. Or maybe the ending was logical. Ayub had come to power through unconstitutional means and he exited power by the same route.

Ayub Khan comes across as a thinking man who tried to do his best for Pakistan. He worked hard and his outlook was progressive and enlightened. He had the ability to go further than he did, but what distance he did cover will always do him credit. In his dealings with kings, presidents and prime ministers, you can see the man holding his own and dealing with them as equals. It was not possible to pull rank on him. He was a confident leader who did much good for Pakistan – despite his shortcomings, which every strong ruler (even one most benevolent, which he was) bears. He was not a democrat, but he was a man of reason and he was tolerant. Unlike most military rulers, he was not cruel. While it is true that he let his firstborn go into business, Ayub was honest. All that he left behind was his retirement home in Islamabad – regrettably sold for profit by his sons to the Great Hotelier – and his farm and orchards in his beloved Hazara. Compared to what even the lowliest of the low have done since with public money and state lands, Ayub Khan’s conduct in power remains angelic.

Ayub did not like Bhutto, who is dealt with in the bitterest of tones throughout; and he did not like communists, with whom he felt certain quarters were infested, such as the Progressive Papers Ltd. He writes that he took over the PPL because he wanted to purge the communists working there. Ayub’s observations on men and matters are often a delight to read. Of Ghaffar Khan he says, “He is trying to persuade the Afghans to allow him to set up a provisional government of Pakhtoonistan. He is supposed to have told a friend, ‘The King of Afghanistan calls me uncle and so does the President of Pakistan, but the trouble is that my nephews don’t listen to me.’ Who can listen to such a man!” In 1966, Charles de Gaulle asked Ayub if India would not disintegrate were Kashmir to be settled. Ayub replied, “If India was so fragile, then what is the good of attempting to hold it together?” Ayub told his finance minister N. M. Uqaili in 1967 that there were three jobs he would never like to have. To be a bearer, a cook or a finance minister, because whatever you do, you can never please your master. Our present rulers may perhaps like to follow Ayub’s example when he handed over a Trident aircraft bought for his use to the PIA, saying, “It would have hurt me to see this expensive aircraft just tied up for my sake.”

It was Dr Abdus Salam who advised Ayub to develop the nuclear option. An entry recorded in August 1967 reads, “Dr Salam, my scientific adviser, came to see me. He pleaded that now we are setting up a nuclear power plant, we must invest in a plutonium separation plant. It will help us to produce our own nuclear fuel and also give us a nuclear option.” Ayub was an enlightened man. The following entry sums up his understanding of Islam. “It is necessary to educate our young people in the ideology of Islam, similarly, it is necessary to acquaint them with Islamic history and Islamic traditions. At high levels of education there should be adequate opportunities for students to specialise in theology. However, all this has to be done in the context of present-day realities and contemporary requirements. The object should be to enable the people to imbibe the spirit of Islam and to move with the times in the full consciousness of Islamic values.” An entry in 1968, when Dr Fazlur Rehman had to resign because all the mullahdom of Pakistan had risen against him, reads, “It is quite clear that any form of research on Islam which inevitably leads to new interpretations has no chance of acceptance in this priest-ridden and ignorant society. These people will not allow Islam to become a vehicle of progress. What will be the future of such an Islam in the age of reason and science is not difficult to predict.”

Of Altaf Hussain, editor of Dawn , who had joined his cabinet, Ayub writes, “As the editor of Dawn, he used to criticise and admonish the whole world, but since he has become the minister, he has turned into a dead mouse. He just does not open his mouth in public.” The Queen of England told Ayub when Tito’s name came up, “For a brigand, he has done remarkably well.” There is a priceless 1967entry on Sharifuddin Prizada, “I am getting concerned about Mr Pirzada, our foreign minister. He has not proved much of a success. He is on the run in foreign countries most of the time and often purposelessly. Very suspicious by nature. Has hardly any communication with the staff. Chases small things most of the time and is frightened of taking a definite stand on any issue. There is also some suspicion that he is not above telling a lie. So I am in a fix as to what to do with him.” For the next 40 years, Pirzada did quite well, something Ayub would have found inexplicable

And of the Pir of Dewal Sharif, who in those days was said to be “Ayub’s pir,” the Field Marshal writes, “After usual pleasantries, which is the normal technique of softening a person, he made several requests. Some mullahs operating against his leadership should be dealt with. I should provide the money for an institute that he wants to run and that I should build a mosque in his village. The Auqaf Department of West Pakistan, Mr Masood (Khaddarposh) should be removed from his job, and he is not helping his party people. There is no dearth of my ‘well wishers.’ The only trouble is that they happen to be very expensive.”

With that, I award game, set and match to the Field Marshal, Teri yaad aayee teray janay ke baad.

Iqbal will have been dead exactly 70 years this year, but one tends to think of him in terms of the immediate rather than the distant, and he continues to be remembered with affection, but affection tinged with a sense of awe because of the tremendous power and sweep of his genius.

Faiz called him the “sweet-voiced wanderer who transformed wildernesses into living cities and abandoned taverns into halls of good cheer”, whose “song lives, like a lamp that the blowing wind cannot put out, like a candle that lives on beyond the morning.”

It was here in Washington the other day that Iqbal’s memory was invoked at a small gathering, curtsey Abul Hasan Naghmi, Radio Pakistan Lahore’s once famous Bhai Jan. He had taken advantage of the presence in town of Syed Taqi Abidi, an Indian-Canadian physician, who has written a book on Iqbal’s ailments based on his research, the poet’s letters being the primary source.

Iqbal was not a well man, especially in his last years. Over the course of his life he suffered from one thing or another. Ironically, his genes were good though because there was longevity in his family. According to Dr Abidi, Iqbal should have lived at least for another 20 years. And had Iqbal been born in the latter part of the last century than in the latter part of the one before, modern medicine would not have let him die seven months short of his 61st birthday.

One thing is clear. Iqbal did not like doctors and, as he writes in one of his letters, he is like a child who hates to drink the bitter medicines that are given to him. He had little faith in allopathic medicine and much preferred the herbal and traditional kind. He was a great believer in the efficacy of what the famous Hakim Nabeena of Delhi, under whose treatment he remained for many years, prescribed. He also had himself seen by the celebrated Hakim Ajmal Khan.

But Iqbal’s various ailments were beyond the ken of traditional healers and, as Dr Abidi shows, for over 30 years, those who attended on him included Dr Mathura Das of Lahore, Dr Abdul Basit of Bhopal, Dr Muhammad Yusuf, Dr Abdul Qayyum, Dr Jamiat Singh and Lahore’s famous German physician Dr Seltzer.

Dr Abidi has gone through 1,450 of Iqbal’s letters and found 251 of them descriptive of the various diseases and ailments that assailed him for a good part of his life, especially the final pain-filled years. Iqbal was a great believer in the development of traditional Islamic medicine and hoped that it would undergo some revolutionary change.

Dr Abidi, who has practised medicine for 30 years, is wonderstruck at the calm and confident way in which Iqbal received news of the presence of a tumour in his chest after an X-ray examination performed by one Dr Dick, a Lahore radiologist. A few hours after he was told, he wrote to Syed Nazir Niazi asking him to have a word with Hakim Nabeena. Two hours before his death, he refused to take an opium-based painkiller saying he did not wish to die in a half-conscious or unconscious state. Only a few hours before the end, Iqbal spent time discussing with the woman principal of an Islamic school in Lahore the best way to bring the message of the Quran to her students.

A list of Iqbal’s ailments worked out by Dr Abidi makes chilling reading. A lesser man would have given up and succumbed to them much earlier. He had heart and renal disease, gout, immature cataract, liver congestion, bronchial asthma, shortness of breath, laryngitis and oral problems that dogged him all his life. In the last two years, his voice kept getting progressively hoarse. And yet this titan packed more into his 60 years than it would take others centuries to even comprehend, much less express in undying verse and prose.

Dr Abidi is indeed a remarkable man. Married to an Iranian, who does not speak a word of Urdu, as don’t their children, he converses with them in Farsi, while he writes his books, of which there are many, in Urdu. Before Dr Abidi spoke about Iqbal, the host Naghmi recalled that 35 years ago when he came to Washington, there weren’t many in this town who were interested in Urdu. But an entire generation of Pakistanis had grown up here since, which was divided into two groups: one understood a bit of Urdu, while the other could speak Urdu but was unable to read it. They wrote Urdu in Roman letters.

If the practice grew, as it is likely to, we would be like Turkey where thousands of books written in the Arabic script lie in libraries with no readers. To that I can add that some of the more with-it of our Pakistani youth not only cannot read Urdu but are quite proud of it. I cannot help quoting Faiz, who once said that if you do not know your own language, you will remain ignorant of other languages too.

Dr Abidi said Urdu is becoming an “aural language” whereas it should be a language of the eyes. There are 600 million people in the world who understand Urdu but the Urdu script is slowly dying. In India, for instance, I can narrate from my own experience, that in the entire city of Lucknow, I could find only one sign in Urdu — and that too was a crumbling one which said that the place where it hung used to be the site of the famous Maktaba Nawal Kishore. I looked for a bookshop that would sell Urdu books but all I found was a small place with a couple of hundred used books that were coming apart.

Dr Abidi, to whom I return, described himself as “a physician by profession and a patient of the Urdu language by choice”. He said on no other poet had more books been written than on Iqbal. He listed the number at 4,500, compared with Ghalib (1,600), Mir (350) and Anis (225). He also said that the largest number of commentaries on the Quran were to be found in Urdu.

Dr Abidi said Iqbal smoked a huqqa for 35 years at least and in Europe he must have smoked cigarettes. He wasn’t much for exercise and preferred to recline on a bed to read and converse. He was simple in his eating habits and would take whatever was brought to him. Once, the story goes, someone said to him, “Dr sahib, whenever I’ve had the pleasure of breaking bread with you, it is always cauliflower and meat. That must be your favourite dish.” “Not really,” Iqbal replied, “but that is all Ali Bux knows how to cook.”

What a man!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Given the recent rise in the number of ambassadors-at-large and ambassadors not-at- large, it occurred to me to check out if that consummate American diplomat, Chas Freeman – now retired and running the only fair-minded think tank on the Middle East in this last resting place of all think tanks called Washington – had anything to say on the subject. I was not disappointed. Not long ago Freeman spoke to a group on diplomacy as an element of statecraft, given the fact that by now most Americans recognise that they are in a bit of trouble both at home and abroad. They have also begun to wonder if diplomacy is a better answer than the use of force, he noted.

Arthur Goldberg, a judge and diplomat, said that “diplomats approach every issue with an open… mouth.” An American diplomat who had served as ambassador to China once said, “a diplomat is someone who thinks twice – before saying nothing.” Freeman has worked out that the US is now spending about 28 per cent more on the military each year than it did during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and over one-third more than at the height of the Reagan defence build-up against the Soviet Union. Some other statistics: the US is spending considerably more on military power than the rest of the world put together – three and a half times as much as the highest estimate for China, Russia, Cuba, Iran and North Korea combined; and at least 12,000 times as much as al Qaeda and all other terrorist groups with global reach. “It is not clear what enemies justify all this money,” Freeman observed.

Unlike other nations’ armed forces, he said, those of the United States are not geared for defence against foreign invasion or attacks on the homeland, but are configured for offensive deployment in support of foreign policy. They engage in deterrence, punishment and conquest of real and potential foreign enemies. That is why American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Bosnia and dozens of other places around the world that have neither the intent nor the capability to attack the United States. Freeman said that the wisdom in Washington has always been that if something is not working, you throw more money into it. Hence more and more is going into defence spending. The intellectual energy that such massive spending generates has revolutionised the American approach to foreign policy. Freeman recalled that it used to be thought that the purpose of war is to secure a more perfect peace. That has changed. The Americans, for example, are in Iraq to end the fighting and then to hang around until the Iraqis decide to make peace with each other. That might take a while, he added sardonically.

Such thinking, Freeman argued, has squeezed out serious consideration of diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force. He maintained, “Diplomacy is more than saying ‘nice doggie,’ till you can find a rock. Weapons are tools to change men’s minds but they are far from the only means of doing so. The weapons of diplomats are words and their power is their persuasiveness. Talk is cheaper than firepower and does less collateral damage, so it makes sense to try it before blazing away at the adversary. There is another reason to regard force as a last resort. It creates ruins that cannot easily be rebuilt and resentments that cannot easily be overcome. War is a form of demolition; its results are messy and its effects on those it touches are uncertain. In the age of globalisation, moreover, military invasion is as likely to incubate terrorists with global reach as it is to overthrow governments and seize terrain. It makes sense to exhaust diplomatic remedies first, not to follow a script of ‘Ready! Fire! Diplomacy!’ ”

Diplomacy is the art of pursuing the internationally possible. Its main drawback is that it involves the unpleasant task of interacting persuasively with usually disagreeable adversaries and sometimes tedious friends. Freeman quoted Al Capone, who once observed sagely that “you will get farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” Diplomacy is largely about adding the strength of others to one’s own, but its greater mission is to take the political offensive, identifying or creating opportunities and seizing them to advantage, which is what Truman did with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO, as Freeman pointed out. It is what Nixon did with his opening to China, he added.

May one suggest that the ambassador-manufacturing facility in Islamabad might perhaps like to remember Abba Eban’s words, “The bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through empirical evidence. But it has not been discarded.” Freeman lamented that the US now staffs its foreign policy apparatus almost entirely with people with no diplomatic experience. He recalled a story he heard from Mac Toon, a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union. Toon once found himself aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. The admiral commanding the battle group said to him, “What’s it like being an ambassador? I’ve always thought that after I retire I might want to try it.” Toon, a crusty gentleman, shot back, “That’s funny. I’ve always thought that, when I retire, I might try my hand at running a carrier battle group.” The admiral said, “That’s ridiculous. A naval command requires years of training and experience.” What the admiral did not seem to realise was that so does the management of foreign policy and diplomacy, “if the ship of state is not to be sailed onto the rocks or beached in the desert.”

Pakistan has had more than its share of cowboy ambassadors, some of whom have been sent out for no other reason than that they were once in the same uniform as the reigning Rawalpindi-risen “Commander of the Faithful” of the time, a “ paiti bhra ” as the delicious Punjabi phrase has it, a “brother of the belt.” One such, serving in a major capital many years ago, had a file on everything in the chancery and his residence. Each bush, each tree, each crumbling piece of furniture in the consular section had a folder entirely devoted to itself. Regular reports were to be submitted by the head of chancery as to the current state of their health and well-being. More than one of those serving under him were later found to be in need of serious psychiatric attention. His Excellency fared well and retired after several years of service. What was more, he was even re-employed. What happened to those scores of files, no one knows. I suspect the day the ambassador left the station, a bonfire was seen burning merrily in front of his former chancery.

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