The hypocrisy virus

Anees Jillani

How many umras have our rulers performed during the past 22 years? They appeared to get richer every year and perhaps needed repeated visits to Makkah to cleanse their sins. Can Allah forgive them and accept their umrahs after all the sins that they committed and particularly when all these visits were paid for by the hard-earned revenue collected by the CBR? No person on earth can really commit a sin and be corrupt if he or she really believes in God because the punishments for these offences are all described, explicitly and in no uncertain terms, in the holy books. Would you ever be late to office if you know that you would certainly be dismissed from service? How can you then be so corrupt and sinful when you know that the punishment for the offence is going straight to hell?

The fact is that what we have been witnessing in the Islamic republic of ours during the past 22 years is simply, as they say, dramabazee. General Ziaul Haq brought out the rabbit of religion from his hat in July 1977 and played around with it for eleven long years. It was hard after that to reverse the cycle. Benazir Bhutto, a former president of the Oxford Union who was brought out on the shoulders of her supporters after her victory at the university, became so defensive that she had to cover her head the moment she saw a camera. Privately, she is as westernized in her values as any other woman in London.

Nawaz Sharif is a creation of General Zia and entered politics as Punjab's finance minister in 1981. He is one of those fortunate sons of the soil who have been, more or less, in power since then. He comes from a different background than Benazir's. But personally he is as modern as any man on the streets of London. It is perhaps for this reason that he decided to buy flats in London and sent his sons for higher education in England and not in Saudi Arabia or Sudan where
the Shariah is fully enforced. However, Nawaz Sharif constantly played on two wickets: he spoke one language in the West and another one addressing the ulema gatherings.

Keeping the above 22-year-old background, the nation was stunned to see General Musharraf coming out of his house in front of cameras with his whole family, including of all the people, female members of the family. He committed a crime because the nation by this time is no longer accustomed to the ruling family females so boldly coming out. What a pity! While the world is moving forward and the West is contemplating establishing colonies on the moon in the next century, we have put our whole nation in the reverse gear and constantly munching retrogressive values. Look at the role of women in the Khilafat movement, in the independence struggle and even in the 1950s and the 60s in Pakistan and compare their status at that time with that of the present times. Instead of being emancipated, their stature has gone down.

General Ayub Khan's family, keeping aside the allegations of corruption indulged in by some, radiated liberal values. Some of the most liberal laws of Pakistan were introduced during those days, including the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance which the mullahs are hell bent to get declared as un-Islamic.

ZA Bhutto's family was no different but Bhutto started to become defensive during the PNA movement in the summer of 1977; Mrs Bhutto's picture of dancing with the US President Ford at the White House and photograph of Benazir swimming as a teenager were widely distributed by the opposition forces during the March 1977 election campaign. Pakistan has been going downhill since then.

Friday was a weekly holiday until March 1997; alcohol is prohibited; azans are regularly telecast on the television; interest is banned and we instead have 'profit' in banks; the Sunnis pay zakat; all our laws have been Islamised and we even have the Hudood Ordinances; Qur'aanic verses are displayed everywhere and the rulers are regularly shown performing umras.

The country nevertheless is simply not coming out of the crisis; its corruption rating is now one of the highest in the world and its economy is in shambles. Pakistanis all over the world are regarded suspiciously by the police as they are involved in all sorts of crimes. And to top it all, despite our having an Islamic system, the whole nation wants to leave the country and move to countries where there is no Shariah.

A girl in Islamabad recently cut both her wrists because she did not want to live in Pakistan and her parents wanted her to live here as she had become a teenager.

The problem is not with any religion: the problem is with us. A deadly virus of hypocrisy has permeated our whole society from top to bottom and it has paralysed the system. General Musharraf is bold enough to praise Kemal Ataturk and he should stick to it. General Musharraf should not go defensive if he loves dogs and got photographed with them. Getting photographed with dogs is not meant to send messages to the White House that you have a liberal general at the helm of affairs in Pakistan; there are other more sophisticated ways of conveying this message. This was probably already done.

One need not organise a ten-day symposium to discuss the causes of the present rotten system in Pakistan. It can be described in one word: hypocrisy. Sermonising Shariah publicly and playing harmonium privately with Malaika videos running in the background is what has brought about the downfall. Let the American embassy in Islamabad release the list of visa seekers and the Green Card holders and you would be astonished to find the number of so-called fundamentalist family members either already living in America or constantly seeking to go there.

We resent the attention given to Mahatma Gandhi all over the world; go to any book store in the remotest corner of the world and you would find hundreds of books about Gandhi, and his life. Gandhi covered himself with one piece of cloth that he himself had woven and he would go to meet the prime minister or the Queen of Great Britain, a colony where the sun never set, in the same attire; he was not switching dresses from capital to capital. He had no property, nothing of personal value and always travelled third class by train. He was not a hypocrite.

The government should not be intimidated by the reaction of a section of our political parties to his outlook. He should remain steadfast. Even if he cannot move forward, the least he can do is to hold to the present ground and slowly reverse some of the orthodox gestures that have been introduced in our polity during the past 22
years. It would be a pleasant change in our lives.