... From the Lahore Crucible ...

It’s my grandmother’s favorite proverb:

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“Saray sheher mai bhugdur muchi, burhia ko apnay nikkah ki puri”.

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I don’t mean to ridicule myself but you can’t deny the aptness of this proverb. It saddens me, both ways, when I see Lahore on fire and protestors laughing away and tearing down buildings and when I see the flip side of the picture, where I see some people around me saying, “What’s the big deal, it was just a cartoon and we’re on the roads! Why weren’t we on the roads after 9/11?”

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Who are these people, who don’t understand their own contradictions?

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I am a cynic, I know, but I am sad right now, so everything is permissible! There are people Bullay Shah addressed incessantly: those who will spend their lifetimes trying to figure out what the length of the beard should be, when to pick on your wife for her ‘version’ of the ‘Hijab’, grotesque details of life beneath the surface of this earth, where to keep the hand, the finger in prayer (who cares about the heart, anyway?). I don’t deny the relevance of these issues, but I unapologetically abhor emphasis on it.

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If there is chaos and fire a few kilometers from my office right now, with irrational people, who may never have missed a single Friday sermon in the past twenty years, it’s because the Friday sermons they listened to had nothing to do with what every Muslim has to know and understand today! We appoint a professional Qari Saab to teach our kids how to read the Arabic text of Quran, we forget to teach them that a Muslim is one from whose hand and tongue other Muslims are safe. We start checking girls with glares and threats when it’s time for them to start covering themselves up as if they should be ashamed of how God has created them, instead of telling them they are beautiful, they should respect what they are and they must protect that, themselves.

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Women share everything with men today: buses, schools, universities, restaurants, even small cubicle offices – but they can’t share a mosque with them, not even a segregated one? Only a handful of mosques in Lahore have space for women… what is the message I should be getting from that?

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What do you have to offer? A smart son? And do you have money? Great! Make him an engineer, a doctor, make sure he earns a lot of money. Alrighty, you’re doing good!

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And what have we got here? A pretty daughter? Umm… okay, make her literate, save money, marry her off… it’s all taken care of.

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What’s the issue now? Who’s going to talk about Islam in the modern context? Who has the time to intellectually and passionately study Islam and be a progressive think-tank from amongst the Muslims?

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Let me think… well, you see, it so happens that the only protectors of this religion on the forefront are these mullah-dudes or the guns-bearing bipolar freaks. I say we leave it to them… and when the West asks us about them, just say they are ‘extremists’, we are different from them, and save ourselves the trouble of explaining.

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That’s what we are doing!

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And from the looks of it, that’s what we’ll continue doing until …

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(Until I feel rational enough to think of practical solutions, soon, inshAllah)…