|
Dear Sohail Saheb
Thanks for your email. I have a great respect for you and your views
and I hope you will also respect my desire to end my participation on
FOTH website. In my following email to Mr. Javed I. Chaudry I
have explained the background. With my best wishes and regards.
Anis Zuberi
Chaudry Saheb
Thanks for your email. What one can say in a group
where there is a complete unanimity, except mun tura haji be’goyum ,
tu mara haji be’go. That is not
the reason that I am leaving FOTH website. There is a background to it and
that has nothing to do with the members. I respect them all and offer my
sincere apology if I have heart somebody’s feelings.
A few years ago, a read the biography of Sattar Edhi written by Temina Durrani and that had a
profound effect on my thinking. I thought that perhaps Edhi
is one of those about whom Iqbal had said meiN uska bunda banuN ga jisko khuda
ke bundu se piar hoga. Here is a man
who leaves his bride on the wedding night to spend next three days carrying
dead bodies for burial.
I have recently finished another book “Three Cups of
Tea” co-authored by Greg Mortenson. What Greg was
able to achieve has made me humble. Here is a mountaineer who lost his way
while coming down after a failed attempt to reach K2 and ended up in a village called Korphe
in Baltistan, eight hours Jeep drive from Skardu. He was sick and exhausted. The village chief
looked after him. There he found that the children assemble each morning on
a patch of open land called “school”. I quote from the book “---the
children sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication
tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks they’d brought for the
purpose. The more fortunate had slate board they wrote on”. As for teacher
he writes, “A teacher costs the equivalent of one dollar a day ------ which
was more than the villager could afford. So they shared a teacher the
neighboring village---------- three days a week. -----Villagers complain
about ------Pakistani government, which they consider foreign----. ---- most of the money that reached this altitude was
earmarked for the army, to finance its costly standoff with Indian forces
along the Siachen Glacier. But a dollar a day for
a teacher----.”
The year was 1993 and Greg, a male nurse of California with no savings left the village after making a
promise to set up a school. From there his journey started. Since then he
has returned to that area so many times that his face has become familiar
to the staff of Islamabad airport. He managed to remove all hurdles came in his
way and presently running Central Asia Institute that has 78 schools and
28,000 students, including a large number of girls, in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The amazing part of the story is that those illiterate
villagers climbed for miles on steep mountains with heavy load of building
material on their backs and participated in the construction of schools. We
are wrong to assume that those who born in poverty want to keep their
children ignorant or wish to educated them in madrassa
only.
“The
governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan are both failing their students on a massive scale.
The work Mortenson is doing, providing the
poorest students with a balanced education, is making them much more
difficult for the extremist madrassas to recruit."
(Ahmed Rashid, best-selling
author of Taliban: Militant Islam and Oil in Central
Asia and Descent into Chaos).
Please note the underline words, a reality many of us
writing on the website of the FOTH are not aware. I can forgive Peter for
his ignorance but not those Pakistanis who are expressing similar views.
Instead of cursing mullah, give the poor child an alternative and then see
the results.
Greg’s story made me question my own conduct. Who am I
to pass judgment on those poor villagers while I am sitting in the comfort
my house in Canada in front of a computer? Am I a special human being?
When all doors are closed, where those poor villagers could turn to for
justice, a corrupt police officer, a corrupt magistrate, a corrupt union
council member? May be those
demanding Sharia law are seeking justice as they
relate Sharia with fairness. Do I want to take
away the right of a human being to demand justice?
These questions compelled to see little value in these
futile debates and seminars on favorite topics such as religion vs.
secularism, modernity vs. conservatism, fundamentalism, women rights, hijab, niqab, madrasa, Sharia law ect.,
especially in the context of Pakistan where people are deprived of necessities. Am I not
involved in this academic discourse as a pastime? If I cannot do any thing
for people whom I left behind for greener pastures, then what right do I
have to sit here arrogantly and pass judgments on them?
I am sure that the members of the FOTH are well
meaning but I do not want to be part of it. My thanks and regard
Anis Zuberi
|