Ibn Taymiyyah Abrahamic prayer & Friday Focus | Iqbal...
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08 Greater Kashmir SRINAGAR | December 16, 2016, Friday Abrahamic prayer & advent of Prophet (pbuh) A dvent of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) on 12 th Rabbi-ul-Awal in the year 570 A.D had been prayed for by Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) and his son Syedena Ismail (A.S) after they founded Biet’u’llah: Kabbah, praying to Allah (SwT) to accept their services and make them and their progenies Muslims: ‘And remember Abraham and Isma’il raised foundations of the House (with this prayer): ‘’Our Lord: accept (this service) from us: for Thou art All-Hearing, the All-Knowing’’ (Al Baqarah: 127) The prayer to make them and their progenies submit to the Will of Allah (SwT) in other words make them Muslims followed: ‘Our Lord! Make of us Muslims bowing to Thy (Will) and our progeny a people Muslim, bowing to They (Will) and show us our places for the celebration of (due) rites; and then turn unto us (in Mercy): for Thou art Oft-Relenting, Most-Merciful’ (Al Baqarah: 128) And finally the prayers for the advent of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) followed the prayer to accept their services and make them and their progenies submit to the Will of Allah (SwT): ‘’Our Lord! Send among them a Messenger of their own, who shall rehearse Thy Signs to them and instruct them in Scriptures and Wisdom, and purify them: for Thou art the Exalted in Might, the Wise’’ (Al Baqarah: 129) With Prophetic foresight, Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) could foresee that Kabbah would descend into a time phase, where the practice of prayer would not follow the precedent, he and his son—Syedena Ismail (A.S) had set, which in essence meant the worship of one and only Allah (SwT) hence not only did the patriarch of prophets—Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) and his son Syedena Ismail (A.S) pray for making them and making their progenies Muslims, but also prayed for the advent of Messen- ger—Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to purify their progenies of corrupt practices and instruct them in Scriptures. Allah (SwT) answered their prayers with advent of Prophet Muham- mad (pbuh) to renew the pledge of Abrahamic practices. THOUGHT OF THE DAY — The disease that knowledge brings is arrogance, and the disease that worship brings is showing off | ― ― Ibn Taymiyyah # Sugar coated politics | L oss of power has always caused constipation in New Delhi patron- ized and groomed pro-accession political camp, of whatever political and ideological persuasion they are. But the pangs of isolation make the NC, in par- ticular its Nawabs, jittery. To break it loose they clone themselves into a spe- cies strikingly different from the monster of heydays in power. A ‘generous’ spe- cies-- distinguished from the prowling predator--that now crawls to the homes of persecuted for seeking forgiveness of the betrayals and insults heaped on them. And inversely, for redeeming the pledge of being truthful to ‘tehreek’ and their habitat. And vowing not to fall to the lowest of low—decoys—to sell them to Tsars in democratic robes. But, alas, these ‘loyalty’ resolutions coughed out from the avatars in days of Opposition, as track record of their falsification show, reflect more the wilful mind than an innocuous desire of promise execution. And with this foxing of the pious sentiments, the naïve people are caught in the cross hairs of most deceptive, cunning and shameless predatory lot. Blackmailing credulous people to the butcher’s cleaver Abdullah family has none to outsmart. They have mastered the sophistry to its perfection--- Mufti family—in green-- is a minnow to such perfidy. Two-pronged approach the father- son duo meticulously followed. One, to tread on the track of appeasement to win favor from Delhi, second to trigger goose bumps in the corridors of power by putting on Hurriyat attire. Omar Abdul- lah’s October 22, 2016 New York speech was directed to impress and ensure his masters of their family’s bonded labor allegiance. In replicating his grand- father, Omar stunned even Modi and entire diplomatic procession from India. What they would have restrained from saying—fearing too much culling of his- torical facts regarding Kashmir might boomerang and deride them to the level of a clown—Omar etched his and his ‘grand’ party’s loyalty to the Indian tri- color and Indian soldiery. He reminded Indians that in him run the genes of his grand father who, to please Indians, rebuked Pakistan claim on the floor of UN assembly. So, from his every hair follicle he pleads beseechingly that he be recognized more Indian than Indians. And thus a ‘better’ alternative to Meh- booba Mufti. Omar, feeling jubilant after his New York tirade on Pakistan, on 8 November, accused Mehbooba Mufti for ‘ceding all powers to Geelani’( for the protest calen- dar state government failed to break the cycle of). His father Farooq Abdullah on the same day accused Mehbooba of ‘fail- ing to control the situation and (demand- ed) it is better she steps down’. Wearing all this kind of Indianess on their sleeves, the duo tried to convey Delhi that they need not to worry for in NC they have a more reliable choice than Mehbboba-led dispensation. But Mehbooba’s proclivity to bow (where only a bend would have sufficed) to both Delhi has dried this option. Mehbooba was in chair, but real power belonged to BJP. With a pliant chief minister unmoved and callously insensitive to the brutalities inflicted on her people who voted her to power in the past five months Abdullahs have had to switch to the ‘ enemy’s enemy’. And now listen from the horse’s mouth. ‘ We won’t remain part of Hindu India’, growled Farooq as RSS chief removed the façade of ‘ secular India’ in his plain-speaking. While the Gen-3 rd hereditary Sultan did not utter a single word on muzzling of dissent, gross human rights violations, killing, maiming and pellet-blinding and mass detention in the US, he hit hard on India in his speeches that followed. ‘ ….dis- sent and discontent cannot be silenced by cannons on the border and by pellet guns in Kashmir.. There is an ocean of mistrust and anger in the valley that keeps snowballing into such agitations and mass unrest.’ He called for lasting and permanent solution of JK dispute ‘ as per satisfaction and sentiments of the people’. Sifting through the tangle of lies and distortion of facts about Kashmir in his US speech, this is a complete U-turn, relying, of course, on our forgetfulness. And then came the ‘ bomb-shell’. On Sheikh Abdullah’s 111 th birth anniversa- ry, Farooq accompanied by his son, told his party workers at his father’s mau- soleum to ‘ support Hurriyat’. Asking Hurriyat ‘not to get divided’, he said the unbelievable , ‘ We stand with you (Hurriyat) and not against you. ..Take this (freedom) movement forward. We are with you.’ Exhorting on the unified stand, Farooq Abdullah sounded as the leader Delhi has used time and again as kingpin in the conspiracy of ‘divide and rule’ and now remorseful is throb- bing for Nation Kashmir unity: ‘If we are divided we will be at loss..We will never be free if we don’t get united.’ Accord- ing legitimacy to the 5 month long mass uprising against India’s forcible rule, FA warned India that, ‘ it cannot suppress’ Kashmiris. He also said that NC ‘ is not against plebiscite’. Can we infer from these outpourings that Abdullahs have appreciated the seismic shift that occurred behind the surface in the recent Intifada? Have they reconciled to the stark reality that Kashmiris want and struggle for ‘plebi- scite’ and that Hurriyat alone represent the basic sentiment? And have Abdul- lahs came to conclusion that autonomy have no buyers in Kashmir? Can we hope this new-found Azadi romance of the duo is not polluted at its spring- head, it is not masked in intent. And the couple is now unburdened of play- ing the role of the flunkies and clean of their smudged past? That should make us welcome the new political dynamics that has appar- ently set in. But , alas, the follow-up to support the “ landmark shift” from Indian narrative (they helped to strengthen) to dominantly prevailing Kashmir mainstream narrative( Azadi) is missing. They are still actively con- solidating the status quo and the politi- cal and military system they now are targeting. The touch stone to judge their sincerity to peoples’ ‘aspirations’ is they should join hands with Huryat and resign from the assemblies. They are not going to do that. For the revolt of their genes. Like a snake can cast its slough but not poison, Abdullahs can cast themselves in any mould. But there is betrayal in their blood. Friday Focus | Dr. Javid Iqbal | [email protected] COMMENT HASSAN ZAINAGIRI [email protected] Inside out BY: SUHAIL NAQSHBANDI I t was one of the darkest hours of the human history. It was the hour which broke our hearts, which made the entire world aghast. It was the hour of disgrace which gave a chill to the nerves of humanity. It was the winter of bloodbath. And it all began that morning – morning of that December, the winter of which was less harsh than what it was going to witness; when the kids left their homes for school and never returned. It was the day when children went to acquire the light of knowledge and faded into the eternity of grim dark- ness; when teachers were giving les- sons and received bullets in wage. It all began the morning when a bunch of terrorists, laden with lethal arms, misled by their distorted religious ideologies, committed the terror that claimed lives of the buds which were yet to bloom. Around 10:30 in the morning, on the 16 th of December, seven heavily armed men in the guise of Pakistani Paramilitary Forces entered the premises of Army Public School in Peshawar. With the aim of inflicting maximum casualties, they opened fire on the innocent children and their teachers in the school audito- rium. The incessant firing left over 150 dead among which 132 were stu- dents and remaining were the staff members. The spectacle aftermath was heart-rending – the bodies of innocent children lying dead and cold, their notebooks besmeared with innocent blood, the air smell- ing injustice and echoing the shud- dering shrills of bewildered children who were injured. Gunmen were killed and some children managed to get evacuated in the joint operation conducted by Pakistani Army and Police. While everybody was mourning over the massacre, TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) claimed the responsibil- ity and termed it as the revenge against the Pakistan Army. Giving a thought to it, the sound conclusion is inevitable – if Pakistani Army launches an operation against the terrorism in order to make peace and security prevail in the state, in order to make churches safe for Christians and Mosques safe for Shia Muslims, in order to make mar- kets safe for public and on and on. The question is why would TTP kill innocent children and justify their vindictive ingression into a school by calling it a righteous vengeance? Had those school children to do any- thing with this? No. This is not Jihad, and certainly not what Islam teaches. This is not what Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) taught. This is outright brutality and the perpetrators of such brutal and outré ferocities are not human beings at all. The children, who had left their homes to learn, left this world by inscribing in our hearts the saddest of memories. The Peshawar School Massacre was the massacre of future, hope, knowledge and truth. It was the massacre of spring. It was the massacre of humanity. Coffins of the children were resting on the peo- ple’s shoulders – the children upon whose shoulders their nation was hoping to stand. It was the funeral of despair and those were the smallest of coffins, and someone has rightly said: “Smallest coffins are the Heavi- est” May their souls rest in Heavens and may Almighty bestow their Par- ents an everlasting strength. Ameen Commemorating Peshawar tragedy That was when innocent children fell to bullets and humanity felt ashamed BLOODBATH PEERZADA MUZAMIL [email protected] Kashmir is different | D uring the past few months several Indian civil society delega- tions visited Kashmir. They condemned the government of India, the state government and the armed forces for `let- ting loose a reign of terror’ in Kashmir. I also interacted with the members of a couple of delega- tions. They talked about juvenile justice system of the state and suggested a comparative study of the Juvenile system in rest of India and the state of Jammu Kashmir. One of the members told about a case wherein the magis- trate had resisted pressure from various quarters and destroyed the records of a juvenile. Accord- ing to the delegation, the law required that all records pertain- ing to the juvenile be destroyed so that he leads a normal life and carries no stigma. The delega- tion, however, was told that the police in this neglected land pre- serve the records for intimidat- ing the juvenile in future. The delegation members were shocked to know that minors were lodged with crimi- nals charged under section 377 of the Ranbir Penal Code [RPC] in Jammu Central Jail, Kote Balwal. The delegation was further told that minors were stripped immediately after entering the jail and kept in solitary confine- ment for a couple of days. The delegation members were shocked to hear this. `Why’, they asked. They were told that Kashmir was different and the authorities ensure that it stays different. The delegation also talked about setting the system right in this state. The talked about proper functioning of the criminal justice system and supremacy of judiciary in Jammu Kashmir. They said the courts should have the final say in the release of prisoners. They admitted that the armed forces had different yardsticks for the people of Kashmir and rest of India. I could gather that they wanted Jammu Kashmir to look like any other Indian state. I got a feeling that the delega- tions visit Kashmir to integrate it with the Indian union. Of course the delegation members more often than not happen to be persons of integrity but barring few honourable exceptions, the Indians, by and large do not take a position on Kashmir. For most of them India [Bharat Mata] is a deity and its armed forces are gods and gods do not falter. Kashmir is unique for other reasons as well. Kalhana has been proven wrong. He had said that Kashmiris cannot be cowed down by the sword. According to him, Kashmiri can be won over by love. But his- tory is witness to the fact that the poor Kashmiri has always been brutally crushed. The Mughals, the Pathans, Sikhs and the Dogras strangled dis- sent. Our own leader whom we loved was no different. In 1947 he formed the infamous Peace Brigade to teach his opponents a lesson. They abducted women, resorted to extortion, humiliated people and this is what gave the former governor, Grish Chander Saxena the idea of making the Ikhwaan in mid 90s. The so-called Peace Brigade was used to silence all those who had the guts to oppose accession. They were either arrested or exiled- the only place in the sub- continent where people were exiled in `democratic’ rule. After crushing dissent, the next institution that came under attack was the judiciary. Jammu Kashmir has the dis- tinction of being the only state where judiciary flourished during autocracy and lost its sheen during democratic and popular rule. In 1944, Maharani Tara Devi was out in her chauffer driven car. The driver was booked for a minor traffic offence and accord- ingly put on trial. The Maharani wrote a note to the presiding offi- cer of the court requesting him to take a lenient view in the case. The magistrate informed Maha- raja Hari Singh who tendered an unconditional and written apology to the magistrate and thus upheld the supremacy of the judiciary. A few years later, the state came under `democratic rule’. A Halqa president of the ruling National Conference wrote a letter to a high court judge urging him not to hear a second appeal in a land dispute case from Budgam district. The learned judge raised the issue with Sheikh Muhammad Abdul- lah who wrote, “We are passing through an emergency. You do what my worker has told you or vacate.” The learned judge being a man of integrity submitted his resignation which was accepted. The rulers never allowed judiciary to flourish. According to former Bar Secretary, GN Shaheen. “Kashmir happens to be the only place on earth where the executive issued a written order directing the jail superintendents not to honour court orders seeking release of political prisoners. The order was issued in July 2000 and with- drawn after fifteen days when the bar association registered protest. This is the reality of Kash- mir and this makes it different. A tehsildar [executive magis- trate] goes out of way to remand a person to police custody. When asked reasons, he brazenly says, `I received a call from New Delhi.’ Similarly New Delhi `directs’ a police officer to arrest a par- ticular person. Yet another trait that makes Kashmir different- Jammu Kashmir police get orders directly from New Delhi! CONCEPT SHEIKH FAYAZ AHMAD “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” - Bertrand Russell D issent is a part of democracy. It forms the backbone of any sub- stantive and a flourishing com- munity. It’s in the healthy diversity of thought that the new ideas flourish and the ‘truth’ emerges. The lack of dissent or the muzzling of it leads to a situation where the ‘dominant ideas’ held by one section of population matter and it is they who monopolise the structures of power to be handed down to their suc- ceeding generations. The question of the importance of ‘dissent’, ‘criticism’, or ‘questioning’ (in the academic circles) has been dis- cussed since Socratic times or even ear- lier. Socrates, we know through Plato, refused to be bogged down by the ‘domi- nant ideas’ of the time and chose to die for his opinions. The tradition was kept alive by Plato as he arrived at some ‘truth’ only after rigorous disputations and dialectics with his colleagues. Aris- totle in the same vein in his Nichoma- chean Ethics also argues for subjecting endoxa (reputable opinions) to rigorous examination lest they be simply passed off as truth. The question of dissent has got healthy attention by the scholars who have positively treated it as a good sign for not only arriving at any genuine idea but also to make the idea more polished. We write this article not only as a response to a write-up ‘Breaking the Silence’ by Atherul Islam (GK: Novem- ber 18, 2016) and similar writings but more importantly to highlight the value of disputations and disagreements in a democratic liberation struggle. We argue that the substance of the aforementioned article sets the dangerous trend that may nullify the ideals that are basic to the movement itself. The author comes up with his arguments against Professor Abdul Gani who had in recent past criti- cised the joint leadership of Hurriyat and the ways they have adopted in leading the movement for self determination. The author in a fashion that can be anal- ogised with the Orwellian Animal Farm maxims chalks down certain points that define who is following a ‘right path’ and who a ‘wrong’ one. The author implicitly argues that all those ‘raising questions on leadership’ are riding a ‘wrong horse’, and puts the onus on them to prove why they are not! While avoiding the ad hominem refer- ence points, we propose to deconstruct the substance of the article. To begin with, the argument that to question the leaders necessarily leads one in the camp of the oppressor is in contradiction with the lexicon of resistance that not only allows critiquing the oppressor narra- tives but also leaves enough room for questioning the multiple narratives of the oppressed. This is true of the indi- viduals also who assume importance due to the resistance and owe their very existence to it. The importance of critiqu- ing the ways and means the individuals actively associated with the resistance employ is redoubled for the necessity and urgency of keeping the movement from turning into moribund flow. It’s like pumping pints of fresh blood in the stream of resistance. The oppression and liberation are dif- ferent just because of their very nature – one subjugates, is suffocating, and scuttles any possibility of meaningful opposition, while the other aims at eman- cipation, not only of the exploited but of the exploiter itself. Paulo Freire terms a liberation struggle as ‘the restorer of the humanity of both.’ What Freire means is that if there is no space left for disagree- ments in a liberation struggle by the oppressed themselves then the struggle itself becomes tyrannizing. And that individuals in the liberation struggles in initial stages may tend to emulate the ways of oppressors and become them- selves the ‘sub-oppressors’, but in the mature struggles the people tend to wage a double front struggle – to confront the oppressor and its narratives as well as to be cautious of not turning oppressors themselves. In Kashmir, we are surrounded by a diversity of thought and opinion which is really a compliment for us. This fact is more appreciative than worrisome in that we are trying to be as open as possible to novel ideas and have not closed ourselves down in the outmoded processes of thought. But in order to pre- vent any cataclysmic fall that may leave us in the Freire’s category of a ‘youthful liberation struggle’, we should under- stand and articulate among the genera- tions that our survival is conditional upon how tolerant we are and should be in confronting an opinion. This does not mean that we should do nothing to prevent any thoughtless scrap of ideas but that we should try to engage with it rather than to dismiss it as ‘mindless’ or to brand the opinion holder as a ‘col- laborator’. This in a sense is a message that is reminiscent of the ideas of Fou- cault who in a 1978 essay ‘Qu’est-ce-que la critique’ argues that criticism is ‘to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Prac- tising criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.’ That’s exactly what we do when we are questioning somebody or some argument – we make facile gestures difficult. Emerson says, ‘Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.’ Our strength comes not from outright condemnation of ideas but with every contradiction that we face and with every error that we remove. Why Questions Scare us? | Health of a society lies in the way we disagree with each other SPECTRUM ZAHIR-UD-DIN [email protected] That is what they have been doing all along There is something that happens here only Printed and Published by: Rashid Makhdoomi on behalf of GK Communications Pvt. Ltd. | Editor: Fayaz Ahmad Kaloo | Legal Advisors: Bashir Ahmad Bashir (Sr. Advocate) Muhammad Altaf Haqani (Advocate) | Jammu Bureau: 3/A, Auqaf Complex, Auqaf Market, Gandhi Nagar, Ph: 0191-2430732 Published from: 6 - Pratap Park, Residency Road, Srinagar - 190001 | P. Box No: 558 (GPO) | R.N.I. No: 48956/88 | Regd. No: JKNP-5/SKGPO-2015-2017 | Phones & Email: Editorial: 2455435 Fax: 0194-2477782 [email protected], [email protected] Advertising: 2474339, [email protected] | Circulation: 2474755, [email protected] | Printed at: E-Tech Printers, Industrial Estate Rangreth EDIT twitter.com/GreaterKashmir_ facebook.com/DailyGreaterKashmir epaper.GreaterKashmir.com CMYK
Transcript of Ibn Taymiyyah Abrahamic prayer & Friday Focus | Iqbal...
08 Greater KashmirSrinagar | December 16, 2016, Friday
Abrahamic prayer & advent of Prophet (pbuh)
Advent of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) on 12th Rabbi-ul-Awal in the year 570 A.D had been prayed for by Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) and his son Syedena Ismail (A.S) after they founded Biet’u’llah:
Kabbah, praying to Allah (SwT) to accept their services and make them and their progenies Muslims:
‘And remember Abraham and Isma’il raised foundations of the House (with this prayer): ‘’Our Lord: accept (this service) from us: for Thou art All-Hearing, the All-Knowing’’ (Al Baqarah: 127)
The prayer to make them and their progenies submit to the Will of Allah (SwT) in other words make them Muslims followed:
‘Our Lord! Make of us Muslims bowing to Thy (Will) and our progeny a people Muslim, bowing to They (Will) and show us our places for the celebration of (due) rites; and then turn unto us (in Mercy): for Thou art Oft-Relenting, Most-Merciful’ (Al Baqarah: 128)
And finally the prayers for the advent of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) followed the prayer to accept their services and make them and their progenies submit to the Will of Allah (SwT):
‘’Our Lord! Send among them a Messenger of their own, who shall rehearse Thy Signs to them and instruct them in Scriptures and Wisdom, and purify them: for Thou art the Exalted in Might, the Wise’’ (Al Baqarah: 129)
With Prophetic foresight, Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) could foresee that Kabbah would descend into a time phase, where the practice of prayer would not follow the precedent, he and his son—Syedena Ismail (A.S) had set, which in essence meant the worship of one and only Allah (SwT) hence not only did the patriarch of prophets—Syedena Ibrahim (A.S) and his son Syedena Ismail (A.S) pray for making them and making their progenies Muslims, but also prayed for the advent of Messen-ger—Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to purify their progenies of corrupt practices and instruct them in Scriptures.
Allah (SwT) answered their prayers with advent of Prophet Muham-mad (pbuh) to renew the pledge of Abrahamic practices.
thought of the day — The disease that knowledge brings is arrogance, and the disease that worship brings is showing off | ― ― Ibn Taymiyyah#
Sugar coated politics |
Loss of power has always caused constipation in New Delhi patron-ized and groomed pro-accession
political camp, of whatever political and ideological persuasion they are. But the pangs of isolation make the NC, in par-ticular its Nawabs, jittery. To break it loose they clone themselves into a spe-cies strikingly different from the monster of heydays in power. A ‘generous’ spe-cies-- distinguished from the prowling predator--that now crawls to the homes of persecuted for seeking forgiveness of the betrayals and insults heaped on them. And inversely, for redeeming the pledge of being truthful to ‘tehreek’ and their habitat. And vowing not to fall to the lowest of low—decoys—to sell them to Tsars in democratic robes.
But, alas, these ‘loyalty’ resolutions coughed out from the avatars in days of Opposition, as track record of their falsification show, reflect more the wilful mind than an innocuous desire of promise execution. And with this foxing of the pious sentiments, the naïve people are caught in the cross hairs of most deceptive, cunning and shameless predatory lot. Blackmailing credulous people to the butcher’s cleaver Abdullah family has none to outsmart. They have mastered the sophistry to its perfection---
Mufti family—in green-- is a minnow to such perfidy.
Two-pronged approach the father-son duo meticulously followed. One, to tread on the track of appeasement to win favor from Delhi, second to trigger goose bumps in the corridors of power by putting on Hurriyat attire. Omar Abdul-lah’s October 22, 2016 New York speech was directed to impress and ensure his masters of their family’s bonded labor allegiance. In replicating his grand-father, Omar stunned even Modi and entire diplomatic procession from India. What they would have restrained from saying—fearing too much culling of his-torical facts regarding Kashmir might boomerang and deride them to the level of a clown—Omar etched his and his ‘grand’ party’s loyalty to the Indian tri-color and Indian soldiery. He reminded Indians that in him run the genes of his grand father who, to please Indians, rebuked Pakistan claim on the floor of UN assembly. So, from his every hair follicle he pleads beseechingly that he be recognized more Indian than Indians. And thus a ‘better’ alternative to Meh-booba Mufti.
Omar, feeling jubilant after his New York tirade on Pakistan, on 8 November, accused Mehbooba Mufti for ‘ceding all powers to Geelani’( for the protest calen-dar state government failed to break the cycle of). His father Farooq Abdullah on the same day accused Mehbooba of ‘fail-ing to control the situation and (demand-ed) it is better she steps down’. Wearing all this kind of Indianess on their sleeves, the duo tried to convey Delhi that they need not to worry for in NC they have a more reliable choice than Mehbboba-led dispensation. But Mehbooba’s proclivity to bow (where only a bend would have
sufficed) to both Delhi has dried this option. Mehbooba was in chair, but real power belonged to BJP. With a pliant chief minister unmoved and callously insensitive to the brutalities inflicted on her people who voted her to power in the past five months Abdullahs have had to switch to the ‘ enemy’s enemy’.
And now listen from the horse’s mouth. ‘ We won’t remain part of Hindu India’, growled Farooq as RSS chief removed the façade of ‘ secular India’ in his plain-speaking. While the Gen-3rd hereditary Sultan did not utter a single word on muzzling of dissent, gross human rights violations, killing, maiming and pellet-blinding and mass detention in the US, he hit hard on India in his speeches that followed. ‘ ….dis-sent and discontent cannot be silenced by cannons on the border and by pellet guns in Kashmir.. There is an ocean of mistrust and anger in the valley that keeps snowballing into such agitations and mass unrest.’ He called for lasting and permanent solution of JK dispute ‘ as per satisfaction and sentiments of the people’. Sifting through the tangle of lies and distortion of facts about Kashmir in his US speech, this is a complete U-turn, relying, of course, on our forgetfulness. And then came the ‘ bomb-shell’. On Sheikh Abdullah’s 111th birth anniversa-ry, Farooq accompanied by his son, told his party workers at his father’s mau-soleum to ‘ support Hurriyat’. Asking Hurriyat ‘not to get divided’, he said the unbelievable , ‘ We stand with you (Hurriyat) and not against you. ..Take this (freedom) movement forward. We are with you.’ Exhorting on the unified stand, Farooq Abdullah sounded as the leader Delhi has used time and again as kingpin in the conspiracy of ‘divide
and rule’ and now remorseful is throb-bing for Nation Kashmir unity: ‘If we are divided we will be at loss..We will never be free if we don’t get united.’ Accord-ing legitimacy to the 5 month long mass uprising against India’s forcible rule, FA warned India that, ‘ it cannot suppress’ Kashmiris. He also said that NC ‘ is not against plebiscite’.
Can we infer from these outpourings that Abdullahs have appreciated the seismic shift that occurred behind the surface in the recent Intifada? Have they reconciled to the stark reality that Kashmiris want and struggle for ‘plebi-scite’ and that Hurriyat alone represent the basic sentiment? And have Abdul-lahs came to conclusion that autonomy have no buyers in Kashmir? Can we hope this new-found Azadi romance of the duo is not polluted at its spring-head, it is not masked in intent. And the couple is now unburdened of play-ing the role of the flunkies and clean of their smudged past?
That should make us welcome the new political dynamics that has appar-ently set in. But , alas, the follow-up to support the “ landmark shift” from Indian narrative (they helped to strengthen) to dominantly prevailing Kashmir mainstream narrative( Azadi) is missing. They are still actively con-solidating the status quo and the politi-cal and military system they now are targeting. The touch stone to judge their sincerity to peoples’ ‘aspirations’ is they should join hands with Huryat and resign from the assemblies. They are not going to do that. For the revolt of their genes. Like a snake can cast its slough but not poison, Abdullahs can cast themselves in any mould. But there is betrayal in their blood.
Friday Focus | Dr. Javid Iqbal | [email protected]
CoMMeNt Hassan Zainagiri
Inside out by: suhail naqshbandi
It was one of the darkest hours of the human history. It was the hour which broke our hearts,
which made the entire world aghast. It was the hour of disgrace which gave a chill to the nerves of humanity. It was the winter of bloodbath. And it all began that morning – morning of that December, the winter of which was less harsh than what it was going to witness; when the kids left their homes for school and never returned. It was the day when children went to acquire the light of knowledge and faded into the eternity of grim dark-ness; when teachers were giving les-sons and received bullets in wage. It all began the morning when a bunch of terrorists, laden with lethal arms, misled by their distorted religious ideologies, committed the terror that claimed lives of the buds which were yet to bloom.
Around 10:30 in the morning, on the 16th of December, seven heavily armed men in the guise of Pakistani Paramilitary Forces entered the premises of Army Public School in Peshawar. With the aim of inflicting maximum casualties, they opened fire on the innocent children and their teachers in the school audito-rium. The incessant firing left over 150 dead among which 132 were stu-dents and remaining were the staff members. The spectacle aftermath was heart-rending – the bodies of innocent children lying dead and cold, their notebooks besmeared with innocent blood, the air smell-ing injustice and echoing the shud-dering shrills of bewildered children who were injured.
Gunmen were killed and some children managed to get evacuated in the joint operation conducted by Pakistani Army and Police. While everybody was mourning over the massacre, TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) claimed the responsibil-ity and termed it as the revenge against the Pakistan Army. Giving a thought to it, the sound conclusion is inevitable – if Pakistani Army launches an operation against the terrorism in order to make peace and security prevail in the state, in order to make churches safe for Christians and Mosques safe for Shia Muslims, in order to make mar-kets safe for public and on and on. The question is why would TTP kill innocent children and justify their vindictive ingression into a school by calling it a righteous vengeance? Had those school children to do any-thing with this? No.
This is not Jihad, and certainly not what Islam teaches. This is not what Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) taught. This is outright brutality and the perpetrators of such brutal and outré ferocities are not human beings at all.
The children, who had left their homes to learn, left this world by inscribing in our hearts the saddest of memories. The Peshawar School Massacre was the massacre of future, hope, knowledge and truth. It was the massacre of spring. It was the massacre of humanity. Coffins of the children were resting on the peo-ple’s shoulders – the children upon whose shoulders their nation was hoping to stand. It was the funeral of despair and those were the smallest of coffins, and someone has rightly said: “Smallest coffins are the Heavi-est” May their souls rest in Heavens and may Almighty bestow their Par-ents an everlasting strength. Ameen
Commemorating Peshawar tragedy That was when innocent children fell to bullets and humanity felt ashamed
BLoodBathPeerZada MuZaMil
Kashmir is different |
During the past few months several Indian civil society delega-
tions visited Kashmir. They condemned the government of India, the state government and the armed forces for `let-ting loose a reign of terror’ in Kashmir.
I also interacted with the members of a couple of delega-tions. They talked about juvenile justice system of the state and suggested a comparative study of the Juvenile system in rest of India and the state of Jammu Kashmir.
One of the members told about a case wherein the magis-trate had resisted pressure from various quarters and destroyed the records of a juvenile. Accord-ing to the delegation, the law required that all records pertain-ing to the juvenile be destroyed
so that he leads a normal life and carries no stigma. The delega-tion, however, was told that the police in this neglected land pre-serve the records for intimidat-ing the juvenile in future.
The delegation members were shocked to know that minors were lodged with crimi-nals charged under section 377 of the Ranbir Penal Code [RPC] in Jammu Central Jail, Kote Balwal.
The delegation was further told that minors were stripped immediately after entering the jail and kept in solitary confine-ment for a couple of days.
The delegation members were shocked to hear this. `Why’, they asked. They were told that Kashmir was different and the authorities ensure that it stays different. The delegation also talked about setting the system right in this state. The talked about proper functioning of the criminal justice system and supremacy of judiciary in Jammu Kashmir. They said the courts should have the final say in the release of prisoners. They admitted that the armed forces had different yardsticks for the people of Kashmir and rest of India.
I could gather that they
wanted Jammu Kashmir to look like any other Indian state. I got a feeling that the delega-tions visit Kashmir to integrate it with the Indian union. Of course the delegation members more often than not happen to be persons of integrity but barring few honourable exceptions, the Indians, by and large do not take a position on Kashmir. For most of them India [Bharat Mata] is a deity and its armed forces are gods and gods do not falter.
Kashmir is unique for other reasons as well. Kalhana has been proven wrong. He had said that Kashmiris cannot be cowed down by the sword. According to him, Kashmiri can be won over by love. But his-tory is witness to the fact that the poor Kashmiri has always been brutally crushed. The Mughals, the Pathans, Sikhs and the Dogras strangled dis-sent. Our own leader whom we loved was no different. In 1947 he formed the infamous Peace Brigade to teach his opponents a lesson. They abducted women, resorted to extortion, humiliated people and this is what gave the former governor, Grish Chander Saxena the idea of making the Ikhwaan in mid 90s.
The so-called Peace Brigade
was used to silence all those who had the guts to oppose accession. They were either arrested or exiled- the only place in the sub-continent where people were exiled in `democratic’ rule.
After crushing dissent, the next institution that came under attack was the judiciary. Jammu Kashmir has the dis-tinction of being the only state where judiciary flourished during autocracy and lost its sheen during democratic and popular rule.
In 1944, Maharani Tara Devi was out in her chauffer driven car. The driver was booked for a minor traffic offence and accord-ingly put on trial. The Maharani wrote a note to the presiding offi-cer of the court requesting him to take a lenient view in the case. The magistrate informed Maha-raja Hari Singh who tendered an unconditional and written apology to the magistrate and thus upheld the supremacy of the judiciary.
A few years later, the state came under `democratic rule’. A Halqa president of the ruling National Conference wrote a letter to a high court judge urging him not to hear a second appeal in a land dispute case from Budgam district. The
learned judge raised the issue with Sheikh Muhammad Abdul-lah who wrote, “We are passing through an emergency. You do what my worker has told you or vacate.”
The learned judge being a man of integrity submitted his resignation which was accepted.
The rulers never allowed judiciary to flourish. According to former Bar Secretary, GN Shaheen. “Kashmir happens to be the only place on earth where the executive issued a written order directing the jail superintendents not to honour court orders seeking release of political prisoners. The order was issued in July 2000 and with-drawn after fifteen days when the bar association registered protest.
This is the reality of Kash-mir and this makes it different. A tehsildar [executive magis-trate] goes out of way to remand a person to police custody. When asked reasons, he brazenly says, `I received a call from New Delhi.’
Similarly New Delhi ̀ directs’ a police officer to arrest a par-ticular person. Yet another trait that makes Kashmir different-Jammu Kashmir police get orders directly from New Delhi!
CoNCePt sHeikH FayaZ aHMad
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
- Bertrand Russell
Dissent is a part of democracy. It forms the backbone of any sub-stantive and a flourishing com-
munity. It’s in the healthy diversity of thought that the new ideas flourish and the ‘truth’ emerges. The lack of dissent or the muzzling of it leads to a situation where the ‘dominant ideas’ held by one section of population matter and it is they who monopolise the structures of power to be handed down to their suc-ceeding generations.
The question of the importance of ‘dissent’, ‘criticism’, or ‘questioning’ (in the academic circles) has been dis-cussed since Socratic times or even ear-lier. Socrates, we know through Plato, refused to be bogged down by the ‘domi-nant ideas’ of the time and chose to die for his opinions. The tradition was kept alive by Plato as he arrived at some ‘truth’ only after rigorous disputations and dialectics with his colleagues. Aris-totle in the same vein in his Nichoma-chean Ethics also argues for subjecting endoxa (reputable opinions) to rigorous examination lest they be simply passed
off as truth. The question of dissent has got healthy attention by the scholars who have positively treated it as a good sign for not only arriving at any genuine idea but also to make the idea more polished.
We write this article not only as a response to a write-up ‘Breaking the Silence’ by Atherul Islam (GK: Novem-ber 18, 2016) and similar writings but more importantly to highlight the value of disputations and disagreements in a democratic liberation struggle. We argue that the substance of the aforementioned article sets the dangerous trend that may nullify the ideals that are basic to the movement itself. The author comes up with his arguments against Professor Abdul Gani who had in recent past criti-cised the joint leadership of Hurriyat and the ways they have adopted in leading the movement for self determination. The author in a fashion that can be anal-ogised with the Orwellian Animal Farm maxims chalks down certain points that define who is following a ‘right path’ and who a ‘wrong’ one. The author implicitly argues that all those ‘raising questions on leadership’ are riding a ‘wrong horse’, and puts the onus on them to prove why they are not!
While avoiding the ad hominem refer-ence points, we propose to deconstruct the substance of the article. To begin with, the argument that to question the leaders necessarily leads one in the camp of the oppressor is in contradiction with the lexicon of resistance that not only
allows critiquing the oppressor narra-tives but also leaves enough room for questioning the multiple narratives of the oppressed. This is true of the indi-viduals also who assume importance due to the resistance and owe their very existence to it. The importance of critiqu-ing the ways and means the individuals actively associated with the resistance employ is redoubled for the necessity and urgency of keeping the movement from turning into moribund flow. It’s like pumping pints of fresh blood in the stream of resistance.
The oppression and liberation are dif-ferent just because of their very nature – one subjugates, is suffocating, and scuttles any possibility of meaningful opposition, while the other aims at eman-cipation, not only of the exploited but of the exploiter itself. Paulo Freire terms a liberation struggle as ‘the restorer of the humanity of both.’ What Freire means is that if there is no space left for disagree-ments in a liberation struggle by the oppressed themselves then the struggle itself becomes tyrannizing. And that individuals in the liberation struggles in initial stages may tend to emulate the ways of oppressors and become them-selves the ‘sub-oppressors’, but in the mature struggles the people tend to wage a double front struggle – to confront the oppressor and its narratives as well as to be cautious of not turning oppressors themselves.
In Kashmir, we are surrounded by a
diversity of thought and opinion which is really a compliment for us. This fact is more appreciative than worrisome in that we are trying to be as open as possible to novel ideas and have not closed ourselves down in the outmoded processes of thought. But in order to pre-vent any cataclysmic fall that may leave us in the Freire’s category of a ‘youthful liberation struggle’, we should under-stand and articulate among the genera-tions that our survival is conditional upon how tolerant we are and should be in confronting an opinion. This does not mean that we should do nothing to prevent any thoughtless scrap of ideas but that we should try to engage with it rather than to dismiss it as ‘mindless’ or to brand the opinion holder as a ‘col-laborator’. This in a sense is a message that is reminiscent of the ideas of Fou-cault who in a 1978 essay ‘Qu’est-ce-que la critique’ argues that criticism is ‘to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Prac-tising criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.’ That’s exactly what we do when we are questioning somebody or some argument – we make facile gestures difficult.
Emerson says, ‘Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.’ Our strength comes not from outright condemnation of ideas but with every contradiction that we face and with every error that we remove.
Why Questions Scare us? | Health of a society lies in the way we disagree with each other
SPeCtRuMZaHir-ud-din
That is what they have been doing all along
There is something that happens here only
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