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Creeping madness
By Chris CorkThe discovery of America profoundly altered European consciousness, and the great French essayist of the period, Michel de Montaigne, wrote of his unhappiness with the attitudes of his fellow countrymen who, whilst critical of the savages that were the indigenous inhabitants of the New World were blind to their own faults and inadequacies. He concluded: Every man calls it barbarous anything he is not accustomed to. We have no other criterion of or right reason than the example and form of the opinion of our own country. There we also find the perfect religion, the perfect political arrangements, the most developed and perfect way of doing everything. Despite the fact that Montaigne was writing centuries in the past his words have a penetrating relevance here in Pakistan today. Reason is increasingly absent from the collective consciousness in Pakistan, and the flight of reason from the minds of ordinary men and women bodes ill for all of us who live here. A mullah was lynched recently close to Bahawalpur by a crowd incited to murder by a mullah from a rival sect. The rival mullah had accused him of an act of desecration or blasphemy. He died, along with a man who came to his aid, as the result of collective madness. As if this were not enough proof of the flight of reason the police compounded the lunacy by registering a case for blasphemy against the dead man. One presumes they will arraign his decaying corpse at some future hearing before a judge as similar in thinking as the police who filed the charge. Two women teachers and their young children were shot to death in the last couple of weeks by unknown assailants for the heinous crime of teaching girls how to read, write and number. They were working for an NGO on a government-sponsored scheme to raise education levels for women and girls in the tribal areas. Recent arrests may or may not turn into hearings and convictions. Acts of barbarism? Some would say so, but sadly many possibly even a majority here - would not. No processions have been taken out to protest the murder of these innocent people and beyond some hard-nosed editorials in the English-language press there has been scarcely a ripple in the murky depths of society generally. Once again deaths murders have come into the lives of hitherto blameless people for no other reason than that they have put a pleat in the paradigm of some demented obscurantist and his followers. The religious lunatics can, it seems, rouse the populace to whatever levels of violence they feel like and then walk away from the carnage and destruction; secure in the knowledge that nobody will make a serious or sustained effort to catch and punish them. Now come with me and sit on the roof of my house, and listen as I do every day to the faithful at their prayers. Look at the infidel goras! Look at how they insult our Holy Prophet (PBUH) and defame our culture! Look at their immorality, their skirts and shorts and uncovered hair! Their sinful adulterous habits! Their filthy education systems that mix boys and girls together! Single-parent families! Should we not wipe them from the face of the earth? Kill them? All of this, and far worse, came from the speakers of the mosque close to the house of this correspondent last Friday. Say anything like that publicly in the UK and you are before a court in no time. Say it in Pakistan and your congregation cheers you to the echo. Yes indeed, please do look at them, those barbarian goras. Then look back at yourselves. Not just the mullahs reading this (a number hardly above the fingers of your hands) but all the rest of you. And then look again at the quotation from Montaigne that opens this piece. He penned a universal truth; that man finds few faults in the world that is his, and faults aplenty in worlds that are not banishing reason from his mind. It is to protest the flight of reason that people should be thronging the streets, not answering the call of the creeping madness. The writer is a British social worker settled in Pakistan. Email: manticore73@hotmail.com Posted by: john 2006-06-26 |
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