Attacking Iran?

ACCORDING to the western media, Israeli plans for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations are ready, and it goes without saying who has supplied the bunker-bursting bombs, most probably free. But that is of little consequence, for Israel is quite capable of developing far deadlier bombs. The issue is the backing which Israel has been receiving from the US on the possibilities of a strike at Iran for solving the nuclear issue. Tel Aviv is now reported to be “sharpening” the military option idea if a diplomatic solution to the crisis is not found by March. This is as good as saying that an Israeli strike is a certainty, because a solution is nowhere in sight. Iran’s on again and off again dialogue with the European Three has been in progress since Mr Mohammad Khatami’s days, and there is nothing to suggest that the EU-3 and a government led by a hard-liner like President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad are going to clinch the issue within the next one and a half months. The “sharpening” of the military option idea is needed because some Israelis feel that the situation is not what it was in 1981 when Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor. Actually, the situation favours Tel Aviv, because there never was an American administration more pro-Israel than the present one. In fact, the departure of Mr Colin Powell as secretary of state means the exit of the only man in the Bush cabinet who had stood up to the neo-cons, who — to quote the late Edward Said — “populate” the Pentagon and the State Department, Mr Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s departure from Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office having little impact on the conduct of foreign policy.

Mr Ariel Sharon’s moribund condition does not mean that the spirit of militancy and aggression that has characterized his policies is no longer there. Mr Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister whose ambition it is to be prime minister again, said last month if he won the March election he would strike at Iran. This is in line with Mr Cheney’s instruction to the Pentagon last year to draw up a contingency plan for an attack on Tehran’s nuclear installations. In 1981, when the Saudi air force intercepted Israeli warplanes on the way to Iraq, Israeli pilots told them in Arabic that they were a Jordanian patrol. This time they are under no such obligation, because the US controls most of the air space which the Israeli planes will take on the way to Iran. So militarily, Israel has no problems with carrying out yet another of its attacks on a Muslim country.

What Israel and its backers should concentrate on is not the logistics of attack but the consequences of it. Already, the US has attacked two Muslim countries in the post-9/11 period and the Arab-Muslim peoples the world over hold America as much responsible as Israel for whatever is happening in Palestine. An attack on Iran will not only add to the list of Muslim countries targeted by the US, it will also add to the number of extremists and terrorists swearing to wreak vengeance on the US. Let America listen to what Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of a country that is Washington’s ally, has to say. In an interview with the BBC Prince Faisal, admitting that Mr Ahmedinejad’s views were “extreme”, asked for a political solution to the crisis and said that the West was “partly responsible” for the crisis because it had helped Israel acquire nuclear weapons.

Sri Lanka: threat of civil war

ONCE again, there are ominous signs that Sri Lanka, after nearly four years of an uneasy truce, is sliding back into civil war. More than a hundred people, including military personnel and civilians, were killed last month in rebel attacks. Meanwhile, there has been no let-up in the violence in January, leading to fears that the death toll at the end of the month might exceed that recorded in December. The Norwegian-led truce monitors, whose offices were bombed by suspected rebels on Friday, have said that the Tamil Tigers could not deny involvement in the growing violence. In the face of such grave provocation from the Tigers, it is to the credit of the Sri Lankan government that it remains committed to a political solution. However, continued attacks on military installations and personnel may force it to change its mind and adopt military means to counter the rebels.

Following Mr Mahinda Rajapakse’s election as president last November, there were hopeful signs that the faltering peace process would be revived, especially when he announced that the government was ready for talks with the rebels. But the Tigers’ intransigence on the question of a venue — possibly an excuse to take up arms again — caused such optimism to vanish. Even under these trying circumstances, one hopes that a course of moderation is adopted and that the government heeds the advice of the peace monitors and disarms paramilitary groups contributing to violence. Of late, the international community has stepped up its condemnation of the separatist Tigers. But considering that most of the rebels’ financial support comes from Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates in Europe and North America, individual governments need to keep a closer watch on the movement of Tamil funds and halt dubious monetary transfers while clamping down on fund-raising activities meant to benefit the rebels.

Unhealthy state of prisons

IT is no coincidence that some 500 prisoners out of a total of 2,500 kept in the Sialkot district jail should have been found suffering from hepatitis. Mainly a water-borne, infectious disease that can be fatal, hepatitis is an alarmingly high-incidence ailment prevalent in and outside the prisons. The overcrowded prison in question was meant to house no more than 660 inmates, and in that it is no different from other prisons in the country. Our detention centres notoriously lack basic health and sanitation facilities, with the prevalent levels of congestion putting the prisoners at a high risk of contracting infectious diseases. No wonder that resort to violence on the part of the inmates and the existence of crime within jails remain the sorry facts of prison life. There was a time when prison officials at least used to commit themselves to the need for prison reforms, but not anymore. The last time one heard of reforms in that quarter was under the amended Police Ordinance of 2002, but the revamped law has not even taken off the ground yet. The state of our prisons is pathetic: inmates are routinely tortured; they are barely fed and clothed and forced to live in subhuman conditions, with little recourse to justice.

Part of the problem of poor health and hygiene found among the prison population stems from the unreasonably high number of under-trial prisoners being kept in prisons alongside hardened criminals and convicts. In many prisons no provision is made for keeping juvenile prisoners in separate barracks. Women, too, are among the most vulnerable groups of inmates: a majority of them are booked under the dubious Hudood Ordinances that presume them to be guilty before so proven in a court of law. The need for urgent prison reforms cannot be overemphasized. It is time the government, with help from international donor agencies, chalked out a comprehensive reform plan. Under-trial prisoners, and even convicts, have rights that must be respected. The least of these is the right to live in an environment that is not detrimental to health or denies them basic hygiene.

Curriculum change controversy

CURRICULUM revision seems to have become a very controversial issue in the country with not a month going by without some political or religious party objecting to a reported change in some textbooks or syllabus.

The unfortunate thing about all of this is that many of the objections raised by those who oppose changes in, or a revision of the syllabus seem to border on the trivial.

In most cases, the ready defence cited against changing anything in the national curriculum — as if it were a holy scripture ordained from the heavens — is religion and quoting content of the Holy Quran.

Any attempt to revise or modernize the curriculum is seen by such obscurantist and retrogressive elements as an attempt to “secularize” the education system which is further equated with a distinct lack of godliness in society. Those at the forefront of opposition to changes in the curriculum have a very warped interpretation of the word ‘secular’ which they equate with the Urdu ‘la deeni,’ meaning absence of religion or to mean irreligious. This interpretation is then used by them to claim that those who believe in secularism are in fact godless or atheists.

The real sense of the word ‘secular’ is lost on them, or maybe they deliberately do not want to accept it because it would render their objections redundant. ‘Secular’, as it used by progressive and forward-looking people in this country, means not being irreligious or godless but rather the separation of government and religion. Further, it means that government policies should be free of the influence of any particular religion and that such policies should not propagate or edify the values and beliefs of any particular religion.

A couple of years ago, a report by some researchers at the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute had brought the curriculum revision issue to the fore. The authors of the report had argued that textbooks used in government schools needed to be revised because even subjects that were clearly not religion-based had religious content in them.

They had further pointed out that the content in most textbooks was such that those who are studying them would end up being intolerant, bigoted and narrow-minded individuals with a common belief that other religions were imperfect and flawed. India was demonized, women, children and minorities were marginalized and disproportionate emphasis was placed on religion. Taught in a system which encouraged rote learning and where most teachers were wont to encourage their students to ask probing questions, the results were extremely disturbing.

The truth is that rising intolerance, sectarianism, narrow-mindedness, obscurantism, violence against religious minorities and lack of respect for the views of others (and even a singular lack of respect for women and their rights) can be traced in large part to an educational system which is based, for the most part, on indoctrinating its students. The result is that students at even some of the better public-sector universities seem to be obsessed with matters such as patriotism, religion and the country’s ideology and this clearly comes out every time there is a report published describing the holding of a national debate competition and the topics spoken on by participants.

Another example of this growing tendency towards blind religiosity in education was the decision by Gen. Zia’s government to award extra marks to students who had learnt the Holy Quran by heart. Such a rule is unfair for Christians, Hindus, Parsis and any other minorities living in the country because it does not award them extra marks if they have learnt their holy scriptures the same way.

In recent weeks, starting from the beginning of December, two controversies regarding this issue surfaced. The first was reported in several international wire services but died down quickly, except on some people’s e-mailing lists. This had to do with the inclusion in the Class XI syllabus of a poem called ‘the leader’ by an anonymous writer.

The problem with this poem, which talked about the qualities needed to become a good leader, apparently, was that the first letter of each line, all taken together, formed the following words: “President George W. Bush”. Clearly, an edifying poem like this should not have been included in the syllabus of a country like Pakistan, so thought those who objected to its inclusion. While in most countries such a matter would not have raised much of a furore and would have been dealt with at the administrative level, here it was publicized much in the media (especially Urdu newspapers) and even made its way to parliament where members of the opposition raised it in the National Assembly.

In any case the poem was eventually deleted from the textbook. The fact is that such amateurish material (in the form of poems, articles, etc.) circulates on the Internet and it is possible that some enterprising textbook writer saw it fit to simply plagiarize directly from the net and include it in the Class XI syllabus, rather than to write something original.

The controversy (which was more of the ‘tea-cup’ variety) should have rested there but it didn’t. Unfortunately, quite a few people — some of them educated — equated the initial inclusion of the poem with an attempt by the government and the ministry of education to deliberately brainwash students to make them have a favourable view of the US president. Such a view is myopic, given that the US would hardly need a poem glorifying its president to be inserted into a Pakistani textbook to become popular in this part of the world.

Unfortunately, those who, in recent years, have opposed curriculum revision have offered little substance in any of their arguments opposing the changes other than a resort to religious nationalism or misguided patriotism (reinforcing one’s belief in the saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel).

Quite a few MMA leaders were in the forefront of making such remarks, though the brainwashing of students in the name of religion seems not to bother them, probably because it suits their purpose. In any case, the error was pointed out and the said poem was taken out of the textbook.

The episode, however, showed certain traits that increasingly seem to have become part of our national psyche and character. These are: a tendency to take positions that border on the very extreme, leaving no room for any compromise and with no rational perspective on the matter or issue at hand (which explains why debates and discussions are slowly dying in our society); a tendency to see everything as a conspiracy (a trait also often possessed by an individual or a group that has been victimized or perceives itself as being a victim) and a tendency to attribute to American prodding or dictations everything and anything that the government does in this country.

The second, more recent, controversy surrounds the deletion from textbooks of a chapter containing information for students on how to pray. The information relates to prayers specifically for Muslims and was included in the textbooks during Zia’s Islamization drive. Reports that the material had been deleted from textbooks galvanized the country’s religious parties and groups and their respective student wings into action. Regrettably, one has yet to see these elements take to the streets to demand clean drinking water, better sanitation, a public transport system or to rally against honour killings or horrible traditions like vani.

But when it comes to an issue like curriculum reform or the establishment of a private examination board by an organization, they waste no time in launching a campaign against such moves. The MMA has already raised objections to this in the Senate and the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba has held rallies in Karachi and some other cities protesting against the deletion of certain material. Again, the blame has been laid at the doors of America, with one Jamaat-i-Islami leader saying that the “generals ruling” the country have become proxies of Washington and are bent on destroying Pakistan’s ideology at the behest of the Americans. The fact is that at least on this count, the government needs to be supported for taking the correct decision. Mainstream textbooks are loaded with religious content. Even language textbooks contain several chapters which list, among other things, the duties of a good Muslim, how to say one’s prayers (applicable only to Muslims), stories about the Haj, the importance of being a good Muslim and so on.

There is nothing wrong per se with these but there needs to be a balance (if such content is deemed necessary for inclusion in non-religious textbooks at all) between religious and non-religious content. Besides, if such content — clearly aimed at the majority population — was balanced by including material that catered to the country’s minority community students, then it would not be a discriminatory aspect to it, But that isn’t the case.

Besides, when Islamiat is already taught as a compulsory subject from class I right up to the university level, what rationale is there for including religious content in subjects that are purely humanities or science-based? Similarly, if the government wants to award extra marks to students who have learnt the Holy Quran by heart, it must extend the same privilege to students of other faiths, provided they too have learnt their holy scriptures.

In any case, learning how to pray is something that children usually learn at home — taught by their parents, grandparents, older relatives or the religious teacher who comes to their homes to teach them how to pray and how to read the Holy Quran. Why cannot space in textbooks be reserved for topics and subjects that would attract young minds towards science, nature and an exploration in general of the world around them? The fact is that attempts to overload mainstream textbooks with religious content (and that, too, only for the supposed benefit of the majority community students alone), should not be seen as a sincere move to make the people more pious and godly but rather as a disingenuous attempt to indoctrinate young minds.

E-mail: omarq@cyber.net.pk