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THERE are few things as powerful as a well-designed public service message. It can raise awareness on crucial issues and be instructive and aesthetically appealing at the same time. Of course, sometimes the tedium of trying to drill a message into a stubborn audience can get to your designers and they may try a different technique.
Take electricity theft for example. K-Electric has tried many methods to curb this, from suspending services to celebrity messages and ‘shame’ campaigns. Clearly, the problem hasn’t gone away since, very recently, K-Electric tweeted and facebooked a new message against electricity theft.
In a departure from the norm, this was in fact a hadith to the effect that anyone who steals more than half a dinar should have his hand chopped off.
That may be instructive and spine-chilling in equal measure but also raises some very interesting questions.
Many are out to turn piety into profit.
What would be the prescribed punishment, say, in the case of overbilling by the power utility? What about, for example, damage to household implements due to brownouts, fluctuation and unexpected power outages? What of the issues of interpretations, conditionalities and fiqh?
Then there’s the question of whether the message would dissuade non-Muslim electricity thieves or if appropriate biblical passages and quotations from the law of Manu would have to be used. In any case the original tweet was soon deleted and K-Electric clarified that it would not be chopping off any hands and that the message was meant to emphasise how serious a crime electricity theft was.
It should be pointed out that the handlers of the account, who are mostly very professional and social-media savvy, dealt with the situation quite well indeed. While this campaign may have got the chop, that doesn’t change the fact that posting such material not only degrades the source material itself, but also puts one on a very slippery slope. Take an example from the month of May: back then, PTCL posted what it probably believed was an educational message on its Facebook page. This exhorted the people not to say ‘hello’, but instead to say ‘Assalam o aleikum,’, not to say ‘wow’ but to say ‘subhanallah,’ and so on.
Now if someone chooses to do this on their own accord, without the preachiness and judgement that usually accompanies such directions then well, more power to them. But coming from a telecommunication company whose own slogan is ‘say hello to the future’ it seems laughable at best.
But then, that’s the thing with an approach that emphasises appearance over actual implementation and the letter over the spirit; it isn’t really given to deep or critical thinking.
PSMs aside, many are out there to use your piety for their profit. We’ve seen the exponential growth of Islamic banking which, most insiders agree, is simply a case of renaming certain services and adding Arabic calligraphy to bank signs.
Consumer Here, a recent marketing campaign for a certified halal soap, complete with testimonials that this soap in entirely in line with religious precepts also deserves a mention.
That a Pakistan-based manufacturer would use prohibited ingredients in the first place would mean exposing themselves to all manners of calamity, and here the implication seems to be that this soap’s competitors are doing just that. That, to me at least, is borderline exploitative. But then, this is a land in which the ‘most popular’ Ramazan show host can ask scholars if it is permissible to pray for the victory of non-Muslim football players without batting a kajalled eyelid.
Now as far as food products go, many religions have dietary laws and it is the right of believers to abide by them. It is also well within their rights to demand that a widely consumed product be transparent about its ingredients.
Thus, just as the global kosher food industry caters to observant Jews, the halal industry caters to observant Muslims, and with that latter industry now estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, there are many eager for a piece of this growing pie.
Some, like the UK-based manufacturers of halal cat food, one may argue, push the envelope just a tad too far.
It’s very much a global trend; there’s even a company in India that markets vegetarian water, a miracle achieved by filtering water so thoroughly that not even a living microbe can enter your system and inadvertently violate your beliefs.
A similar product is also marketed towards vegans in the West, who can also feed their felines vegetarian cat food thanks to the wondrous combination of capitalism and credulous consumers. At least one cat-owning vegan nearly killed his pet by imposing his dietary laws on the poor animal. Consume all you like, and profit, but try to match your dollars with sense.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
Published in Dawn, July 14th, 2014
