Does Benazir's death matters?

Words of sympathy, bewilderment abound. What did benazir contribute to the world/pakistan political or social scene? Is it that she went on to become the head of one of the Muslim countries but then so they have been in turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh. All these (so called) Muslim countries have been headed by a woman at one time or the other, quite ironically, something which American's, French and Russians still wish to achieve.

Largely her contributions are not much that wuld be remembered in history.

She was a novice in politics irrespective of what the world media writes about her. Her current sacrifice on the altar of Bush, makes her all the more irrelevant. I believe that was what Ms Bhutto didn't realize since her return from self imposed exile, at behest of Bush & Co., that while Bush could have it both ways, if she succeeded great, she would be another stooge of American interests like Mushrraf already is, but under the garb of democracy and IF she met an ill fate, he could declare under the banner he still maintains under an executive order to invade Pakistan to 'liberate the people and institute democracy'. If alive, there was no way that anyone else would ever win the elections in Pakistan except her PPP.

Her contribution to India was something that not many know about, maybe, something that changed the course of Indian relationship with Pakistan. That was undertaken during her brief tenure as Pakistani PM 98-90.
We all know that militancy in Punjab and Kashmir was at peak post Indira's assasination. Zia was proving too clever to handle and he had made a master move to engage Indians on both fronts and was most likely to have his way if continued to live any longer. Rajiv declared from the ramparts of the Red Fort that 'hum unhey unki naani yaad dila dengey'. A few weeks later Zias plane blew up in mid air and remains a mystery till date.

Benazir took up Pakistan reins thereafter and Rajiv Gandhi met her in Delhi during that brief stint. After that meeting, quite miraculously, the very next day onwards...the Punjab militancy had died out. Just like *poof*.

KPS Gill just happened to be at the right place at the right time and Indians would not give the credit of this to Benazir for electorate would question the reasons behind this pakistani gesture of magnanimity? . When the same KPS Gill was sent to other troubled spots upon people's behest, he failed miserably but no one questions. Not to mention the charges of molestation against this man by a senior civil officer.

Anyways, Benazir describes that meeting with Rajiv in her own words, "Nobody else knew what Rajiv and I discussed. There was no fly on the wall. How can anyone say I have not kept my promises to him when the single biggest result of that meeting was the end of the Sikh insurgency? It was Rajiv who committed to me that he would withdraw from Siachen. I made no promises that could have been broken."

Indian establishment would do well to grant that due, where it lies, if it really has to pay tribute to benazir. But this act of her's also shows that they came out to be a pretty novice vis a vis Rajiv Gandhi, so as to understand politics, where promises are made to be broken.

In another interview with Rediff, she went on to publically state her views about gen Musharraf's analytical skills: "He (Musharraf) was my Director General Military Operations and he presented me with his plan in front of 50 officers about how the mujahideen would infiltrate an area similar to Kargil. How they would bring about a war and the Indians wouldn't be able to dislocate us and they would be forced to start a second front at which point the international community would intervene and we would take Srinagar."

She is probably the only premier of a country who has so routinely violated Official Secrets Act and her oath of secrecy, probably you wouldn't even expect the likes of Laloo prasad or Mulayam Singh to succumb to because of their political misalignments. Good for Indians, but this lady was not supposed to be where she reached, by luck or by fluke.

She played in the hands of India then, she played into the hands of US now. She lived in the hope of emulating Indira because just like her, she got the reins of a political party into her hands, as an inheritance, but unlike Indira, she wasn't shrewd, cunning or politically savvy. Strong! yes..maybe!! but courageous acts can, in retrospect, also be deemed foolhardy.

So, grieve for the lives lost as we should for what they sought to do, but remember US complicity with their tunnel vision. I hope we learn that Shock and Awe as a super power, treating nations they don't understand like dominions is not the solution of democracy because Democracy is rooted in self determination not having a super power dictating what Thou Shall Do and Don't.

That's has been America's arrogant mistake. Ask America's Native American elders and their fate.

Grieve, then do the right thing, not the emotional thing.

Salman Rusdie- The knight of the looming nights

The Western world has developed and now mastered, the art of glamorizing filth and sin. IMMORALITY is now termed "new morality!" Whoever thinks that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are in a sinful adulterous relationship despite all the adoptions they both undertake? That Jemima Khan and Hugh Grant were two souls seeped neck deep in adultery and it all looked so very cool?
Nevertheless, it is defamatory and libelous to call a woman a b1tch, but not if you call her a "super b1tch."
I have heard that in London there is a Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, where many enjoy the passionate and vehement harangues. It's free for all. One is allowed to curse, abuse and swear anybody and everybody. The law of libel and defamation does not apply in this haven of free speech and un-bridled expressions. Yet I am told that Her Majesty the Queen of England is above any abuse or tirade. She is sacrosanct! Not only in Hyde Park but throughout Britain either by word of mouth or through the media, "Thou shalt not denigrate the queen".

A retired employee at Buckingham Palace wrote a book entitled "Officially Speaking." About the goings on in the Royal precincts. About drunken orgies and sexual frolics among the Royalty. The publication of this piece of Royal gossip was rightly suppressed by Mrs. Thatcher's (then) government. Amazing England! But Mr. Rushdie prevails where a blue blooded Englishman fails. Thanks to Maggie and her British votaries of free speech. Wait and read!!
"Chamcha (another name of Rushdie in The Satanic Verses TSV - Have you read it? Please read it but only a pirated version) finds himself dreaming of the Queen. of MAKING TENDER LOVE to the MONARCH. She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her, JOINED WITH HER; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight" (page 169 of TSV)(1) . What is Rushdie telling his readers, if not that he f*&^ked her Majesty? "Joined with her," above compare with his expression "STILL CONJOINED," on page 12.
I expect some British blockhead of the literary world to cry - "Oh! Rushdie only f*&^ked our Queen in his dream." It is all fiction! After all, we can't hold a man accountable for his dreams. That is true, but "O pervert!" Rushdie was not dreaming when he penned those words!

Anyways...this old plagiarising wannabe writer Salman Rushdie has been knighted in the Puppet Monarchy's Birthday honors for services to racial hatred and stirring up fundamentalism. Everything else is secondary.

This author of The Satanic Verses has been credited with inflaming more racial hatred, irrational superstitious religious intolerance and fundamentalist persecution's than all the previous writers of his generation who ever attempted cashing in quick on debunking the holy books and scriptures od their forefathers.

Looking smug and utterly confident in his self-publicity today Rushdie and his equine-toothed wife Padma Lakshmi were utterly cock-a-hoop at the glory of the Knight of the British Empire - aka KBE. Remember, it was Mr. Rushdie, the knight, who went about in the press, accusing kaizad gustad of that movie 'boom' fame, for not paying his girlfriend (padma lakshmi) her dues despite making her strip on screen. What a knight for Padma, what a knight to be honoured by a queen?

This is even better news than the £10 million of British taxpayers' money that has been lavished on police protection for me since the Ayatollahs pronounced me a corrupting influence," Rushdie told the press today.

The fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomenei (two years past the first publication) sent sales of my book soaring into the stratosphere. Crazy Ayatollah!! But for him, this knight would have been an unknown entity.

But for now, this KBE is just the icing on the cake.

And now we can enjoy all of that cake and eat it at the same time!

Bottoms UP everybody!

Islam - A renaissance overdue by a hundred years

"...the Qur’an is not a talisman to be hung around our necks for protection against evil. Allah helps those who improve their minds."

Children often play a game where they sit in a circle and one whispers something to his neighbor, who then whispers that information to the next child, and so on, around to the beginning again. By the time the last child whispers the information to the first, it is often totally different from what was originally said.
Something like that seems to have happened within Islam. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, brought one - and only one - religion. Yet today we have perhaps up to a thousand religions that all claim to be Islam.
Divided by their different interpretations, Muslims do not play the role they once did in the world; instead, they are weakened and victimized. The Shia/Sunni schism, for example, is so deep that each side condemns followers of the other as apostates, or kafir. The belief that another group’s religion is not Islam, and that its followers are not true Muslims, has historically fuelled internecine wars and conflicts in which millions have died - and continue to die.

Even among the Sunnis and Shias there are further divisions. The Sunnis have four imams and the Shias have twelve; their teachings all differ. Then there are other divisions, including the Druze, the Alawites, and the Wahabis.
We are also taught by our ulamas (religious instructors) that their teachings must not be questioned: Islam is a faith which must be believed without question and logic or reason plays no part in it. But what is it that we must believe when each branch of Islam thinks the other one is "wrong"? The Qur’an, after all, is one book -- not two or three, nor a thousand.

And according to the Qur’an, a Muslim is anyone who bears witness that "there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is his Rasul (messenger)." If no other qualification is added, then all those who subscribe to these precepts must be regarded as Muslims. But because we Muslims like to add qualifications that often derive from sources other than the Qur’an, our religion’s unity has been broken.
Perhaps, the greatest problem of all today is the progressive isolation of Islamic scholarship - and much of the rest of Islamic life - from the rest of the modern world. We live in an age of science in which people can see around corners, hear and see things happening in outer space, and clone animals. And all of these things seem to contradict our belief in the Qur’an.

But this is so only because those who interpret the Qur’an are learned only in religion, and in religious laws and practices; thus they are usually unable to understand today’s scientific miracles. The fatwas (legal opinions concerning Islamic law) that they issue appear unreasonable and cannot be accepted by those with even basic scientific knowledge.

One learned religious teacher, for example, refused to believe that a man had landed on the moon. Others assert that the world was created 2,000 years ago. The age of the universe, or measurements of the size of our own galaxy in light years, are ideas that ulamas (Islamic instructors) who are exclusively trained in religion cannot comprehend.
This failure is largely responsible for the sad plight of so many Muslims. Today’s oppression, the killings and the humiliations of Muslims, occurs because we are weak, unlike many Muslims of the past. We can feel victimized and criticize the oppressors, but to stop them we need to look at ourselves and must change for our own good. We cannot ask our detractors to change, so that Muslims benefit.

So, what do we need to do? In the past, Muslims were strong because they were learned. Muhammad’s injunction was to read, but the Qur’an does not say what to read. Indeed, there was no "Muslim scholarship" at the time, so to read meant to read whatever was available. Thus early Muslims read the works of the great Greek scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers; they also studied the works of the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese.
The result was a great flowering of science and mathematics. Muslim scholars added significantly to the body of world knowledge and developed new disciplines, such as astronomy, geography, and new branches of mathematics. They introduced numerals, enabling simple and limitless calculations.

But around the fifteenth century, Muslim intellectuals began to curb scientific studies and to focus on religion alone, insisting that only those who study religion - particularly Islamic jurisprudence - would gain merit in the afterlife. The result was a widespread Muslim intellectual regression at the very moment when the rest of Europe began embracing scientific and mathematical knowledge.

And so, as Muslims were intellectually regressing, Europeans began their renaissance, developing improved ways of meeting their societal and economic needs -- including the manufacture of weapons that eventually allowed them to dominate the world. By contrast, Muslims became fatally weakened in their ability to defend themselves by neglecting, even rejecting, the study of allegedly "secular" sciences and mathematics.
This cultural myopia remains a fundamental source of the oppression suffered by Muslims today. Many Muslims still condemn the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kamal, because he tried to modernize his country. But would Turkey be Muslim today without Ataturk? Mustafa Kamal’s clear-sightedness saved Islam in Turkey and saved Turkey for Islam.

Failure to understand and interpret the true and fundamental message of the Qur’an has brought only misfortune to Muslims. By limiting our reading to religious works and neglecting modern science, we destroyed Islamic civilization and lost our way in the world.

The Qur’an says, "Allah will not change our unfortunate situation unless we make the effort to change it." Many Muslims continue to ignore this and instead merely pray to Allah to save us, to bring back our lost glory.

But the Qur’an is not a talisman to be hung around our necks for protection against evil. Allah helps those who improve their minds. - Mahathir Muhammed