By Zafar Syed
Pop star turned proselytizer and self-appointed religious scholar Junaid Jamshed hosts a TV show on a Pakistani channel where he expresses his views about everything between the earth and the sky, and sometimes, things that are neither found neither on the earth nor in the skies.
A couple of days back he said something about the flood victims that was profoundly disturbing and morally shocking. He said in a very passionate and self-righteous tone:
I was among some people who had the audacity to say that this is the result of the Global Warming. No, it’s not … It’s due to my and your sins!!!
This statement is so damaging, cruel and heartless that I don’t know where to start. What’s more, this is not an isolated opinion: there is no shortage of mullahs in Pakistan, former pop stars or otherwise, who think on the same lines. In essence, they are blaming those poor, poor victims for this calamity: they were sinners, so God unleashed his fury to take them to task. In other words, they got what they deserved, so there is no need to grieve for those millions and millions of shelterless, hungry, sick, despondent people who lost everything they had.
And why is that every time God punishes only the people of Pakistan? Be it in the form of the devastating earthquake of 2005, or the relentless spell of terror that has shaken the foundation of the country over the past four years, or the fantastically inept bureaucracy or the corrupt-to-the-bones leadership, or this fresh curse, Pakistan seems to be the most blighted nation on earth today. So what does JJ have to say why the God’s fury batters only Pakistanis, while the rest of the world goes mostly scot free?
“It’s because we are the chosen people. Just like one cares more about one’s own child compared to a neighbor’s, God care more about the Muslim Ummah and thus he warns them by those catastrophes in this world to shield them from the eternal damnation … so that they are jolted to action right here and now to straighten up their lives.”
But the problem is that there are more than one and a half billion Muslims in the world, why does God treat them like a step-son and doesn’t hurl His wrath upon them to mend their ways? Or is Junaid Jamshed implying that the only true Muslims in the world are Pakistanis – who comprise only ten percent of the world’s Muslim population – and the rest of the 90 percent are somehow above the Divine Law? Do these people really think that the residents of Nowshera, Kalam, Kashmore or Dadu indulge in more transgressions than the Muslims of Dubai, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, or the nearly million Muslims of London, for that matter?
And whether it’s the earthquake or the floods or terrorism, why do only the people from the lowest strata of the society suffer? If it’s only sinners, than surely these cataclysms should have hit the builders that used more sand and less cement to build the schools which collapsed like cardboards during the earthquake … or those chaudharies, waderas, industrialists and politicians who suck the marrow of the hapless villagers.
In the current floods also the poorest of the poor have suffer the most. The chaudhary’s haveli, in any case, is built on a elevated plain with ample cement.
Accusing the victims may have another sinister consequence as well: It can discourage people from helping them. Why should one lend a hand to an evildoer who deserved what he got, anyway?
Moreover, such a defeatist approach is the greatest obstacle in the development of science and technology. When plagues are sent down by God, why bother trying to find a cure? Just shun your sinning ways. When earthquakes bury tens of thousands of school children alive in their classes, why build sturdier schools the next time? Just pray harder. When a flood wreaks havoc, why build dams and levees, just turn over the beads of the rosary more quickly.
It is said that when the Muslim armies laid siege to the Christian city of Damascus, the bishops urged people to pray to ward off the attackers. But within a few centuries the tables of history were turned and when the hordes of Helegu Khan surrounded the Muslim city of Baghdad, the ulema appealed for cumulative du’aa to thwart the Mongols.
Seven and a half centuries have between those events to this single most destructive episode in Muslim history but we have yet to learn our lessons.
Tags: dams, disaster, Featured, floods, fundamentalists, Junaid Jamshed, levees, mullahs, natural disaster, Pakistan, water
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