Shaikhul Islam Dr Tahirul Qadri has made a comeback in Pakistani politics. And when he said he would gather a million people in Lahore for his first speech, people believed him. He has the money and he has the organisation — of the same scale that his Ahle Hadith counterpart Hafiz Saeed has.

Certain signs point to his ambition despite his assertion that he and his party will not take part in elections. And he can give up his Canadian citizenship to become the ruler of Pakistan.

He has the backing of the MQM. Since he is a Barelvi and in the crosshairs of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and since the Sunni Tehreek has gone radical and is no longer a Barelvi adjunct of the MQM, Tahirul Qadri (TQ) could be the substitute partner and a gateway to Punjab, his treasury.

On December 25, someone shot at and injured Maulana Aurangzeb Farooqui, a central leader of the Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat, which is the banned Sipah Sahaba under a new inoffensive name taken as it were from the Barelvi nomenclature. The revenge will now likely be taken by the Taliban on the Shia community and the Barelvis.

This raises other dangerous queries.

Does TQ have Iran‘s backing, too? No one knows who the second-rung leaders in Pakistani Awami Tehreek (PAT) are, but an old ‘Iran connection’, Agha Murtaza Pooya, is a vice-chairman of PAT. Since Pakistan is killing its Shias, Iran would be beholden if Tahirul Qadri can spread some Sunni-Shia peace around. He makes moving speeches on Eid-e-Ghadir. The Ahle Sunnat Ittehad led by an aggressive Fazal Karim will not gravitate to TQ despite his wealth because of his change of heart on the blasphemy law while in the Christian West.

Imran Khan has carefully decided not to take him on but the fact is he can’t get too close because TQ is not well liked by the Taliban. Yet, TQ is more or less like Imran Khan, after staging his comeback at the Minar-e-Pakistan.

The army leadership is humbled by the killing spree of the Taliban. It must hate the killing of the Shia and might favour intimacy with Tehran in opposition to the more ‘realistic’ stance of the PPP and the PML-N who can’t afford to go against the Arab-American strategy in the region.

Tahirul Qadri has made public his dislike of the PPP and the PML-N, which is a sentiment close to what the army feels, too. Flying in the face of the Twentieth Amendment, he suggests that the caretaker government before the 2013 election be set up after ‘additional’ consultation with the Supreme Court and the army. He hints at postponing elections, too. He threatens the PPP government with a ‘Long March’ of four million (sic!) to Islamabad on January 14 if it doesn’t reform the electoral system in three weeks.

The PML-N is furious. According to one statement, which is appropriately right-wing-xenophobic, it prefers to connect TQ with world powers (alami taqatain) who “don’t want the PML-N to come to power”. TQ’s slogan ‘save the state, not politics’ has been interpreted to mean that elections must be set aside till the state is strong enough under a specially constructed caretaker government.

According to some, first the ISI fielded Imran Khan and has now brought in TQ. More alarmingly, it is fielding the Defence of Pakistan Council, too, to prevent the Pakistani change of mind about India. There are so many balls of confused strategy in the air that the wits of the ISI can be clinically challenged, that is, if it has done this.

However, it is not very fair to ask TQ to reveal his wealth and the way he has acquired it. If this is what is required, then other religious leaders whose madrassas are exempt from scrutiny will have to give accounts, too. Where does the ‘green turban’ Dawat Islami get its billions? Who is spending the big money behind the grand mobilisation of the Defence of Pakistan Council announcing jihad against India? Who was handing out cash during the last Long March of the Council to Islamabad?

President Asif Ali Zardari, ever nimble-footed when it comes to survival, has countered the ISI move by moving closer to Nawaz Sharif through the appointment of Makhdoom Ahmad Mehmood as governor of Punjab. No ‘pipliya’ will enter the Governor’s House now. The Makhdoom is out to take down the Tehreek-e-Insaf, the tormentor of both the PPP and the PML-N. He has been and continues to be a friend of the Sharifs; he is additionally a sworn ally of President Zardari.

The Makhdoom says he belongs to no party and probably will not live in the Governor’s House, and if he does, he will spend his own money there. This will facilitate better mixing with the PML-N leadership who would not like to be seen visiting the big place in public view.

It is interesting how the bipartisan system in Pakistan defends itself despite irrepressible hatred between the leaders of the two big parties. They must feel that their vote banks are being raided by the likes of Imran Khan and TQ.

Breaking the bipartisan system often doesn’t lead to good results. General (retd) Pervez Musharraf tried to do it; the army in Bangladesh tried to do it. In India, fragmentation has succeeded the bipartisan system developing between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, and it has made governance more difficult for the large ruling coalitions now routine in India.

You can’t keep big money in Canada without investing it and thus exposing it to risk. That could be a reason for TQ’s comeback. Also, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the West will retreat into its highly organised states to defend itself against al Qaeda ‘from the inside’. And migrant Muslims might face even tougher laws of surveillance after that.

Or, TQ might go quietly back to Canada, his home country.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2012.

The Taliban have killed Bashir Bilour, one of the top leaders of the ANP in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. In the aftermath, ANP leaders have said some bitter things about how Pakistan interprets terrorism in the country.

They insist that it is the Taliban we have to fight, not America. In other words, the enemy is not the trio of America, India and Israel, but the home-grown terrorists led by Hakimullah Mehsud under the tutelage of al Qaeda.

No one is going to listen. It suits all the political parties to avoid looking terrorism in the eye. In the coming elections, the three ‘secular’ allies — the PPP, ANP, MQM — are going to be targeted. Their voters may not even turn up for voting. The others don’t want to be in the bad books of the terrorists. They will insist that Bashir Bilour was killed because Pakistan was siding with America; get out of this evil connection and terrorism will go away. The media will run away once again with this miracle mithridatic potion.

Pakistan suffers from a terrible misdiagnosis of what it is suffering from. The last crutch of its ‘moral’ stance — the drones — may be taken away after America and the EU decide to retreat into the stronghold of their highly organised state enacting draconian laws against Muslim immigrants, leaving Pakistan to cope with the disease it refuses to acknowledge. The drones have killed 50 al Qaeda terrorists to date, not including some very dangerous Pakistanis turned against their own state.

The 2013 elections will truly be a re-enactment of the Stockholm Syndrome: self-empowerment through kissing the hand of the tormentor. Terror works better than any ideology; that is why ideology often leans on ‘fear and trembling’ to get itself accepted.   ‘Terror’ in English comes from the root ‘tr’ meaning to tremble. It gives us words like terrible, tremor, tremble, tremendous, deter, etc. The dominant sense is that of fear but in the case of ‘tremendous’, it can also mean so good that it makes you tremble. In French, ‘tressaillir’ is to tremble. This root ‘trs’ has come down to us.

In Persian-Urdu, the word is absolutely the same. ‘Tars’ in Persian means fear. In such Urdu words as ‘Khuda-tars’ (God–fearing), there is no ambiguity.

Trembling is present in both fear and sympathy. When you feel sympathy for someone, you tremble the same way as when you experience fear.

In Greek, trembling is associated with pigeons. One must admit that pigeons are a frightened lot and tend to tremble all the time — hence the Greek name ‘treron’ for pigeons, which is used as genus in zoology.

But in Hindi, it is the monkey (‘kapi’) that trembles! The monkey trembles because it is full of unspent energy. Maulvi Azad tells us that in Persian, too, it is called ‘kapi’. This is from the verb ‘kanpna’ (to tremble) and is present in Urdu for trembling, ‘kapkapi’.

In Russian, a coward is called ‘trus’ or ‘truslivi’, demonstrating that there, too, the root ‘tr’ is operative. In Punjabi, the word for fear is ‘trah’; it has been derived from Sanskrit ‘taras’.

Punjabi ‘trah’ derives from the same Indo-European root. Interestingly, the Latin name of Eros, the Love God — Cupid — comes from the ‘kp’ root meaning trembling because when you are in love, your emotions are in a state of upheaval.

The ANP is right when it says that terrorism is going to increase after the Americans are gone. Pakistan is looking more and more like Afghanistan as it loses control of its territory. Fukuyama would be intrigued by this ‘decentralisation’ of Pakistan through an act of national ‘trembling’.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2012.

When Zia Mohyeddin half-runs on to the stage on the night of December 31 every year in Lahore, it is pure theatre. The audience suspends disbelief and submits to the witchcraft of his presence. Reading his book Theatrics (NAPA 2012), I feel confronted with a man who could be performing Sophocles or Shaw or Hashr — flawless in rendition.

At NAPA, his pupils should enjoy his knowledge of the famous Parsee Theatre of Bombay that kicked off in the “brief reign of Wajid Ali Shah just before the middle of the 19^th century (when the opera Inder Sabha vas staged) and lasted until the end of the 1920’s. The substantial dramatic output of these 75 years could not have been possible if it weren’t for the enterprising Parsee impresarios of Bombay”.(p.31).

His yardstick of excellence is unsparing but he lets in Agha Hashr Kashmiri. When Hashr’s heavily sanskritised scripts were attributed to hired hands, Hashr challenged his detractors to a munazira, to be conducted in Hindi. No one picked up the gauntlet.

Zia, on his next genius: “Charagh Hassan Hasrat is remembered today as a renowned journalist, but he was a fine etymologist. Luminaries like ZA Bokhari and Rafi Peer often turned to him to verify the correctitude of a word or an expression. Hasrat had never written a play, but every line he ever spoke sounded like a quotation from a dramatic text. I wondered if he had acquired his mannerism from watching Hashr’s plays”.

Now comes the purple patch about how we get our Urdu readings wrong: “When the Parsees tackled the text in Urdu (a foreign tongue to them), they followed the pattern of the English actors, that is to say, they spoke their lines sonorously, over-inflecting the rhyming words and laying undue stresses on line-ending words. This style became the hallmark of Urdu acting for generations. When non-Parsees — towards the end of the 19^th century — entered the arena to play leading parts, they, too, took up the bombastic style”. (p.54).

It is in his discussion of comedy, he talks of Moin Akhtar: “His true metier was to portray dotty, quirky eccentrics, outcasts; men blinkered, soaked in their prejudices and mockingly assertive. He had a penchant for portraying characters far removed from the rational approaches to life. To such characters he brought an inward glow. He appeared to be at ease residing in their souls, but, given an opportunity, he could step into the inner core of extroverts with equal facility. He was the only performer in our part of the world who gave earnest thought to Garrick’s observation that Comedy is a serious business”. (p.174).

About reading, which remains underdeveloped in Pakistan despite some popular exponents, Zia lets you in on some secrets: “You have to make an enormous effort to tear your eyes from the page. At first, you feel you dare not do it for fear of losing your place [on the page] and yet you must make an attempt. You must realise that in order to make any kind of an impact, you have to take the words into your mind, look up from the page, speak them to the audience and then look down for more. You have to acquire the knack of wrenching your eyes away from the text to make a direct communication”.

Will Zia Mohyeddin be remembered? Perhaps not in the toxic annals of our ideology but in our hearts through those recordings that will contain his unrepeatable genius. But the fate of the actor is in the breath that dominates the stage awhile before evaporating forever.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2012. 

Today, the Lal Masjid Operation is owned by no one. General (retd) Pervez Musharraf may regret he ordered it. But the facts will not disappear.

On July 6, 2008, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) observed the anniversary of the operation by killing 19 people in Islamabad through a suicide bomb, 15 of them policemen. An al Qaeda videocassette marked the first anniversary of the destruction of Lal Masjid in which revenge was sworn.

Amir Mir, in his book Talibanisation of Pakistan from 9/11 to 26/11, states: “Before the bloodshed, the Mosque had a reputation for radicalism, mostly attracting Islamic hard line students from North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and tribal areas where support for the Taliban and al Qaeda is quite strong. Much before the military operation code named ‘Operation Silence’ was launched by the Pakistan Army, the Lal Masjid had become known to the outer world as a centre of radical Islamic learning, housing several thousand male and female students in adjacent seminaries.

“As the Operation Silence unfolded, it was discovered that elements from jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkatul Jihadul Islami were present inside the seminary … carrying Kalashnikov rifles, LMGs, hand grenades, petrol bombs and rocket-launchers”.

Zahid Hussain, in his book The Scorpion’s Tail: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan and how it Threatens America (2010), noted: “Lal Masjid clerics Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid had learned their militancy from their father, Abdullah Ghazi, who received funding and guidance from the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies for jihad. After the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, Abdullah Ghazi became closely associated with al Qaeda.

“In 1998, he travelled to Kandahar to pay homage to Mullah Omar, and took his younger son along. During this visit, Abdul Rashid Ghazi became radicalised. He met with Osama bin Laden alone for an hour. At the end of the meeting, he picked up Bin Laden’s glass of water and drank from it and said: ‘I drank from your glass so that Allah would make me a warrior like you’.” (p.112)

Two months after the Lal Masjid siege, an 18-year-old boy blew himself up inside the high-security base of Zarrar Company, the elite commando unit responsible for Operation Silence; 22 commandos were killed. It was an insider job. Zahid Hussain writes: “One of the officers identified was Captain Khurram Ashiq, who had served in Zarrar Company” (p.121). Captain Khurram Ashiq died in Helmand fighting on the side of al Qaeda. His brother, Major Haroon Ashiq, too, worked for al Qaeda, killing SSG commander Major-General Feisal Alvi in Islamabad. He has been acquitted this year by an antiterrorism court in Adiala Jail.

British journalist Owen Bennett-Jones, in his lengthy study Questions Concerning the Murder of Benazir Bhutto (London Review of Books, December 6, 2012), refers to one of the assassins of Benazir Bhutto named Husnain Gul, who joined the killer gang because of Lal Masjid: “Husnain Gul was a madrassa student who in 2005 had received small-arms training at a camp in North-West Pakistan. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) report says that when he was arrested, he had a hand grenade and clothes belonging to his friend Bilal.

“In his confession, Gul described how a friend of his had been killed when Musharraf ordered an assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007… Gul decided to avenge his friend’s death and persuaded his cousin, Muhammad Rafaqat, to join him”.

Operation Silence was disowned by the ruling PML-Q government. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman was reprimanded by the madrassa network into opposing it. The media sided with Lal Masjid during the operation.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16^th, 2012.

After I wrote a column on hajj in The Express Tribune, titled “The annual pilgrimage” (November 1, 2012), a scholar from Israel kindly got in touch with me to offer some aspects of the word ‘hajj’ that I did not know. In him, my prayers have been answered. Avrom Yarolshalmi is truly an enthusiast of the Semitic heritage of Hebrew-Arabic tradition.

I asked him a question that had troubled me. I referred to him a word that I had read in a paragraph in Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (William Morrow & Co 1998) p.40: “That night while sleeping, Jacob is attacked by an angel in the form of a man. Jacob wrestles with the angel and although this otherworldly spirit wounds him in the thigh Jacob ultimately succeeds in pinning the angel. The angel awards Jacob with the additional name of Israel (in Hebrew Yisrael). You have wrestled with God and men and prevailed.”

My Lughatul Quran says, ‘Israel’ literally means “(brave) man of God”. Israel is written with ‘seen’ in the Quran. There is another word ‘sar’ (with ‘suad’ and ‘ain’) which means ‘wrestling’. Hence, in my view, if you wrote Israel with ‘suad’ instead of  ‘seen’, the meaning would be ‘wrestling with God’. I wanted to know if Hebrew ‘Yisrael’ was written with ‘suad’? Avrom Yaroshalmi disabused me in my view that Hebrew spelling had somehow preceded the Arabic spelling.

He wrote: “The grammar and phonetic rules of classic Hebrew were compiled much later between 3^rd to 8^th century AD when Hebrew was no longer a spoken or vernacular language by scholars known as masoreh (hence the term masoretic tradition) in Palestine and Babylonia.

“The influence of Arabic as well as Arabic grammatical traditions cannot be ignored. You will be astonished to know that the first books of classic Hebrew grammar were written in Arabic; the first lexicon by Saadia Gaon in present-day Iraq in 10^th century AD namely kitab ul usul wal sir al ibrania and later translated in Hebrew by the author himself with the Hebrew title ‘aragon’ meaning ‘compendium’. And also, simultaneously, in Muslim Spain by Dunash ibne Labrat and Menahem bin Suraq in Arabic and also in Hebrew”.

Yaroshalmi went on to clarify that the Arabic ‘seen’ in Israel, as it appears in the Holy Quran was correct since, in Hebrew the root was not as clear: “The letter ‘S’ in Hebrew can be either ‘suad’ or ‘seen’. Both have the same sounds, at least according to Masoretic tradition, and Israel is written with ‘seen’ which is then the same as ‘seen’ in Arabic”.

Thus, were doubts about the orthography adopted by Muslims removed? Another issue that became clear was this. In Arabic, the two senses are represented by two separate letters. With ‘suad’ it meant wrestling. At the Olympics, the wrestling event is written as ‘sar’ in Arabic. Therefore, Israel would have to be written with ‘suad’ and ‘ain’ to denote the third syllable. The Urdu word ‘misra’ (one half of a couplet in poetry) shows the two lines as ‘wrestling’ with each other.

There is another root close to the two discussed. The root swr in Arabic means ‘to be on top’. It is used to express Sura as the section of text of the Holy Quran. A Sura is so called because of its high position.

Yaroshalmi’s final verdict: “The spelling of Israel in Arabic, if deliberate, was undertaken by those who must be very well versed in biblical tradition and targumim and the comparative philology of Semitic languages especially Aramaic”.

Generally, the text of the Holy Quran is more deferential towards the prophets of God and presents them in a better light than the text of the Old Testament.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th, 2012.

Ijazul Haq, son of army chief General Zia, has accused Zia’s then vice-chief General Aslam Beg of being a part of the conspiracy to kill his father. He appeared on Geo TV on December 1, 2012, and said he was sorry that General Hameed Gul, who was the ISI chief at the time, took no notice of his officers plotting to kill his father. He added that General Beg caused the wreckage of the plane to be removed to hide the effects of a missile fired into the plane from another plane. He also prevented autopsies of the dead to hide the fact that everyone on the plane had died from gas poisoning. A report by an air force officer, Zaheer Zaidi, was suppressed because it focused on the “other plane”. He said Beg had reacted to his certain impending replacement with General Afzaal as vice-chief.

No one can say who killed Zia. But when he took Beg as the army vice-chief, Zia was deeply committed to the Arabs in the post-Bhutto period. He was to offer Islamisation in return for funds that went into buying Pakistan’s sorely needed 40 F-16 warplanes and seed-money for the Zakat Fund. Islamisation was also meant to restrain revolutionary Iran. (Tehran was seen as destablising the Gulf states with acts of terrorism.) In 1980, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was created and Zia could not resist being secretly its ‘military teeth’.

According to Christopher M Davidson in The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers), 2005, p.206 and p.244, the plan for an anti-Iran axis existed up until 2001: “Until September 11, 2001, many of the strongly anti-Iranian emirates had favoured a ‘Sunni axis’ comprising the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Afghan Taliban, in an effort to curb potential Shia expansion.” The author footnoted that his information had come from “personal interviews, undisclosed locations, 2003”.

In 1980, Zia imposed Zakat on the Shia on the basis of a law written by Maruf Dualibi, an adviser to the Saudi King, while sitting in the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). Islami Nazriati Konsal: Irtaqai Safar aur Karkardagi Council of Islamic Ideology: Evolution and Activity — (Dost Publications, Islamabad, 2006) records that “Dr Maroof Dualibi visited the offices of the Council” p.961. However, the Council’s own report to the government in December 1981, observed that Hudood laws were discussed by the Council and the Law Ministry under the guidance of Dr Maroof Dualibi who was specially detailed by the Government of Saudi Arabia for this purpose.

During the Iran-Iraq war, Zia became peacemaker and tried to intercede with Imam Khomeini but was not treated well by him because of the GCC affair. (Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future, Norton, 2006, p.162.)

The Arabs and the US were funding Zia’s jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Shia were excited by the Khomeini phenomenon but were under pressure from the anti-Shia Afghan militias centred in Peshawar. In 1987, when he appointed Beg as vice-chief, Zia had allowed a jihadi lashkar to stage a massacre of the Shia in Parachinar in Kurram Agency. The Arab-Iran sectarian conflict was relocated to Pakistan.

In 1985, the Deobandis got into the act, creating the Sipah Sahaba in Jhang (Punjab). In 1986, the Saudi-funded Rabita Alam Islami head of Nadva tul-Ulema madrassa of Lucknow in India, Manzur Numani, decided to compile apostatising fatwas targeting Shias. All the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan sent fatwas to him to be compiled in a book, later distributed in Pakistan. In 1988, two incidents exacerbated the sectarian war: the massacre of Shias in Gilgit and the murder of Shia top leader Ariful Hussaini in Peshawar.

As Gordon Corera noted in his book Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Security and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (Oxford University Press, 2006, p.59-60): “At this point, without a green signal from Zia, Beg got together with Dr AQ Khan to sell Iran nuclear technology crucial to building an Iranian bomb.”

Dr Khan was already into selling his wares globally. Iran was the first country to receive centrifuges from him. According to the IAEA, he made the sale to Iran of all the required elements in 1987 in Dubai, collecting payment in Swiss francs. Zia did not know. He did not know either that Beg too had got into the act. (After Zia’s death, prime minister Nawaz Sharif was shocked that Beg had signed a secret nuclear deal with Iran without telling him.)

Zia had the Pakistan-specific Pressler Amendment to duck to keep the US dollars rolling in. Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar tricked Dr Khan into blabbing about the bomb, which sent Zia ballistic. At this point, the plot to kill Zia may have taken shape involving diverse categories of people, including the two pilots of the doomed C-130.

A report appearing in London’s Sunday Times titled “Pakistan’s Dr Nuke bids for the Presidency”, (August 24, 2008) by Simon Henderson revealed: “Khan’s activities give a new explanation for the crash of President Zia’s C-130 plane in 1988…. Wing Commander Mash’hood Hassan, the plane’s pilot, had also been flying Khan’s centrifuge equipment to China. On one such trip he confided in a colleague of Khan that he hated Zia, holding him responsible for the murder of a local religious leader [Ariful Hussaini]: “The day Zia flies with me, that will be his last flight”.” Hardly 10 days after Hussaini’s murder, on August 17, 1988, his co-pilot, Sajid, had told his mother he was going to do something big as he left home.

In 1993, Ijazul Haq forced prime minister Nawaz Sharif to set up an inquiry commission. The Justice Shafiur Rehman Commission ended the work saying the Pakistan Army did not let it conduct investigation into the Bahawalpur crash. Its report was sealed.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2012.

Jamaat Ali Shah was Pakistan’s Indus Waters Commissioner with a long tenure because he had a brilliant record as his country’s watchdog over India’s actions under the Indus Waters Treaty (1960). Then, some people thought he was in cahoots with the Indians. The state went for him. See the chronology of this unhappy episode.

The Jamaatud Dawa newspaper, Jarrar (March 5, 2010), reported that the people of Pakistan thought that Pakistan’s Indus Water Commissioner, Jamaat Ali Shah, was bodily a Pakistani but his tongue spoke the language of Hindus. He had not stopped making the strange statement that India had not stolen Pakistan’s water. Jamaat Ali Shah was getting his salary from Pakistan but was working for India.

Before this, the Jamaatud Dawa had taken out a procession on Lahore’s central mall in February 2010. Provocative speeches were made. Then, the army chief and the prime minister also raised “the issue of waters” in their statements.

Reported in the Nawa-i-Waqt (June 3, 2010) a seminar held by the Nawa-i-Waqt group of newspapers decided that Jamaat Ali Shah defended India’s stealing of river waters through 62 dams. Speakers included retired ambassadors and army officers, who said that India was stealing 14 million acre feet of water and that India’s water aggression could lead to an Indo-Pak war that would soon turn into a nuclear world war.

The Nawa-i-Waqt further accused Jamaat Ali Shah of stating that Pakistan was getting its share of waters under the Indus Treaty and that building a dam was the right of India. He said less water in Pakistani rivers was because of lack of rain, not because India had stolen it. The statement was a shock to many who thought India was waging a water war against Pakistan.

Reported in the Nawa-i-Waqt (December 16, 2010) Jamaat Ali Shah was made officer on special duty by the prime minister. He was commissioner in 1993 and was on the job till 2010, while India changed four commissioners during this period. Zahurul Hasan Dahir of the anti-India lobby said Shah had “accepted Indian influence” and had allowed Indian dams to be built on rivers belonging to Pakistan.

Reported in Jang (January 5, 2012), Indus Waters ex-commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah facilitated the building of India’s illegal Nimoo-Bazgo dam so that Leh could get electricity, which meant that Indian soldiers at Siachen would get the benefit of more comfort through the use of electricity.

Dawn (April 16, 2011) reported: Intelligence agencies seized the record of at least two federal ministries to investigate an alleged institutional lapse of not raising objections over Indian aggression on the country’s water rights. A preliminary report maintained that the commissioner had remained silent over the Nimoo Bazgo hydropower project (built by India during 2002-2009) and did not raise any objections during the meetings. There were rumours that Shah had fled the country.

The Express Tribune (January 3, 2012) reported: The latest case under dispute is the construction of the controversial 45-MW Nimoo-Bazgo hydropower project on the Indus River by India; (then) Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani approved challenging the project in the International Court of Arbitration (ICA).

After six months, the Daily Times (July 18, 2012) reported that the federal government had decided not to file a lawsuit in the ICA, in The Hague, regarding the controversial 45-MW Nimoo-Bazgo hydroelectric power project. The fear was that Pakistan might lose again as it did over the Baglihar Dam.

Annexure C of the Indus Waters Treaty allows India to take some water from the Western Rivers given to Pakistan. Annexure E says there is no bar on India building water storage dams for electricity generation on the Western Rivers.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 2^nd, 2012. 

On November 19, 2012, ex-amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmed was attacked by a female suicide bomber as he entered the Mohmand Tribal Agency, which is ruled by a particularly savage Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) commander, Umar Khalid. After a narrow escape, Qazi Sahib claimed he was attacked not by Taliban but by a combination of foreign powers — namely America, India and Israel.

Some Taliban-watchers said the attack could have been ordered by the TTP chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, through Umar Khalid. Reason? Because in April 2012, Qazi Sahib is alleged to have said in an interview: “The Afghan Taliban’s resistance against foreign forces in Afghanistan is true jihad and that of the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan is un-Islamic”. Hakimullah had first only complained. Later, he issued a more aggressive video CD through Umar Khalid, calling him jihad-farosh (betrayer of jihad).

The suicide attack could still be a shot across the bow. Qazi Sahib is a respected non-clerical leader of a cleric-dominated party. He lifted his party to a high point of power and influence during the jihad against the Soviet Union. In tandem with Afghan commander Hekmatyar, he literally dictated policy in Islamabad.

But the warrior-base on which he built his power was not loyal to him and acted just like Hakimullah.

Pakistan’s ex-foreign secretary, Riaz Muhammad Khan, in his book Afghanistan and Pakistan: Conflict, Extremism and Resistance to Modernity (OUP 2011) relates how the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union let Qazi Sahib down when former prime minister Nawaz Sharif requested Qazi Sahib, in 1992, to get Hekmatyar and Co. to agree to an agreed mixed interim government in Kabul:

“It was arranged for Qazi Hussain Ahmed to meet the Tanzeemat leadership. After meeting for several hours, Qazi Sahib was exceedingly upset with the Jamiat and Hizb leaders and said, ‘There was a time when these people had turned up at my doorstep in tatters. Today they refuse to listen to me’ (p.44)”.

Qazi Sahib refuses to name his attackers. He rather blames those “working for America”. This, of course, gibes with the line adopted by PPP Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who often hints at the “foreign hand”. The nation is waiting for a new ‘post-American’ order on the basis of a deliberate misdiagnosis.

The pathology of fear was obvious when ANP leader Ghulam Ahmad Bilour swore to kill an American maker of a blasphemous video, openly asking the Taliban for exemption from targeted killing in return for this indictment of the “real enemy”. The act of siding with the tormentor has two hidden aspects: 1) exemption from pain and 2) self-empowerment against peers.

Self-empowerment was clearly in evidence in the statement of the Awami Tehreek, leader Ayaz Palijo, when he came on television and diagnosed the disorder of Sindh and Karachi as the mischief of America, India and Israel, in collusion with the MQM and the PPP, the last two having pledged support to the creation of a ‘new Israel’ in Karachi.

In Balochistan, too, it is India backed by the US and Israel that is killing the Hazara, even though the Hazara are very clear about who is killing them — and it is not America. It is also India, the US and Israel slaughtering Punjabi schoolteachers, kidnapping doctors and murdering journalists.

The collective mental archive of Pakistani nationalism has always tagged India as the arch-enemy in a zero-sum battle with Pakistan. The US and Israel are the new ingredients in this national prescription. The problem is that no one in the world agrees with it. Last time it happened, in 1971, we lost East Pakistan. There are no exceptions to this paranoid consensus. The chemistry of surrender is at work and the only smell striking the nostrils is that of fear.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 25^th, 2012.

Sunday’s column by Salman Rashid on Alexander as Zulqarnain/Cyrus has taught me a great deal as usual. But he has also triggered my own curiosity. Since this is a vague subject, I must assert that I do not claim to be right about anything.

We all believe that there was once a good king called Zulqarnain whom Allah made powerful on earth. The Holy Quran says (18:83-94) he travelled to where the sun set in a muddy well, after which he went east where the sun rises. He then went north where he built a wall to protect the world against Yajuj-Majuj or Gog-Magog.

Zulqarnain means man with two horns. Although an old tradition says Moses had two horns, Muslims have largely identified him with Alexander the Great. In Rome, the statue of Moses has two horns.

Firdausi in his Shahnama immortalised Zulqarnain as the just king and conqueror. He ‘owns’ him by making him the grandson of Darius.

Abul Kalam Azad thought Zulqarnain was Alexander. Alexander as Iskandar has always been a popular name. His wall is known as sadd-e-Iskandari. Almost all great Persian poets wrote at least one masnavi about him.

Cyrus was the great Persian king who rescued the Jews from their exile in Babylon. The king with two horns is mentioned by Prophet Daniel. He wore the two horns to indicate his control of two countries: Pars and Medea.

Zulqarnain is also a Muslim name because the Holy Quran speaks well of him. It comes from the root ‘qrn’ meaning horn/ head.

Arab ‘qrn’ appears in Greek as ‘kr’ and in Latin as ‘krn’. The origin of the word must be Syriac from where many words have radiated to the Semitic and Indo-European group of languages.

Greek ‘kr’ became ‘sr’ since Latin had no ‘k’ sound. So we have rhinoceros meaning horn on the nose. The mythical horse unicorn has one horn because corn here means horn. (Note the transformation of Latin corn into horn in English.)

In Persian and Urdu, ‘sar’ means head and in Urdu-Hindi, the same word is used to indicate top end (‘sira’). Our name for south Punjab, Seraiki, comes from Sindhi ‘siro’ meaning top end. In English, cranium for skull has the same root. Christian name Cornelius means crowned.

The musical instrument horn was first fashioned out of a horn. Another name for it is cornet. The word for head in Urdu is ‘sar’ but in Latin the word for head/brain is cerebrum in which the root is ‘cer’.

Alexander is also a curious word. The ander part in it means man and comes from ‘aner’ through a grammatical change andros. We know that ‘nar’ in Persian and Sanskrit means man.

From aner came andros. Name Andrew means manly. Alexander means he saves men. The saving sense is conveyed in alex, which is a negative of leg meaning to join. Root ‘lg’ appears in lex (law) and religion. Religion binds and the word ‘ligature’ means bound.

The ‘lg’ root is the same as in Urdu-Hindi ‘lag’ (join) and ‘alag’ (separate). Alexander separated men from harm and, therefore, was saviour of men. We believe that the Holy Quran, talking of a non-Muslim favourably, gave us the permission to admire all men of other creeds who are just and wise.

PS: The Greeks call themselves Hellenes. The eastern world knew them as Ionians — now in Turkey where Troy was located — and pronounced the word correctly as ‘Yunani’. Helen means Greek woman. In India, Greeks were called Yavan from Ionian and Jaunpur and Junagarh are named after them.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2012.

Geo News anchor Kamran Khan, in his November 12, 2012 programme, revealed that Pakistani officials had told Antiterrorism Court Judge Chaudhry Habibur Rehman on November 10, 2012 that terrorists who attacked and killed over 166 innocent people in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, belonged to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and that they had trained in various cities of Pakistan. The mastermind of this attack, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, is under trial at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi.

Five inspectors of the Crime Investigation Department (CID) deposed before the court that the terrorists had been trained in camps located in Mansehra, Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir, Khairpur, Thatta, Lakro and Gadap Town in Karachi. This was a big revelation striking at the base of the ‘media war’ between India and Pakistan, during which the world correctly divined that the Indian media was more credible. Why did the FIA, which is prosecuting Lakhvi, decide to come clean?

One reason was the surrender to India by Saudi Arabia of Syed Zabihuddin Ansari, alias Abu Jandal, an Indian-born member of the LeT, who escaped from Pakistan after the Mumbai attack on a Pakistani passport. According to a deposition of the only terrorist captured in Mumbai, Ajmal Kasab, Abu Jandal was present in meetings in Karachi preparatory to the attack. Abu Jandal, after landing in India, implicated members of the Pakistan Army and the ISI agency in the planning of the attack.

Those who have seen the National Geographic documentary on the Mumbai attack should now be informed that the man who was on the phone talking to the Pakistani killers was this man, Abu Jandal. This nom de guerre is a favourite of the LeT, indicating acceptance of crime committed in the name of high faith.

In the July 2005 issue of the monthly Herald, Zulfiqar Ali described one of the terrorist camps in Mansehra where al Qaeda had interface with our jihadi organisations, including the LeT. The news in 2001 that the Mansehra camp had been disbanded was mere exaggeration. Before Osama bin Laden was finally made to live in Abbottabad, he thought he could be comfortable in Mansehra where al Qaeda was lending a hand.

One Pakistani journalist who lost his life telling the truth about the Mumbai attack was Saleem Shahzad. In his book Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11 (Pluto Press 2011), he wrote that it was al Qaeda who planned the Mumbai attack “through former Pakistan Army officers with help from the LeT without the knowledge of the ISI despite the fact that LeT was on ISI’s leash”. He wrote further:

“The Mumbai operation was actually the revival of an old ISI plan. The idea was to deflect the Pakistan Army away from Waziristan and get it to fight India instead. This nearly succeeded: Pakistan’s militant leaders Mullah Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud announced that they would fight alongside Pakistan’s armed forces in an India-Pakistan war and the director general of ISI, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, confirmed this understanding in his briefing to national and foreign correspondents when he called Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud Pakistan’s strategic assets” (p.95).

After the US got hold of documents from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad safe house establishing a communication link between him and Hafiz Saeed, it moved in 2012 to the final decision to place a bounty of $10 million on Hafiz Saeed.

What is behind this ‘outing’ of Hafiz Saeed now? One reason the Indian press has given is Islamabad’s “keen desire to normalise relations between the two countries which came close to war in the months following the attacks”. The other is Hafiz Saeed’s defiance of policy-change in Rawalpindi.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2012.