I was at a mosque at 11pm and police asked us to shut off the speakers while music blared at a wedding nearby.
LAHORE: The other evening, a few of my fellow lawyers and I were at a mosque in the outskirts of DHA at a mehfil of ‘zikr’. This takes place every month for the past 30 years. However, at around 11pm, two police constables came to the mosque and asked us to shut off the speakers. We asked why and they said that a complaint had been registered against the noise that was being made. Upon further inquiry, we found out that a student had complained about the noise as he was having trouble studying. Surprisingly, a few houses down the road, there was a wedding going on with music blaring all across the entire neighbourhood and on the other side of the street there were people playing the dhol and dancing.
Naturally, we asked if the constables also planned on visiting the wedding or the people playing the dhol, but they said that the complaint was only with reference to the noise coming from the mosque’s loudspeakers. I didn’t understand the logic behind this selective enforcement by the police. It made me and my friends wonder whether we had all lost sight of the basic ideology of Pakistan.
M Hussain Malik
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2011.
