People should not be forced to live a particular way of life as prescribed by clerics.
KARACHI: With reference to Feisal H Naqvi’s article, let alone singing and dancing, many well-educated families also stop their children from watching television or using the internet. Some also discourage their children from pursuing photography and do not keep any pictures at home. And this is happening not in the rural countryside but in cities like Karachi. The numbers who want to have such mores is increasing and these are the same people who demand separate schools and colleges for girls, separate travelling arrangements for women and even segregation in the workplace.
In such families, women cannot talk and sit in the same room with their close male relatives. Such families also send their children to religious schools, and there are many now in the major cities. The poorer ones send their children to a madrassa to learn the Holy Quran and after that they go to a mainstream school.
Compare this drive for segregation with the reality that the bulk of our population lives in rural areas where women and men work in the fields side by side. One can only wonder what these retrogressive elements would say about this. Also, for many poor rural people, it is simply not possible to build separate areas for the women of their house and they cannot follow segregation of men and women as prescribed by the local cleric.
In the same way, those affected by the flood, or other internally displaced people, have to live together in the open or in government buildings. What would the mullahs say about this? People should not be forced to live a particular way of life as prescribed by clerics who interpret religion in a very narrow way. What we need are reasonable and rational solutions and this can be done through the use of ijtihad.
Irshad Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2011.
