Pakistan has become a theocracy ruled by priests with a divine mission, contrary to Jinnah’s vision for the country
NEW YORK: Maulana Abdul Aziz is a dangerous, incendiary figure. Iron hands are required to put him down. Lest anyone forget, Aziz supports Talibanisation in Pakistan.
In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, we have the Jamaat-e-Islami telling people that schoolboys wearing shirts and trousers is tantamount to “Americanisation” of the school system and Pakistan. They do not have the sense to see that iman, or faith, resides in the heart, not in the clothes one wears. What people need is freedom of choice, not the dictates of obscurantist elements shoved down their throats in a daily stream of drivel. We know what comes next: virtue and vice squads armed with a state mandate to whip people into submission and shoot those who dissent, like Malala. This is not what the freedom Mr Jinnah fought for.
Pakistan has become a “theocracy ruled by priests with a divine mission”, contrary to Jinnah’s vision for the country, as a liberal secular democracy where religion was “not the business of the state,” as he instructed the Constituent Assembly charged with drafting the Constitution, in his August 11, 1947 speech.
Omar Mirza
Published in The Express Tribune, November 19th, 2015.
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